PaceWildenstein is pleased to present Thomas Joshua Cooper’s newest series of silver gelatin photographs entitled Ojo de Agua—Eye of the Water consisting of 60 new sea pictures, made in the last two years at the extreme cardinal edges of the South American continent, along the Atlantic Ocean, from December 1, 2006 through January 20, 2007 at 32 East 57th Street, New York City. Ojo de Agua is the third part (preceded by Away from Home and point of no return) of the much larger on-going trans-oceanic project, The World’s Edge. The gallery will host a public reception for the artist tonight from 6-8 p.m. A color catalogue with an essay by John Yau accompanies the exhibition.

Thomas Joshua Cooper’s overall aim is to circumnavigate the entire Atlantic Basin by land, compiling a visual inventory of artworks of all the major cardinal terrestrial points from all five continental landmasses surrounding the Atlantic Basin, into an investigative and exploratory visual entitled An Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity.

This project began in 1990, and continues on in Ojo de Agua’s extreme coastal Atlantic works from the furthest continental North and East to The End of the World in works from the farthest South of South America. There are two more large sections to complete before An Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity is finally concluded.

In his catalogue essay, At the Southern Edges of the New World, John Yau writes that “in the age of globalization and increasingly exotic forms of tourism, Cooper does something unique: he uses an atlas, specifically The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World…to determine exactly where he will go…. The places Cooper chooses are defined by their historical significance and by their geographical extremity…. beyond the fact that Cooper will travel to a place where land and ocean meet, he has no idea of what he will find when he gets there. And often, because he is in effect on a solo expedition to a place that may be uninhabited and inhospitable, he must make the photograph within a span of a few hours…. Such is the extremeness of Cooper’s performative photography.”

Allan Harkness, in his unpublished essay Sojourns in The Archive: Photographs of The Atlantic Basin, proposes that Cooper’s Atlantic Basin project is an “indexical mapping project, an archive of witness. It is about place and memory, about historical identity and contemporary hopes and fears – and finally about silence and slowness.” He continues, ”...the project is a one person, low-tech version of a deep space exploration, a scientific project to send data to our future: instead, no data, but enigmatic, dark, foreboding experience of the edge, the limit, the end.” Cooper’s project harnesses the geographical to the historical to the psychological in the collective visual experience of “mapping” The Atlantic Basin’s terrestrial extremities. Ojo de Agua reflects the current state of this measure—its conditions and its consequences.