Founder October 20th – November 10th, 2007

GONER November 16th – December 7th, 2007 seer December 13th – December 29th, 2007

Andreas Grimm is pleased to announce Jonathan Berger’s first New York exhibition. Titled Prologues, Epilogues, Thresholds, the exhibit consists of a series of three sequential installations – Founder, GONER, and seer. Berger’s work relies on architecture’s power to express civic and social ideologies and aspirations. This phenomenon serves as a starting point for creating a series of meta-narrative installations. By creating mental spaces that allude loosely to past, present and future, Berger engages in a dialogue about the way that we experience the built world and the relationship of those experiences to our own understanding of power dynamics, history, and hope. Using wood, paint, metal, miniature lights and a small army of friends and supporters, Berger has, over the last four years, fashioned together, by hand, an extraordinary number of elements that constitute this exhibition.

To accompany the installations, Berger has produced a book, designed by Julian Bittiner, that includes contributions from visual artist Carol Bove, architecture critic Judith Dupre, “The Nation” journalist Esther Kaplan, writer Mady Schutzman, “Cabinet” magazine editor David Serlin, and curator Jasmin Tsou.

The gallery will be open from 11 am to 6 pm, Tuesday through Saturday, during the three scheduled exhibition periods between October 20 – December 29, 2007. For a full understanding of the work, viewers are encouraged to return three times and experience changes in the same place, from one installation to the next, over the total ten week course of the exhibition.

Prologues, Epilogues, Thresholds maps the relationship between the monumental flowering of empire, the ruins of history, and spaces of possibility for envisioning the future. Time is an essential element in the exhibition as a whole, both in the content of the work and in the way the viewing of the exhibition is designed. Each installation is intended to transform the gallery space completely through specific alterations to the room’s dimensions, color, and architectural detail, including the installation of handmade wooden walls and molding. The first installation, Founder, begins the use of an architectural vocabulary, set of symbols, and interior geography, which continue to change and develop throughout GONER and seer. Each of the three designed viewing spaces contains a series of dioramas and models, all of which appear as vacated settings for events, constantly placing the viewer in position where it is unclear if an event is about to take place or has already transpired.

Jonathan Berger has received both the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo fellowships and was the curator of “Jack Smith and the Work of Reinvention” at Grimm/Rosenfeld gallery. He has had exhibitions at Vox Populi in Philadelphia and the Coral Sands Motel in Los Angeles. He studied at CalArts and RISD as an undergraduate and received his MFA at New York University. Berger was born in 1980.