CEPA is pleased to announce Urban Dresses, an exhibition of photographs by Gisela Gamper, on view July 9 - August 20, 1999 in CEPA's Underground Gallery. Viewing hours are Monday - Saturday, 10am - 5pm.

Artist Statement:
"But all her life the woman is to find the magic of her mirror a tremendous help in her effort to project herself and then attain self-identification..."
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

A memory lingers from my early childhood. My mother, who worked in a textile mill, showed me how the look of velvet was changed by light. Apparently, there was a right way and a wrong way and this depended on the way the velvet was held under the light. This looked like magic to me. Almost half a century later I still experience this sense of magic working within the medium of photography.

For over twenty years I have photographed my clothed torso. First I photographed myself in clothes made of luminous fabrics. Now I weave my own cloth from the textures I photograph in various environments. Through photomontage and digital manipulation my body merges with these environments. The body postures convey emotional messages and the constructed torsos become icons of my essential self.

"Gamper's pictures ... take existence into themselves, mapping it, transforming it, and finally releasing it, both within and beyond the reality of the body."
Rachel Pollack, Gisela Gamper Fabrications


Biography:
Gisela Gamper has been photographing and exhibiting for the last 25 years. Since early 1990 Gamper has employed photo montage and more recently digital manipulation to superimpose a variety of textures on female torsos. In 1999, Gamper's work was included in numerous shows including exhibitions at The Rice Gallery, the Albany Institute of History & Art, and the Vanguard Visions Multimedia Art Installation at Ericsson's CyberLab East in New York City. Among Gamper's grants and awards are two Fellowship Grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts in 1985 and 1990 and the Hasselblad Cover Award in 1991. In 1997, a catalogue of Gamper's photographs was published entitled Fabrication with text by Rachel Pollack. Gamper currently lives and works in New York City.