Dana Hoey

Phoenix

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DANA HOEY
"Phoenix"
April 30 – May 29, 1999
Opening reception: Friday, April 30, 6-8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the second solo show of new works by Dana Hoey. The opening reception is Friday, April 30, from 6 to 8 pm. The show continues until May 29, 1999.

This new body of work, Phoenix, consists of 18 selenium-toned silverprints, each 16 x 20 inches and a large billboard. The photographs are a conflicting combination of an acerbic photo-realistic style with mythic, ultra-American narratives. Hoey stages a man-hunt between two women starting simultaneously on both the East and West Coasts that culminates when the two characters' paths intersect in Phoenix. The photographs were shot in upstate New York, Los Angeles, and such Arizona locations as Sedona, Apache Junction and Tombstone.

Some of the subjects depicted are a catfight in the OK Corral, moments with a outlaw, and a desert encounter with a truck. Meetings with a cowboy and an old man are an abject look at masculine heroes, while a photo of a girl living in a tree - to save it - designates moral courage. One image shows two female correction officers on four-wheelers who become an oracle of freedom - a vision of life without men. The different stations of the search construct a parable of the attempt to live, acquire power, security and happiness.

While Hoey's last group of color photographs were concerned with the relation between women and their immediate social environments, these pictures investigate a reversed rite-of-passage, a poetic journey into the post-feminist mind. Hoey suggests that the lawlessness of two female bounty hunters can be seen as a metaphor for making it as a woman, and in turn, contends that the women have no clear or fixed object of success.

A survey of Dana Hoey's photographs is currently exhibited in Unheimlich (Uncanny) at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland.