May 25 – August 26, 2007

The photographs that compose Shadow Chambers: Roger Ballen depict an abstracted imaginary space that is inhabited by both animals and people. Mostly within grey, barren cell-like structures, nightmarish scenarios, which are unspecific in their narrative, are enacted. The oppressive intensity of this environment is created by the metaphorical or symbolic interplay of the spaces, the figures and animals, and the furniture and other paraphernalia that exist within – and in fact help create – this world. This body of work has developed out of an interaction between the artist’s subjects and himself in a fictitious space that is, at times, set in actual rooms and, at other times, within mere suggestions of interiors.

Ballen’s work raises questions about the pathos of human survival and engages the viewer with some fundamental notions about the paradoxical nature of the photographic image, in which fact and fiction, the spontaneous and the staged, the imaginary and the real, painting and photography are often blurred into a nether realm. The photographs in this show have been taken using a square-format camera, and have been carefully composed; in these images meaning resides where the tightly ordered abstract elements meet the people, animals, and objects in the scenes, where the formal and symbolic convene. Which is to say that within this mixture a layered and highly complex artistic statement develops and is presented.

While there are similarities between this new work, produced by Ballen since the year 2000, and his previous thirty years’ of work, these recent images contain a more universal appeal in their subject matter and interpretations. Further, Ballen’s recent work has entered an entirely new (for him) realm of contemporary photography, since it straddles and combines aspects of photography, painting, sculpture and installation art.

Ballen’s photographs are the subjects of five previous volumes including the award winning Outland (Phaidon Press, 2001) and Platteland, Images of a Rural South Africa. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Louisiana Museum, Denmark; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and others.