RWFA is pleased to present:

Regina DeLUISE: The Gathering

REVIEWS:

Aesthetica Magazine, A Curious Gaze, by Diana Bestwish Tetteh

About Photography, The Intimate World of Regina DeLuise: A Journey Through the Hands of My Friends

The Guardian, ’I never know what I’ll find’: under the influence of Italy - in pictures, by Mee-Lai Stone

The Eye of Photography, Saint Lucy Books : Regina DeLuise: The Hands of My Friends

From the specimen here given it is sufficiently manifest, that the whole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way. The more strange and fantastic the forms of his old teapots, the more advantage in having their pictures given instead of their descriptions.

-       William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, Plate 3. Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, London,1844

I am at my most productive when I keep something of an unsteady ground underfoot. I never know what I'll find when I'm out in the world, and I'm drawn to that not knowing. The air feels different, communication is awkward, and a new quality of light, illuminating the unexpected, is a wonder. Honing my visual acumen is a way to find balance, keep alert, agile and alive.

Regina DeLuise: 'I never know what I'll find': under the influence of Italy - in pictures, Mee-Lai Stone, The Guardian, August 6, 2024

Rick Wester Fine Art is pleased to announce Regina DeLuise’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, The Gathering. DeLuise has exhibited throughout the United States, and internationally since the 1980s. This includes her first solo exhibition in 2022 at RWFA, The Hands of My Friends. DeLuise’s process has been in place for some forty years, employing a large-format 8x10 inch view camera, producing contact prints in platinum and palladium. Her formal approach has always been dedicated to, and motivated by, observation and discovery. She exalts in her camera vision with a direct and unpretentious approach, seeking the visual complexities in everyday experience, seen simply through the genres of portraiture, landscape, and still-life.

The Hands of My Friends was a survey of her life's work leading to the eponymous publication, whereas The Gathering concentrates specifically on her still-life pictures. DeLuise developed artistically during the galactic big bang of the medium's resurgence in the 1980s as a dedicated student of the history of photography. Looking back to the publication of the first photographically illustrated book, William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature, lends insight to the breadth of this aspect of her work. In Talbot's essays he sums up one purpose of and need for photography: as inventory taking. The Gathering is in itself a collection of her broad use of the medium in that manner.

Her first monograph, The Hands of My Friends, published this year with Saint Lucy Books, features four decades of her poetic imagery that encompasses intricate complexities of the human experience.

Her work is held in numerous prestigious museums, institutional and private collections. These include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas. She is also the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and residencies, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. DeLuise has traveled around the globe, producing work in collaboration with communities in Bhutan, Nepal, Northern India, Europe and most recently, Morocco. She is Professor Emerita at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

An artist reception and book launch will be held at RWFA Thursday, October 17 from 5 - 8 pm. Saint Lucy Books publisher Mark Alice Durant and collaborator Felicia McCarren of Tulane University will be present.