Janet Borden, Inc. is pleased to announce Full Scale | Meadowland Still Lifes, an exhibition of new photographs by Ray Mortenson. The exhibition will run from 16 April through 27 May 2011.

In 1983, Lustrum Press published Ray Mortenson’s extraordinary book, Meadowland. Twenty years later, the area still impelled Mortenson to document it. After photographing nature in its more pristine forms, Mortenson returned to the sprawling New Jersey site again and again to document its abandoned beauty.

In this compelling series, Mortenson set himself the task of photographing on a 1:1 scale, so that when printed, a tire is the size of a tire, a plastic bag snags on its fence in actual size. This does bring up questions of scale, both photographically and theoretically. Mortenson’s exquisite printing again transforms the detritus of an abandoned lot into a scavenger’s dream of forceful shapes and appealing tones.

Ray Mortenson (American, b. 1944) lives in New York. Mortenson’s earlier landscape trilogy, Pleasant Hill, Island Pond, and Ocean Point, was exhibited at the gallery in three separate exhibitions. His book, Meadowland, was published by Lustrum Press in 1989. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the country, and is in the collections of such museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; etc. His exhibition Broken Glass, was recently shown at The Museum of the City of New York

Peripatetic artist Jim Dow has compiled many of his best-known images in this extraordinary love poem to America. Using a large format camera on the road, Dow has catalogued the stadiums, the road signs, the diners, and the ice cream parlors that pepper the landscape.

In his amazing and generous introduction, Ian Frazier writes: With these photographs Dow catches the hints latent in dozens of American settings, almost all of them temporarily unoccupied. The absence he finds is rich with suggestion about the parts we are supposed to portray in the dream.

Published by powerHouse in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary at Duke University.

Signed copies will be available from the gallery.