White Room: Janice Guy

White Columns is pleased to present the first New York solo exhibition of Janice Guy’s vintage photographs. Produced in the late 1970s in Dusseldorf – where she had studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher – Guy’s photographs have not been seen since 1979, when she had her only solo exhibition at Galerie Ricke in Cologne.
Consisting of a group of unique, black and white vintage silver gelatin prints (some of which are hand-tinted), and shot in the artist’s domestic space, Guy’s work depicts the artist self-consciously engaged in the act of photographing herself. Exploring questions of narcissism, objectification, and the processes of representation Guy’s works can be understood as part of a complex interrogation of identity-related image-making that includes work by Dan Graham, Hannah Wilke, and Urs Luthi, among others.
Guy’s photographs first re-surfaced in the White Columns’ exhibition “Early Work” – organized by White Columns, the artist Marilyn Minter, and curator Fabienne Stephan – in 2007.
Guy abandoned art making in the early 1980s and is now better known as the co-director of the New York gallery Murray Guy.