New York’s Estonian House is delighted to host a two-person exhibition of art work by Amanda Means and Jaanika Peerna. Taking over the spaces of the Great Hall and the Blue Room in the East 34th Street building, the artists will present works in photography and drawing from September 14th through October 15th.
Right: Jaanika Peerna, Undulations Series #18, 2013, pigment and pencil on mylar, 18 x 18 inches.
Amanda Means will be exhibiting her celebrated Light Bulb works, here showing a set of black and white gelatin silver prints that depict the same incandescent light bulb photographed using a range of exposures and filters—rendering each successive image as an often dramatic variant of the one preceding. Presented face-on, filling the frame of the 22 x 18 inch print, Means lends these familiar mass-produced objects a monumental quality, making light, translucency, and radiance her subject matter.
Jaanika Peerna will also be exhibiting a set of related works: her Undulations drawings. These pieces in pencil on mylar are presented as a discrete series of 16 x 16 inch works that nevertheless set up a flow of correspondences between each other, the filament-like lines of one work continuing off the edges of the drawing and picking up again on the next drawing. Peerna’s Undulations foreground gesture and rhythm, the glides and elisions of the artist’s pencil lines and their erasures being closely related to her work in installation and performance art.
Together, the artists share an interest in transparency and luminosity; Peerna’s use of the semitranslucent material of mylar echoes the varyingly frosted opacities of Means’ light bulbs. The artists’ explorations of line and form, rhythm and repetition, set serial presentation in play with unfolding development in works that approach the musical in their deft command of theme and variation.
Amanda Means was born in Marion, New York, and is a graduate of Cornell University and SUNY Buffalo. In 2017, the artist was awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship for her contribution to contemporary photography. Means has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad and, in 2021, was honored with a career retrospective at University Art Gal-lery, University of Massa-chusetts, Dartmouth. Her work can be found in public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Jaanika Peerna was born in Tallinn, Estonia, and received an MFA from SUNY New Paltz, NY. Her solo exhibitions and performances have been presented at galleries internationally including Haus Gal-lery, Tallinn, Estonia; Gallery 222, Hurleyville, NY; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; the Espro-nceda Center for Art and Culture, Barcelona, Spain; and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, NY. In 2022, “Glacier Elegies”, a new monograph about the artist’s acclaimed series of performance works lamenting the loss of glaciers and natural ice, was published by Terra Nova Press. Amanda Means and Jaanika Peerna are represented by JHB Gallery, New York.
Reception: Wednesday September 14th, 6–8pm. The exhibition continues through October 15th, 2022.
