Willie Doherty

Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce three solo exhibitions of works by Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Robert Kinmont, and Willie Doherty.

Willie Doherty’s No Return (2017), a single channel projection, will be installed in the video gallery. No Return was shot in a small town near Pittsburgh in an area once known as the “cradle of Western Pennsylvania’s steel industry,” before suffering from its collapse in the 1980s. While the work engages with the landscape as it looks today, it also approaches it as both a repository for the memories of past experiences and a witness to the ravages of socio-economic change and ecological degradation. In looking at the present, No Return visualizes our shared apprehension about the future.

Doherty’s approach and process is speculative. Often taking an existing image or other information as a starting point, he then proceeds to see what can be discovered or found in a location. No Return extends Doherty’s interest in the relationship between landscape and memory and working in locations that bear the traces of contested histories and narratives; some forgotten, some half remembered. The work was commissioned by the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh for their exhibition so it is which opens on April 7, 2017.