“Dazzling” is a series of photographic portraits taken at the Platinum International New comer’s Pageant and at several subsquent pageants. The portraits are of the participants, a mixture of drag, cross-dressing and transgender. They are competing to become Mr. and Miss Platinum International Newcomer. The subjects are primarily African American, and the Pageant is held in an improvised club in the town of Fairfield, Alabama, a previously white steel town outside of Birmingham, Alabama, whose population is now 90% African American. Daryl, who legally changed his name in 2009 to Daroneshia, operates the Pageant.
Sonja Rieger met Daroneshia in 2006 when she was an attendant at the Episcopal nursing home where her mother had moved after a massive stroke. In the first days that Sonja spent at the nursing home, she noticed that the staff was predominantly black and the residents were predominantly white. It was ironic to her that this elderly population of a racially torn city lived the end of their lives so closely dependent on and inadvertently intermingled with the black population and culture that they had shared such a history with. The same year she met Daroneshia, Sonja took her documentary photography class to the nursing home to take portraits of the residents. Daroneshia approaced her several months later and asked if her students would document the Pageant. The Pageant was close to Christmas and her students were gone for the holiday. Sonja went herselt to the Phoenix Club to photograph. She watched the participants transform themselves and the intimate relation- ships they shared with one another, photographing them just before they went on stage.
Sonja Rieger received her MFA from Rutgers University, her BA from the University of Mas- sachusetts, Amherst and became a Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 1979. From 1991 to 1997 she served as the Chairperson of the Department of Art and Art History.
Windows to the Unknown features Richard Alden Peterson, whose old-school Punk photography was showcased at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver last year, expanding into other bodies of work with this new show. It includes five new collaborations with Sydney Kovac Peterson. The ornate, hand-crafted, recycled paper ensembles coupled with the photographs create a mysterious presence, bringing out the enigmatic figures in the portraits.
Richard Peterson is an American photographer born in 1951 in California. He began photo- graphing at an early age. Artists’ portraits, punk rock era portraits of musicians, nudes, dark nature shots, and surrealist photographs make up his broad oeuvre. Surrounded by the Beat Generation, Punk rock, and the underground scene since the 1960s, his extensive archive of photographs spans nearly five decades.
Sydney Kovac Peterson is a mid-career American artist who lives and works in Colorado. She is a visual stylist who designs complex interiors involving religious imagery, mosaics, found objects and photography. She creates elaborate mosaics as part of her site specific installations.
EXHIBITIONS
Sonja Riegger and Richard Peterson
March 1 – April 5, 2013
Carmen Wiedenhoeft Gallery
3542 Walnut Street
Denver, CO 80220
USA
