Nick Kline

R.Jampol Project(s) will present an exhibition of new work by artist Nick Kline. The exhibition “Newark will see it Through” will be on view from Friday, September 5 – Sunday, October 12, 2014. “Newark will see it Through” is a series of photographs that were made at, and derive from the Archives & Records Management Center, City of Newark, NJ. Boxes of official photographs, particularly from the 1960’s-1980’s, are currently being archived and digitized. Folders generically labeled “Janitor,” “Nursing Aid,” “Employment,” etc., or acronyms for agencies, and others with names of people, were largely documentation of governmental programs, politicians, program directors and city administrators. Many were connected to Great Society federal programs that addressed education, medical care, transportation and other systems in an effort to reduce poverty and racial inequality. Kline found the images with tracing paper hinged to them, pencil-lined crop marks drawn with ruler, (and other masking techniques) created by an editor and used for selecting images for reproduction in a variety of agency publications and reports. The files were not intended for public view but were constructions of an idea. In the mid 1970’s many of these photographs were reproduced along with articles in the publication “People Power: The Official Monthly Organ of Newark, New Jersey’s Employment and Training System.” Kline approaches the work by re-photographing and creating new context by addressing previous markings. Meantime, he keeps intact all meticulously created lines, and layers to shed light on the known details that can be interpreted as powerful metaphors of systemic structures that contain and marginalize groups and individuals. The artist greets the 350th anniversary of Newark, NJ with this new body of work. Kline has a vivid connection with city, his place of work, research and inspiration. For nearly 50 years the city’s landscape has undergone unprecedented transformation, but it also fights for promises that were never kept related to the 1967 uprising. Many of the photographs in this archive are from this period of time and demonstrate the resilience and pride of the city, his work attempts to open up that history and keep it in the foreground. Nick Kline was born in 1968 in Spring Lake, NJ. He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan in 1992 and a BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1990. Selected solo exhibitions include: Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY; Occurrence Gallery, Montreal, Canada; Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Prosjektrom Normanns, Stavanger, Norway; Sol Mednick Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. In 2014 Kline will make a collaborative installation at the Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; a two-person exhibition at Berlin Model Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic, and in 2015 a solo show with Another Space, Copenhagen, Denmark. Selected group exhibitions include: Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA; Contemporary Art Galleries University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT; Minnesota Center for Photography, Minneapolis, MN; and Smack Mellon Studios, Brooklyn, NY. Kline is a recipient of 2011 Emergency Grant Award, Foundation for Contemporary Art, NYC. His artists’ publication “Sorry You’re Here,” was a finalist in NATT & DAG Magazine’s, Norway, National Book of the Year Award, 2012. His artists’ publications can be found at Printed Matter, NYC and are in permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artexte and Banff Center. In 2014 Kline was awarded Artist-in-Residence, Artexte, Montreal, and in 2015 will be in-Residence at Center for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic. Kline’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Time-Out NY, The PhotoReview, Frankfurter Rundschau Magazine, among others. He resides in New York, NY and is an Assistant Professor, Photography, Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark.

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