James Cathcart: Boneyards

South 3rd and Hewes St. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1988, James Cathcart, Silver gelatin print

Causey Contemporary is pleased to present a solo exhibition of James Cathcart’s black and white photography. Boneyards will feature two series; one documenting the rough, ghostly landscape of late-1980’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the other capturing rare views of the U.S. Military’s aircraft repository. Boneyards, Cathcart’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, will be on view from June 1st to July 15th. A public reception will be held for the artist on June 1st from 6-9 pm. After moving to the south side of Williamsburg in 1988, Cathcart became interested in observing, documenting and working with the process of car stripping. In the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, Williamsburg was a convenient neighborhood for the dismantling of stolen cars and the resale of used car parts - a type of Boneyard. His observation of car stripping and disposal in Williamsburg continued through the mid nineties – when the neighborhood began changing rapidly. Falling parallel to the dilapidated, industrial aesthetic are his photographs of AMARC (Aerospace Maintenance And Regeneration Center). Cathcart first discovered the massive, 2600-acres facility out of the window of a commercial airplane in 2006. Adjacent to the Davis-Monthan Air Force base in Tucson, Arizona, AMARC stores over 4200 aircraft in the Sonaran Desert. Serving as the official repository for all of America’s military aircraft after retirement, some of the craft are dismantled for parts, while others are sold as scrap metal. A remarkable aspect of this series is that non-military personnel can’t access the site; the photographs were taken from either a moving bus, from behind a perimeter fence, or from a small private plane at the limits of restricted air space, all for a glimpse at what is locally known as the Boneyard. James Cathcart is a member of Ralph Applebaum Associates, the largest interpretive museum design firm in the world. While best known by the public for his work on the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., his projects are widely published and have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States. Additionally, Cathcart is a collaborator and co-founder along with Frank Fantauzzi and Terence Van Elslander of a collective called Iceberg Project . Iceberg Project creates innovative installations and other art works relative to the act of building. Although strongly conceptual, their work engages the public, a primary function of architecture. Cathcart, like Fantauzzi and Van Elslander, is an alumnus of both the Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Capp Street Project, a nationally recognized artist-in-residence program dedicated to the production of site-specific installations. He received a fellowship in architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Emerging New York Young Sculptor Fellowship from the Greenwall Foundation. He has lectured and exhibited at numerous venues nationally and internationally, including the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Industriemuseum in Dortmund, Germany. The public is invited to attend the opening of Boneyards, or visit the gallery during its summer hours: Wednesday-Friday, 11-6 pm, Saturday and Sunday, 12-6 pm. http://www.causeycontemporary.com/node/james-cathcart-solo-exhibition