The exhibition includes seven color photographs, made from 2009 to 2010, depicting the water fountains at The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art. The series is rooted in the artist's longtime attraction to "liquid Imagery," inspired by recent observations in digital animation and television advertising ("splashes are everywhere"), and a certain nostalgia for the obsolescence of water as an element in photographic processing.

 

For almost forty years Tim Maul has used photography as both the principal medium for his art, and an essential tool for organizing and understanding the world. Since 1973, when he graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a degree in painting, he has produced deadpan, snapshot-style images that tease out the hidden meanings of "the things between the things we see," transforming prosaic renderings into objects that combine intellect, irony and beauty.

 

From the mid-1970s throughout the 1980s, Maul's photographs challenged accepted norms of artistic photography both in terms of their subject matter (a sheet of stationery, an audio cassette, hotel rooms and office interiors, etc.) and the fact that they were shot like tourist photographs – on impulse in color using a hand-held camera. Travel, tourism, and a mild fascination with the occult have also been ongoing preoccupations for the artist. In the early 1990s he produced and exhibited a series of black and white photographs entitled A Cultured Tourist, in which he photographed sites in lower Manhattan, pointed out by a psychic. During that time, he also documented other allegedly haunted locations in photographs taken during many annual visits to Strokestown Park, an eighteenth-century manor house in County Roscommon, Ireland.

 

Maul began his newest series, entitled Museum Wish, after moving from his longtime home in the Village to a new apartment on the Upper East Side. He writes:

 

I once took a photograph of a pond in a shopping mall that was filled with loose change. Several years later I revisited the image and found that it possessed the contradictory elements I had often struggled to combine in my earlier work: formal abstraction and a subjective narrative. It reminded me of the color field paintings I had made in art school while the haphazardness of the coins thrown in the water suggested post-minimal scatter art and the conceptual works of Mel Bochner which I had admired. Moving uptown in 2005 allowed for more leisurely visits to the museums in the area and I found myself drawn to the man-made bodies of water within them. I observed parents encouraging their children to throw coins into these spaces and to 'make a wish.'

 

Tim Maul was born in 1951 in Stamford, Connecticut. He arrived in New York in 1969 to attend the School of Visual Arts and has lived and worked here since that time. Although he is best known for his photographs, Maul has also worked in performance and regularly publishes articles and reviews in international art publications. Since 1979 he has had one and two-person exhibitions at galleries, museums, and alternative spaces in the U.S. and Europe, including the Berkeley Art Museum; the Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland; Artists Space, New York; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, and many others. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at such distinguished institutions as The Photographers Gallery, London, the International Center of Photography, New York; The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and has performed at PS 1; White Columns; Franklin Furnace; the ICA, Boston; the Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; and many other well-known venues.

 

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects is located on the 6th floor of 535 West 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.