William Greiner has spent the majority of his career living and working in the South, where he was born. Consistent throughout his images is the straightforward though sometimes wry and foreboding way in which he observes the strange and small detail of our lives. He captures these things that both distinguish us and yet are visually taken for granted in our suburban landscapes, and suspends them before us with bemused stillness.

Greiner's colorist style and confoundingly banal subject matter reveal the immediate influence of William Eggleston, the so-called "first color photographer," whose images changed the way in which color photography was viewed. Greiner's more recent work continues the aesthetic initiated by Eggleston, but shows him pressing the boundaries of his own personal vision. Objects and interiors are more closely cropped, such that the viewer's eye is directed towards a small detail, though often only after the eye has worked through the formalized fields of color that compete for its attention. In one such photograph, the cherry-red hood of a car dominates the foreground of the image, and draws the eye to the red stop sign which is just out of focus in the background. But only then does the eye return to the car's darkened windshield and observe a small red sign hanging from the rearview mirror that reads, "JESUS IS LORD." This relationship between detail and color gives Greiner's photographs both their coherence and their underlying tension.

Greiner's work is held in the permanent collections of many prestigious museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. His photographs have also been extensively exhibited and his first monograph, The Reposed, was published in 1998.

While his work has previously appeared at this gallery in group exhibitions, this is the gallery's first solo exhibition of William Greiner's photographs. Approximately 20 photographs by the artist will be on view beginning January 11, 2002 with a reception from 6-8 PM.