DEVILS NIGHT, THE MORNING AFTER by Katherine York / SAVE THE DATE

I have been working with photographer Katherine York to mount her first solo show in Berlin! A one night only event open to the public will be held at a pop-up gallery space in a private location in Prenzlauer Berg. Save the date for the opening!

DEVILS NIGHT, THE MORNING AFTER by Katherine York
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 22, 2012 from 7 – 10 pm 
Exhibition period: March 22 – 25, 2012, appt only 
WINS Gallery, Wins Strasse 62, Prenzl'berg 

KATHERINE YORK will present a photographic series of her hometown Detroit, Michigan in her first solo show - DEVIL’S NIGHT, THE MORNING AFTER. Devils Night is the informal title given to October 30th, the night before Halloween, now remembered by the vandalism and arson seen in Detroit from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Devils Night dates from as early as the 1940's, where youths would engage in a night of criminal behavior, usually of acts of almost exclusively petty vandalism. However, in the early 1970s, the vandalism escalated to arson as political turmoil, job losses, rioting and an increase in violence, causing a mass population exodus. In the past 50 years the population has halved. Property owners, unable to sell in the city's rapidly declining housing market would use Devils Night as an opportunity to burn down their homes, collect the insurance money, and claim that an arsonist was at fault. From the 70s until the mid 90s arson and vandalism became more prolific in Detroit's inner-city every year.

The destruction reached a peak in the mid 80s, with between 500 and 800 fires being lit in the three days before Halloween.

During the summer and winter of 2010/2011, York spent time photographing the burnt and abandoned houses in the disappearing suburbs of Detroit. The series documents a city in decay and the ruin of its human inhabitants with traces of the people who still live in the area.

KATHERINEYORK (b. 1976, Detroit) a self-taught photographer based in Berlin, York

was first introduced to the medium by her grandfather. Leaving Detroit at 19 to

California, York worked primarily in architecture and design. York’s childhood in Detroit, juxtaposed with her early passion for architecture, is evident through the sprawling desolate city, suburban and industrial landscapes of her photography. Fascinated by neglect, post industrial and post communist landscapes, York documents the transition of social spaces after the fall of a dictatorship, thriving industry or over developed past. In doing so, she questions: how these transitions have failed or succeeded, what blossoms in these exhausted landscapes and how the spaces become reconfigured or imagined. York’s images often leave the audience with a sensation of viewing a site where an event has occurred, but what remains is unsettling unknown.

WINS GALLERY

The exhibition will be a one night only event open to the public at a pop-up gallery space in Winsstrasse, Prenzlauer Berg, after which it will be open by appointment only until March 25.