Jack Barrett is pleased to present Place/Image/Object, a multigenerational three-person exhibition featuring the work of Anna Plesset, Fred Terna, and Daniel Terna. The show comprises a video projection and painting installation by Plesset; a short film by Daniel Terna; and drawings by Fred Terna. Through physical and psychological encounters with sites and spaces, the three artists combine the monumental and the intimate, the remembered and the witnessed, the traumatic and the blissful to explore the construction and interpretation of history by drawing on first-hand experience.
 

Plesset’s work, part of a larger project titled Various Records, consists of a video projection and a painting installation comprised of trompe l'oeil paint- ing in a freestanding room. The project grew out of Plesset's discovery of film footage shot by her grandfather while he was serving as an American army psychiatrist in World War II. Following his arrival in Normandy in 1944, Plesset’s grandfather traded a P38 pistol for a 16mm camera and subsequently documented the immediate aftermath of the war, capturing scenes that cut between ravaged landscapes (collapsed bridges, bombed out buildings, forced labor camps), touristic sights (Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, Moulin Rouge), and the idyllic (family vacations, mountain views, ducks on a pond).
 

Using the film as her guide, Plesset retraced her grandfather’s path through Europe and in so doing, accumulated photographs, ticket stubs, museum pamphlets, postcards, maps, and other documents. The sequence of imagery painted in oil directly onto the walls of Travelogue (21st Century Room) (2013-2018) synthesizes these various ephemera into a singular record, evoking a site of research-in-progress to look at the psychological and physical relationships between war, trauma, suffering, and everyday life. In Document of a Travelogue by Lt. Col. Marvin R. Plesset, Division Neuropsychiatrist (2013), Plesset re-films her grandfather’s unaltered footage as a projection onto her studio wall to establish a new point of view and present the film as an autonomous document of travel through geography, history, memory, and technology. By relying on forms—trompe l’oeil and film—that offer the illusion of reality in their verisimilitude and yet inherently present an altered version of reality, Plesset examines how history is witnessed, experienced, authored, and shared while raising questions about the veracity of records, the meaning of seemingly insignificant objects, and the translation of history, memory, and knowledge.

Fred Terna's ink on paper drawings, which predate his arrival in Paris in 1946 through his 1952 move to the United States, feature scenes of post-war Europe and New York City's urban landscape. Terna, a Holocaust survivor, began drawing, covertly, while interned in German concentration camps between 1941 and 1945. Depicting cityscapes, domes- tic scenes, and bucolic landscapes, the drawings—at once loose and precise, many still in their original note- books—consider the process by which we study, analyze, and attempt to self-orient in place. Terna’s subjects, which include the room of his first hotel in Paris, the crowded apartments of the Latin Quarter, the trees of the Bois de Boulogne, the docks in Brooklyn, and New York City’s bridges—spotlight sites evoking ideas of travel, movement, and modernization.

Daniel Terna’s My First Wife Stella (2013) is a still and moving image project. Kodachrome slide pictures taken by Fred Terna, Daniel’s father, during a 1967 trip with his first wife Stella, structure and propel the narrative of Daniel’s piece. Hoping to gain insight in to his father’s relationship with Stella, a Holocaust survivor whom Daniel never met, and the period of his father's life following World War II, Daniel retraced the route of the couple’s 1967 trip through central California, a vacation that had been suggested for its potential therapeutic effects on Stella following her traumatic experiences in the camps. The slides serve as a record for an event that was never witnessed by Daniel. They also function as markers on a map, commemorating sites that have no formal monuments but are imbued with personal significance. Strung between the still shots is video documentation of Daniel and Fred, which offers intimate glimpses in to their daily interactions.

Place holds memory, so do the things we leave behind. Bringing together work spanning seventy-five years, Place/Image/Object explores the impulse to connect with the past through the images, objects, and places we encounter and considers how such tactile and visual experiences shape our understandings of history and the present.

Anna Plesset (b. 1977) uses painting, sculpture, drawing, and other media to create installations that engage personal and shared histories to examine how history, memory, and knowledge are constructed and mediated. Upcoming solo shows in 2019 include Various Records, Hunter Harrison, London, UK andVarious Records, PATRON, Chicago. Most recently, her work was featured in New York City at venues including 315 Gallery, Yossi Milo Gallery, Marlbor- ough, UNTITLED, the Horticultural Society of New York, and the Abrons Arts Center. In 2016, Plesset was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Additional awards and residencies include the Terra Foundation for American Art Summer Residency Fellowship in Giverny, France (2011) and the AIRspace residency program at Abrons Arts Center in New York City (2012-13). Her work has been featured featured in The New York Times, Artfo- rum, frieze, Bomb Magazine, Modern Painters, Time Out, and the Brooklyn Rail. Plesset received her BFA in Painting from Cornell University and her MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
 

Fred Terna (b. 1923) is a Holocaust survivor and painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Terna was born in Vienna, and lived in Prague from 1926-1940. From 1941-1945, he was an inmate in German concentration camps, among them Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Dachau. Terna moved to Paris in 1946 and informally studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and the Academie Julien, where he was inspired by the work of the Cubists and post-Impressionists. After eventually settling in New York in 1952, Terna elaborated on the prevailing modes of Abstract Expressionism with a personal style that infused textural elements into his compositions.

Terna has lectured extensively and exhibited his work in several solo and group shows. His work is included in a variety of collections including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC); Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC); The Albertina Collection (Vienna, AT); The Ghetto Fighters Museum (Israel); and the Yad Vashem Museum (Israel). Recent solo shows took place at 321 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), St. Francis College (Brooklyn, NY) and the Museum of Arts and Culture at New Rochelle High School (New Rochelle, NY). Recent group exhibitions include Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York, NY).

Daniel Terna (b. 1987 Brooklyn, NY) is a Brooklyn-based artist working with photography and video. He has participated in select group exhibitions at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York, NY); Galeria Breve (Mexico City, MX); Foley Gallery (New York, NY); MoMA PS1 (New York, NY); Baxter St. Camera Club of NY (New York, NY); the International Center of Photography (New York, NY); New Wight Biennial (UCLA, Los Angeles, CA); BRIC Arts Media Biennial (Brooklyn, NY); Eyebeam (New York, NY); The Wild Project (New York, NY); the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA); Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA); Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans, LA); and Gallery Tayuta (Tokyo, JP). Terna was a resident in the Collaborative Fellowship Program at UnionDocs, Brooklyn, and was awarded the Cuts and Burns Residency at Outpost Artist Resources in Ridgewood, NY. His work has been featured in Still Magazine, The New York Times, Dazed, Oxford American, Conveyor Magazine, Aint Bad Magazine, and Slate. Terna graduated with a BA in photography from Bard College and received his MFA from the International Center of Photography-Bard. He founded and co-directs 321 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY).