FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LOS ANGELES, CA.

Rocky Schenck will have his first Los Angeles exhibition in two years, opening September 10th, 2005 at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery. This exhibition opens September 10th and runs through October 8th.  A reception with the artist will take place on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 from 6:00 to 8:00pm.   The reception is free and open to the public.  The gallery is located at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, just west of Fairfax.  For information call 323-937-0765.

The new collection, entitled "Wonderland," explores fantastical and wondrous environments that couldn’t possibly be real, but indeed they are.  From a silver sphere in a Paris suburb to a forest of blackened shafts blanketed in snow to an alien landscape of towering pinnacles, all the images in "Wonderland" celebrate the magical world around us.

Mr. Schenck’s new work continues the journey he’s been on documenting his travels and personal experiences around America and Europe. "By continually exploring alternative realities and photographing the experiences, I feel that perhaps I’ll better understand how I got to this point in my life, and perhaps where I’ll be heading in the future." These wanderings are my therapy."

Mr. Schenck’s first book, "Rocky Schenck: Photographs", published in the fall of 2003, sold out within a year and is now in it’s second printing.   The book and accompanying exhibitions received glowing reviews from coast to coast, with PDN including it in their year end round up of "most intriguing photo books", writing   "it is a measure of the curious strength and unity of vision of the photographs that after you’ve examined all…of them, you feel… that there is no other way of seeing the world than his, that there is no other photographer you’d rather be looking at."   In her review in Paper Magazine, Ann Magnuson wrote "Schenck’s photographs seem like buried memories you can’t quite recall but continue to obsess over with the hope that by doing so you will achieve that ever-elusive breakthrough, just like in therapy…. they are phantasmagoric."   Artnews described Schenck’s work as "mysteriously foreboding, as though Edgar Allan Poe might have conceived it."

As author John Berendt wrote in the foreword to Schenck’s book, the photographs are "a psychological expression of one’s confrontation with priorities, obligations, things to be done, decisions to be made, consensus to be arrived at.  Each photograph is like a still taken from a movie that exists not on film but rather in one’s memory, with all the fuzziness typical of remembered impressions."