Events

                               February 6 - March 28, 2009

                               "Soul Rebel: An Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley"

                              February 6- March 14, 2009

                              David Robin, "Homestead Project"

                              February 5 - April 25, 2009   

                              Jason Florio, "Makasutu: Mecca in the Forest"

"War in Lebannon"

May 1 - June 17, 2007

Opening talk with Scott Anderson.

"In the Shadow of Power: Poverty in Washing D.C."

March 12- May 8, 2007

"The Price of Oil"

Opening talk with Sebastian Junger

Cycle of Violence

November 6, 2006 - January 7, 2007

The Outcasts of Slovakia

June 27 - August 22, 2006

Judge of the Undergraduate Photography show.

Afganistan Embedded

April 17 - June 25, 2006

March 5th - April 16th, 2009

opening reception: Thursday March 5, 2009 6-9 pm

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NEW YORK, NY (March 9, 2009) — Jonathan LeVine Gallery is proud to present Paperweight, a solo exhibition of new works by Phil Frost. For his first show at the gallery, Frost has created a new series of works on paper, including paintings and original drawings. As his first exhibition in New York in the past three years, Paperweight marks a highly anticipated event for this celebrated artist.

Using mediums such as ink, aerosol, gouache and oils, beneath a layer of correction fluid, Frost has been known to paint elaborate installations on found objects such as baseball bats, windowpanes, and old barn doors. Oscillating between modernist design and primitivism, abstraction and representation, Frost’s work is tied together cohesively by his signature top-layer of crisp white patterning—remarkably drawn free-hand with a correction fluid pen, without the use of stencils. This white-out element often appears to form a code or language, composed of letters, hearts, dots and mask-like faces, reminiscent of tribal and indigenous art. These symbols, which the artist refers to as “glyphic distinctions,” are painted on top of heavily textured backgrounds. The overall effect is a masking yet highlighting of negative space, like a delicate lace of personal faith and truth, veiling the decay of humanity. Frost’s deep pantheistic spirituality is expressed through imagery such as in the open-heart motif, which represents the surrender of self to a higher purpose. 

NEW YORK, NY (March 9, 2009) — Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to announce Hindi Love Song, a solo exhibition of new works by Gary Taxali. For his fist solo show in New York, the artist has created a series of mixed-media paintings and sculptures in what will be his largest collection of original work to date, both in quantity and in scale. Highly explorative when it comes to application methods, Taxali combines layers of collaged materials and silk-screening techniques. His images are produced using a variety of mediums—ink, oil, acrylic, enamel, and gouache—applied to a number of different surfaces including: paper, plywood, masonite, steel, aluminum, and vintage book covers.

Hindi Love Song features Taxali’s anachronistic aesthetic, evoking nostalgia for an era before his own time. Expanding upon his signature style, works in the show feature playful imagery inspired by vintage animation and packaging, often combining the artist’s hand-rendered typography with geometric patterns to compliment his figures. In a Los Angeles Times review, Holly Myers wrote: "The work of Gary Taxali takes a basically juvenile bibliophilic impulse—doodling in the leaves of borrowed books—to a more artistically sophisticated level. There is an appealing sense of play, drawn from childhood but supported by a mature iconographic sensibility."

An award-winning illustrator, Taxali’s process in creating commercial work remains void of digital assistance (a rare trait in an increasingly electronic industry) which perhaps has led to the appeal and stylistic development of his retro-looking visuals. The same is true of his approach to gallery work, which is based on a deep love of drawing and hands-on printmaking methods. Taxali’s subjects, with their minimalist yet exaggerated facial expressions and gestures, are painted in flat color onto found materials and other non-traditional canvases. Some of his characters have been created in three-dimensional form, first as a series of vinyl figures, and later in fiberglass. For this show, one of Taxali’s reoccurring characters makes his debut appearance as a limited edition bronze sculpture. Gary Taxali’s new line of limited edition gold and porcelain cufflinks, produced by Hobbs & Kent, will also be on view and available for purchase during the exhibition.

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “Mentors,” an exhibition of work by BFA Photography Department students inspired by their year-long mentorship with key figures in the New York arts community. Drawn from the ranks of city’s best-known photographers, curators, art directors, publishers, art dealers, critics and writers, the mentors are paired with students based upon their field of expertise and the student’s area of concentration. The 2008-2009 mentors include creative director Fabien Baron, cinematographer and SVA alumnus Harris Savides, New York Times writer Philip Gefter, and photographers Ari Marcoupolis, Sally Gall and Gregory Crewdson, among others. 

Calumet Photographic is pleased to host the 2009 BFA Exhibition by students from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Department of Photography and Imaging. 

This diverse exhibition features work by 28 emerging artists and is comprised of a wide range of media, including traditional black-and-white and color photographs, digital art, publications, web-based projects, video, collage, drawings and sculpture. 

On view from April 16 to May 1, 2009 

Gallery Hours are M-F 8:30-5:30, Sat 9:00-5:30 

Join us for an opening reception on Thursday, April 16th from 6 to 8 p.m.  

What: “Stoked on Spring” – Stoked Mentoring’s Annual Spring fundraiser 

Date: Saturday May 16th 

Time: 6-10pm (6-7pm VIP, 7pm opens to the public) 

Venue: Open House Gallery www.openhousegallery.org 

Event Overview 

May 16th will mark our annual Spring fundraiser, which will include 125 works of art 

and one-of-a-kind items in a silent auction format. We will also have 15 select pieces 

of art sold during a live auction alongside 10 Stoked Scholarships. Our VIP champagne 

reception will be held from 6-8 pm and will provide a chance for guests to learn more 

about Stoked Mentoring in an intimate setting. VIP Ticket holders will also have first 

access to preview the art and will receive an exclusive gift bag. There will be limited 

tickets available for the VIP reception. The event will include an open-bar, celebrity 

hosts and DJ. 

Ticket price: 

VIP: $100, General: $75, Jr. Member: $50 

Confirmed Artists: 

Peter Max, Michael Dweck, Kenzo Minami, Jack Laroux, Chris Gentile, Abe Lincoln Jr.- 

ELC, Matt Siren, J. Strickland, Andrew Kessler, Aaron Aujla, Inga Huld Tryggvadottir, 

Julian Ungano, David Cook, Mara Sprafkin, Dana Veraldi, Tommy Agriodimas, Deryck 

Todd, Agatha Wasilewska, Daniel Zvereff, Adam Gianotti, Russell Short, Bwana Spoons, 

Noh J Cole, Col RWK, Royce Bannon-ELC 

Expected Audience: 

300 young professionals from the action-sports, art, and fashion industries, including 

artists, beginning and seasoned art collectors, as well as on-going supporters. 

Press Coverage from Past Art Events: 

The NY Times, NY Daily News, Gotham Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, Nylon Magazine, 

Fashion Week Daily and The Onion 

A selection of contributing artists from last year's event includes: 

Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Tom Sachs, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol Estate, Phil 

Frost, Kehinde Wiley, David Hockney 

Personal

May 7th - June 6th

Artists' Reception: May 13 7pm-9pm

Featuring artists: Brad Harris, Timothy Hogan, Henry Leutwyler, Giles Revell, Martin Schoeller, Mark Zibert

Personal examines the personal photographic explorations of six artists who work in multiple realms of contemporary photography.  The exhibition discusses the elements of style and vision and how an artist, be it a fine artist or commercial artist or those that blur the lines, create work for their own personal expression.

Opening Reception: May 16, 2009 7-10 pm

Crown of the Lost

Featured Artists: Eliud Carrizales, Giovanni Cervantes, Debra Holt, Mathias Kessler, Hugo Lopez, Christoph Morlinghaus, Julie Pike.

The show's main focus is the foreboding aspects of nature and the inevitable decay of beauty through the exploration of behavioral aspects of biological and technological ecosystems and environments, their development, peaks, and ultimately their breakdowns.

Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 13  6pm-8pm

Michael Mazzeo Gallery is pleased to present Transmutations: Abstraction in Nature, featuring work by Caleb Charland, Christian Erroi,  Young Hee Kim, Sebastian Lemm, and Chris McCaw.

Transmutations consists of imagery in which either the photographer alters nature or allows nature to alter the photographic material.  The exhibition will be on view from May 13 through June 20.

Praia Piquinia, Lyon-based artist Christian Chaize's first US solo exhibition, Wednesday May 20, 2009. You may recognize Christian's work from another Jen Bekman Project, 20x200. His editions debuted there back in December of last year and were featured in the pages of Domino Magazine. Christian's large prints (44" x 37") are the perfect way to welcome summer and keep the beach close by all year round!

Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 | 6pm-8pm
Please join us at the gallery Wednesday, May 20th from 6pm-8pm, at a reception for the artist.

  7 - 10 p.m.

 Black Star presents: Wishful Thinkers- A Milk        Gallery Project

 Portraits of 50 Inspirational Women to Benefit FINCA  International

 DJ:Seeps

 Reception generously sponsored by Charles Noian  and Andy Tobias

Hans Gissinger's Exploding Cakes project

The Gallery @ Stockland Martel

Opening: Thursday, June 4th, 6-8 pm

The explosion of the cake sets into motion different mechanisms that go beyond the formal frame of the work.   Each tart gives rise to an installation.

Curator Marshall Kappel has compiles an exhibition in Dumbo of all Polaroid-based artitsts.

Thursday, June 4th 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.

Please join us as we celebrate the work and achievement of the ICP students in the General Studies and Documentary Photojournalism Certificate Programs with their exhibition Pluperfect.

Curated by Alison Morley, Chair of the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program and Marina Berio, Chair of the General Studies Program.

This exhibition will be on view June 27-August 16.  The Education Gallery is open 10:00am-6:00 pm.

Gallery 151 invites yo to the opening of "Coexist: The Universe and I" the newest exhibit from the Urban Green Initiative- an ongoing series of art exhibitions, music concerts and dance performances that encourage an artistic approach to conversations of about environmental awareness.

  Open: June 16- July 16  1-6pm Wednesday-Sunday

  Open house every Thursday from 6-8pm

Inaugural Show in our New Space: Same Address, Now Ground Floor

THE WORLD IN BLACK AND WHITE:

Vintage Prints from the National Geographic Archive

Exhibition: September 17 – October 17, 2009

Reception: September 17th, 6-8pm

Steven Kasher Gallery is proud to present the first exhibition and sale of vintage prints from the archives of the National Geographic Society. The exhibition will feature over 150 unique vintage black and white prints representing the earliest days of the Society (founded in 1888) through the 1940s. It will present premier examples of the most aesthetically and historically significant prints in the archive.

Hey, Hot Shot! 2009 First Edition Exhibition

Opening Reception | Wednesday, September 9, 2009 | 6–8 p.m.

images | statements | press release

Hey, Don't Forget!

Please join us TONIGHT Wednesday, September 9, from 6 to 8 p.m., at the opening reception for the Hey, Hot Shot! 2009 First Edition Exhibition, featuring eighteen works from five photographers: Michelle Arcila, Daniel Cheek, Mike Sinclair, Parsley Steinweiss and Kurt Tong.

The exhibition will be on view Thursday, September 10th through Saturday, September 19th, 2009.

Until the Kingdom Comes

September 10, 2009–October 31, 2009

Artist's Reception

Thursday, September 10, 2009, 6:00–8:00 pm

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new images and sculptures by Simen Johan, entitled Until the Kingdom Comes. The exhibition will open on Thursday, September 10, and close on Saturday, October 31, with a reception for the artist on Thursday, September 10, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

In his ongoing series Until the Kingdom Comes, begun in 2004 and first shown at the gallery in 2006, Simen Johan depicts a natural world hovering between reality, fantasy and nightmare.  Merging traditional photographic techniques with digital methods, Johan’s images are crafted over time and may include a synthesis of landscapes from various geographical locations and animals photographed in captivity or in the wild.

An albino deer is camouflaged in a lattice of trees, shadow and light in one image; in another, a weeping willow is enshrined in an apocalyptic fog. Three of Johan’s recent sculptures incorporating taxidermy, insects and foliage into miniature ecosystems will also be included in the show.

In his work, Johan blurs the boundaries between the real and the unreal, re-imagining worlds that, much like our own, are forever a mystery. Majestic animals in fantasy landscapes are set in relief against a darker reality, one of absence and longing. The work addresses primal experiences, shaped by desires and fears—solitary paths towards imagined fulfillment.

Simen Johan’s work is included in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Cleveland Art Museum. He recently received a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 2010–11, work from the series Until the Kingdom Comes will be presented in solo exhibitions at the Frist Center of Art in Nashville, TN and at the Pollock Gallery at SMU, Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas, TX. His work has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, Norway and the National Art Museum of Lithuania, and in group exhibitions at the George Eastman House, the International Center of Photography, the Australian Centre for Photography, the Neuberger Museum of Art and the University of Iowa Museum of Art. In 2003, Twin Palms published his monograph, Room to Play. Simen Johan was born in Kirkenes, Norway in 1973. He was raised in Sweden and has resided in New York City since 1992.

The Open Society Institute invites you to its sixteenth group photography exhibition Moving Walls.

Please join us for the opening reception

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

6-8:30pm

400 West 59th street 

The exhibition is open to the public through May 21, 2010.

http://www.krisgravesprojects.com/

jonathanlevinegallery.com

jonathanlevinegallery.com

http://www.foleygallery.com/exhibitions/exhibitions_up.php3

This major career retrospective on Tim Burton (American, b. 1958), consisting of a gallery exhibition and a film series, considers Burton's career as a director, producer, writer, and concept artist for live-action and animated films, along with his work as a fiction writer, photographer and illustrator. Following the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work, the exhibition presents artwork generated during the conception and production of his films, and highlights a number of unrealized projects and never-before-seen pieces, as well as student art, his earliest non-professional films, and examples of his work as a storyteller and graphic artist for non-film projects. The opposing themes of adolescence and adulthood, and the elements of sentiment, cynicism, and humor inform his work in a variety of mediums—drawings, paintings, storyboards, digital and moving-image formats, puppets and maquettes, props, costumes, ephemera, sketchbooks, and cartoons. Taking inspiration from sources in pop culture, Burton has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as a spiritual experience, influencing a generation of young artists working in film, video, and graphics. 

Throckmorton Fine Art is pleased to offer an exhibition of thirty-five rare vintage prints by Tina Modotti. Some of the works shown are unique images. Modotti only took photographs during her seven tumultuous years in Mexico, from 1923-1930. It is estimated that her artistic legacy is limited to six hundred photographs, the majority of which are now in museum collections. (The holder of the most images is the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) Gathered for this exhibit is the largest group of Modotti photographs still in private hands. The photographs exhibited are from a number of distinguished collections, including those of Francis Toor, Xavier Guerrero, and Luis B. Traven. A few of the images were loaned to the retrospective of Modotti at the Philadelphia Museum in 1995, which traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1996, and then to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art the same year.

Although Modotti learned photography from Edward Weston, with whom she had a long, intimate relationship, her photography is distinct from his work. Modotti’s images fit into the innovative photography of the 1920s that pushed the boundaries of the medium—and of art itself. This work, often called modernist photography, embraced experimentation, unusual points of view, and unconventional subjects. Modotti’s subject matter varies, including as it does crowd scenes, industrial views, Mexican folk culture, flora, and even portraits. Her compositions, though, mark her work: there are strong angles and an unnerving starkness that give her photographs a captivating immediacy.

During their years together in Mexico, Modotti and Weston were part of a celebrated circle of artists and intellectuals, including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Modotti’s involvement in politics led to her expulsion from Mexico in 1930. Leaving Mexico, she became even more consumed by politics, ending her work as a photographer. She leaves us, though, a rich body of images, which is amply represented in this exhibit.

http://www.throckmorton-nyc.com/

jenbekman.com

http://www.marvelligallery.com

Giant Robot is proud to host Paul Hornschemeier and Jay Ryan as they hit the road together in November and December for an extensive book tour to promote their respective new releases, All and Sundry and Animals and Objects In and Out of Water.

Paul Hornschemeier began self-publishing his experimental comics series Sequential in college. Graduating with a degree in Philosophy, he moved to Chicago and began his series Forlorn Funnies, producing the graphic novels Mother, Come Home, The Three Paradoxes, Life with Mr. Dangerous, and the short story and illustration collections Let Us Be Perfectly Clear and All and Sundry. Hornschemeier's work has been translated into multiple languages and won international acclaim and awards, including honors at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His clients include, Intel, CNN/Mother Industries, the Wall Street Journal, Life magazine, This American Life, Brooks Running, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Books UK, Marvel Entertainment, DC Comics, and Nickelodeon. He currently resides in Chicago, where he is still at work on Forlorn Funnies as well as various illustration, prose, and music projects.

Jay Ryan has been making screen-printed concert posters in Chicago since 1995, and at his own print shop, The Bird Machine, since 1999. Known for his hand-drawn type, humorous animal subjects, and muted color selections, he has worked for thousands of indie bands such as the Melvins, Shellac, Andrew Bird, Fugazi, the Flaming Lips, and the Jesus Lizard, as well as clients like Patagonia Clothing, Converse Shoes, and the BBC. When he's not playing bass in his band, Dianogah, Jay lectures to students and shows his prints at universities and galleries across the US and Europe.

The in-store appearances and book signings by Paul and Jay will take place from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. on Monday, November 16 at GRNY. For more information about the artist, the Giant Robot stores, or Giant Robot magazine, please contact:

Eric Nakamura
Giant Robot Owner/Publisher
eric@giantrobot.com
(310) 479-7311

Bruce Silverstein Gallery: Martin Denker

http://www.hastedhunt.com/exhibition.php?p=u&e=152

The New York Times, September 4, 2009

Treading in the footsteps of Charles Marville, Brassaï and Atget, German photographer Christopher Thomas creates black and white images of cities in a state of repose, as if only the viewer's gaze could animate these empty streets. After years of photographing his native Munich, Thomas turned his camera on his adopted city, New York. The resulting exhibition of 30 large-scale landscapes feels both nostalgic and contemporary, offering an elusive glimpse of 19th century tranquility while hinting at a cryptic apocalyptic ending just around the bend.

The exhibition, co-curated by Ira Stehmann and Petra Giloy-Hirtz, accompanies the publication of New York Sleeps, by Christopher Thomas, Petra Giloy-Hirtz (editor) Ira Stehmann (editor), with essays by Robert Shamis and Ulrich Pohlmann. (Prestel, Munich, Berlin, London, New York, 2009)

Curator  Bob Shamis writes in his essay Coming Upon New York: “The quietness that these photographs evoke, so at odds with our expectations, is at first unsettling for someone well acquainted with New York. The urban landscape may be familiar, but this is not the city that most of us know and experience. The total absence of people in Thomas’ photographs is the result of shooting in the early morning hours, when even New York’s streets are almost deserted, and because of the necessity of making long exposures with his view camera. With his lens shutter opens for many seconds for each exposure, moving figures did not register on the slow film that Thomas used, reinforcing the impression of the city as the site of a lost civilization.”

From views of an abandoned Staten Island ferry terminal to the deteriorating Coney Island Cyclone, Thomas documents urban scenes that while outwardly static, show a city in perpetual transition. The presence of previous inhabitants lingers heavily within each frame, like dinner plates that have recently been cleared away.

Like a Surrealist flaneur, Thomas explores the complex tension between absence and presence in his dreamlike outer landscapes. Devoid of human figures, his images of winding alleyways, imposing monuments and gleaming mist-filled harbors veer off at random into psychological terrain. Using a custom large-format camera and Polaroid film, he has created a nebulous archive of our collective inner longings.

Born in Germany in 1961, Christopher Thomas has worked for magazines such as Geo, Stern, Merian, and the SüddeutscheZeitung Magazin. He has produced numerous photo essays and received international awards for commercial and fine art photography. He lives and works in Munich and New York.

Christopher Thomas: New York Sleeps will be on view December 3, 2009 through January 9, 2010.

http://stevenkasher.com/html/exhibinfo.asp?exnum=1070

Artists include: Julia Fullerton-Batten, Mercedes Helnwein, Anthony Lister, Ian Whitmore, and Sarah Wilmer.

http://www.randallscottgallery.com/

myplasticheart presents "Saline" the latest exhibition featuring Atlanta based artist/designer Dosa Kim. Using the canvas as his soap box, Dosa looks at the world he inhabits and uses his medium of choice to give us a glimpse of how he sees society and the world around him. With a very specific point of view and no qualms about sharing it, Dosa skillfully expresses his thoughts and perspective metaphorically through his work. Please join us at the opening reception on December 18th from 6-9PM. Dosa will be in attendance to chat and discuss his work.

http://myplasticheartnyc.com

www.hastedhunt.com

http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/upcoming.htm

http://www.klompching.com/kcg/upcomfront.htm

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of two bodies of work by Jacob Aue Sobol, Sabine and I, Tokyo. The exhibition will open on Thursday, January 14, and close on Saturday, February 20, with a reception on Thursday, January 14, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

Jacob Aue Sobol’s series Sabine (1999-2001) chronicles three years the artist spent in the settlement of Tiniteqilaaq in Greenland, his life as a fisherman and hunter, and his intimate relationship with Sabine and her family. The series of black-and-white photographs is a visual diary of a love story and daily survival, capturing private moments with Sabine contrasted with the harsh arctic environment of the east Greenlandic coast.

Photographs from the series I, Tokyo were taken between 2006 and 2008 while the artist lived in Tokyo. Overwhelmed by loneliness and isolation due to the unfamiliar culture and large city, the artist used the camera to find “individual human presence” in a swarming metropolis. The photographs offer a personal view of Tokyo, a result of the artist’s need to connect to the people and the city.

Jacob Aue Sobol’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museet for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark, and Rencontres D’Arles, Arles, France. In 2006, he received the First Prize, Daily Life Stories, World Press Photo. Jacob Aue Sobol’s recent book,I, Tokyo, was awarded the Leica European Publishers Award 2008. The book Sabine was published in 2004. Aue Sobol studied at the European Film College and Fatamorgana, Danish School of Documentary and Art Photography. He was born in Denmark in 1976 and grew up in Brøndby Strand south of Copenhagen. He currently lives and works in Copenhagen.

http://www.yossimilo.com/exhibitions/2010_01-jaco_aue_sobo/

http://www.sashawolf.com/Exhibition_Upcoming.html

www.yanceyrichardson.com

Amador Gallery is pleased to present the series “New Trees” by German photographer Robert Voit. These large-format color photographs focus on seemingly commonplace trees within urban and rural settings. In their typology, Voit has appropriated the strategy of Bernd and Hilla Becher and his former instructor Thomas Ruff. Yet Voit updates this strategy in a humorous, insightful and visually intriguing commentary on networks and illusion as pervasive mainstays of contemporary life.

Voit’s “Trees” are initially slow to reveal their true nature. Prolonged viewing, however, discloses the artificiality of these central focal points, which, in reality, are cell phone masts that have been meticulously disguised by telecom companies to blend in with their surroundings. One of the photos features a seemingly real palm tree looming above a trailer park in Las Vegas; it stands, dwarfing the other—real—palm trees. Despite its initially convincing appearance, the tree begins to seem uncannily rigid and linear. A subtle, but jarring, sense of artificiality comes to pervade the image, a feeling which is confirmed by the sight of mechanical antenna structures somewhat cloistered within the fake tree’s long, artificial leaves. The trees’ attempts to fit in with their surroundings creates the tension of Voit’s work and make for its great departure from the typological studies of the Bechers; his subjects are aggressively tied to their surroundings and to the social sphere rather than an objective and abstracting gaze. 

The attention drawn by Voit to these all-too-perfect imitations calls to the fore the communications and surveillance networks, which pervade the seemingly natural and commonplace world of our everyday lives. Trees, an emblem of shelter, solidity and the incorruptibility of nature, appear ironically co-opted, channeling information invisibly, through walls and in the service of social, commercial and political interests. Likewise, photography is put under scrutiny in these images, its oft-declared allegiance to verisimilitude undermined and its own artificiality and manipulation highlighted by the very illusionism of the documented scene. Voit’s commentary, however, is not acerbically critical. Rather, by stressing the singularity of these objects in contrast to their intended uniformity with their surroundings, Voit humorously exposes the invisible networks the fake trees represent, and he furthermore quips at the absurdity of the effort. Too valuable to be left open, the massive fake trees are often surrounded by fencing or other protective barriers, emasculated and protected from the world into which they are attempting to blend.

A graduate of the prestigious Düseldorfer Akademie, Robert Voit currently lives and works in Munich. The publication “New Trees” is forthcoming from Steidl. He has won several awards including the Europäischer Architektur Fotografiepreis, the Munich Hausderkunst Preis and the Sophie Smoliar Award. In addition to his native Germany, Voit has exhibited widely in Europe and Asia.

Amador Gallery is located in the landmark Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street on the 6th floor. Gallery hours are 11 to 6 Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment. For additional information, please contact the gallery at (212) 759-6740, for more information visit www.amadorgallery.com or contact us at info@amadorgallery.com.

Dean Project is pleased to announce, “Parallel States” a group exhibition featuring the work of Palma Blank-Rosenblum, Sangbin IM and Kris Tamburello.

The works in this exhibition explore concepts of structure and visual perception, which includes image construction, deconstruction, transformation and the perspective-dimension of space. The artists in this exhibition have approached these concepts by creating paintings or photography based on abstract geometric compositions or from photographs of city and landscapes.

Through the chosen building process and medium by each of the artists the viewer is presented with a group of works that display elemental and conceptual ideas of image perception.

In the process of layering transparent colors with simple geometric structures Palma Blank-Rosenblum acrylic paintings create both multiple spaces, directions existing in a state of flux, multidimensional evolution and an amplifier of color and light.

Kris Tamburello’s work originates from the use of his architectural photography from in which he chooses details of light and reflections. He then transforms the photo by way of a digital process of stretching and pulling the image in order to uncover the layers of the inner structure of the image.

Sangbin IM’s photographs are the meticulous result of transforming and assembling his own photography and paintings. Acting as a curator he selects a group of images from a pool of his photographs of specific places or subjects. He then organizes imaginary environments of both unfamiliar images of landscape or compositions based on real life elements.

Palma Blank-Rosenblum is based in New York and received her MFA from Yale University in 2006. Sangbin IM is based in New York having received his MFA from Yale University in 2005 and is presently completing his PHD at Columbia University. Kris Tamburello is based in New York where he has been working in photography for fifteen years.

http://www.deanproject.com/

The Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University is hosting a traveling exhibition by photographer Susan Nolan, Associate Professor of Psychology and United Nations representative for the American Psychology Association. Dr. Nolan’s photographs capture the spirit of post-war Bosnia-Herzegovia, focusing on young people working to improve their lives in the aftermath of war. The images are quite different from the stereotypical depictions broadcast by American media outlets. Instead, Nolan captures youthful subjects engaged in leisure activities, providing positive portrayals of youth expressing their identities through their vocations and avocations. The energy radiated by the young people she encountered during her visits is incredibly uplifting.

Nolan’s photographic essay was inspired by her recent trips to the region, the first of which dated to 2005. She stated, “I was struck by the contrast between the realities of life we saw in Bosnia compared to the images I had come to know through American mass media.” Because Nolan’s initial stay lasted 15 months and her husband Ivan is fluent in the local language, she was able to gain the trust and friendship of the people, resulting in images that penetrate the private worlds of her subjects. The exhibition will subsequently travel to the city of Banja Luka in Bosnia.

http://academic.shu.edu/libraries/gallery/current.htm#budi_

Known for her innovative use of current technology, like search engines and picture sharing services, the work of Brooklyn-based Penelope Umbrico reveals truths within the seemingly ordinary in two new interventions. In Leonards for Leonard, Umbrico investigates the history of the space where she will exhibit – the Leonard Natman Room – creating a project that would draw attention to the disparity between the pre- and post-digital worlds while providing a strange, new subject with companionship. In 5,537,594 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 5/30/09 - for BAM, Umbrico reimagines an ongoing project, using images of sunsets sourced from Flickr in the context of BAM spaces.

Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to inaugurate our new location with This Much Is Certain, the first New York solo exhibition by German conceptual photographer Ulrich Gebert. With selections from two series of his image-cycles, Typus (2005) and Life among beasts(2009), This Much Is Certain serves as an introduction to Gebert’s work in which he examines explosive topics—such as racism and power structures—via unspectacular motifs presented in quasi-scientific and sometimes unsettlingly humorous arrangements.

In each of the three tableaus from the Typus series, for example, Gebert presents 6-7 photographs of coniferous trees ordered by species. Photographed by trekking to remote botanical gardens and parks, often retracing the steps of 19th century scientists, the Typus tableaus are juxtaposed with an “List of Invalid Names”: a list of Latin terms that are no longer in use, making the reconciliation of competing names a difficult process and shattering the fantasies of their original christenings toward an authoritative ordering of nature. In doing so, Gebert also alludes to the darker side of cataloging nature, specifically with regards to totalitarian categorizations of humans.

Similarly, in the Life among beasts series, Gebert presents tableaus of two to five cropped photographs of humans physically interacting with animals. The results are both disturbing and awkwardly tender. New unusual creatures are suggested through the compositions, as impressions of brutality are counterbalanced with an almost absurd humor. Here again, the crisp aesthetics of the presentation suggest a fantasy of order that undercut by closer consideration.

Ulrich Gebert was born in Munich and lives and works in Munich and Leipzig. He received his Masters in Photography at Royal College of Art, London, and studied at the Glasgow School of Art and with Timm Rautert at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at KLEMM’S in Berlin; a group exhibition at project space 176/Zabludowicz Collection, London; and exhibitions at the Kunstverein Hildesheim, the University of Salamanca, and the Pfaffenhofer Kunstverein.

For more information, please contact Edward Winkleman at 212.643.3152 or info@winkleman.com.

Winkleman Gallery
621 West 27th Street (NEW LOCATION)
New York, NY 10001

The Front Room Gallery is proud to present "Wildfire," by Sasha Bezzubov. This will be the first public exhibition of photographs from Bezzubov's recent book by the same name, published by Nazraeli Press. In the "Wildfire" series Bezzubov focuses on the devastation wrought by wildfires on the American west, with dramatic large-scale landscapes containing charred, burned-out forests, houses and neighborhoods. In one image a spiral staircase rises skyward out of the wreckage, the last remnant of a once standing home. Other photographs in this series focus on the damage inflicted on nature, the pine forests, and whole mountainsides reduced to ashes. 

These heartwrenchly beautiful landscapes draw us in and confront us with the uncomfortable notion that we might be somehow to blame. In the introduction to the book "Wildfire," writer Bill McKibben explains these distressing statistics: in the last 35 years the number of fires increased by a factor of four; the average fire went from lasting a week to lasting five; the total area burned increased by six and a half times; the average fire season increased by 78 days, or 64 percent. McKibben then goes on to express that these fires are an indicator of global climate change, caused in part by the earlier thaws of snow in the mountains and longer dry seasons. Within these series of photographs, the larger scope of our involvement with the natural world and our ability to protect and preserve against some of the more devastating effects of natural disasters is brought to question...are we to blame, and can we prevent the onslaught of wildfires, are just a few of the questions that arise from Bezzubov's most recent series. 

This is Sasha Bezzubov's third exhibition at the Front Room Gallery, and a continuation of his ongoing series "Things Fall Apart," landscape photographs of the aftermath of natural disasters. This series, which began in 2001, contains photographs of forest fires, earthquakes, tidal waves, and tornados, around the world. "Wildfire," Bezzubov's most recent presentation from this larger series, targets an intimate look at the catastrophic impact of these uncontrollable fires on many varied landscapes, from urban to wilderness. 

The Front Room Gallery is located at 147 Roebling Street in Williamsburg Brooklyn. Gallery hours are Friday-Sunday 1-6PM and by appointment. Press contact: Daniel Aycock 718-782-2556 

“I don’t deal directly with reality but with representations and stories. The truth basis of what I’m doing is not interesting to me. In an act of storytelling, there is a truth.” Omer Fast, as quoted in New York Magazine, December 21-28, 2009.

These exact words were never uttered in this order. But, like in Fast’s works, it is precisely in re-telling, editing, interpretation, misunderstanding and subjective recollections that we encounter the kernels of what is real.

Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of two video works by Omer Fast. The show coincides with Fast’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Take A Deep Breath” (2008)

In the summer of 2002, Martin F. was standing outside a Falafel shop in Jerusalem when it exploded. A trained medic, he went in and discovered the body of a young man on the floor. The young man had lost both legs as well as an arm, but his eyes were open and focused. Hoping for a miracle, Martin F. decided to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After a few minutes though, the young man’s eyes rolled up into his head and he expired. A crowd of onlookers had gathered outside and the police showed up. They wanted to know how many casualties were inside. When he responded that there was only one, Martin F. realized the young man he had just left inside was the suicide bomber

In “Take A Deep Breath,” extracts from a conversation recorded with Martin F. in Jerusalem alternate with scenes filmed in Los Angeles in which a team of actors attempts to stage his ordeal for the camera. There are two cameras shooting simultaneously. Each shoots a different view.

“De Grote Boodschap” (2007)

Filmed on-location in Mechelen, Belgium, “De Grote Boodschap” presents the stories of paired Flemish characters who appear to be caught in a time-warp: A stewardess and her unemployed husband, an old junkie and her caregiver, a white beatboxer and his black girlfriend, a real-estate agent and a taciturn Arab. As the characters interact, the story of a family’s diamonds is revealed and retracted in an endless loop that mistakes the scatological for the profound.

“Fast is interminably drawn to the figure of “the witness”—the individuals un/officially earmarked to repeat their personal experiences for something like the greater good. And it is precisely in these active, “acted” retellings, in which memory is vocally rehashed, that Fast encourages his protagonists to stumble. Rather than drawing a fine-tooth comb through their dreams à la psychoanalysis, Fast surveys their seemingly-scripted public stories, and from stilted syllables and logical missteps excavates flashes of that abstract notion of the “real.” (…)Perhaps because of this interpretive flair, Gideon Lewis-Kraus has called Fast a “reanimator”; in particular, it is his ability to imagine an interviewee’s (beaten, dead) tale as something other than it is (alive). Trafficking in structural manipulation allows Fast to avoid the video artist’s inevitable gambit of camera-as-confessional, leaving critical, and even ethical, space for the viewer to wallow about in."? Kari Rittenbach “Dramatic Witness: The Art of Omer Fast (Art In America online December 2009)

Omer Fast was a recipient of the Bucksbaum Award at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In October 2009 he has received National Gallery Prize for Young Art in Berlin. Most recently Fast’s works were shown at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Gallery of South London, Berkeley Art Museum, Lund Konsthall, Indianapolis Museum of Art and Performa 2009.

Giant Robot is proud to host Playful Extremities, a group show featuring new works by Louise Chen, Hellen Jo, Sara Antoinette Martin, Tran Nguyen, and Sylvia Park.

Although Louise Chen is freshly graduated from UC Santa Cruz's art program, her work is uncommonly diverse and realized. She transfers the clean, effortless lines of her etchings and woodcuts to her drawing, seamlessly inserting them into otherworldly landscapes rendered with equal craft and tremendous atmosphere.

Hellen Jo was born in Starkville, MS in 1983 and lived in Florida and New Mexico, but is firmly entrenched in Northern California, where she plays in indie bands and makes indie comics. Her style is loose but attentive--as evidenced in her full-color issues of Jin & Jam, which combine the raw humor and honesty of underground comix with the precision of alternative manga.

Brooklyn-based Sara Antoinette Martin takes familiar subjects of cryptozoology, symbols of Freemasonry, and tattoo flash art and presents them in highly graphic and surreal forms. The bold arrangement of commonly-known-but-mysterious imagery forces viewers to revisit their preconceptions about truth, legend, and aesthetics.

The surreal art of Tran Nguyen has a faded, antique look, but the subjects are timeless.The Savannah, GA-based artist depicts young, beautiful subjects in dark settings--surrounded by melancholy and/or ectoplasm, if not actually emitting them from their pores. The effect is strangely hypnotic and hauntingly beautiful.

Sylvia Park is a New York City-based artist who depicts an imperfect real world with perfect lines. Using only contours, she is able to create out hyper real scenes with depth and feeling. Her precision line work is highly effective for editorial purposes publications, but wavers just enough to convey subtle emotion and urge closer viewing in a gallery setting.

Giant Robot was born as a Los Angeles-based magazine about Asian, Asian-American, and new hybrid culture in 1994, but has evolved into a full-service pop culture provider with shops and galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, as well as an online equivalent.

A reception featuring many of the artists will be held from 6:30 to 10:00 on Saturday, January 16. For more information about the artists, GRNY, or Giant Robot magazine

http://farmanigallery.com/en/upcoming.php

The Harlem School of the Arts (HSA) Visual Arts Department presents Hank Paper’s Ascension: The Journey of John Coltrane.

In hopes of designation as a national landmark, The Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism provided Hank Paper a grant to photograph the Philadelphia home John Coltrane shared with his cousin, Mary Blair. More than thirty years after Coltrane’s death, Mr. Paper began the task of tracking the musician’s life from birth in North Carolina, through the beginnings of his career in Philadelphia, to his success in New York City. Ascension takes the viewer on a “photographic jazz evocation of a life.” Mr. Paper “wanted his show to be something like a jazz song itself, free-flowing and lyrical, with structure and harmony, and yet with a sense of improvisation, that finally disappears into the air, leaving an ineffable trace of the man and his music.”

The Director of Visual Arts, Adarsh Alphons says, “We are delighted to host Mr. Paper’s ten-year project about the legendary John Coltrane. The exhibition’s photographic journey tells the story of dedication, hard work and perseverance, attributes that the artistic and talented faculty at HSA instill in our students everyday.” During Black History Month, Mr. Paper will also host a Saturdays at Noon discussion about his travels documenting Mr. Coltrane’s life and the subsequent exhibition on February 6th.

Evoking the life of a legend through photos is no easy task yet, Mr. Paper has done so by “visiting surviving neighbors and neighborhood haunts, empty lots and abandoned buildings, old jazz clubs whose sounds had long ceased, and still-thriving venues whose sounds have forever been changed by the music he brought there.” The Harlem School of the Arts is proud to display the talent of Mr. Hank Paper and John Coltrane.

Hank Paper has photographed around the world. His many solo exhibits include The African American Museum in Philadelphia, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the High Point Historical Museum in North Carolina (Grand Opening Exhibit), The Jewish Museum of New Jersey; the Morgenthal-Frederics Gallery is SoHo, and the Tamarkin Leica Gallery in New York. He has also exhibited extensively in New Haven, has received numerous awards and honors, and been published widely. The Kehler-liddell Gallery in New Haven represents him.

This group exhibition includes five photographers whose work explores fascination with “the other" through gendered, sexual, racial and subcultural costuming. 
The exhibiting photographers depict white Europeans and westerners who glamorize and vilify other cultures, at times presenting them as the enemy, while at 
others declaring them a cultural muse. On the surface, the latter appears to be an attempt to understand or elevate them, but in many cases this actually leads 
to further complication by turning their identities into caricatures. This exhibition also explores the motivations for this role-play: is it an act of mere flattery? What does it mean to try on the skin or cultural signifiers of another?

Helen Maurene Cooper makes studio portraits of white women from varying socio-economic back-grounds as they costume themselves in various adornments and/or stereotypes of American hip-hop culture. Cooper’s images explore these performances of synthetic identities and investigate where she sees them fail. How do women use cultural synthesis to signify identity of race and class? What happens when economically privileged white women use the same props as less privileged 
women? At what point do each of these performances break apart and rupture? What is the obsession with the super-feminine and how does it play into “ghetto glam” culture?

Claire Beckett’s series “Simulating Iraq” focuses on military training for the war in Iraq. Her pictures depict the appropriation of Iraqi culture by Americans (both soldiers and civilians) role-playing as Iraqis, using specific costumes, objects and architecture. Shot with a large format camera, her images also raise questions of the nature of documentary photography and the implicit subjectivity of the photographer.

In Michael Buhler Rose’s series, “Constructing the Exotic,” he photographs American born white women raised with Indian culture, religion, dress, in a new community in suburban Florida. These white women in “foreign” garb ultimately become a new kind of "other" in an environment with which they would generally be associated as a majority group.

Interested in displacements and confusions of cultures, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher’s “German Indians” is a series of photos of Germans participating in an annual celebration called “Karnival”, or “Fashing.” Over a period of several days, participants get together, celebrate, and have parades and parties, all dressed in homemade or store-bought native American costumes which they have mimicked from American movies and other sources.

Humble Arts Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that works to advance the careers of emerging fine art photographers by way of exhibition and publishing opportunities, limited-edition print sales, twice–annual artists grants, and educational programming.

Founded in 2005 by amani olu and Jon Feinstein, Humble has been a pioneering hub for showcasing new fine art photography, and has served as a resource for collectors, galleries, museums, curators, photo editors, and bloggers internationally. http://hafny.org/

Like the Spice is pleased to announce Bennett Morris: Climate Untamed.  This will be the artist's first solo show in New York highlighting twelve photographs made between 2006-2009 that diagram Morris's unique examination on beauty, fear, politics, and the sublime.

Steeped in the visual language of Romanticism, Morris's photographs examine the intimate relationship between beauty and fear while playing on the diluted modern politics of  "shock and awe". Re-examining the classical thresholds like harmony and unity, Bennett follows in the path of painters like Salvatore Rosa who was drawn to the foreboding beauty of the Pyrenees when the term "awesome" was still weighted by a near-religious awe. The result of Bennett's exploration into this godlike fear and beauty creates a show that is more about climate than atmosphere, releasing singular moments to a vast array of emotions.

For Bennett the photograph becomes a means to an end as he begins his process by constructing large-scale dioramas within water tanks using fragments from fallen architectural structures, wax, model building parts, and other found materials. These post-human controlled environments are built for ruin; as he fills his tank with water what took many months to build disassembles in minutes. While paint pigments are added with perfect control Bennett has only minutes to capture with his digital camera these transcendent yet ever ephemeral color reactions. He infuses these underwater landscapes with elements from the German Romantics and the Hudson River School and then steeps them with Gothic Revival. What comes from this is sculpture, forced into false scales, and a strange, terror-stricken beauty, born from a luminiferous aether made ‘simply’ from water and paint. Balancing between beauty and terror in this design one is able to look through this cloud to see the deception and recognize beauty.

Born in Portland, Maine in 1978 Bennett Morris earned his BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth in 2001 and his MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from the Maine College of art in 2007. He is a recipient of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellowship. Mr. Morris work has been exhibited extensively in group shows across the US. Mr. Morris will also be featured in Skowhegan at 92YTribeca: An Alumni Exhibition running concurrently with this exhibition. Bennett is an Assistant Professor at the Maine College of Art. This will be Mr. Morris' first New York Solo Exhibition.

Announcing the launch of 1500 Gallery, located in New York City’s West Chelsea

gallery district at 511 West 25th Street, #607. 1500 Gallery specializes in Brazilian

photography, and is the first art gallery in the world with this explicit focus. 1500

interprets the notion of “Brazilian photography” to comprise photography made

by Brazilian photographers, as well as images bearing a conceptual or thematic

relationship to Brazil. 1500 represents the work of 17 artists, both emerging and

established: 6 of 1500’s photographers are represented in the Sao Paulo Museum

of Art’s Collection of Photography. 1500’s collection of images includes both

contemporary and vintage photography.

1500’s inaugural exhibition is a group show entitled Brazilian, which will run Feb

11 – May 1.

1500 Gallery represents the following photographers: Rémy Amezcua, Julio

Bittencourt, Bruno Cals, João Castilho, Marc Dumas, Antonio Augusto Fontes,

Bina Fonyat (1945-1985), Edouard Fraipont, Garapa (collective), Christian Gaul,

Hirosuke Kitamura, Marc van Lengen, Murillo Meirelles, Gustavo Pellizzon,

Eduardo Queiroga, Vincent Rosenblatt, Jens Stoltze.

For further information about each artist, as well as the works presented, please

see online at www.1500gallery.com

1500 Gallery was founded by Alexandre Bueno de Moraes and Andrew S. Klug.

Alex was born in Rio de Janeiro, and raised in Paris and New York City. He now

lives between New York City and Rio de Janeiro, where he owns a photo

production company and photographers’ agency (www.1500brasil.com), one of

the most prominent in Brazil, with offices in Rio de Janeiro and New York.

Andrew graduated in 2009 with an MBA from Columbia University, and prior to

that worked as a corporate lawyer (specialized in banking and finance) at the

Montreal office of one of Canada’s top-tier national law firms.

Contact: Andrew Klug

c: +1.917.362.0770

e: andrew@1500gallery.com

Luhring Augustine is pleased to present its first exhibition featuring the work of Daido Moriyama, one of Japan’s leading figures in photography. Witness to the spectacular changes that transformed postwar Japan, his photographs express a fascination with the cultural contradictions of age-old traditions that persist within modern society. Providing a harsh, crude vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters, his work occupies the space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real.

Moriyama takes pictures with a small hand-held camera that enables him to shoot freely while walking, running or through the windows of moving cars. Blurred, taken from vertiginous angles or overwhelmed by close-ups, his images are charged with a palpable and frenetic energy that reveal a unique proximity to his subject matter. Snapshots of stray dogs, posters, mannequins in shop windows or shadows cast into alleys present the beauty and sometimes terrifying reality of a marginalized landscape. His anonymous and detached approach enables him to capture the “visible present” made up of accidental and uncanny discoveries as he experiences them.

Moriyama emerged as a photographer in the 1960’s at the tail end of the VIVO collective, a revolutionary and highly influential group of Japanese artists who reexamined the conventions of photography during the tumultuous postwar period. William Klein’s loose, Beat style images of New York City in the 1960s also served as a major turning point for Moriyama, who found inspiration in Klein’s free-form photographic style. Taken by these innovative approaches at home and abroad, Moriyama ultimately went on to forge his own radical style.

“Hawaii”, Moriyama’s most recent body of work, was produced over a period of three years and presents his distinct perspective on the daily lives of the people living on the islands of Hawaii and Oahu. Returning to the island five times before feeling prepared to shoot these surroundings, Moriyama’s overall approach is purposeful and considered despite his loose and highly informal style. The series was recently exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and published in a volume by the institution.

Daido Moriyama was born in Osaka in 1938. He has had museum shows around the world including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His work is part of many major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Getty in Los Angeles.

The Silverstein Photography Annual (SPA) is part of the gallery's ongoing effort to provide exposure to emerging artists whose work incorporates the medium of photography. Bruce Silverstein Gallery with the guidance of curatorial advisor Nathan Lyons, annually invites ten prominent curators to nominate one artist whom they feel deserves the opportunity for further exposure within New York's cultural milieu.

David Zwirner is pleased to present Thomas Ruff’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, marking the New York debut of new work in two series: zycles and cassini. 

Among the most influential photographers working today, Ruff has redefined photography’s conceptual possibilities, simultaneously capturing and questioning the essence of photography as both a means and a tool for visual experience. Over the past twenty-five years, he has approached various photographic genres in his work, including portraiture, the nude, landscape and architectural photography. He carries out these investigations using his own analog and digital photographs, computer-generated images, alongside images culled from scientific archives, print media, and the Internet. 

In both of his new series — drawing from the natural sciences, astronomy, neurology, and art history — Ruff creates elaborate, open-ended visual systems that challenge viewer’s perceptions, demonstrating that structures can become increasingly complex the more one contemplates the details. 

The zycles series, grounded in mathematics and physics, shows computer screen-grab recordings of curves modeled in three dimensions. The views captured by the computer are produced as large-scale chromogenic prints, or are printed directly onto canvas. Inspired by 19th century science books, Ruff’s zycles present abstract contours based on “cycloids,” the mathematical curves obtained from rolling one curve along a second, fixed curve. Particularly interesting to Ruff was Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s (1831-1879) treatise on electro-magnetism, accompanied by copperplate engravings of magnetic fields. Ruff found these delicate traceries, while not intentionally aesthetic, suggestive of minimalist drawings. To explore their visual and spatial possibilities, Ruff used a three-dimensional rendering program to translate the algebraic formulae of the cycloids — regarded in mathematics as “the most aesthetic of curves” — into computer-generated imagery. The resulting virtual structures display the intricate linear filigree of cycloids as they would appear in space. The spiraling formations, always faithful to their mathematical origins, evoke a multitude of forms: the trajectories of planets, cascading ribbons, line drawings, or musical vibrations. 

The works in the cassini series are based on photographic captures of Saturn taken by NASA’s Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft, which launched in 2004 and completed its initial four-year mission in June 2008. The spacecraft orbited around Saturn to provide the first in-depth, close-up study of the planet and its domain, including its rings, moons, and magnetosphere, the enormous magnetic bubble that controls its planetary movement. Ruff acquired these black and white raw images from NASA’s website, where they were broadcast directly from the spacecraft and made available for public download. Through computer manipulation, Ruff infused each gray-scale image with saturated color. The resulting chromogenic prints transform the originals into visual statements that both capture the sweeping enormity of planetary structures while still distancing themselves from concrete forms, evocative instead of abstract and minimalist compositions.

Thomas Ruff (born 1958, Zell am Harmersbach, Germany) is known for his exploration of the mechanical production of images, and how technical mediation can influence a picture’s expressiveness. His telescopic views of the night sky, Sterne, printed from pre-existing negatives; his provocative nudes borrowed from pornography websites; Substrat, his colorful manipulations of Japanese manga and anime; and his jpegs demonstrate Ruff’s approach to reinventing existing images. Together with zycles and cassini, these serialized considerations draw attention to the abstraction that occurs when the visually explicit is re-imagined.

He was the subject of solo museum exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Museum für neue Kunst, Freiburg; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Mu˝csarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest (all 2009); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Sprengel Museum, Hanover (all 2007). His work is held in the collections of many major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Art Institute of Chicago; Essl Museum, Klosterneuberg; Dallas Museum of Art; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He was the 2006 recipient of the Infinity Award for Art presented by the International Center of Photography, New York, and in 2009 Aperture published jpegs, 

As the country struggled to regain its sense of direction following the political activism 

and social idealism of the 1960s, photographers embarked on a search to discover new 
subjects, methods and meanings. Color offered an obvious if indistinct way forward, a path 
leading beyond the void left by the 1960s and the era of the "concerned photographer" 
(as defined by Cornell Capa in 1968) toward some new as yet to be defined sense of purpose.
1970s color photography may thus be characterized as a chaotic and disparate search, 
a heterogeneous effort encompassing diverse bodies of work by artists as dissimilar as 
Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston and others toward the rediscovery of 
something ennobling and purposeful in modern American life. 

Opening February 25th, Owls Have More Fun is a solo show of works by Danish artist Lisa Grue featuring the artist's bold and exuberant nature illustrations on custom-made wallpaper, handprinted porcelain plates, and more. Lisa, known for her playful and sometimes shocking illustrations that mix girlishness with feminism, puts her spin on owl and nature motifs, surrounding viewers with a magical world via domestic objects.

The show will comprise a large, custom-made wallpaper, 100 handprinted porcelain plates, and a rug, all customized with Lisa's black and white illustrations that mix owls, flowers, and words. Limited-edition prints will also be available.

Lisa's powerful and fun illustrations remind viewers to never forget the magic in everyday life. In addition, they make a statement to girls and women that wisdom and beauty go hand in hand. And of course, Lisa's artwork reminds us all to love and take care of our natural world.

Please join us and the artist for a cozy opening with (limited!) owl goody giveaways on Thursday, February 25th, at 7-9 pm!

In conjunction with this show, gallery hanahou is asking owl-lovers everywhere to share their own owl artwork in the new gallery hanahou Flickr group. We already have some wonderful owls posted - keep them coming!

galleryhanahou.com

RSVP: info@galleryhanahou.com

This March, Factory Fresh welcomes heliumcowboy artspace of Hamburg, Germany as we partner to presents the art of Boris Hoppek & Alex Diamond. Our two galleries will bring together German Artist Boris Hoppek & transient Alex Diamond’s work as they have received increasing international popularity in recent years. These artists have exhibited in solo and group shows in museums, galleries, festivals and art fairs in Europe as well as in the US. In a joint effort the artist will show new works on paper and Boris has promised an up the skirt installation.

Boris Hoppek, has been an acclaimed name in the Graffiti-world since the late eighties, more recently he has become an outstanding talent within the contemporary art scene. By thematizing sexuality, violence, racism and oppression in a very clean and accurate style, the artist isolates provocative themes for contemplation. Since 2004, the heliumcowboy artspace has exhibited his works in three solo shows and on diverse art fairs. In Basel and Miami 2007, Hoppek set up huge interactive cardboard installations at SCOPE, and today he is one of the most prominent European artists coming from a background in Street Art/Graffiti. For SCOPE Basel 2008, Hoppek was invited to convert the water taxis commuting across the Rhine into floating artworks, bringing his narrative potential away from the constrictions of a traditional booth scenario onto the water.

Alex Diamond is unseizable as a person and difficult to categorize as an artist, he is more fantasy than reality. His main issue always centres around his work and its presentation, but never around the personality of an individual. Alex Diamond appears always as a new and different creation of a role or character with every one of his shows. Not limited by a CV, a formative education or even a dedicated technique or style, Alex Diamond constantly develops a new specific presence for the “Artist behind the work“. Alex Diamond is an artist who apparently lives solely through the art he creates – and vice versa. He plays mind tricks with visual aids, pleasing at one moment, disturbing in the next. Independent from styles and techniques, he mirrors life and our constant fight for possession, superiority, survival and love in an almost nonchalant way. Having focused on his project Being Alex Diamond for the last year and a half (and of which also a catalogue has been published lately), the artist will now present a whole new body of drawings at Factory Fresh.

Steven Kasher Gallery is pleased to present the first exhibition of previously unpublished and unexhibited photographs that Warhol selected for his 1979 book Andy Warhol’s Exposures.The exhibition will feature over 70 unique vintage black and white photographic prints. It will be accompanied by a new book, Andy Warhol: Unexposed Exposures (Steidl/Kasher, 2010), edited and with an introduction by Bob Colacello (who was executive editor of the original book as well). Starting in 1976, Warhol shot several rolls of film every week and selected images for the 1979 book. He had intended to title it Social Diseases, but his concept was heavily watered down by his publishers at the time and many of the selected images were removed. Colacello writes: 

There is a sense of intimacy as well as of voyeurism, of funny-looking, insecure, wistful Andy, through flattery and attentiveness, trying to connect. Yet, because he was not just any photographer but a famous artist, a star, there is often a sense that the looking is being done at the man with the camera as well as by him. In some cases, the subjects are clearly performing for their fellow luminary, or close friend, or boss. As spontaneous as these images may seem, they are intrinsically staged, with Warhol himself as both chronicler and catalyst of the moments he is documenting.

And what moments they are! Only Andy could get David Hockney in extra-brief running shorts, or Susan Sontag batting her eyelashes across a fancy restaurant table at Gloria Vanderbilt, or Halston’s Venezuelan window dresser and lover, Victor Hugo, sitting under Goya’s Red Boy in Kitty Miller’s Park Avenue parlor. Here’s Faye Dunaway smooching fashion designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo; Paloma Picasso spreading her hands to indicate the width of one of her father’s paintings; Margaret Trudeau, Canada’s First Lady, chatting up Milos Forman. Indeed, almost all the face cards of the late 70s scene are here, at ease behind the velvet rope: brash Steve Rubell and reticent Ian Schrager, Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller with Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger beside Catherine Deneuve, Roman Polanski, Diana Ross, Tatum and Ryan O’Neal, Liz Taylor deep in her Senator John Warner period, Arnold Schwarzenegger before politics, and O.J. Simpson when everyone still loved him. So are the footnotes of celebrity history: Elvis’s ex, Priscilla Presley, with her Scientologist model boyfriend, and Ruth Kligman, the woman who was in the car with Jackson Pollack when he crashed it into a tree and was killed. And let’s not forget—Andy didn’t—Don King, boxing impresario; little Edie Beale, Jackie’s batty cousin; Famous Amos, the cookie king, and Norman the neighborhood coke dealer, if your neighborhood happened to be the West Village. Enough! You get the picture. Andy always did.

A.M. Richard Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by photographer Andrew Garn.

In the summer of 2008, Andrew Garn was assigned by the Smithsonian Institution to document biodiversity in a remote area of the Peruvian Amazon. This mission was an incomparable opportunity to photograph an unexplored region of the jungle. Accompanied by six scientists and a number of macheteros, the team traveled throughout the brush, many times creating new trails in untouched rain forest.
Soon the duplicitous nature of the expedition surfaced. The Smithsonian was in place to document the pristine conditions of the forest during the early stages of an extensive oil exploration project initiated by the Spanish energy giant Repsol. Leasing an immense 800 sq mile tract from the Peruvian government, Repsol created over 20 helicopter landing fields by clear cutting immense swaths of forest. Explosive charges were set off to measure the oil reserves under the jungle floor. Eventually, pumping rigs were flown in and a 50-mile pipeline was constructed to bring the oil to market.

Mr. Garn’s experience in the Amazon reveals a place of majestic beauty as well as one of overwhelming chaos, confusion and terror. His photographs and 8 minute video, Lost Amazon, depict a setting of obfuscation, where the boundaries of heavenly reprieve frequently dissolved into torment and wretchedness. 
Two series of photographs detail the jungle inhabitants in their grace and inevitable demise. The Shadow Series illustrates a troubling world where lies an artificial sense of safety. The main body of work, set in a darkened gallery, conveys both the seduction and fear that make up the Amazon.

This is Mr. Garn’s third exhibition at A.M. Richard Fine Art. Mr. Garn is the recipient of numerous grants. His works are in several private and public collections. Most recently, Mr. Garn was invited by the U.S. Consulate General in Russia to participate in the First Biennale of Contemporary Art in the Urals (September 2010).

In the project room, Toxic Molecules, welded steel and paper wall sculptures by artist Christy Rupp. Ms. Rupp has long been pre-occupied with global environmental issues. Her work, deceptively whimsical, is charged with dangerously lucid social concerns.

Sugar is honored to host A sense of Humor, a select group of photographs that will hit your funny bone. Elliott Erwitt, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Diane Arbus, and more.

Following the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the subsequent public survey along the Sixth Principal Meridian, the Great Plains was officially opened to development and the surveyor's grid provided the basis for cataloguing the open expanse. Drawing on the remarkable history of 19th century survey photography, Joe Deal's new series of photographs, West and West, serves as a meditation on landscape and history, and their place in the realms of imagination and representation.

Robert Mann Gallery will exhibit a selection of photographs from this body of work, which continues Deal's keen observation of the forms and markers of built and natural landscapes. While West and Westeschews the imagery of development for which Deal is best known, this project still connotes the impact of human-initiated processes by asking the viewer to think historically and consider what in a landscape has changed and also what has not changed. Focusing on the Great Plains also marks a return to the region where Deal grew up. West and West offered the opportunity to reconnect with what he calls "the dreamed landscape" of his childhood, now framed by the complicating knowledge of the history that shaped the land. In the introduction to the book of the same title, published in 2009 by the Center for American Places, Deal writes,

The act of making a photograph is not all that different from the act performed by the surveyors. Both are essentially visual; both impose a frame around something that has no clear boundaries of its own. In some respects, making these photographs was a kind of reenactment, a way of knowing what it must have been like to lay a straight line down over a vast plain. Only, in my case, and from my vantage point in time, the intention is to reimagine what lies beneath the grid. If the square, as employed in the surveys of public lands, could function like a telescope, framing smaller and smaller sections of the plains, it can also be used as a window, equilaterally divided by the horizon, that begins with a finite section of earth and sky and restores them in the imagination to the vastness that now can only exist as an idea: the landscape contained within the perfect symmetry of the square implies infinity.

West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains is Joe Deal's third solo exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery.Joe Deal: New Work was recently presented as a solo exhibition at the Museum of Art RISD, and travels to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona this summer. Deal is also included in the touring re-creation of the landmark exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. He is represented in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Born in Topeka, Kansas in 1947, Joe Deal lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

HASTED HUNT KRAEUTLER is pleased to announce Great Photographs of the 20th Century: Staged and Startled. The gallery will be exhibiting a selection of rare and sought after photographs lent from numerous private collections representing some of the most important photographers of the last 100 years. 

The title Staged and Startled refers to the various processes artists use in achieving their final images including lighting, setting, equipment and planning, or conversely, deliberate eschewal of preparation. The opportunity to compare these works side by side reveals the individuality of the century's most iconic photographers. The exhibition spans from the premeditated studio portraits of artists such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn to the spontaneous street photographs of such masters as Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander. 

Whether a photographer has staged or startled his or her subject also leads to an important consideration of the relationship of the photograph to truth and reality. Along these lines, Steven Klein's photograph of actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, in which multiple layers of acting and playing are realized, Case Study #13 (2005) and Irving Penn's posed model in an exotic scene, Woman in Moroccan Palace (1951), present an interesting contrast to Harry Callahan's more sincere but no less nuanced photograph of his wife and child, Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago (1953) and Joel Sternfeld's photograph of a planned fire department exercise that he encountered unexpectedly, Mclean, Virginia (1978). 

Richard Avedon's Nastassja Kinski and the serpent, Los Angeles, California, 1981 was a major turning point for the artist. Shot for Vogue magazine, this photograph received immediate critical acclaim and widespread publicity making both Avedon and Kinski household names. Although Avedon was well regarded in the fashion and photographic communities prior, the celebrity of this image outgrew these spheres. Its presentation here alongside the earlier photograph of a model by Irving Penn and the later photograph by Steven Klein of the early 21st century super celebrities Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt provides an interesting genealogy of American culture as well as photographic history. 

This exhibition also includes works by Tina Barney, Lisette Model and Garry Winogrand. Imagery ranges from celebrity to unknown subjects who happened to be at the right place at the right time to an artist's friends or family. Many of the photographs possess levels at which they are the staged, controlled presentations of the subject or photographer, and other levels at which they are startled, unplanned and even unintentional. 

HASTED HUNT KRAEUTLER is taking this opportunity to show work that would usually be restricted to a museum setting, but made available here to collectors and the greater gallery going audience. 

For visuals or more information, please contact the gallery at info@hastedhuntkraeutler.com.

Bogdan Mamonov’s great-grandfather, Gregory Speer, found himself at the time of the Bolshevik revolution a German bridge engineer hired by the government of the last czar in Kolomna, a city approximately 100 miles outside of Moscow. The revolution gave his bridge design expertise a renewed sense of purpose in a country set to build a new world, and also simply needing rebuilding itself after World War I and the ensuing civil war.

By 1932, at the height of Stalin’s purges, however, Speer’s luck had run out and he was arrested in a so-called “engineer’s case”. According to the official version, Speer hanged himself in prison. Virtually all of his possessions were confiscated. Speer’s youngest daughter Lidia could not bear the death of her father and died soon after, having suffered a psychiatric break-down.

Speer’s fate forever cast a shadow over the lives of his family. Bogdan Mamonov’s childhood was steeped in his family’s contempt for the Soviet regime. Mamonov’s father (himself an artist) was a staunch anti-Communist throughout Bogdan’s childhood. At one point, he threw out the family’s TV set so as to avoid having his family subjected to Soviet propaganda.

One of the few possessions of Speer’s that was not confiscated after his arrest was his collection of glass plates of stereo photographs capturing the idyll of his family’s life and leisure. Although Speer did not consider himself an artist and captured his family purely as a record of happy times, he possessed an innate sense of composition. The collection of stereo photographs that survived through three generations of Speer’s descendants and twentieth century turmoil became the most tangible, most intimate link for Mamonov to his ancestor whose life and death so directed his upbringing.

Now, Bogdan Mamonov, a mature man and a well recognized artist (who among other things represented Russia at the 51st Venice Biennale), is still deeply affected by the influence of totalitarianism on humanity. The Intimate Life of Gregory Speer is Mamonov’s long-nursed look at the tension between liberty and oppression. The common thread of all works in The Intimate Life is a number of Mamonov’s favorite images from his great-grandfather’s collection, each examined, interpreted and reinterpreted by Mamonov the artist and Mamonov the great-grandson.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is Sapojok (Little Boot), a piece of video produced by Mamonov for the Kandinsky Prize London 2009 and appearing for the first time in a commercial gallery. Sapojok juxtaposes idyllic scenes captured by Speer with a recitation from Tranquillus’s Twelve Caesars of the deeds of Caligula, the Roman emperor who rained between 37 and 41 AD and is best known for using his absolute power for absolute depravity.

In addition to Sapojok, the exhibit will present large-format photography, transparencies, paintings and the original glass plates.

Hooray for the dreamers - the luckless and the odd balls. The old-timers, life-timers, the ground-breakers and the pioneers. Hey ho to the subway performers toiling away night and day and all those who paint their passion on the streets. Not on TV, not profiled in a magazine maybe, not famous - don't care.

Dreams can be big or small - we do what we can to fulfill them. Failure is not in it - not worth thinking about. Do what you love money and the money will follow? Nah - more likely dreams cost money and consume all your free time - everything. But it matters not if you're living a life that is fulfilling in some way every day. This show is a celebration of Living the Dream.

Featured artists: Gary Panter, Kaz Prapolenis, Matt Campbell, Stephen Bliss, Roy Calloway, Travis Millard, Mel Kadel, Karl Wills, John Hobbs, Bill Moulton, John Tymkiv, Yuri Shimojo, Chris Kapuzo, Ted Mcgrath, Reg Mombassa and Markus Oakley.

About the curator: Matt was one of the founding partners of the Riviera Gallery in Williamsburg Brooklyn 2003 - 2008. Originally from NZ, Matt moved to NYC in 1994 after 4 years in Tokyo where he designed, drew or painted on everything he could get his hands on. Although now mostly living in NZ Matt has kept close ties to NYC where he returns often for work art and play. For this show he has put together a collection of his favorite dreamers to represent a theme that is close to his heart.

“Living the Dream,” Group Show curated by Matt Campbell runs March 27 through April 17, 2010, at Fuse Gallery, 93 2nd Ave (between 5th & 6th Sts, 2nd Ave stop on the F), NYC, NY. The opening reception, on Saturday March 27th, from 7 to 10 pm, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Fuse Gallery at 212.777.7988 or fusegall@fusegallerynyc.com.

Farmani Gallery is proud to present Select Gender, introducing fourteen rising photographers communicating their contemporary viewpoint within fine art photography. The exhibition, co-curated by budding artists Rafael Soldi, Paolo Morales and Elle Perez, will present a diverse selection of innovative artworks that focus on the theme of gender perceptions and the role of sexual assignments in America and abroad. This exhibition embraces the mission of the gallery and the curators in their support of promising talent and our hopes to further a conversation through photographic works of present-day subject matter.

Select Gender revolves around the themes of gender-based identity, self-awareness and gender-specific culture. Whether they are discussing their own identity or that of others, this diverse group of emerging photographers shows us different aspects and interpretations of perceived gender roles.  The juxtapositions of gender queer, hyper masculinities, and ambiguous representations force the viewer to question his or her own perceptions and the legitimacy of a gender binary.  Ultimately the goal of Select Gender is not to expose, shock, or titillate, but to offer reflection on the constructs and wide range of possibilities for gender expression.

Rafael Soldi is a Peruvian born, New York based photographer. He holds a degree in Photography and Curatorial Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work has been shown in NY with Humble Arts Foundation and Daniel Cooney Fine Art, Conner Contemporary Art in Washington D.C. as well as in Philadelphia, Atlanta and Baltimore.

Paolo Morales has studied at the Art Institute of Boston, International Center of Photography, San Francisco Art Institute and School of Visual Arts. His work has been exhibited in New York and Boston. He is a curator of Gallery South at the Art Institute of Boston.

Elle Perez is a photographer currently based in Baltimore, MD. She has studied Photography and Gender Studies and she has exhibited in Maryland and New York. Perez is the director of the Wlgus Gallery at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

For press inquiries, to obtain an electronic press kit or to RSVP to the press preview, please contactmail@farmanigallery.com or call 718-578-4478.

For other inquiries please contact team@farmnigallery.com.

Israeli photographer Arye Carmon’s stunning color photographs of people and places around the world create connections between seemingly different cultures.

Arye Carmon heads the Israel Democracy Institute, a “think tank” that fosters strategies and solutions to critical policy issues. A photographer for more than forty years, Carmon’s current exhibition exemplifies the relationship between his work at the IDI and his work as an artist. Both endeavors strive to create harmony between disparate ethnic backgrounds, beliefs, world views and political practices. According to Carmon, the parallels in his photography and career give him “a new perspective on what makes us human and new ways to imagine in our collective futures.”

Duke University curator Alex Harris says that Carmon’s works viewed individually are “beautiful compositions” that compare and contrast his subjects in one photograph. Taking them further as a collection, pairing one photograph with another from a different time and place and looking at the subjects through Carmon’s eyes creates a connection between “what might seem radically different cultures and moments by allowing us to see in a way that connects rather than separates these worlds.”

Presented here are 15 photographs and a photo ‘zine from the series “The Urban Forest” by Kate Glicksberg. This project explores the city as a unique habitat, where nature, humans and the concrete grid co-exist and intermingle. Nature may frame the series, but human presence is a fundamental part of this work. Formal land cultivation tries to contain natural growth within the urban landscape. Yet through pictorial representation, humans invent ways to insert types of wilderness into street life. The inherent desire to integrate nature into built environments competes with the need to control it. The benefits of nature to society at large have recently been re-established. Urban landscaping projects have brought another context for experiencing an outdoor city life. From replanted clusters in public plazas, to mass reforestation of the city’s public/private lands, trees play an increasing role in the shifting urban landscape. In this shift, the city is reimagined.

K&K presents a unique series of new work by two photographers.

The sensation of light is a consistent thread throughout the work of Filipa Castro; it is a third presence (in addition to the photographer and subject) whose mark is felt on various — often empty — spaces, and anonymous figures. Additionally, her images filter the world through a subdued and painterly palette. This combination of the activity of light and subtlety of color project a vision of her surroundings which is at once solitary and beautiful. She currently lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

The work of Guillaume Gilbert portrays the urban areas of both New York City and Paris. His dogged use of 35mm black and white film provides a fitting medium for his depiction of social alienation as evidenced in his subjects: archetypes of youth and maturity, commuters and night figures. His work depicts a claustrophobic and harsh space traversed by assorted characters who are often connected only by a glance. Yet ultimately a connection can be made; alienation — like the commute itself — is a transient state.

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by French artist Mohamed Bourouissa. The exhibition will open on April 22, and close on June 5, with a reception for the artist on Thursday, April 22, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

Mohamed Bourouissa’s photographs from the series Périphéries are staged depictions of the tensions and issues affecting daily life for young people living in the suburbs of France. The artist orchestrates his photographs in carefully scouted locations, such as apartment building rooftops or subway stations, with specially selected models and strategically placed lighting. The imagined scenarios explore the social and economic issues of the area in which the artist grew up, while questioning stereotypes about life in the suburban territories of Paris and other cities in France.

The images combine documentary-style journalistic content with formal compositions influenced by traditional paintings, such as those by Delacroix and Gericault. Though the scenes are planned in advance, the artist allows the interplay of gazes and gestures to occur spontaneously, infusing the images with emotional friction and the threat of violence.

Mohamed Bourouissa’s photographs were included in the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition Younger than Jesus in 2009. His work is included in the collections of the Fonds national d’art contemporain and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. Mr. Bourouissa was born in 1978 in Bilda, Algeria, and attended the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoritifs, Paris, and the Sorbonne, Paris. He currently lives and works in Paris.

Soho Photo Gallery is pleased to announce that in April 2010, the

entire Gallery will be devoted to SOHOPHOTO 2010, the 15th annual members’ juried

show. Once again, the members’ show is being held to coincide with TOAST—the annual

TriBeCa Open Artist Studio Tour that’s scheduled for April 23 through April 26. Last

year, TOAST brought more than 250 additional visitors to the Gallery during its four day

run; we’re hoping for a repeat performance in 2010.

The juror for this year’s competition will be Lyle Rexer who has written extensively

about contemporary art and culture and has also curated a number of exhibitions

including “The Edge of Vision, Abstraction in Contemporary Photography.” Rexer

writes a column for Photograph magazine; and is the author of The Edge of Vision: The

Rise of Abstraction in Photography (2009); Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde;

and The New Wave in Old Processes (2002).

The work in SOHOPHOTO 2010 will provide a unique opportunity to experience

virtually the entire range of classic and contemporary photography—from pinhole, mixed

media and digital photography to color, black and white, bleached and toned prints and

those otherwise manipulated. One thing is certain: diversity will rule.

All the winners in SOHOPHOTO 2010 will be clearly identified so that Gallery visitors

will be able to compare their favorites with those of the juror, Lyle Rexer. The 2009

members’ show had a wide variety of great work on display and this year’s competition

is sure to produce more of the same.

On Stellar Rays is pleased to present two new videos by NY-based artist Alix Pearlstein, Talent and Finale. Together the works explore the perimeters of the performance score, related shifts in subjective and objective perception, and the subtle difference between being, acting and performing.

Both videos share the same set, a dance studio which doubles as a performance venue, and the same cast, comprised of 10 professional actors. Talent consists of a sharply structured and edited sequence of acts, actions and interactions among the actors, alternately suggesting a contest, audition, rehearsal, performance and shoot. The camera bisects the studio as it tracks laterally, back and forth along a white line on the floor, creating a physical and psychic division between cast and crew. Further complicating the composition is a mirrored wall behind the actors, reflecting and exposing the activity of the camera, crew and artist / director, while implicating them in the scene. This construct recalls aspects of two widely divergent, iconic works that premiered concurrently in 1975: Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line and Dan Graham’s Performance / Audience / Mirror.

Finale takes a decidedly more introspective mood. Shot at dusk, the studio windows reveal the sun setting behind the Manhattan skyline. A centrally positioned camera rotates continuously counter clockwise in the space. For the duration of a single long take, cast and crew refer and respond to actions from Talent. They circulate freely throughout the space, alternately stepping in and out of their roles, as the structured acts of the preceding hours unravel.

Running times for Talent and Finale are 10:30 and 10:20 minutes, both works are from 2009.

Alix Pearlstein’s work in video and performance has been widely exhibited internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; The Kitchen, NYC; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA; Lugar Commum, Lisbon; Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, NYC; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston and Postmasters Gallery, NYC. Her works have been included in exhibitions at Internationale D’Art De Quebec; The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Annual Exhibition of Visual Art, Ireland;BAM / PFA, Berkeley; SMAK, Ghent; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; ICA Philadelphia; Biennale de Lyon, France; and The Museum of Modern Art, NYC. Pearlstein lives in New York.

CHRISTINA RAY is pleased to present Mark Price’s second New York solo exhibition, Designer End Game Strategies. The exhibition includes a series of new works on panel in which the human, the machine and the global city have merged into a broken landscape of crisis. The exhibition opens with a reception on April 22nd, 7–9pm, and runs through May 23rd.

Designer End Game Strategies merges fantasy with reality in the depiction of a contemporary state of emergency induced and performed by an irrational and panicked society. Bodies are sacrificed into abstract remains under the cultural mismanagement of capital and technology. Fluids are exchanged between populations – gold for blood, blood for oil – while actual events are lost and forgotten. The populace becomes generalized and ambiguous as it slips between screens and ruptures at every point. Temporary solutions to problems that cannot be solved have been exhausted as end game strategies become fragile and few. The body now functions as a broken landscape, un-navigable and stuck, devoid of options for resolution.

As Guy Debord noted in his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, “With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, un-checkable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.” Price grasps this sense of instability as he rips the foundation from his compositions, leaving a spatial casualty of jagged forms in toxic, hyper-saturated hues. In depicting the confused survival efforts of a technology-driven human population, Price’s highly stylized technique hints at the futuristic graphic novel. Yet the narrative of permanent, self-induced catastrophe is flattened – shattered at each turn into a crisp, pop-colored space punctuated with disaster.

Mark Price lives and works in Philadelphia. His work was recently selected by curator Aaron Betsky for inclusion in the internationally recognized Confines exhibition at the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern. Group exhibitions include Peer Pressure at The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and Locally Localized Gravity at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Price was a member of the Philadelphia-based artist collective Space 1026 from 2004 – 2009.

http://www.brycewolkowitz.com/

Clic Gallery is proud to present ASYLUM: PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER PAYNE. The show will run from April 13 to May 23rd, 2010. There will be an opening reception from 6 to 9 pm on Thursday, April 15.

Massive state-funded mental hospitals, many of them among the largest and most elaborate structures ever erected in America, were a prominent feature of the American landscape for more than a century. Once sources of civic pride before becoming warehouses of neglect, the asylums were emptied towards the end of last century, and now sit crumbling, keeping their secrets. Many of them are already gone. Architectural photographer CHRISTOPHER PAYNEwas granted unprecedented access to document the abandoned buildings and interiors over a period of six years, and the resulting book, ASYLUM: INSIDE THE CLOSED WORLD OF MENTAL HOSPITALS (MIT Press, 2009), has become something of a phenomenon, touching people in unexpected ways. Remarkable both as photojournalism and as art, the images of ASYLUM are elegiac, emotionally gripping, and possessed of a cinematic sensibility. Payne’s photographs have been praised by THE NEW YORKER for their “eerie beauty” and by THE NEW YORK TIMES, which said, “What distinguishes Mr. Payne’s work is not only his knowing documentation of architectural features but his eye for the telling human detail.”

A graduate of Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, CHRISTOPHER PAYNE trained and practiced as an architect before turning to photography. In addition to ASYLUM, he is the author of NEW YORK’S FORGOTTENSUBSTATIONS: THE POWER BEHIND THE SUBWAY (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002). ASYLUM is his first gallery show in New York.

The presence of excess exists in our day-to-day lives, but often hides behind masks of disposal systems, social acceptance, and misinformation. This exhibit explores the idea of the impact of excess on our natural environment both visually and theoretically. The art involved will relate to the effect of mass consumption and waste on the environment. All sales of art will benefit the non-profit organization, Art for Global Justice.

Artists showing work include Chris Jordan, Eve Mosher, Walter “Tinho” Nomura, Justin Gignac, Joseph Heidecker, Mikal Hameed, Erwin Timmers, Miles Wickham, Beau Stanton, Destroy and Rebuild, Christina Chobot, Trash Track, and more.

Andrea Meislin Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Rina Castelnuovo. Although Castelnuovo considers her work photojournalism, her moving images have captured the daily life of Israeli people in a way that few other photographers – fine art or otherwise – have.

Castelnuovo was recently awarded First Place, International News Picture Story in the Best of Photojournalism 2010. She has been photographing for the New York Times in Israel since the mid-nineties, as well as for Time Magazine, Stern Magazine, and the Associated Press since the eighties. Her work presents a look into the complex forces that drive the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The award-winning series focuses on the West Bank settlements and outposts, which Israel has promised to dismantle as part of its commitment to a two-state solution. In the image above, a Jewish settler prays at sunrise from the top of Mt Gerizim where an outpost once stood and was evicted, overlooking the Palestinian city of Nablus and the surrounding “Hills Of Fire” dotted with Jewish settlements. Settlers are holding a permanent presence here despite the eviction as according to their belief that no authority is allowed to relinquish “any portion of the land.”

Castelnuovo captures this and many other moments up through the present day in her exhibition at Andrea Meislin Gallery. Some are dramatic and moving, while others are everyday scenes of the families and people inhabiting this land. Castelnuovo’s striking ability to capture both the extraordinary and the habitual puts her in a class of her own. Rina Castelnuovo studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, and is the recipient of many prestigious prizes for her photography.

Christopher Henry Gallery is proud to present Christopher Makos Polaroids, an exhibition of 55 original vintage SX-70 Polaroids. Much more than photographs, Makos’ Polaroids are, in fact, precious artifacts – historic one-of-a-kind mementos from the 70s and early 80s, an era famously celebrated for its decadence but less often noted for its remarkable innocence Decades before the age of flatbed scanners, digital cameras and desktop printers, Polaroid cameras had the unique ability to capture private, unreproducible moments in time – it was a seductive producer of images that developed magically before your eyes in the privacy of your own hands. Calvin Klein reminisced, “No one was afraid of being photographed back then because it was more likely a picture would end up in the back of someone’s drawer than on Facebook, YouTube or the front page. So people were free, spontaneous, a little exhibitionistic. There was a sort of shared promise that things could remain a secret.”

This unrestricted sense of intimacy and spontaneity is captured brilliantly in the warm hues and pure poetic forms of Makos’ Polaroids. From the innocent to the sensual, from a dated automobile (i.e. 1976 AMC Pacer) to a timeless torso, objects take on a magical allure as in Beach Ball and Flippers, Champagne and Donuts, World Trade Center, and Boxing Gloves, 1981 (worn by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat for their iconic Collaborations / Shafrazi Show poster). Even in celebrity shots of Warhol, Deborah Harry, and John F. Kennedy Jr., all were shot with varying degrees of wit and humor – for Makos the Polaroid was not just a camera, it was an instrument of exploration. Having apprenticed with Man Ray, Makos understands the inner essence of things and it is this luminescence that radiates from his photographs. Time stands still – ephemera are immortalized.

The exhibition is presented concurrent with the launch of a 180 Polaroid monograph Christopher Makos Polaroids, published by Photology with text by Calvin Klein available for sale at the gallery.

Deitch Projects is pleased to present May Day, an exhibition of new work by Shepard Fairey, as its final project. Titled not only in reference to the day of the exhibition’s opening, the multiple meanings of May Dayresonate throughout the artist's new body of work. Originally a celebration of spring and the rebirth it represents, May Day is also observed in many countries as International Worker's Day or Labor Day, a day of political demonstrations and celebrations coordinated by unions and socialist groups. “Mayday” is also the distress signal used by pilots, police and firefighters in times of emergency. 

With energy and urgency befitting the title May Day, Fairey captures the radical spirit of each of his subjects, using portraiture to celebrate some of the artists, musicians and political activists he most admires. Says Fairey, "These people I'm portraying were all revolutionary, in one sense or another. They started out on the margins of culture and ended up changing the mainstream. When we celebrate big steps that were made in the past, it reminds us that big steps can be made in the future." 

Many of the steps Fairey refers to involve the advocacy of the working class, put forth in the songs of Joe Strummer and Woody Guthrie and the writings of Cornel West, and among the works of other heroes portrayed in May Day. International Worker's Day celebrated in nearly 100 countries throughout the world, commemorates the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago when a peaceful rally supporting workers on strike was disrupted by a bomb, and then a barrage of police gunfire. Because of negative sentiment surrounding the incident, U.S. President Grover Cleveland decided it was best to avoid celebrating the day, but it is precisely such sentiment that Fairey believes must be voiced: "It's a day to express frustration with the powers that be, but also a day for activists to pursue ideals." In May Day, he does both, with images supporting free speech and bemoaning the U.S. two party political system, pushing for renewable energy and critiquing corporate propaganda. 

In Fairey's mind, the persistence of difficulties across all of these arenas—political, environmental, economic, cultural—points to that third meaning of May Day: a distress signal. "By now we thought we would be in post-Bush utopia, but we're still having to call attention to these problems,” he remarks. Like any mayday call, however, the sounding of the alarm also brings hope for help on the way. "If we stay silent, there's no hope,” Fairey muses. "But if we make noise, if we put our ideas out there, then maybe we can make a change like the people in the portraits have done." 

Shepard Fairey is the man behind OBEY GIANT, the graphics that have changed the way people see art and the urban landscape. Fairey’s art reached a new level of recognition in 2008, when his “HOPE” portrait of Barack Obama became the iconic image of the presidential campaign and helped inspire an unprecedented political movement. As Shepard Fairey’s body of work reached its 20-year mark in 2009, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston honored him with a full-scale solo retrospective, which drew a record number of visitors for the museum. Entitled Supply and Demand, the exhibition shares its name with Fairey’s career-chronicling book, now in its second edition (Gingko Press). The exhibition traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and will move to the Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, on view through August 22nd, 2010.

David Zwirner is pleased to present Edward Kienholz’s (1927-1994)renowned installation Roxys, 1960-61. First exhibited at Los Angeles Ferus Gallery in 1962, this significant large-scale assemblage represents the first of the artist’s environmental installations, or as he called them, and has been credited as being one of the earliest examples of what is now ubiquitously referred to as installation art.

This exhibition follows the recently acclaimed presentation of a related work by the artist (in collaboration with Nancy Reddin Kienholz), The Hoerengracht National Gallery, London, in November 2009 - February 2010. An important figure in postwar American art, Kienholz has become best known for evocative assemblages and environments made from disparate found objects and discarded, everyday materials. His work draws from the vernacular of contemporary American life,confronting the viewer with issues surrounding cultural existence and the inhumanities of twentieth-century Western society. In 1953 Kienholz moved to Los Angeles from his hometown in Fairfield, Washington, and quickly became an active participant in the Southern California art community. Although his early work took the form of abstract wall reliefs and paintings, by 1960 Kienholz’s practice shifted to three-dimensional, free-standing constructions and environmental assemblages. His groundbreaking tableaux, which addressed themes surrounding the vulgarity of humanity, gave him the reputation of being a significant socio-critical artist and pioneer of Assemblage art.

Set in 1943, Roxys presents a life-size recreation of a well-known Las Vegas brothel. In a furnished room filled with objects and figures, Kienholz accurately displays the history and patina of the period—evoking the era of the artist’s adolescence—with vintage props such as a 1943 calendar, movie magazines, a juke box playing familiar songs from the forties, a slot machine, brand-name beer bottles and cigarette wrappers, a call-to-arms portrait of General MacArthur, period furniture, and miscellaneous bric-à-brac. The room is populated by disturbing, provocative figures that represent the remnants of human experience. This elaborately detailed tableau evokes the brutalities of the human condition: by offering an all encompassing, visceral sensory experience, the viewer is fully and unavoidably confronted with the bleak realities of its subject matter.

The installation consists of a series of figurative assemblages, each placed on tile pedestals to indicate a deliberate separation from their environment. Each of these “characters” has a curious and descriptive name: Ben Brown; Dianna Poole, Miss Universal; Miss Cherry Delight; Cockeyed Jenny; Fifi, A Lost Angel; A Lady Named Zoa; Five Dollar Billy; and The Madam. These figures—one “male” and seven distorted “women” made out of mannequin body parts combined with absurd, surreal objects—demonstrate the dismal social realities of prostitution. In 1977, thinking back on Roxys, the artist recalled: “I went back in memory to going to Kellogg, Idaho, to whorehouses when I was a kid, and just being appalled by the whole situation—not being able to perform because it was just a really crummy, bad experience, a bunch of old women with sagging breasts that were supposed to turn you on, and like I say, it just didn’t work.”1

A recurring concern addressed throughout Kienholz’s practice, which is clearly pronounced in this important tableau is the effect time has on environments, objects, and human experience; the installation intertwines the past with the present, and the artist uses “junk” as a way of referring to, and symbolizing, the relationship between time and death. As Kienholz stated in 1977, “all my work has to do with living and dying, our fear of death.”2

Upon entering the installation, the viewer is greeted by The Madam, the operator of the brothel, who has a boar’s skull as a head and is dressed in dark, draped garments which appear to be in a state of decay. As one proceeds into the space, the scene becomes increasingly disturbing, as each figure, stained with splatters of paint, illustrates a grotesque portrayal of prostitution. Another figure, Five Dollar Billy, demonstrates the morbid realities of her occupation. She rests horizontally on top of a sewing machine stand; her torso is tarnished and carved with names (presumably of those who have possessed her). The rose in her throat represents, as Nancy Reddin Kienholz suggests, “the innocence which separates her mind from what her body is doing. She is the whore with a purpose as represented by the squirrel which is stashing nuts (money) against the future (ugliness and old age).”3

The artist’s deliberately awkward juxtaposition of materials is evidenced in Fifi, A Lost Angel, in which the face of a child is combined with the torso and legs of a mature woman. A clock is embedded in her stomach, suggesting a method of timing her customers and referring to Kienholz’s concerns with the passage of time. Other figures, such as Cockeyed Jenny, a spread-legged, faceless body made from a pop-lid garbage can with mannequin legs, address the use of women as “‘dumping’ grounds for man’s physical and emotional advances.”4

Each character in Roxys has a background story which the artist addresses through various details, such as a letter from the prostitute’s sister in Miss Cherry Delight; the papier-mâché jack-o-lantern head of Dianna Poole, Miss Universal; and the letter-dispensing machine which acts as A Lady Named Zoa’s torso. The only male represented is Ben Brown, the towel boy. Written on his head are the words “See No—Hear No—Speak No,” referring to the common pictorial maxim of the three wise monkeys. Wrapped around his waist is a metal chastity belt, suggesting that he is protected from the establishment’s customers.

Roxys, which gives visual form to a broad archetypal experience, was radical when it was first presented and is a crucial work in the artist’s oeuvre. All of the figures depicted in the installation are made to be repulsive, while functioning metaphorically. Kienholz created a vivid and somewhat theatrical experience of the horrific qualities of prostitution; his bordello is grotesque and morbid rather than erotic. The work addresses themes which the artist continually concerned himself with, such as the oppression of women, the bleaker aspects of memory and time, and the troubling cruelties of contemporary culture. Kienholz finds his inspiration in the detritus of modern existence, and much of his practice can be seen as a vehicle for social critique. His large-scale tableaux, which not only incorporate the physical aspects of human existence, but also draw attention to society’s distorted social conditioning, stand alone within the history of 20th century art.

HASTED HUNT KRAEUTLER is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographs from the body of work Lowdensitypolyethylene by JULIAN FAULHABER.

The German-born photographer made his United States debut in Chisel curated by Kathy Ryan of the New York Times at the first annual New York Photo Festival in 2008. His first gallery show in New York followed in the fall of that year at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler. Since then, Faulhaber has been named a new and emerging photographer to watch in 2009 by Photo District News (PDN) and has been included in the exhibition Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The photographs in Faulhaber’s body of work, Lowdensitypolyethylene, are created in newly constructed spaces in the time between when they are completed and when they become occupied or in use. The intense colors and sheen result from exposure times of 10 to 20 seconds, the perspective selected and the artificial light at the location, rather than from post-production. The resulting image often appears abstract, even unreal, but it is in fact a straight document of the space, reflected in such direct titles as “Supermarket” and “Garage”.

Faulhaber’s work comments on the discrepancy between the material reality of construction, the daily experience of a space, and the utopian ideals that inspire the avant-garde of the architectural field. The actual formal points of an architect’s utopian vision are often inspired by the other arts: painting, writing and photography. His work is also embedded in a tradition of German photography that considers the investigation of architectural forms to be important social commentary, a history that spans the work of Albert Renger-Patsch, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Demand. Faulhaber’s work is included in the permanent collections of such esteemed institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Harvard Art Museum, and the Princeton Art Museum. 

JULIAN FAULHABER is represented in the United States exclusively by HASTED HUNT KRAEUTLER. For visuals or more information please contact the gallery at info@hastedhuntkraeutler.com.

curated by Dean Daderko

THROCKMORTON FINE ART is pleased to offer an exhibit of work by France’s greatest living photographer—Lucien Clergue. The exhibit consists of 35 photographs from throughout his lengthy career, all portraying one of his cherished subjects—the female nude. The works are in black-and-white. Many nudes are set in either water or sand, both of which are drawn on to accentuate the sculptural qualities of the human body. Clergue is inventive, a master of composition and of the use of light and shadow. The resulting images look effortless and natural; they are clean, sensuous yet pure, and attain a quiet, understated elegance. Jean Cocteau described Clergue as “a poet with a camera.” Pablo Picasso proclaimed Clergue “the Monet of the camera.” The first collector of his work was Max Ernst. Great artists recognize their brethren—and the images exhibited here also testify that Clergue is an accomplished artist. Clergue, however, has not been as well known in the United States as he is in Europe. This exhibit is an effort to build at least a small bridge across the Atlantic Ocean. Clergue was born in 1934 in Arles, an ancient port city. He is rooted in Mediterranean culture. He began taking photographs in 1953—at the age of just nineteen. He quickly achieved renown, but he declined offers from Paris-Match and Vogue, adhering to a vocation as an artist. Even after five decades of labor, his enthusiasm is tireless and he retains a gift for growth. He has stayed close to Arles, but he always sees something new, and he keeps working. His illustrious admirer and friend, Picasso, would be proud.

Graphic Intersections is a collaborative project loosely based on the old Surrealist and Dadaist game, the Exquisite Corpse. Designed to unite disparate artists in an interconnected photographic relay of images inspired by one another, this project strives to emphasize a system of response entirely rooted in unmediated visual reaction.

The exhibition includes photographs by Ben Alper, Anastasia Cazabon, Thomas Damgaard, Scott Eiden, Grant Ernhart, Jon Feinstein, Elizabeth Fleming, Alan George, Hee Jin Kang, Drew Kelly, Michael Marcelle, Chris Mottalini, Ed Panar, Bradley Peters, Cara Phillips, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Irina Rozovsky, Brea Souders, Jane Tam and Grant Willing.

In the inside gallery space, a second exhibition, The Portrait as Allegory, examines the work of Timothy Briner, Birthe Piontek, and Susan Worsham, three artists who utilize the figure metaphorically in service of a broader discourse on the human experience. In addition to exploring the personal identities of their subjects, these portraits simultaneously become vehicles which speak to a variety of social, historical, and familial histories.

In a major departure from his usual practice of working in the rural landscape, Andy Goldsworthy will present photographs, sculpture and videos made exclusively in New York City. In New York Dirt Water Light, Goldsworthy’s subjects include debris, passersby, and the interplay of natural and artificial light-demonstrating the artist’s broad, compelling understanding of nature. The exhibition at Galerie Lelong will include nine photographic suites, a triptych of “rain shadow” videos, and a sculptural installation made of dirt collected from the city streets. The exhibition will open to the public on Thursday, May 6 from 6 to 8 pm, and the artist will be present.

Since 1993, when Goldsworthy presented his first solo exhibition in New York City, the artist has sought to find a way to convey the nature in urban environments. The heart of New York Dirt Water Light is a series of time-based photographs that represent Goldsworthy’s most intensive work in an urban setting to date. On two separate trips, he spent several weeks in New York, choosing Times Square as the city epicenter and the site for most of his experiments. Often working at night, he drew lines and circles on the ground with water and documented them in the vagaries of natural and artificial light as they evaporated. Amid the frenzied activity of the city, Goldsworthy’s works are radically quiet, using the simplest of means.

Goldsworthy will also show a video triptych of his “rain shadows,” a motif he has revisited throughout his career. In these works, Goldsworthy lies outside as it begins to rain, remaining still until the surrounding ground is wet. After he stands, the dry imprint of his body lingers, fading slowly as the rain continues to fall. To make his rain shadows in an environment as congested and fast-paced as Manhattan posed an interesting challenge for the artist.

The final piece in the exhibition is a sculptural installation composed of dirt collected over several days from different locations in the city. By concentrating and displacing the common, unassuming substance, Goldsworthy challenges and heightens our perception of our physical environment. “People and dirt,” says Goldsworthy, “are nature in New York.” As displayed in the exhibition, Goldsworthy’s recurring themes-effects of time, the relationship between people and environments, the persistence of cycles-are as present and provocative on the densely populated, hyper-developed streets as they are in the remote landscapes of his most recognized works.

Since his last exhibition at Galerie Lelong in 2007, Goldsworthy has completed numerous public and private commissions, including Spire at the Presidio of San Francisco; three prominent works at Jupiter Artland, a sculpture park in Edinburgh; and En las entrañas del árbol, an installation presented by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Thames and Hudson recently published The Andy Goldsworthy Project, a book on his work at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and other permanent commissions. Currently, the artist is at work on projects at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Albright Knox Art Gallery, and Storm King Art Center, among others

Winkleman Gallery is pleased to present “American ReConstruction,” a group exhibition of new photography by emerging artists Matthew Albanese, Jowhara AlSaud, Jeremy Kost, Mark Lyon, Curtis Mann, and Cara Phillips. Organized by New York collector Michael Hoeh, “American ReConstruction” features artists who construct photography-based work through an array of pre- and post-printing considerations or processes.

“Reconstruction” is the act of rebuilding an object or structure that had been destroyed. Hence, the post-Civil War years in US history were called “The Era of Reconstruction.” In contemporary America, we are witnessing a new need to rebuild a wide series of systems: our economy, healthcare system, political system, consumer confidence, and in the new age of iPads and Facebook even our methods of communication and visual language. In this exhibition, Hoeh has brought together a group of artists whose work all touch upon these issues. Some of the artists’ work is created by physically altering the raw material of photography or its subject matter—by scratching (AlSaud), bleaching (Mann), or directly building detailed models (Albanese) for the making of their images. Others work by innately focusing their camera gaze on society’s impulse to rebuild or reconstruct our appearances (Phillips), personas (Kost), or environments (Lyon).

For his “Strange Worlds” series, Matthew Albanese first creates highly detailed models in his studio from surprising simple materials. By then maximizing the capacity of photographic techniques (such as scale, depth of field, white balance and lighting), he produces highly emotive landscape photographs from these models in which telltale signs of the artifice compete with the astonishing illusions. Jowhara AlSaud, whose “Out of Line” series deals with the language of censorship as applied to photographic images in her native Saudi Arabia (where it’s not uncommon to find skirts lengthened or sleeves crudely added with black markers in magazines or blurred out faces on billboards), etches line drawings directly onto her film and prints her photographs in a traditional darkroom process. By eliminating the faces and skin of her chosen subjects, she circumvents the cultural taboos of photography even as she illustrates how malleable the medium is.

Whether the subjects of Jeremy Kost’s Polaroid collages are drag queens, club kids, or barely clothed young men, his work always presents a remarkable intimate portrait of someone attempting to present themselves in a fabulous light. The paradox of the subtle insecurities Kost’s portraits of extreme extroverts reveal is echoed by the complex, chaotic structure of his collages in which glamor mingles with reality. Mark Lyon’s “Landscapes for the People” series focus on the use of romanticized wallpaper landscape photographs found in everyday environments. For Lyon, these photographic murals seem to serve a psychological function, given their potentially intimidating or banal locations, like dental rooms and Laundromats, as they allow the viewer an alternate mindset to nerve racking procedures or the mundane activities of everyday life.

Also currently on view at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Curtis Mann’s photography begins with found images from online sources and photo-sharing websites that he orders as printed photographs and distorts with household bleach, which he uses to erase and obscure portions of their compositions. His latest series begins with photographs of the Golan Heights found on flickr. Even more abstract than his previous work, these images reference Rorschach test blotches. Titled “foldings” (referencing how they are made [being folded in half]), they also reference the two sides of the conflict in the Golan Heights and who is the rightful owner of this stretch of land. The two series included by Cara Phillips operate from opposite ends of the reality spectrum on personal beauty. In the “Singular Beauty” series of cosmetic surgeon’s offices, Phillips captures the emotional significance of the chairs, beds, machines, and tools through which so many seek happiness. For “Ultraviolet Beauties,” she takes head-on portraits using ultraviolet light (a tool plastic surgeon) use to show patients the damage underneath the surface of their skin. This filter allows us to see what beyond the capacity of the human eye, deeper than what a normal camera lens can record.

SPECIAL EVENT
On Saturday, June 5, 2010, Cara Philips will set up her UV studio at the gallery and offer collectors the opportunity to commission an Ultraviolet portrait. Please call or email for cost information and to reserve your spot if you would like to participate.

Michael Hoeh is a member of the Guggenheim Photo Acquisition Committee, the Co-Chairman of Aperture Foundation’s 2010 Winter Auction, and was interviewed in the January 2010 issue of Art+Auction as one of the “New Guard” of contemporary art collectors. Hoeh is also the author of the art blog www.ModernArtObsession.com, which is listed by The Metropolitan Museum, The Walker Art Center, and The London Times as a top online resource for contemporary art. He has been widely quoted in the press, such as the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, Black & White Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail about the state of the contemporary art market. Hoeh has also guest lectured or opened his collection to graduate classes at the SVA, FIT, UCONN, and The New School.

“As my artwork has moved towards working with light, water and fog, evoking aspects of architecture, space, and the more ephemeral aspects of nature and life, it seemed that, in response to the expedition’s mission—creating art in the context of the sail in the Arctic—it was most appropriate to make temporary, ephemeral light/earth works with traces of light suspended above water.” -Raphaele Shirley

Dorfman Projects presents Arctic Lights, five photographs by Brooklyn based artist Raphaele Shirley, documenting her expedition to the Arctic Circle, October 2009. The exhibition runs concurrently with Shirley’s 0910 Light Shots at the Chelsea Art Museum, NY.

Raphaele Shirley, a multi-media artist, explores geometrical and architectonic forms and the different ways they relate to their surroundings. During her voyage to the arctic, Shirley transposed the idea of the light sculpture to the icy, nighttime waterscape using a makeshift “light brush” attached to a zodiac boat. From the rolling hull of the expedition’s vessel, she used time-lapse photography to capture the movements of the light as it sculpted across the surface of the water. Frozen by the Shirley’s lens, the lights form three-dimensional structures made up of cylinders, lines, and prisms, existing for an instant and leaving nothing behind, save for the specters that appear in her photographs.

Raphaele Shirley has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums in New York and abroad in addition to creating installations for public commissions. She was an assistant to Nam June Paik and is one of the originators of Perpetual Art Machine, an interactive video installation and online web community. Most recently, she completed Shooting Stair, a laser and water fog sculpture produced by Dorfman Projects and Jewels of Kvinesdal, a large-scale installation in Kvinesdal, Norway. Her newest laser sculpture, 0910 Light Shots, opens at the Chelsea Art Museum this May, followed by her short video, StarGaze in Sandes, in Sandes, Norway.

Elizabeth Dee Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new sculptural, photographic and video works by Josephine Meckseper. For this exhibition, Meckseper transforms the gallery into a mirrored achromatic showroom, drawing comparisons between current and past US political strategies.

Meckseper alters the gallery interior through a series of architectural interventions, including a reflective ceiling grid, mirror slat wall and dark fluorescent lighting installed on the perimeter of the gallery floor. The entire exhibition space is activated as a showroom and oversized display vitrine, reflecting its contents on the walls and ceiling. Reminiscent of chrome surfacing in 1980s architecture, the car dealerships along 11th Avenue and the discount stores of the Garment District, Meckseper’s signature shelves and industrial sculptures hang from hooks on a slat wall like merchandise in a discount store. Meckseper’s interventions emphasize both the display and retail functions of gallery space, while the dark fluorescent lighting casts a discomfiting, perpetual and artificial twilight.

Meckseper presents a number of new sculptures including chromed wheels on mirrored pedestals, and a double-sided metallic display rack showcasing disembodied car parts, metal chains, paintings and newspaper images of luxury watches, the US Supreme Court, and Iraqi Shiites protesting the US occupation. These conjunctions in the works manifest the nature of the mirror, both reflective and diatonic. Mirrored surfaces multiply, fracture and expand the space, creating infinite juxtapositions. Images of elusive affluence and phantom notions of economic recovery confront a judiciary declaring an interest in expanding the rights of corporations. Chains binding the hands of Iraqi Shiites echo the chains on the sculptures, evoking the shackling of the US to its automotive-centric industrial past; grids in the racks, ceilings and achromes conjoin to expand the space into an immersive minimalist geometry; and reflections of the viewers collide with subjects and images of American consume rism, media and foreign policy.

Additionally, two new films are exhibited in the context of the installation. Meckseper’s newest film focuses on the glorified depiction of the American oil industry and the perpetuation of US imperialism. Here, images from the 1980s television shows Dynasty and Dallas are juxtaposed with an acid house soundtrack from the same decade, creating the context for a renewed debate on offshore oil drilling and the recent catastrophic explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in Louisiana. Meanwhile, installed alongside empty display racks in the second gallery, Shattered Screen depicts a flickering image of television static on a broken monitor, echoing the smashed mirrors in the sculptural works and creating its own fiendish glow.

This is Josephine Meckseper’s fourth solo show with Elizabeth Dee and follows the gallery’s solo presentation of her work at The Armory Show earlier this year. Her film Mall of America is presently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as part of the 2010 Whitney Biennial. In 2009, Meckseper had solo exhibitions at the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum at the University of Houston, Texas, the Ausstellungshalle zeitgenössische Kunst in Münster, Germany and the Migros Museum in Zürich, Switzerland. Her work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the exhibition New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky, and in 2007, her work was the focus of a mid-career retrospective presented at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, which traveled to Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen. She has been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions including Brave New Worlds, Walker Art Center, Minnea polis, MN, touring to Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Resistance Is, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Second Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, Seville; USA Today, Royal Academy of Arts, London, which traveled to The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Media Burn at the Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

The exhibition will open concurrently with New York Gallery Week, a new initiative presenting 50 solo gallery exhibitions and special programming by galleries around New York City, scheduled for May 7 – 10.

Book signing: Sunday, May 9, 2 pm

Extended hours during New York Gallery Week: Sunday, May 9 and Monday, May 10 open 11-6 pm

For his fourth solo show at Metro Pictures, T. J. Wilcox presents three new films installed within a series of free-standing collaged screens. In these films, Wilcox celebrates the eccentric, historic, personal and ephemeral using his signature romantic yet concise narrative. In each gallery space is one film and a series of related, large-scale collages mounted on hinged wooden panels reminiscent of traditional Japanese screens.

The Heir and Astaire tells the tale of Nebraska native Adele Astaire, sister of Fred and the biggest vaudeville star of her day, who became Lady Charles Cavendish upon her marriage to the second son of the Duke of Devonshire in 1932. The film explores Adele’s ill-fated fantasy of introducing American show business style to the English aristocracy at Lismore Castle, the family’s ancient home in the Irish countryside. Wilcox intercuts archival footage with his filmed interview with the 90-year-old Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, sister of Charles and the last of the famous Mitford sisters.

With a nod to nature films, L’eau de Vie strings together three stories: the tale of Wilcox’s young friend who discovers an endangered turtle in her swimming pool; a history of Ukai or bird fishing, a traditional method of Japanese river fishing that has been practiced for some 1300 years; and documentation of the artist’s own backyard-attempt at making eau de vie de poire, or pear brandy.

The third new film immortalizes the country and western star Patsy Cline whose wistful music of loss, sorrow and longing still captivates audiences nearly 50 years after her tragic death at age 30.

Wilcox was born in 1965 in Seattle and currently lives in New York. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York (BFA 1989) and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California (MFA 1995). One-person exhibitions include the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunstverein Munich; UC Berkeley Art Museum; Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. His films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Modern, London.

LMAKprojects is pleased to present three series of work by Penelope Umbrico: Broken Sets (eBay), 2009- 2010, Zenith Replacement Parts, 2009, and Desk Trajectories (As Is), 2010. Mining the Internet for its idealized fictions of a technologically obsessed society, Umbrico creates taxonomies of images that point to a deflation or rupture in these fictions. Employing methods of appropriation, extraction, and accumulation, Umbrico extracts details from these images that belie an optimism usually associated with this content.

Broken Sets (eBay) are images of the screens cropped from pictures of broken LCD TVs Umbrico found on eBay.com, where they are sold for parts. The sellers turn on the TVs while photographing them so that potential buyers can see that the electronics behind the screens work. Umbrico became interested in the incidental abstract beauty of the screens because they are derived from the breakdown and failure of their own promising technology. By presenting these inadvertent abstract compositions as formal compositions in their own right, Umbrico collapses the obsolescence and breakdown of new technology with the aesthetic formalism of utopian Modernist abstraction.

Zenith Replacement Parts are photographs, also taken from eBay, of dusty cardboard boxes containing Zenith replacement parts. What intrigued Umbrico about these images was the seller’s belief in the photograph – that a picture of the box storing the part would lend more veracity to the objects inside, than to simply list the parts numbers. The reductiveness of the box form and its repetition is further emphasized by Umbrico’s gridding of them, turning them into a Judd-like eulogy.

A reoccurring theme in Umbrico’s work is the examination of how unattainable lifestyles are marketed, lusted after, and devoured by consumers. She highlights underlying cultural longings of a consumer subject allowing it to be replaced by a fictional, idealized, non-existent abstraction. This sentiment is poignantly illustrated in Desk Trajectories (As Is), 2010. If a new office desk promises the ultimate in organization and productivity, these same desks on craigslist and eBay, by virtue of the fact that they are “used” and out of commission, represent the exact opposite: a deflated and empty sign of productivity. No longer useful, and taking up too much space, these desks have been subsumed to an economy of re-appropriation, value deflation, and physical degradation.

The term As Is indicates a good bargain with perhaps some flaw, but taken here as an ontological statement, As Is points to a sort of existential anxiety: its reason for being is hinged on its potential for facilitating productivity, and its form is a testament to ideologies of a clean, elegant modernist aesthetic. In these pictures, all efficiency, productivity and elegance is in question.

Penelope Umbrico has had numerous solo exhibitions, including International Center of Photography, NY; Julie Saul Gallery, NY; Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston; P|M Gallery, Toronto; and her work has been included in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia; Bard College, NY; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; Art in General, NY; Gallery 44, Toronto; Dazibao, Montreal; Ansel Adams Center for Photography, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA. Umbrico’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; International Center of Photography; Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. She is the recipient of an Anonymous Was A Woman Award; New York Foundation for the Arts, Artists Fellowship; a New York Foundation for the Arts, Catalogue Project Grant; an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant; and a Harvestworks Scholar Fellowship.

Camel Art Space presents Photogenic: An investigation into current photogram practices, featuring Brian Buckley, Millie Falcaro, Bryan Graf, Jeffrey Rothstein, Drew Wiedemann and curated by James Isherwood.

Photogenic is an investigation of current photogram practitioners and their efforts to mine the alchemical and physical roots of the medium. By getting back to basics, the artists delve into the mysteries and magic of core photographic principles that generated their original fascination with image making. The photogram demands their physical presence as well as that of man-made and natural elements.Process and approach are dominant. Chance and mistakes play major roles in refining and integrating the creative act. This witch’s brew forms the catalyst for inhabiting the visceral experience created by the artists. They are seekers of beauty and tragedy, poetics and higher meaning,all within the boundaries of the photogram.

A photogram is the immediate result of a constellation of light,three dimensional objects and photosensitive material.The image results from the process of light-bending or refraction caused by the placement of the objects themselves. A source of light can be used as well as invisible waves such as microwaves,infrared light and x-rays. Due to its immediacy,its quality as index caused by potential contact and physical distance relationships,the photogram imparts more to imprint techniques and the phenomena of shadow. -J.Isherwood

The School of Constructed Environments of Parsons The New School for Design is pleased to present “See Through City,” an exhibition of photographs by Jill Corson, in the Cases Gallery in the School of Constructed Environments, on the second floor of 25 East 13th Street in New York City.

Corson’s multi-layered jewel-toned photographs of New York City’s built environment reveal her unique manner of seeing and recording our consumer culture. A colorist, Corson creates psychedelic montage in the moment by using reflection in glass to juxtapose pedestrians with luscious store window displays.

The work provides keen social commentary. Made between 1999 and
2005, Corson’s pieces record the retail boom years along Fifth Avenue and in Manhattan’s other high-end shopping districts during the years preceding the current economic downturn.

“There is enormous visual pleasure in these photographs,” writes Jerry Cullum, Senior Editor of Art Papers Magazine. “There is also visual information, for the would-be sociologist of the contemporary street. This is what Walter Benjamin would have called the phantasmagoria of consumer culture, the oh so trendy razzle-dazzle of its bling-bling.”

In his 2005 book, La Ville: Entre Reprèsentations et Rèalitès, (SCÉRÉN/CNDP Press), French architectural writer Claude Loupiac compared Corson’s photographs with work by photographer Eugène Atget.

Corson is Associate Director of Academic Advising for the School of Constructed Environments. Meter Gallery and Gallery Stock represent her work.

Sitting on the outskirts of the five boroughs, the world famous pleasure beach of Coney Island has been the summer destination for New Yorkers since its heyday in the 1890s. Towards the end of the 1960s, one year after he first picked up a camera, Bruce Gilden took the subway train through Brooklyn to capture the sunbathers, the weekenders, the sideshow booths and the Cyclone rollercoaster. Coney Island's reputation has steadily slipped since Gilden started to photograph there, and is now known as a place where the poor who cannot escape the summer city heat go for thrills. Regardless of this reputation, Gilden's ability to eke out the characters and eccentricities give the beach and its surrounding neighborhood a humorous view of daily life from the sixties through until the late 1980s.

“A man can be replaced at any time but a paybook is sacred if anything is.”
-Man equals Man by Bertolt Brecht

With chase, Liz Magic Laser reinterprets Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 play Man equals Man. The project includes a feature-length video, an installation of ephemera from the production of chase as well as a theatrical set that will serve as a backdrop for a live performance.

Working in collaboration with nine actors, Laser staged Brecht’s play in the ATM vestibules of banks throughout New York City. Videotaping each actor’s performance separately, she edited the scenes, creating a complete version of the narrative. The element of estrangement in the original play is heightened through jump cuts and spatiotemporal shifts. The actors were instructed to deliver their lines to the bank’s ATM machines and unsuspecting patrons. In the final edited version, the characters seem to converse with one another through mechanical and human conduits. Laser writes:

I see the ATM as a contradictory space that on one hand constructs an utterly private experience and on the other reduces the individual to a completely generic and anonymous subject. Man equals Man is an allegory about a man who relinquishes his private identity to assume power as an egoless machine.

Originally set in colonial India, Man equals Man is both a comedy and a disturbing social parable that recounts the dehumanizing metamorphosis of an ordinary man into an instrument of authoritarian and capitalist design. At the start of the play four soldiers drunkenly vandalize a temple. One soldier, Jeraiah Jip, is severely injured. His comrades decide they must find a temporary replacement for him in order to avoid being punished for their crime. They pick up a local simpleton, Galy Gay, on his way to buy a fish for his wife. The soldiers cajole him into pretending to be Jeraiah Jip, eventually manipulating Galy Gay into fully adopting the missing soldier’s identity through the use of Jip’s paybook. Predating the concept of brainwashing, Brecht presents a man who relinquishes his individuality to become a war machine.

In addition to presenting the videotaped production of chase, Laser will also stage a live performance during the exhibition opening. The Elephant Calf was originally a farcical play within the play Man equals Man, but Brecht later extracted it from the script and proposed that it be performed in the theater’s foyer during the intermission. With her production Laser takes up this project of bringing actor and viewer into closer proximity. After the performance, the set and costumes (made in collaboration with Felicia Garcia-Rivera) will remain as an installation.

This will be Liz Magic Laser’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Her work will be included in the upcoming Greater New York at MoMA PS1. A recent graduate of The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Columbia University’s MFA program, Laser’s work has been shown at The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Smack Mellon, The Prague Biennial, and The Art Institute of Chicago, among other venues.

Collaborators:
The performance work was developed in collaboration with actors Annika Boras, Andra Eggleston, Gary Lai, Liz Micek, Justin Sayre, Doug Walter, Michael Wiener, Max Woertendyke and Cat Yezbak.
Set and costumes for The Elephant Calf were done in collaboration with Felicia Garcia-Rivera and included production coordination by Mia Tramz.

A playbill booklet was designed by Lauren Adolfsen and includes texts by Carmen Dell’Orefice, Lucy Gallun, Jordan Troeller, Tom Williams, Alberto Pepe and Spencer Wolff.

In Yong Hee Kim’s delicate photographs of cherry blossoms, an ephemeral part represents the beloved whole.
-Russell Hart, Courtesy American Photo magazine

A blooming cherry tree is such a beautiful thing to behold—and so invested with human notions of natural perfection, especially in the cultures of east Asia—that an artist depicting it may struggle to rise above pure representation. This difficulty is still greater in photography because of the medium’s literal inclination. Yet photographers have long been seduced by the cherry’s ineffable pink blossoms, called Sakura in Japan, where its namesakes have included the country’s first color film and its first commercial camera.

So it was aesthetically brave that Yong Hee Kim, in his first photographs of cherry blossoms, chose to sap their very color—shooting them with flash against the sky’s dark zenith and printing them in black and white with such density that they struggle to emerge from the surface of the print. Unable to resist the blossoms’ hue, the South Korea-born photographer has since returned to depicting them in color. His color images don’t represent cherry trees as rooted beings, though. Instead, they form abstract networks of branches exploding with blossoms.

Kim’s show will be up for only seven days, because that’s about how long cherry trees hold onto their blossoms before depositing them in a pink carpet on the ground below. That’s also the time period during which the artist created the entire body of photographs that is on display.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co is pleased to present a dual exhibition of new video works by Burt Barr and recent photographs by Valerie Belin on view from May 21 through July 2, 2010.

Burt Barr has claimed that “black and white are the only two colors I’ll ever need.” The current exhibition maintains this assertion with works like The Sprinkler, The Ship, and The Arrows (all 2010). Each of these works are projected on the walls in approximate square shapes, shot and projected in 4:3 ratio. The nearly still images have no narrative content – intended to be pure visual works that “hang” on the wall.

There are two notable exceptions to Barr’s claim to only need black and white on display here. The ironically named Black and White (2010) is a two-channel installation in color showing the feet of two female dancers – one black, one white. The other exception, Self Portrait (2009-10), greets visitors on a monitor as they enter the gallery. As Barr puts it, “Self Portrait is the creeps,” with a sound track of laughter and showing the artist wearing a horse mask and smoking a cigar.

Burt Barr has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofi?a, Madrid; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; and P.S. 1, Long Island City. Other installations have taken place at The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; and MUDAM, Luxembourg.

Barr is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The American Film Institute, The Andrea Frank Foundation, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, and The Massachusetts Council on the Arts & Humanities. In the summer of 2008 he was a visiting artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.

Post-production for Burt Barr’s videos are provided by Steve Hamilton and Johnny Luisi at Whitehouse Productions.

Concurrent with Barr’s exhibition, the gallery will be showing recent works by Vale?rie Belin. Like Barr, Belin has worked primarily in black and white. Belin’s work captures her subject’s “object-hood” by isolating the subject from its contextual surroundings and accentuating abstract material qualities through the play of light and shadow. On exhibit here are examples from several recent series including a monumentally scaled photograph of a pair of ballroom dancers, four photographs of a single lido girl dressed in different performance costumes, and a still life of a bouquet of “Victorian flowers”- all in back and white.

Again, as with Barr, there are exceptions to Belin’s use of black and white. Her most recent foray into the use of color is a series of fruit baskets, two examples of which are on view here. These works are a response to still-lifes by Edouard Manet created for a solo exhibition at the Musee D’Orsay as part of the museum’s Correspondences series.

In addition to the Musee D’Orsay, Belin has been included in recent exhibitions at Galerie Je?ro?me-de-Noirmont, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; International Center for Photography, New York; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. A retrospective if the artist’s work traveled to the Huis Marseilles in Amsterdam, the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris and the Musee L’Elysee in Lausanne in 2007-08. In 2009, she had her first US museum solo exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

Belin’s works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Maison Europe?enne de la Photographie, Paris; Muse?e des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle,Calais, France; the Cartier Foundation, Paris; and the Bibliothe?que Nationale de France, Paris.

Thought provoking Street Artists AVOID pi & infinity team up for their first duo show together entitled Babel Code. Peering through a semiotic Petri dish intermixed with sub-conscious communication, Babel Code uses primitive and mystical sources as well as runic references, which charges the works of art with a power and energy beyond the objects themselves. 

Babel Code challenges the viewer to reconsider the basic notions of communication and cultural mutation, while providing a closer look into the artist’s own techniques of non-verbal interactions. Building upon a symbolic language shared by both artists, their influences range from a resonance of mixed signals and errant transmissions.

Their symbolism ranges from introverted Platonic deliberation and chemical structures to numerology and DNA; anything and everything from hobo marks and astronomy to grammar diagrams and physics equations.

About the Artists
AVOID pi was born the year IBM released the Personal Computer. He was raised in South Carolina, on a diet of freight trains, deep forests, punk rock, and DIY. He moved to the coast on the eve of the millennium to study both graffiti and philosophy among the flooded streets of Charleston. In 2006, he moved to New York in order to interact on a global stage. He is working on a language of abstractions in the public space, as well as empowering the political potentialities of graffiti.HTTP://WWW.AVOIDPI.COM

infinity was born in 1962 in the Midwest. His family moved to Manhattan in 1970. Obsessions with comic books, heavy metal, and graffiti eventually embraced studies in expressionism, semiotics, and the sciences. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin at River Falls in 1986 and The School of Visual Arts in 1989. He has followed an erratic career path, but always continued his aesthetic and scholarly research.

A phantasmagoric mix of bodies, light, sex, and ether reside in Ellen Stagg’s multi-exposed photographs. Stagg embraces the unexpected and opts for a toy Holga camera using film and Polaroid over the manufactured guise of digital. The multiple exposures cause the women's nude bodies to melt into one another as well as their surroundings. The fluid nature of the images – produced through the manipulation of light leaks, finger prints and film type – offers the viewer 
a surreal visual that is simultaneously in flux and static. Each piece is presented in a unique steel frame constructed by metalsmith Sullivan Walsh.

Ellen Stagg began shooting photos at 16 years old, and instantly fell in love with the art form. She has a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts and is currently based in New York. As a professional photographer, she has worked extensively in advertising and fashion. Stagg has always been drawn to the erotic. Her muse, model Justine Joli, introduced Stagg to many models from the adult industry. Too “artsy” for porn magazines and too “adult” for commercial, Stagg’s stockpile of erotic images found a home on her popular website StaggStreet.com. This outlet has garnered international exposure, including gallery shows, a documentary series on IFC.com, and shoots for Penthouse and Playboy.

“Melting Flesh,” Photographs by Ellen Stagg runs May 22 through June 19, 2010, at Fuse Gallery, 93 2nd Ave (between 5th & 6th Sts, 2nd Ave stop on the F), NYC, NY. The opening reception, on Saturday May 22nd, from 7 to 10 pm, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Fuse Gallery at 212.777.7988 or fusegall@fusegallerynyc.com.

MF Gallery is excited to presentour newest show: "I Need Your Skull", In this show, over 30 international artists were asked to present a piece depicting a human skull... All the money raised from sales of the skull art will be used to build a giant skull on the facade of the MF Gallery building.

Skulls have long been used in art as symbols of mortality, religion, eternal life, rebellion, fear, poison and more. The skulls in "I Need Your Skull" are realized in a variety of different styles and mediums. Photo realistic skulls, gruesome skulls, cartoon skulls, psychedelic skulls, dark skulls and colorful skulls. From morbid to cute, 3D or flat, these skulls are made in a variety of materials from marble to paper; and were created by a group of diverse artists, some who use skulls as the subject matter for their normalwork, and some who were asked to create a skull piece just for this show.

The artists include: Jenny Bird Alcantara, Annie Aube, Nicoz Balboa, Dave Brockie, Candy, Fernando Carpaneda, Gene Coffey, Matt Dickson, Dennis Dread, Kirsten Flaherty, Christina Graf, Guicho, Death Head, Scott Holloway, Lance Laurie, Mike Maas, Drew Maillard, Sarah Antoinette Martin, Angie Mason, Rodrigo Melo, MCA, Chris Peters, Porkchop, Riot Queer, Ed Repka, Lou Rusconi, Frank Russo, John Russo, Martina Secondo Russo, Chad Savage, Anna Semenova, Joe Simko, James Wrona, Genevive Zacconi & More...

Our dream for the new MF Gallery in Brooklyn (A.K.A. The "Fortress MF") has always been to adorn the facade with a 20 foot 3-D skull. Made of fiberglass or a similar material, it will be reminiscent of an old Spook House ride, and would make The Fortress MF an unmissable Brooklyn Landmark! This is a big project that has been in the planning stages for a long time, but one that we have not yet been able to realize due to time and monetary constraints.

"I Need Your Skull" will help to make MF Gallery's Giant Skull Project a reality! All of the proceeds from this show will go towards building the giant skull. As a part of this show, we will be revealing concept sketches for the construction of the "Fortress MF Skull" for the very first time!

Please join us for a rock n roll Opening Party on Saturday May 22, from 7 to 10 pm. Many of the artists will be present, and refreshments will be served. Admission is free and open to all ages. The art in "I Need Your Skull" will be on view until June 20, 2010 and will also available for viewing and purchasing online at: www.MFgallery.net. Come buy some skull art and help us build our giant skull... We Need Your Skull!!!

MF Gallery is located at 213 Bond Street, between Butler and Baltic Streets in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn, NY. Take the F or G to Bergen, (Exit at Bergen and Smith, walk 2 blocks east on Bergen. Turn right on Bond. Walk south on Bond for 3 blocks.) the A to Hoyt/ Schermerhorn, (Exit at Schermerhorn and Bond. Walk South on Bond for 8 blocks.) or the R to Union. (Exit at Union and 4th ave. Walk west on Union for 3 blocks. Turn Right on Bond. Walk North on Bond for 4 blocks.)

For more information, to request high resolution images or to set up interviews, please contact Martina Secondo Russo at info@MFgallery.net or (917)446-8681.

A special selection of extraordinary photographs from the gallery's private inventory

More information about this show will be available soon.

For press inquiries, to obtain an electronic press kit or to RSVP to the press preview, please contactmail@farmanigallery.com or call 718-578-4478.

For other inquiries please contact team@farmnigallery.com.

For latest gallery updates please follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Steven Kasher Gallery is proud to mount an exhibition introducing the autochromes of the National Geographic Society Image Collection. From an archive of over 14,000 color plates made between 1907 and 1930, 65 have been selected as among the most fascinating, and as representative of the scope of the collection. They are being printed in limited editions for the first time.

Autochromes: Early Color Masterpieces from National Geographic will run concurrently with 1.3: New Color Work by Joel Grey, an exhibition of cellular phone photographs by the award-winning actor and photographer Joel Grey. The two shows will juxtapose one of the newest forms of color photography with one of the earliest, and serve to highlight their surprising similarities and differences.

As we are dizzied by new photographic media we can take solace in the pre-modern world of the earliest and maybe most beautiful, color photographs ever made. Autochromes are fragile glass plates: few in number, difficult to exhibit, largely forgotten in photo history. What they show us is a world before highways, before airlines. It is a world without plastic, without neon, without electronics.

In 1895 the Lumiere brothers invented cinema. They immediately set to work on color photography. In 1904 they patented the autochrome (meaning “self-color”). In 1907, they began to mass-market these first practical, accurate color photographic plates, the first true color photographs. Autochrome plates were immediately adopted by the reigning art photographers of the era. Steiglitz, Steichen, Coburn, Kuhn, Struss, White, Eugene, de Meyer, Seeley, Haviland and Genthe sprang to the creation of autochromes. Steiglitz said, “Soon the world will be color-mad, and Lumiere will be responsible. The Lumieres have given the world a process which in history will rank with the startling and wonderful inventions of those two other Frenchmen, Daguerre and Niepce.” Coburn said, “It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to photography.” Over the next several years these Photo-Secessionists produced a small, luminous body of work in autochrome, seeking their Symbolist effects. In the first few years of the autochrome, thousands were shown in important exhibitions throughout Europe and America, and hundreds of articles were written about them in art and photography journals.

Like the daguerreotype and tintype, the autochrome was not susceptible to manipulation. One simply made the exposure and developed the plate, which was a small unique object, impossible to enlarge, difficult to illuminate. It was quickly deemed too “mechanical” for serious artistic expression. The Secessionists abandoned the autochrome. But deficits for the artiste were ignored by a rank of professional autochromists who took the medium in a thoroughly modernist direction. They set out to document the world in color. They invented a realist vision to which art photography didn’t catch up until two decades later. These documentary autochromists worked primarily for two institutions, which today house the two most significant autochrome collections in the world. They are Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planete in Paris and the National Geographic Society in Washington.

The autochromes featured in this exhibition are printed from plates in the National Geographic Image Collection and are by Jacob J. Gayer, Gustav Huerlin, Hans Hildenbrand, Franklin Price Knott, W. Robert Moore, Pierre Manchard, Joseph Rock, Kiyoshi Sakamoto, Willard Culver, Charles Martin, Maynard Owen Williams, and Jules Gervais-Courtellemont. Gervais-Courtellemont is represented in this exhibition by over 25 prints. It is our belief that on the basis of the discovery of over 2,200 of his autochromes in the Image Collection, many of them inspired and haunting, Courtellemont will go down in future history books as the first great color photographer.

Autochromes: Early Color Masterpieces from National Geographic will be on view May 27 to July 10, 2010.

Steven Kasher Gallery is located at 521 W. 23rd St., New York, NY 10011.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 to 6 pm.

For more information or press requests please contact Kirsten Bengtson at 212 966 3978, kirsten@stevenkasher.com.

Brooklyn-based artist Conrad Ventur is best known for his cinematic environments that raise questions regarding aspiration, longing, sincerity, ‘affect’ and captured historical performance. For his exhibition Screen Tests Revisited at Momenta Art, Ventur worked over the course of a year to author a kind of second-generation body of Warholian work, looking to the archive of Andy Warhol’s earliest forays into film-based portraiture, the ‘screen tests’. Initially conceived as quotations, Ventur worked intimately with key Factory ‘Fantastics’ Billy Name, Mario Montez, Ivy Nicholson, Ultraviolet, Bibbe Hansen, Penelope Palmer and Jonas Mekas to restage these films some 45 years later. The new films approximate the lighting, frame and delayed playback speed of the originals, as the subjects of then and now conflate with the two artists and the spaces between them. Formally, the sitters exude a candid familiarity with Ventur, suggesting a conspiratorial undoing of the youth-obsessed ground on which popular culture stands. Screen Tests Revisited is the first of ongoing collaborative works between members of this cast and the artist. For Conrad, the past and present intermingle in a filmic narrative that connects decades just as it reanimates our own particular links with popular culture and shared societal memories radiating with light.

Ventur’s recent solo shows have included The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Forever & Today, NYC; Rokeby, London, and 1/9 Unosunove, Rome. He founded the periodical USELESS in 2004 and received his MFA in Art Practice from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2008. Forthcoming group shows include Greater New York at MoMA PS1.

Momenta Art is located at 359 Bedford Avenue, ground floor, between S4th and S5th Sts. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By subway, take the L train to Bedford stop (the first stop in Brooklyn). Exit on the Bedford side. Walk south 12 blocks. By car, take the outside lane of the Williamsburg Bridge to the first exit. Make a sharp right onto Broadway. Drive 2 blocks to Bedford Avenue and make a right. We are located a half block on the right after you pass under the bridge.

Momenta Art is supported by the Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, The Greenwall Foundation, , The Jerome Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and individual contributors.

RVH FIne Art presents an exhibition of work by Louise Dudis. In haunting, yet stunningly rich images of silhouetted trees Louise Dudis catches the elusive moment at late dusk when light from the rising full moon is balanced with the light of the falling sun.

By hand-holding her camera and using long exposures to capture what little light is available she achieves a soft focus similar to that made by the early, unsophisticated photographic lenses used in latter half of the 19th century and captures the fleeting experience of day passing into night. The unfocused limbs and leaves appear flat, losing dimension and detail and define the waning light which becomes as much the subject of the image as the trees themselves. The indistinct and mysterious imagery that results is a metaphor for a search of the intangible and results in lush, deep chromatic blacks and luxurious colors that appear otherworldly.

At the end of the 19th century photography was in the process of defining itself through a dialogue that occurred between the Pictorialists, who believed that by manipulating a photograph’s development and printing they could heightened its emotive and aesthetic value, and photographers who employed a “straight” technique which did not try to emulate other art forms like painting but remained true to photography’s unique technical qualities, one of which was the documentation of reality. By the early 20th century, the “straight” argument had won the debate. However, today, almost a century later, artists using contemporary technology — digital cameras and software such as Photoshop — have an unlimited freedom to alter photographs and we no longer believe in a photograph’s ability to reveal the “truth.”

In a somewhat ironic way Dudis’s work emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality and composition rather than the documentation of reality and thus mirrors the goals of Pictorialism. However, like the “straight” photographers she uses only straightforward means, no filters, no Photoshop, seeking not to document a literal reality but to find an evanescent, impalpable “truth.” She says, “My work is not about ideas but about experience, the unfocused: the questions that can not be answered.”

Ms. Dudis earned her BA (Cum Laude) in Studio Art from Connecticut College in New London , CT in 1972. She has exhibited her work nationally since 1975 and maintains her studio in New York City. This is her first exhibition withRHV Fine Art.

Tonight’s screening will feature videos by: Larry Carlson, Jashin Friedrich, Koen Hauser, Kitty Huffman, Shana Moulton, Andrew Steinmetz, Jennifer Sullivan, Keith Telfeyan, Willie Thurlow, and Frank Zadlo

featuring artists:

Daniel Rich

Wieland Speck

Affirmation Arts presents Street Smart. Starting with the founding fathers of graffiti and ending with the current generation of street artists, on view are works by:

Gary Baseman
Tim Biskup
Blek le Rat
D*Face
Date Farmers
Shepard Fairey
Doze Green
Keith Haring
James Jean
KAWS
Mark Ryden
Jeff Soto
Robert Williams
WK Interact

K&K is pleased to present One Time Use: a project using disposable cameras. Six artists were commissioned to shoot a disposable camera and then deliver their film to us. We are displaying every frame from this process online, while selected prints will be on view in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.

The limitations of the project subjected six distinct individual aesthetics to the filter of the disposable camera. The disposable provides a medium which — in its lo-fi-ness — is capable of distilling the photographic process away from the technical distractions of photo gear. It is within this deliberately simplistic medium that the artists pursued their work.

The results are at once conceptually varied yet stylistically coherent. The imagery oscillates between landscape, infrastructure, portrait, travel, food, architecture, interior, and the street. Yet it consistently retains shared marks of the medium: obvious grain, distorted rendering of the subject, and a certain consumer haze.

Ultimately the end result of the process — a series of limited edition prints hanging on gallery walls — completes the alchemical cycle from budget / ephemeral back into valued / permanent which began when the artists themselves picked up the one time use camera.

Nature, and how we cohabit with nature, is the subject of my photographs. Vapor trails are a physical phenomenon. At certain altitudes, the jet exhaust of the engine condensates and makes a line of H20 visible in the sky. The atmospheric conditions play with the condensation creating infinite patterns. Each vapor trail also represents an episode of human activity and the hundreds of passengers traveling the sky. Manufactured goods are circling the globe, packages are mailed for next-day deliveries, fruits, vegetables, and ammunition make their way to their final destinations.

On any given day, as we look up, we see multiple trails. One could be walking along the Charles in Cambridge, traveling up the Nile in a boat, sailing in the Mediterranean, or in the China Sea, no matter where one is the sky is criss-crossed. These trails present a symbol of a globalized world and a shrinking, borderless planet. One hundred years ago, it was rivers, sea, and the railways that formed the highways for people in commerce. We have now added the sky, free and flexible, allowing us to travel the shortest routes, defying geography.

While the vapor visually present pure H20 and seem harmless to the environment, they remind us that they are accompanied by burned jet fuel. I am reminded that the beauty observed in the sky has also a price. During a fuel shortage in the past, the question was asked, “Is this trip necessary?” Surely we must now ask, “Is that flight necessary?” for indulging in fruits and vegetables out of season, drinking French spring water in New Zealand and New Zealand spring water in the United States.

My fascination with the trails is to observe the extraordinary and unpredictable beauty of pattern, a vivid demonstration of chaos theory, where winds, temperature, and other atmospheric conditions act upon a vapor emission, and over a brief period of time create wiggles, arches, fractal patterns, or simply disintegrating to merge into the clouds, all to slowly diminish and disappear to nothingness. Like all patterns in nature, the waves in the sea, the formation and disintegration of ice on the river, we are mesmerized, transfixed, as we observe the endless possibilities. At the same time, we are reminded of our own activity and mark on these patterns.

Stephan Stux Gallery presents Barakat: The Gift.

Barakat: The Gift, curated by Italian curator and art critic Gaia Serena Simionati consists of paintings, sculptures, videos, sound installations, photos and works on paper from nine noted contemporary artists from the Middle East and Africa. Ms. Simionati believes that the language of art rather than dwelling on the theme of separation should communicate in ways that defy verbal, ethnic, religious, gender and age barriers.

The nine artists invited to participate: Moataz Nasr and Hamdi Attia from Egypt, Navid Azimi Sajadi, Shadi Ghadirian and Reza Derakshani from Iran, Halim al Karim from Iraq, Nabil Nahas from Lebanon, Maimouna from Senegal and Baris Saribas from Turkey, were specifically chosen for their strength and poetic approach to the theme of communication between different cultures, acceptance, identity and transformation. Their work includes spiritual or ironic socio-political content expressed both in verse and textures that resonate with the curator’s own artistic inclinations. Many of the works on view are shown for the first time in New York.

The show focuses on the word Barakat, meaning Blessing in Arabic and in a broader sense it is translated to “Gift”. Barakat acts as a bridge since it has different connotations in the Iranian, North African, Jewish and Arabic cultures. In addition, in French society the term has taken on a new meaning, that one of Luck due to the increasing Arab influence.

In Arabic, Baraka stands for “a gift from God” in spiritual terms. It is a gift one can choose to either improve upon or ruin oneself and the world in which one is submerged. The selected artists chose to interpret the idea of an ironic and spiritual gift, but there is the proposition of both acceptance and diversity as well. There is a knowledge between various cultures of the Great Gift. This is not a form of oppression; Barakat brings in the end luck and fortune. It leads to a transformation towards a better world, one made of intercultural understanding.

A fully illustrated English/Italian catalogue written by Gaia Serena Simionati with an essay titled Yes, We Can: Inshalla!accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue was produced in Verona, Italy by the art publisher Adriano Parise, it includes an interview with Hamdi Attia conducted by the curator Abdellah Karroum.

This exhibit has been made possible in part through the generosity of Paolo Ingegnoli of Leggiuno and the Gallery Olkay Art with the help of Baris Saribas and Selin Maldonado.

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present Kyung Jeon: Belle Rascal. For her second solo exhibition with the gallery, Jeon has chosen an approach that evokes her process – exhibiting a selection of small works, preparatory drawings, and pages from her sketchbook alongside two fully-realized large-scale paintings.

Drawing influences from such disparate sources as children’s fairytales, traditional Korean genre painting, and the eccentric worlds of Henry Darger and Hieronymus Bosch, Jeon’s works explore in-depth issues of portraiture and narrative. The mural-sized Little Persons, Big Steps and A Weeping Willow (both 2009) offer sweeping vistas of seemingly fantastical lands. Elaborately-rendered, these locales are inhabited by diminutive characters, deliberately simplified to function as archetypes of male or female, adult or child, who play out various scenarios in a full spectrum of emotion. Allegorical microcosms in-and-of themselves, these works are balanced by Jeon’s smaller paintings and drawings which focus more intently on individual characters and themes.

Kyung Jeon was born in 1975 in Jersey City, New Jersey, and received her MFA in 2005 from the School of Visual Arts, NY. The recipient of the Scope Emerging Art Grant (2005), and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship (2003), Jeon was most recently awarded a grant from the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2009). Her work has been included in exhibitions in museums and galleries in Asia, South America, Europe and the United States, including the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul and the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Jeon lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles, California.

A catalog is available in conjunction with this exhibition.

Tria Gallery presents Interior Perspectives, featuring works by artists Sandra Burns, Tricia Wright and Lynne Allen, through July 2, 2010.

Despite the disparate media and styles employed by these artists, their work is nevertheless connected by the universal theme of Home and the physical and psychological interiors thereof. As a photographer, Ms. Burns deconstructs and reconstructs the spatial relationship between body and structure without photographic manipulation. Tricia Wright’s paintings explore decorative interior and exteriors, while her mixed media work utilizes everyday objects to convey both the simplicity and beauty in ordinary daily chores. Hook, Line and Sinker, a neon piece by Ms. Allen, openly expresses her thoughts about her everyday world.

One’s relationship to Home, particularly a woman’s relationship, is often fraught with incongruity. These three artists use the physical materials of the domestic environment as metaphors for the psychological interior. Pattern and repetition play a central, defining role in their work, suggesting interior beauty, or routine, or perhaps even the bars of a gilded cage.

Sandra Clark Burns states that her work “roots in the relationship between past interior environments and the systematic chaos that can occur within.” She explains:

It’s the fragment of resistance between a structure and the action taking place that I find intriguing. The repetitious aspects of my work are a utilization of accumulated imagery that continually compiles upon itself. It is within this accrued imagery that an act or performance is emitted and documented.

Burns received a BFA from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She is currently a Lecturer at the Yale School of Art in the Department of Sculpture. In 2008-09 she was an artist in residence at The MacDowell Colony and the recipient of the Chenven Foundation Grant. She has received an artist grant from the Connecticut Commission of the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center Clowes Fellowship. Burns’ work has been shown and collected throughout the country. This is her first exhibition in New York.

Tricia Wright states that her work draws on “our complex, often ambivalent, relationship to the Home,” and employs the physical materials of the domestic environment as metaphors for the psychological interior:

Pattern plays a central, defining role in my work, and has its roots in my background growing up in England in a culture with a long tradition of decorative interiors. My sources are primarily wallpaper and textile designs, often from the 60s and 70s, chosen for their potential to conjure personal and cultural associations and – paradoxically – for their generic, mass-produced anonymity.

Born and raised in England, Wright received her degrees from Hertfordshire College of Art and Design, and the Camberwell and the Chelsea Schools of Art in London. She moved to New York ten years ago, and now runs a full time studio on the Hudson River, regularly exhibiting her work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the New York area and on the West Coast. She is the recipient of numerous residencies and awards, and a frequent lecturer and panel member throughout the region on general topics of art and color theory. Her work can be found in the United States Embassy; the Hove Museum of Art, the 20th Century British Art Collection in the U.K. Corporate collectors of Wright’s work include Alliance Bernstein, White & Case, Metromedia International Group, Kent County Council, and the University of Wales. David Bowie is among the many personal collectors of her work.

Lynne Allen works in different media, including photogravure, miniature glass objects and neon sculpture, all of which she infuses with a unique sense of style and humor. In Interior Perspectives her neon sculpture, Hook, Line and Sinker, is on display as a complement to the work of Tricia Wright and Sandra Burns. It amusingly evokes the all-encompassing, mechanized nature of running a Home. Allen writes that the neon sign “is a kind of lure, seducing the viewer under false or misleading pretenses.” She adds, “Things are not always as they seem, and we are not to believe appearances, even in art.”

Allen received her MA from the University of Washington, a Master Printer Certification from Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, and her MFA from the University of New Mexico. She has had numerous solo exhibitions and dozens of group exhibitions. Her work is in the permanent collections of museums and corporations throughout the world, including the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington D.C., Johnson & Johnson Corporation, and countless others. She is also recipient of numerous awards, honors, fellowships and residencies.

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present Inside the Outside, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by the Southern California artist Greg Simkins. This is Simkins’ second solo show with the gallery.

A fantasist at heart, Simkins alternates between the unsettling and the sentimental—in his finely rendered work, the grotesque can turn sweet and vice versa. Fanged caterpillars become sad-eyed clowns, grow machine parts, or inflate into bulbous balloons that sprout other bizarre creatures and beings. Simkins’ vision weaves together influences as diverse as contemporary pop culture, twentieth- entury fantasy novels, old master paintings, carnival kitsch, and cyborgian amalgams of technology and nature. With Inside the Outside, inspired by his recent travels in Hawaii, Simkins approaches a new dimension of fantasy—a desire to break down boundaries found in the natural world.

In these 10 acrylic paintings and 20 ink and graphite on paper works, the artist harnesses his appetite for fantasy to challenge the rigid, seemingly arbitrary rules of nature. Whereas taxonomy categorizes the biological world into evolutionary branches, and physics dictates who swims, crawls, and flies, Simkins’ art allows the artist to transcend these limitations to propose a new dimension. He conceives this body of work as reaching “outside” a conventional understanding of the world into a pictorial space of imaginative inquiry—in other words, the native realm of the fantasist.

The almost fantastical beauty and variety of Hawaii’s natural environment is concentrated into works like A Branch in the Water, an acrylic-on-canvas painting where jellyfish possess the anatomy of roses and hibiscus and perch in coexistence with iridescent-feathered birds and hybrid insects of the imagination. Other works evoke the meandering, fluid quality of undersea environments where forms and textures interpenetrate with greater ease—here, Simkins is inspired by tropical fish and coral reefs, though never literally. In another painting, The Welcoming Party, for example, the artist introduces deer, geese, and even upholstered furniture into this environmental mash-up. There is something tantalizing and seductive in these extra-natural introductions between wildly diverse species, an “eco-fantasy” that clearly brings great pleasure to the artist even if existing only on canvas.

Born in 1975 in Torrance, California, Greg Simkins received a BA in Studio Art from California State University of Long Beach. Selected solo exhibitions of his work include: The Pearl Thief, Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight, Los Angeles (2009); It Wanders East, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York (2008). His work has been featured in the following selected group exhibitions: Sons of Baby Tattooville, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA (2009); Locked & Loaded, Joshua Liner Gallery (2008); KNOW Show, Mark Murphy Design (Art Basel Miami Beach, 2007); Bergamont Invasion II, Copro Nason Gallery, Santa Monica (2006).

NY Studio Gallery is pleased to present the 4th Annual MISC Video and Performance. A multi-media experience featuring a variety of emerging, mid-career and established artists working in diverse genres ranging from video, animation, live performance, or video installation. Video loops and installations will be accessible during gallery hours, while performances are scheduled during reception night.

Video Installations include: 
Ron Diorio extends his documentary practices through What I did during the war. Peter Dobill presents his riveting Bloodbreather video. Interaction and attempted manipulation of natural landscapes makes up Murray Dwertman’s Upper Buttermilk Falls. Airline to Heaven, Part II is Annie Heckman’s animation projection at the end of a long tunnel of drawn dirt and bones. Lynn Herring’s Man’s Inner Reflections is a sculpture that is created with mirrors and video. In Mutes I-V Ryan Kuo dramatically slows down TV footage highlighting unnoticed glitches. Yuliya Lanina creates and exhibits racy animatronic characters in Mishka. In the intimate video Sex-Ed, Matthew de Leon attempts to fill in for an X-rated adult actress. Jennie Thwing creates a miniature diorama of forest with fields, tents and celestial projections. Undulating corner projections by Naho Tariushi come back for their second time at MISC. Ina Yun creates animation projections on made and found objects.

Projected Animation Loop: Jonathan Monaghan, Kanako Okazaki, Ben Pederson, Lai-Chung Poon, Elise Roedenbeck, Devlin Shea, Carmen Tiffany.

Video Loop: Arielle Falk, Jason Head, Morrisa Maltz, Liz Rodda, Bradly Dever Treadaway, Traci Tullius, Joy Whalen.

Rooftop projection: Weather permitting Kyung Woo Han projects two videos reconstructing well-known 2-D imagery from 3-D spaces.

Performances: Hector Canonge presents Malattia is a multimedia performance that evokes loss and remembrance through choreographed dance movements, video projections and sound narratives. Genevieve White performs Loss using a sculptural cocoon. Mike Richison improvises acoustic inventions on his vacuum-based instrument.

MISC images: French Penguin by Jonathan Monaghan is an animation of an emperor penguin fused with Gothic architecture.

2010 Yale MFA Thesis Show 

25CPW

Our awkward program name – photography, video, and related media – is becoming ever more apt. This year, the thesis show includes photographic prints, videos, multi-media installations, sculpture and oil paintings. With the swift advance of digital technology, students are using still or moving images merely as points of departure to invent a wide array of forms. Željka Blaskic, for example, produces a five-channel video installation inspired by her childhood in war-torn Croatia. Jan Ebeling (aka Janosch Parker) commissions oil paintings based on photographs of his witty performances. Irene Bermudez combines projected images, freestanding sculpture and a neon sign to create an immersive environment meant to evoke bodily sensations. Allyson Ross creates sculptural reliefs devoid of color based on iconic nineteenth-century photographs of Yosemite National Park. And John Messinger installs a small historical exhibit based on the life of a homeless man. These results and others are exciting to behold and, I confess, daunting for a curator trying to make visual or conceptual order from it all.

If there is an overall trend, it is the trust that students place in personal experience. Robert Gill, for example, embraces the obsession with fitness in our culture. Selena Salfen explores the crushing effects of post-traumatic stress disorder through the history of her own family. Tamar Latzman investigates themes from Jewish-European history by inventing memories of dreams and performing them for the camera. And Laura Oberg explores race in America by interviewing members of her mixed-race family. It may be that the confessional turn of our culture – much enhanced by social networking media – explains the willingness of students to reveal themselves in their work. But the students are not self-centered; they look inward in order to look outward. Growing up with the caveats of identity politics and challenges to the objectivity of representation, our students no longer feel at home with the relatively simple norms of documentary or straight photography. Instead, each student invents a new strategy for using images to make art.

Bonnie Yochelson Curator

Featuring the work of:

RENE BERMUDEZ
ŽELJKA BLAKŠIĆ
LORNE BLYTHE
JOHN CYR
BEATRIZ DIAZ
JOHN DUNWOODY
NATAN DVIR
JANOSCH PARKER
MARTHA FLEMING-IVES
J.A. FOLKS
ROBERT GILL
EUGENE GOLOGURSKY
KATE GREENBERG
DEBBIE GROSSMAN
STONE KIM
TAMAR LATZMAN
VIVIAN LEE
ELIZABETH LIBERT
DINA LITOVSKY
JOHN A. MESSINGER
LAURA OBERG
ALLYSON ROSS
SELENA SALFEN
ANDREA SANTOLAYA
LEIGH WELLS

Michael Mazzeo Gallery is pleased to present Down These Mean Streets, an installation of photographs and ephemera by the American documentary photographer and writer, Will Steacy. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Down These Mean Streets provides us with photographic evidence of America’s abandonment of it’s inner cities.

Prompted by the pervasive fear gripping the country and our preoccupation with homeland security, America has diverted its attention and resources away from those most in need, divesting itself of the basic responsibilities of affordable housing, medical care and essential infrastructure.

Working only at night, Steacy walks alone from the airport to the central business district of each city he explores. With map in hand, he follows a loosely planned route through the barren streets and neighborhoods routinely avoided by all but local inhabitants, while stopping to document his observations and chance encounters on film.

Illuminated by the saturated, artificial colors of the urban night and marked by long, patient exposures with his large-format view camera, Steacy’s images seductively draw us into a country of foreclosed homes and vacant lots, broken economies and neglected people. With a combination of carefully composed urban views, subtly precise detail images, and insightful portraits, he allows us the time and space to enter this world and question our role in it.

This project marks a continuation of Steacy’s extended paean to the American working class. He has received numerous awards and praise for his work including the prestious Tierney Fellowship and The Aperture Foundation New York City Green Cart Photography Commission. Steacy was named as a 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers by powerHouse Books and The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. His photographs have been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Paris Review and on HBO andCNN.

Limited Edition Prints for Sale

Proceeds from the show will allow 12 students to attend an intensive, week-long photography camp in Syracuse, NY this summer, all expenses paid. In addition, NYC Salt student Ruben Ramirez has been awarded a prestigious partial scholarship to study global leadership in Prague, Czech Republic this July.

NYC Salt is a nonprofit 501c3 photography program founded by photographers whose mission it is to use digital technology to engage inner-city teenagers through photography classes, inspire them through the creative job market & college visits, and empower them, by wakening hidden talent and showing them how to use their voices to contribute to NYC culture.

artless is a group exhibition featuring conceptual and installation art, as well as film, photography and paintings. Located at Sacred Gallery 424 Broadway at Canal Street, NYC. Opening is Thursday June 10th from 7-11pm.Exhibition runs through June 27th.

Artist Lance Rautzhan produces artless, a group exhibition of works by artists parallel in their inartificial admission of responsibility to the creative impulse: artless, open and without reserve.

Featured artists include Jay Blohm, manipulator of 8mm and 16mm film, musician cum visual artist Ed Harris, best known for his work with the band Lake Trout, Hanna Toresson, photographer and apprentice of legendary rock and roll photographer Bob Gruen, painter and 2008 exhibitor at Art Basel Lance Rautzhan, conceptual artist and Fountain Art Fair Producer Brian Balderston, and Jackie Roman, rock and roll photographer and regular contributor to music institutions such as Spin Magazine and LimeWire Music Blog.

Curation and exhibition management by Michelle Halabura.

Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce Borrowed From the Charnel House, an exhibition of new work by Saul Chernick.

Saul Chernick makes highly detailed ink drawings that combine masterful control of the individual mark with an incisive grasp of the history of image-making and various visual media. The exhibition brings together works that display Chernick’s penchant for borrowing from the relics of art history to transform them into the constituent elements of his own visual language.

On view are some of Chernick’s largest drawings to date, including a piece in extreme horizontal format, almost thirty-five feet long and comprised of roughly thirty drawings done en plein air at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. A meditation on mortality created from a position in the living world, it also proves to be a forum in which Chernick displays his mastery of the use of line and shifts in perspective. The cemetery is seen not only as a landscape but as a museum of funerary sculpture.

In fact, the exhibition’s title, Borrowed from the Charnel House, refers to the vaults where skeletons are stored, often after they have been dug up from crowded burial grounds; one of the most famous of these, and noted because it is still in use, can be found at St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, where the monks gather relics from the difficult, rocky soil for both practical and spiritual reasons.

Reflections on contemporary sexuality and technology are embedded into Chernick’s intensely detailed riffs on anatomical drawings, heralds, and etchings. The most evident reference is perhaps to the prints, manuscripts, and illuminations of the Northern Renaissance. But like the monks of St. Catherine’s relying upon their brothers’ relics as reminders of their own mortality, Chernick tweaks specific images and compositional methods from the past to shed light upon current cultural conditions. In this sense, he works like a musician improvising on an existing theme or a writer adapting an older idea for a new context.

Another of the large-scale drawings on view, ‘Ars Gratia Artis,’ depicts a lion’s head floating in a vast alpine landscape. Uncannily reminiscent of the roaring lion that serves as the logo for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, the piece seems to hint at both the history and future of cinema, drawing a connection to the logo’s roots in centuries-old coats of arms. Almost eight feet wide, the piece seems to exist at a hybrid scale, between the intimacy of the drawing and the expansive presence of the movie screen. The emotional power of the drawing, however, lies not only in the scope of its cultural references, but in the mysterious way that the lion himself is rendered.

This sensitivity to individual moments, and the subtleties of human and animal forms, lends Chernick’s work an immediacy that places it squarely in the present, and that engages the viewer outside of any specific art historical context. It is a question of both craft and poetry. On the surface it is clear that the artist’s technique is indebted to the achievements of the Old Masters, but the critical and psychological revelations on view in his drawings are wholly his own, and shed light on the future of our physical condition––in the short term with respect to technology, and in the long with respect to death.

Saul Chernick was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions across the United States, and reproduced in a variety of print and online publications.

Horton Gallery is pleased to present Berlin, an exhibition of paintings by German-born Brooklyn-based painter Daniel Rich, and a video, photographs, and soundtrack by Berlin filmmaker, Wieland Speck. The exhibition centers on Berlin as a politically charged space, a sense embodied by the eponymous wall that divided the city from 1961 to 1989. The exhibition coincides with the gallery’s opening of a summer project space called Sonntag in the North Mitte / Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin.

Wieland Speck’s 1978 video “Berlin Off/On Wall” depicts a young man, the painter Per Lüke, climbing the wall to play the harp seated on the structure. Though the musical instrument that he plays has generally peaceful associations – or at least peace-imbuing possibilities – the locus of Lüke’s performance makes it a transgressive act. The performance draws crowds on either side of the wall until the authorities intervene to end the protest-performance. It is a documentary short, shot with a hand-held Sony Portapack video camera.

Daniel Rich’s “Basement/Berlin Wall” continues the exhibition’s examination of the division between East and West through his depiction of a basement passageway sealed with brick because it happened to fall directly on the dividing line. Coupled with the artist’s series of three paintings of the Berlin airports, twenty years after the fall of the wall, these remnants of East and West Berlin become emblems of entrance and exit, articulating with equal potency the frustrating immobility dictated by Cold War politics. Depopulated scenes, as in all of Rich’s works, lend these structures a menacing quality, further enhanced by the technique Rich employs. The process and materials by which these paintings are produced – enamel on Dibond, and made using stencils – more closely resembles sign making than academic painting technique. In their depersonalized, mechanized quality they resemble Moholy–Nagy’s “Telephone Pictures,” or paintings bereft of the proverbial “artist’s hand.”

The work of both artists is formally divergent: Speck’s video is a shaky, cinéma-vérité reel, unmediated by any extraneous stylistic concern whereas Rich’s work is slick and considered. However, it is the notion of specificity of place, moreover specific built structures as articulators of political circumstance that constitutes the strongest relationship between Speck and Rich’s work. If Speck’s video deals directly with the physical symbol of political upheaval – i.e. the wall – Rich’s take on the same conflict is refracted in time and space, though it is rendered with comparable urgency.

Daniel Rich (b. 1977, Ulm, Germany) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. In addition to Horton Gallery (Sunday L.E.S.), his work has been featured at Perry Rubenstein and Elizabeth Dee galleries, New York, NY, as well as the Maramotti Collection, Reggio Emilia, Italy. He has received grants from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, where he will have a studio in the fall.

Wieland Speck (b. 1951, Freiburg, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He studied Germanistik, theatre science, and ethnology at Freie Universität Berlin. As a director, writer, and actor, his films have received international acclaim at numerous festivals an on television – most notable is “Westler” from 1985, which depicted an east/west homosexual love story.

Wieland Speck’s “Berlin Off/On Wall” is exhibited in collaboration with Exile, Berlin

CHRISTINA RAY is pleased to announce the upcoming launch of the new “Collection” section of its website devoted to online sales of curated artist editions, multiples and small works. Throughout the month of June, selected works from the gallery’s summer group exhibition, also titled Collection, will be added to the website and made available for purchase. Artists featured in the exhibition include Darlene Charneco, Beka Goedde, Alice Jarry, Heather L. Johnson, Jason Kachadourian, David Kesting, Zaun Lee, Roberto Mollá, Mark Price, Adrienne Reynolds, Swoon and Michael Zelehoski. The exhibition opens with a reception on June 10th from 7 to 9pm, and runs through June 27th. Online sales will remain an integral part of the gallery’s website following the close of the exhibition, with new works to be added on a regular basis.

Gallery Director Christina Ray states, “We’re thrilled to introduce prints, artist books, zines and original works in series by our artists in a special section of our website. We can now present work we wouldn’t otherwise have available in the gallery during exhibitions. By limiting the online collection to a selection of small and editioned works, we're keeping the prices accessible.”

The Collection exhibition in the gallery includes the work of represented artists side by side with that of artists new to the gallery. Darlene Charneco’s miniature landscapes offer a dreamlike bird’s-eye view of a candy-coated cyberspace, while Beka Goedde’s small works on panel with collage and encaustic echo current situations of cities in crisis where architecture has become fragile and fleeting. Alice Jarry’s series of monoprints reference the original engineering blueprints from Disneyland, where real and artificial worlds collide. Jason Kachadourian introduces a similarly puzzle-like group of collages in which bits of buildings and airplanes remain almost hidden under the cover of trees and clouds. Heather L. Johnson’s delicate embroideries are akin to hand-stitched memories – personal observations and places visited preserved in thread on white linen. David Kesting’s new work on small panels features hand-drawn characters engaged in the day-to-day life of the city. Roberto Mollá and Mark Price, along with gallery newcomers Zaun Lee and Adrienne Reynolds, bring bold, abstract interpretations of the landscape – ranging from formal awareness of grid-based patterns to fluid explosions of color and space. Michael Zelehoski, who will be featured in his first solo exhibition with the gallery in September, contributes to the theme of Collection with a series of miniature assemblages created from found wood. Swoon, whose recently-released book Swoonwill also be available online, brings to the exhibition small works created in conjunction with her current projects in cities ranging from Cairo to  Braddock, Pennsylvania.

CHRISTINA RAY is an innovative gallery and creative catalyst in New York whose mission, grounded by the concept of psychogeography, is to discover and present the most important contemporary artwork exploring the relationship between people and places. 
 
Contact: Christina Ray, Gallery Director
Phone: 212.334.0204
Email: info @ christinaray.com
Exhibition dates: June 10–27, 2010
Reception: Thursday, June 10, 7-9pm
Gallery hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm
Location: 30 Grand Street, Ground Floor, between Thompson Street and 6th Avenue

"TRUE! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acutley. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story." -Edgar Allen Poe, 1843

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present The Tell-Tale Heart (Part 2), a group exhibition inspired by the classic story by American 19th century novelist and poet Edgar Allan Poe. The exhibition opens June 25th through August 13th, 2010 and will feature works by Barbara Bloom, Victor Burgin, Keren Cytter, Hanne Darboven, Maya Deren, Tracey Emin, James Ensor, Kota Ezawa, Nan Goldin, Jesper Just, Susana Mendes Silva, Li Ming, Cheng Ran, Dash Snow and Felix Gonzalez Torres. 

Much like the macabre drama of Poe's story, in which the protagonist's obsession with his upstairs neighbour drives him to murder, the works in this exhibition portray artists various modes of expression which explore dissolute scenarios through the lens of "obsession" that reflect an intensity of passion, guilt, rage, love, identity, death, and political beliefs. 

Maya Deren's seminal film, Meshes in the Afternoon (1943), serves as a cornerstone to the exhibition, embodying the dark impulses that drive human desire and imagination to their extremes. 

Andre Breton's novel about obsession titled Nadja inspired conceptual artist Victor Burgin to createFiction/Film (1991), a photographic work in which a mysterious female figure haunts the Parisian landscape. Hanne Darboven's systemic numbering and time-based collage "12 Months with Postcards from Today of Horses" (1982) posits that if symbolic handwriting and image are mirrors to the mind, then the unconscious keeps its secrets. 

In Felix Gonzalez Torres' video installation, Untitled (Portrait) (1971), two empty chairs sit facing a black television monitor that periodically displays lone statements that portend greed, solitude and unrequited love, examples of which include "a new supreme court ruling," "more failed banks," "long love letters," "a merciless cardinal," and "a patriotic mob". Gonzales presents a "picture" that is simultaneously personal and political while proposing that extreme actions can produce world shaking events. Dash Snow's black and white photograph titled TBT(2008) portrays a lone female lying face down on a bed in a darkened room; there is a sense of the possibility of violence or love lurking in the shadows. An older work on exhibit inspired by a short story by Poe titled "Hop Frog Hop-Frog; or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs" is James Ensor's gritty revenge hand-colored print titled "Hop-Frog's Revenge" (1898) depicting the sadistic murder of the king and his cronies. 

The show will also include the US debut of Li Ming, an emerging conceptual artist based in China. This work was also included in The Tell-Tale Heart (Part 1) at the James Cohan Gallery Shanghai, curated by Leo Xu. In Ming's single-channel video work, XX (2009), two young men sit bound by overlapping t-shirts, struggling to separate themselves from one another. Other works by young video artists explore the darker side of personal relationships such as Jesper Just's work, A Vicious Undertow(2007), Keren Cytter's Something Happened (2007) and Kota Ezawa's animation Who's Afraid of Black, White and Gray, (2003). All three aforementioned works are presented as disjunctive narrative stories which expose the extreme emotion and vulnerability of complex love relationships. The Tell-Tale heart lives within us all.

This exhibition is curated by Elyse Goldberg

For further information please contact Jane Cohan at jane@jamescohan.com or Peter Brandtpbrandt@jamescohan.com or by telephone 212-714-9500.

KLOMPCHING GALLERY is pleased to announce the concurrent exhibitions As Above So Below by Odette England andMicro Mundi by Elaine Duigenan.

With Micro Mundi, Elaine Duigenan continues her fascination with transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. In this intimate series of images, she has photographed the arterial wanderings of snails, as they graze upon algae, leaving behind an aftermath of claw-like patterns—caused by the rasping action of the snail’s spiky tongue. On a micro level, these rambling, chaotic and protracted patterns, attest to a seemingly plodding yet vigorous life-form. On a macro level, they’re dendritic appearance resemble earth’s estuaries as viewed from far above. By presenting the images within a circular frame, these stunning monochromatic photographs are transformed into floating planets, as we would imagine them to be on a cosmic scale. The planetary metaphor is further enhanced with titles that refer to cartographic terms of old, that placed Earth in a philosophical and religious setting.

“Elaine Duigenan’s images in Micro Mundi show how the random exceedingly slow wanderings of a mollusk feeding can depict our planet’s network of paths, roads, and rivers as we view them exceedingly fast from the portal of space, circling our globe every 90 minutes.”—Leland Melvin, Astronaut.

Odette England’s new body of work is also concerned with the sensory and philosophical interpretation of our world. The phrase, As Above So Below, refers to the widespread indigenous cultural belief that the heavens and earth are the foundation of all creatures, including themselves. In this context, land and sky are more than just geographical icons, they are mirrors in which they see themselves reflected. England has documented the vast desert landscape of Southern Australia, photographing the land and sky from a single standpoint as a double exposure, thus merging the space between as a primal ‘middle ground‘ in which humankind resides. The resulting color photographs are quiet, metaphysical studies that astutely span time and space.

Odette England is an Australian artist currently based in London. She is a graduate of the University of South Australia and City of Westminster College (London). Her photographs have been exhibited in France, United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In 2010, she was named a winner of the Flash Forward Emerging Photographers award for the second year running.

Elaine Duigenan is a British artist living and working in London. She is a graduate of Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her photographs have been exhibited in the United Kingdom, United States, Syria, China and can be found in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London) and The Museum of Fine Art (Houston). Paper for Micro Mundi supplied by Hahnemühle.

The artists are available for interviews upon request. Please contact the gallery for inquiries regarding purchases, press images, to schedule an interview or for more information about their work.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of work by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Kjartansson (b. 1976, Reykjavík) is fascinated by the tragicomic spectacle of human experience in which sorrow coexists with happiness, horror with beauty, and drama with humor. Though he is primarily known for performance, Kjartansson also pursues more traditional media such as painting, drawing, and video. His work taps into nostalgic imagery from bygone eras of theater, television, music, and art, allowing him to blur the border between reality and fiction.

In 2009, Kjartansson became the youngest artist to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale and it was there that he created The End (Venice). Merging his continued interest in durational performance with the classical practice of portraiture, he set out to create a painting on each day of the Biennale. The exhibition at Luhring Augustine will display all 144 paintings created during the Biennale, and the installation will follow an approximate chronological order corresponding to the six months of artistic production. Vitrines in the exhibition space will include archival notes and correspondence related to the project. Kjartansson viewed this long durational performance as an opportunity to surrender to his own romantic ideals and to elaborate on the performative, almost theatrical aspect of painting. 

The second gallery will debut a new video work by Kjartansson that was filmed outside Austin, Texas in 2010. Titled The Man, this piece features legendary blues pianist Pinetop Perkins, the oldest living original Delta Bluesman. Kjartansson's exploration of repetition and endurance, apparent in his own performances, is here transferred to this revered musician who has been staging and performing this music for over seven decades. 

Kjartansson lives and works in Iceland. His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Canada, The Sundance Film Festival New Frontier, Park City, Utah, and Hafnarborg, The Hafnarfjordur Centre of Culture and Fine Art, Hafnarfjörður, Iceland. The artist has also participated in the 2nd Turin Triennial, Turin, Italy, Manifesta 8, Rovereto, Italy, and Repeat Performances: Roni Horn and Ragnar Kjartansson, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, among others. His work is included in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida, and The National Gallery of Canada, Ontario. Ragnar's work was first featured at Luhring Augustine in the 2008 group exhibition It's Not Your Fault: Art from Iceland.

For further information, please contact Kristen Becker at 212.206.9100 or via email at kristen@luhringaugustine.com 

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce Retratos Pintados, an exhibition of hand-painted vernacular photographs from Brazil. The exhibition will open on June 24 and close on September 18. This will be the premiere presentation of these one-of-a-kind photographs.

Since the late 19th century through the 1990s, hand-painted photographic portraits were a common feature in homes in the rural areas of the northeastern Brazilian states. At a time when black-and-white photographs were not considered dramatic enough, the retratos pintados (“painted portraits”) glamorized and idealized their subjects. Black-and-white family photos were enlarged and painted, conferring status on members of the family and portraying them as icons or saints. Using oil washes and other techniques specific to the region, local artisans embellished clothing with pattern and color, smoothed wrinkles, added jewelry or resurrected deceased relatives, illustrating the fantasies and desires of their customers.

Due to advances in technology over the past 25 years, hand-painted photographs have become a rarity in the region, and the tradition of analogue portrait-making is being lost. Most portraits are now computer-generated, eliminating the charm and distinctiveness of each artist’s individual style. The exhibition will include approximately 150 unique, vintage painted portraits ranging in size from 8” x 10” to 16” x 20”. The photographs were selected from those collected by Titus Riedl, a European who has lived in the region for 15 years. Fit into simple frames and hung together in clusters, the exhibition reflects the way family photos might be displayed in the home.

Retrados Pintados, a book of 61 four-color plates of photographs from the collection of Titus Riedl with an introduction by Martin Parr and edited by Parr and Riedl, was published by Nazraeli Press in 2010 and is available at the gallery. The publication is the only documentation of a fading art form unique to the tradition of vernacular photography.

Lombard-Freid Projects is pleased to announce Heat Wave, a group show of works by Fikret Atay (b.1976, Turkey), Bani Abidi (b. 1971, Pakistan), Maya Schindler (b. 1977, Israel), Mounira al Solh (b. 1978, Lebanon), Eko Nugroho (b. 1977, Indonesia) and Noa Charuvi (b. 1979, Israel).

Heat Wave brings together six fresh voices from Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Turkey. Though varied in terms of geography, language and tradition, these international artists are bound generationally and unified by an interest in representing elements of cultural and political specificity through expressions and symbols of the everyday. Using humor, critique, irony and introspection, the work of each artist proposes a distinct strategy for active engagement – whether borrowing from popular culture (Atay, Nugroho) or photojournalism (Charuvi), expanding the language of documentary into the realm of fiction (al Solh) or examining tensions (Abidi) and repositories of national identity (Schindler).

Fikret Atay lives and works in his hometown of Batman, Turkey, a Kurdish city near the border with Iraq. In his most recent video work, Batman v. Batman (2009), the mayor of the city plays a superhero who brings a lawsuit against Warner Bros. over rights to the name of the famed comic book character. As with all his videos, narrative simplicity and modest filming techniques produce insightful works that insist on their local context without being didactic. Recent exhibitions include, Fikret Atay, Viafarini, Milan, Italy; Bonner Kunstverein, Germany; King of the Ring, E.N.S.A.D, Strasbourg, France; L’argent, Le Plateau, Paris, France. Atay has participated in the biennales of Lyon, Istanbul, Sydney and Cairo.

Bani Abidi’s Karachi series (2009) treats one of the central dilemmas of Pakistani nationalism at the level of quotidian experience. The six photographs that together constitute the series are all taken at dusk during the month of Ramadan when observant Muslims break the ritual daily fast. Each photograph stages an incongruous scene of a lone figure engaged in a domestic task under the glow of a street lamp. The names of the photographed, as indicated in the titles, call attention to the fact that they belong to the non-Muslim minorities (Christian, Hindu) in Pakistan. Abidi implicates the intersection of private and public space as the site of the increasingly problematic conflicts of this multi-religious city. Recent exhibitions include the 10th Lyon Biennale, France; Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Asia Society, NY; The View From Elsewhere, Queensland Art Gallery, Sydney; 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea.

Born in Jerusalem and living in New York, Maya Schindler addresses the aesthetics and semiotics of political, social and linguistic boundaries. Included in the exhibition will be, White Flags (2010), an installation of seven flags made of fiberglass and thick layers of white acrylic paint. The raw materiality of the colorless sculptural flags becomes a poignant way to reinvent a symbol and question expressions of allegiance that are commonly taken for granted. Recent exhibitions include, Present Progressive, California State University Art Museum, Long Beach; Seeing is Believing, Zaum Projects, Lisbon, Portugal; Wishful Thinking Wishful, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania.

Heat Wave will showcase two works from Mounira al Solh’s series, The Sea is a Stereo, which focuses on a group of men who sit on the beach in Beirut everyday, without concern for weather or war. In the 13-minute video, Paris without a Sea (2008), the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred as the artist interviews the men and then voices-over their lines herself. The comic effect of this technique and light-hearted jest of the dialogue masks a more profound, yet present, reflection on the habits and routines one holds onto in the face of uncertainty. A series of four photographs entitled Elvis (2009), depict the gesture of one character showing the artist photographs of himself as a young man and of his son living abroad with his family. Recent exhibitions include, Volkskrant Prize, Stedelijk Museum Scheidam, Netherlands; 2009 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; Be(com)ing Dutch, Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands and the Lebanese Pavilion, 2007 Venice Biennale, Italy.

A native of Yogyakarta, Eko Nugroho is a self-made artist whose work has come to international attention in the past several years. Working in a diverse range of media, from murals to shadow puppets, video projections to paintings, Nugroho’s images reflect Indonesia’s politically charged environment through fantastic and darkly humorous satires populated by surreal characters that fuse human, machine, animal and plant. Featured in Heat Wave will be new pieces including a vibrant large-scale embroidery and several smaller scale works of textile and watercolor, whose graphic comic book quality portrays figures with alien-like heads. Recent exhibitions include, It’s all about Coalition, National Museum of Singapore; 2009 Jakarta Biennial, Indonesia; Dorodoro, Doron!, Hiroshima Contemporary Art Museum, Japan; 10th Lyon Biennale, France; Beyond the Dutch, Centraal Museum, Netherlands.

New York based, Israeli artist Noa Charuvi paints from photojournalistic images taken in Gaza. Her colorful canvases abstract the demolished buildings ravaged by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Bedroom (2010) depicts the traces of life in what was once a domestic setting; furniture and belongings are strewn across the interior as the torn walls expose the room as a destroyed landscape. The site-specificity of the source images, in contrast with her process of deconstructing the photographed forms creates a body of work that demands attention and observation.

Sloan Fine Art presents two summer group exhibitions, Nice to Meet You and Amuse Bouche.

In Nice to Meet You, the gallery invited 22 artists who had shown in the gallery previously, in group or solo shows, and asked each of them to invite two artists of their choice.

Justin Amrhein invited Scott Campbell and Charles Clary
Jennifer Coates invited Dana Carlson and Clement Coleman 
Roni Feldman invited Max Presneill and Jean-Pierre Roy
Julie Heffernan invited Zachary Wollard and Sarah Zar
Catherine Howe invited Nicole Etienne and Nicholas Rispoli
David Humphrey invited Matthew Bollinger and Dider William
Michael Kagan invited Jane Hamill and John Jacobsmeyer
Tricia Keightley invited Anthony Castro and Elizabeth Cooper
Colette Robbins invited Micah Ganske and Hidenori Ishii

Running concurrently with Nice to Meet You, in the project room, is Amuse Bouche, a collection of small works designed to give visitors a taste of the work of nine gallery artists: Mia Brownell, Clare Grill, Greg Hopkins, Elizabeth McGrath, Marion Peck, Kristen Schiele, Heather Sherman, Nathan Skiles and Aaron Smith.

Works in the show include a miniature rubber cuckoo clock sculpture by Nathan Skiles and a portrait of the Common Bushtit, one of the smallest perching birds in North America, by Marion Peck.

EXHIBITION:

Wed, 16 Jun 10, 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Thu, 17 Jun 10, 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Fri, 18 Jun 10, 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Sat, 19 Jun 10, 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Sun, 20 Jun 10, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Mon, 21 Jun 10, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

AUCTION:

Session 1: Mon, 21 Jun 10, 5:00 PM, Lots 1 - 100

Session 2: Tue, 22 Jun 10, 10:00 AM, Lots 101 - 237

Session 3: Tue, 22 Jun 10, 2:00 PM, Lots 238 - 363

Session 4: Tue, 22 Jun 10, 5:00 PM, Lots 364 - 485

From the time of its introduction in 1948, the Polaroid camera has inspired photographers and artists to push the limits of their creativity. Photographs from the Polaroid Collection comprises an astonishing range of photographic approaches and sensibilities: from the masterful landscapes of Ansel Adams to the surreal explorations of Lucas Samaras; from the massive self portraits by Chuck Close to the cultural commentaries of Robert Heinecken. Polaroid cameras and films have spurred some of the most interesting photographic work of the latter part of the 20th century. In addition to multifarious works in Polaroid media, the Polaroid Corporation also acquired traditional gelatin silver prints of photographic icons by Harry Callahan, Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, Minor White, Edward and Brett Weston, and Paul Caponiogro, to name but a few. Replete with photographic masterworks and little-known gems, Photographs from the Polaroid Collection offers collectors an unprecedented opportunity to acquire images from one of the largest and most distinctive corporate collections to be sold at auction.

Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to present Lifecycle, an exhibition of new works by California-based artist Jeff Soto, in what will be his third solo show at the gallery. In conjunction with this exhibition, the artist will be painting a site-specific public mural in New York City, and releasing a new limited-edition print.

Soto conveys narrative subject matter with dramatic lighting and textural richness in detailed and dynamic compositions. His work often communicates themes of nostalgia, fear, hope, and environmental issues.

On his new series of paintings, the artist says,“My work has always indirectly told bits and 
pieces of my own story, my thoughts and past. This new body of work is still autobiographical without being self-portraiture, but whereas previous exhibitions focused on current events, environmentalism, politics, and war, this show deals with themes that are more personal, emotional and timeless.”

As the show title suggests, works in Lifecycle refer to birth, death, and the voyage in between. The artist’s interest in time, mortality, fatherhood and generational relationships—within his own family and humankind in general—are explored through visual metaphors and symbolism.

Soto’s paintings exude tension through iconographic imagery that has become the artist’s 
signature. His canvases feature ominous worlds where quasi-divine apparitions with organic 
tendrils writhe from the cavities of smoking, robotic shells, as their lumbering frames preside 
over sprawling urban landscapes. With background environments full of old machinery and 
industrial decay, Soto’s creatures inhabit desolate, forgotten spaces—figures duel, wild flowers 
bloom and rainbows thrive, as dark smog and storm clouds loom amidst floating skulls.

Jeff Soto was born and raised in Southern California, where he currently resides with his wife and daughters. In 2002, Soto graduated with Distinction from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In 2008, his work was the subject of an exhibition at Riverside Art Museum. He has published multiple books on his artwork, which has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. The artist’s distinct color palette, subject matter and technique resonate with a growing audience: inspired by childhood toys, skateboarding, graffiti, hip-hop and popular culture. His bold, representational work is simultaneously accessible and stimulating.

Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to announce Mangle, new drawings and paintings of twisted ladies, an exhibition of works by Ottawa-based artist Dave Cooper, in what will be his second solo show at the gallery.

In Mangle, Cooper presents a new series of graphite drawings on polypropylene paper and oil paintings on canvas, featuring his subject matter of choice—fleshy females. Cooper’s unique aesthetic is informed by his obsession with creating billowy, gelatinous landscapes and stylized women with un-idealized physical appearances. The shapes of these nude or scantily clad figures are often exaggeratedly lumpy, with large heads, bulging eyes, shiny red cheeks and toothy grins. They interact with one another in ways that appear disturbingly violent, suggestively sensual, or both, implying bizarre narratives of perverse scenarios and intense human drama.

Through the challenging, disturbing quality of his imagery, Cooper continues to explore themes of libido, hedonism, body image, fantasy, and ambiguity with refined skill and technique. His process consists of building thin layers of sheer color and fine glaze to create smooth texture and translucent opulence to the round contours of his full-figured subjects and th