Marina PINSKY: (projected 18th / 19 votes) 303 Gallery February 22 – March 31, 2018 http://www.303gallery.com/gallery-exhibitions/marina-pinsky/press-release

303 Gallery is pleased to present our first exhibition of new works by Marina Pinsky.

The Moscow-born, Berlin and Brussels-based artist examines the modes in which we read images as material, spatial, and ideological models of the world. Moving between photographic and sculptural works, Pinsky utilizes oblique symbols to invoke potent invisible histories. Comprised of analog black-and-white photographs and a constellation of newly developed sculptures, the exhibition proposes a consideration of the origins of New York in its pre-urban settlement.

An interpretive sculptural model of the Wyckoff House is hand-made in unglazed ceramic. This house, the oldest in New York, was built in 1638 and occupied by Pieter Wyckoff. It is located in what is now the Canarsie area of Brooklyn, situated on land that the Dutch West India Company purchased from the local Lenape tribe to form part of the New Nederland colony in 1636. Pinsky’s model is pulled together with ratchet straps so that the structure becomes a whole only by the force of tension, creating a type of physicality borne of allegory.

The exhibition's photographs are drawings of pine trees, taken from early American colonial flags first appearing in the 1600s in New England. These small images are created without negatives using direct positive black-and- white paper, and appear as mirror images of the traditional analog enlargements facing them. Besides its colonial origin, this pine tree insignia was adopted in 1913 as the symbol of the New York Armory Show. Together with the tagline "The New Spirit," it re-introduced the pine tree as a symbolic reminder of American rebellion, and established New York at the vanguard of contemporary art. Magnifying this conflation of iconography, Pinsky's excursive photographs allow for a more deliberate consideration of the icon and its various histories.

Between the photographic works stand sculptures of delicately rendered vines and leaves of pumpkins, cucumbers, and string beans. They are supported by industrial “frames” based on plant assembly kits used for model railroad construction. Reverse engineered back to life size, the plants become representations twice removed. Another group of sculptures make use of granite slabs, formerly used in factory production as cutting surfaces for other, softer stones. Covered with marks and incisions, they appear to display an unknown ancient language, but actually evoke traces of modern industrial processes. The works present layered dialogues about image/object replication that hover between socio-historic and natural signifiers past and present.

Recent exhibitions including Marina Pinsky's work have been held at the Vleeshal, Middelburg, Netherlands; WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Kunstverein, Düsseldorf; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; 13th Biennale de Lyon; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. The artist received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012, and BFA from SMFA Boston in 2008.

Marina Pinsky's Leaves, Vines and Trees By Aaron Bogart: FRIEZE.COM, 22 March, 2018 https://frieze.com/article/marina-pinskys-leaves-vines-and-trees

At 303 Gallery, New York, the artist demonstrates how easily we give meaning to the mundane, and how easily we can give it away.

In the 17th century, when New York was part of New Netherland, Manhattan’s fertile fields and marshy inlets were a Dutch colony. This early moment of American history is at the heart of Marina Pinsky’s first solo exhibition in New York, which employs both photography and sculpture to examine the ways that symbols are framed, reused and reinterpreted over time.

Pinsky is known for her conceptually strong photographic work, which she continues here with eight framed direct positive photographs, titled Snow Mask 1–8 (all 2017). Each unique print features a simply painted pine tree on paper, foregrounded by live string-bean vines, which snake up armatures such as one might see in a vegetable patch and lend the images an appearance of depth. Some photographs are crisp and clear, while others are ghostly and inscrutable: for these latter works, Pinsky placed images of snowy landscapes, printed on acetate, before the camera’s lens. The pine appears again in two larger, silver gelatin prints, Pine Tree Flag 1 and Pine Tree Flag 2 (both 2017), which depict hand-painted paper trees arranged behind grids of climbing vines. The conifers refer to a number of flags from colonial New England, flown during the Revolutionary War with the added motto ‘An Appeal to Heaven’. In 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art – the first large-scale show of modern art in the US – also adopted the pine tree for its logo along with the slogan ‘The New Spirit’, hoping it would act as a reminder of American rebellion and establish New York at the vanguard of contemporary art. Pinsky’s photographs not only highlight how a latent symbol might return to the forefront of our historical imagination, but also how easily it can embed itself within our visual vocabulary.

The leaf and vine motif continues in three sculptures bounded by thick white frames reminiscent of hydroponics tubes. Produced from epoxy, high-density polyethylene, paint and plastic, and placed on small concrete columns roughly the height of a raised planter bed or a mattress frame, the sculptures are based on toy model assembly kits. The life-sized leaves of Pinsky’s Cucumber Assembly Kit (2018) resemble the kind of foliage found in a typical New York garden, though their off-white lacquer blanches them of colour, as if they have tumbled from an overexposed photograph. Like Pinsky’s paper trees, the leaves – redolent of the ubiquitous New York City Parks and Recreation logo – are playfully reimagined, inviting us to pluck them from their vines or gather them for a comfy bed.

Wyckoff House Model (2018) is Pinsky’s own miniature version of the oldest surviving Dutch saltbox home in the US, built in Brooklyn in 1638. The model – made of unglazed ceramic, polystyrene and painted wood – has no roof and distended walls, which open up its corners and expose its interior layout. Grey nylon ratchet straps crudely belt the sculpture, literally and figuratively holding together a fragile fragment of the past.

Ratchet straps also bind Trigger Trace 3 (2018), one of three sculptures fashioned from polyurethane foam and pale pink and yellow Plasti-Dip adhesive, sandwiched between granite slabs, whose globular forms are meant to mirror the negative space of handgun triggers. Scratches in the granite resemble an ancient and mysterious language but are actually traces from their recent use as industrial cutting stones. Like the photographs, the sculptures require repeated viewing: these are not the historical artefacts they initially appear to be but manufactured objects of the modern machine age. Pinsky demonstrates how easily, and how often, we give meaning to the mundane, and how easily we can take that meaning away.

Marina Pinsky runs at 303 Gallery, New York, until 31 March.

Lissa RIVERA: Beautiful Boy. (16th projected/ 8 votes total.) Clampart, June/July, 2017

Lissa Rivera’s “Beautiful Boy” portraits revel in gender as a repertoire.—Stephen Vider, social and cultural historian

On the subway one evening, Lissa Rivera’s new friend BJ shared that throughout college he had almost exclusively worn women’s clothing. However, after taking a professional job, he felt much less free to explore gender. Lissa, having struggled through her own fraught relationship with the demands of proscribed femininity, suggested to BJ that perhaps photographs might help create a space for him to explore his identity outside isolation.

Lissa writes: “Taking the first pictures was an emotional experience. I connected with my friend’s vulnerability. I wanted to make sure that the images were not a compromise for either of us, and we engaged in many discussions.” Eventually, Lissa and BJ found themselves falling in love. Now romantic partners, the two are collaborators who have sought to “perform and reshape gender individually and as a couple,” writes Stephen Vider. Rivera relishes the visual pleasure an intimate muse can inspire, as so many male artists have experienced historically.

“Beautiful Boy” investigates a visual language of femininity that is deeply embedded in the DNA of our cultural perceptions. Drawing from Lissa and BJ’s shared interests, the earliest photographs mine the history of 20th- century film, photography, and painting. However, as the project evolved, the images began to flood over boundaries of scripts and sets, and reveal individual experiences of gender, desire, and cultural taboo.

Lissa Rivera is based in Brooklyn. Her work has received multiple grants and honors and has been exhibited internationally. She grew up near Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak, where as a child she was exposed to the treasures at the Eastman Museum. After receiving an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Rivera worked professionally in collections, including the Museum of the City of New York, where she became fascinated with the social history of photography and the evolution of identity in relationship to photographic technologies. Rivera was chosen as a “Woman to Watch” for the biennial exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Selected honors include the Griffin Museum’s Peter Urban Legacy Award; Feature Shoot’s Emerging Photography Award; Photographic Resource Center Exposure 2016; Danforth Museum Purchase Prize; Filter Photo Festival’s People’s Choice Award; and the 2017 D&AD Next Photographer Shortlist. She is now Associate Curator at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan. photographer lissa rivera’s enchanting portraits of her gender-fluid boyfriend

'Beautiful Boy' began as a subway confession between two friends. After BJ told Lissa that he liked wearing women's clothing, they started exploring this through portrait sessions, and eventually became lovers. By Hannah Ongley VICE: Jun 2 2017, 6:57pm https://i-d.vice.com/en_au/article/ywvvww/photographer-lissa-riveras- enchanting-portraits-of-her-gender-fluid-boyfriend

We've long been obsessed with the relationship between artist and muse. Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow, Ilona Staller and Jeff Koons — the connection is one of intimacy, intuition, and often, traditional gender roles. Photographer Lissa Rivera wants to explore the feminine muse not as a creative presence but as a constant collaborator. Her own muse is her genderqueer boyfriend, BJ. The two immerse themselves in different feminine fantasies — conceptualizing thrifted costumes and assembling elaborate sets — to celebrate the traditional muse figure while stretching its limits. "We are immune to images of beautiful women and have been taught that the vanity of wanting to be recorded in art is somewhat of a lesser pursuit," Lissa says. "I hope to illuminate the muses of the past that make the art that we worship so poignant with their vulnerability and creative presence."

But BJ wasn't Lissa's muse when the idea for Beautiful Boy arose. In fact, they weren't even dating. The idea for the project came, as good ideas often do, during a long subway ride. BJ revealed to Lissa that he occasionally liked dressing in women's clothes, though had stopped doing so after graduating college and getting an office job. They decided to start taking photos as an experiment in vulnerability and confidence. Over multiple shoots and countless costumes, BJ became Lissa's muse, her collaborator, and eventually, her lover. As Beautiful Boy opens at New York's ClampArt gallery, we talked to BJ and Lissa about looking to the past to shape a more progressive future.

Were you nervous about having your private experiences published and exhibited, or was this the intention all along? BJ: I was definitely nervous at first! It is a very surreal experience to be in the public eye in such a vulnerable way. But it is very gratifying at the same time. We occasionally hear from other queer or gender nonconforming people who have found the images empowering or have connected to them, which is especially wonderful. LR: Yes, it took a while to acclimate! The biggest surprise was seeing articles pop up in China and Latin America. Knowing that our work was having an impact on so many people was mind-blowing. Although the work is very personal, over time I have learned to adapt to the anxiety I had around sharing it. I hope that people enjoy the images — and if they don't, I hope it challenges their perceptions of gender and photography, at least for a moment!

Do you think you would have ended up in a romantic relationship had it not been for this project? BJ: From this vantage point, it's honestly hard to imagine Lissa and I meeting but not ending up in a relationship. At the same time, it's equally hard to imagine Lissa and I spending time together, and not hitting on the idea of taking pictures. The two are just so intertwined. In some ways, they are two manifestations of the same relationship — or the photographs are a kind of public versus private iteration of our daily experience. Of course, the relationship is far bigger and more beautiful than the photographs — how could it be otherwise? The photographs are a facet of the relationship.

Lissa: BJ has always made me feel safe and fully accepted. Being treated with such kindness and support helped me to find my voice as an artist. It is BJ as an individual who is most special and the work is very much meant to honor the beauty I see in him. Although I see myself working with other subjects in the future, I hope to photograph BJ over a period of time, like Emmet Gowin, Harry Callahan, and Lee Friedlander had the pleasure of doing with their romantic partners and muses.

How does reimagining historical representations of femininity allow you to challenge traditional narratives? BJ: It is incredible to be able to "step-inside" the images, which are a complex stage woven out of a variety of influences that we find potent. Photography and film can be incredibly powerful, and iconic images have the power to change culture. We hope to illuminate this phenomenon, revealing the impact of idols from early fashion and film who are deeply embedded in the DNA of the image culture surrounding femininity.

Lissa: I hope to reveal the importance of the feminine muse as a collaborator. Until quite recently, women were not allowed admission into most art schools, or even figure drawing classes. The story of a young woman artist apprenticing for a male artist in exchange for serving as their muse is quite a common one. How did these creative and intelligent women affect the output of these "masters"? Many times I get questions about who BJ is, what his role is, what his contribution is. If I were a male presenting a portfolio of images of a cis-woman, I suspect that questions about her contribution would be less common.

BJ, how have the traditionally feminine costumes affected your relationship to the everyday, masculine attire you wear to work? BJ: Since we started the project, I have evolved into a more androgynous wardrobe, mixing together dresses and blouses with skinny jeans and t-shirts. Pretty ordinary fare, really. I recently donated a box of long-unworn men's shirts! Our photographs have definitely given me a lot of added confidence.

"Beautiful Boy" is on view at ClampArt in NYC through July 15, 2017. An artist talk with BJ Lillis takes place Saturday, June 10 at 3pm.

Maja WIRKUS: NATALIA (8th projected / 17 votes total.)…

From NATALIA…Maja Wirkus: Born in 1980 in Poland / Lives and works in Germany

- Some of the works in the slideshow are included in the exhibition: NEW GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER THE DÜSSELDORF SCHOOL House of Photography @ Deichtorhallen, Hamburg / Jan 26 - May 21, 2018

- Her photographic investigations explores the interdependence between the constructed architectural space, and the socio-cultural and subjective frame- works and processes that imbue these spaces with identity and significance

- Connects the structures of architecture and the built environment with the mechanisms of visual perception and the processes of self-awareness/positioning in relation to the material space

- Extends the representation of form and materiality between the two dimensional (documentary photographs, as well as manipulated, processed and re-constructed photo based imagery) and the three-dimensional (the architectural spaces themselves, as well as the representative, derivative and conditioned forms that some of her photos and sculptures assume)

- Employs mechanisms of repetition, mirroring, manipulation, faceting/tiling, rearrangement, reconstruction and compositing of parts of images into patterns, - (for ex. Image 4 in the slideshow is composed of photographs of densely arranged crowds/cues of people, the images of which have been cut, mirrored and re-composited into what reads initially as visual patterns that are reminiscent of natural formations in the landscape)

- “I ask for the mutual conditionality of photography and architecture, as well as the reciprocal dependency of both of these language systems…...Accordingly, I regard my work as a space of reference and examination of the documentary, as a space of negotiation and inquiry, which – in its openness – follows the societal process of appropriation.” - Maja Wirkus, on “Praesens || Präsens” project that documents architectural spaces in Warsaw, PL (images 7, 9 & 10)

Space—Body—Time: Appropriating Space as Photographic Discourse by Jule Schaffer http://www.maja- wirkus.com/#/arbeitshintergrund/

According to the definition, architecture is the examination of space created by man and particularly the inter- relationship between man, space and time. In etymology, architecture is described as the multiple meaning of the term architecture above all being characterized by the second component techné and its architectural, theoretical interpretation; it can be understood as art, technology or tectonics. The approach in my photography stems from the perception space of architecture that is thereby enabled. On the one hand, the three-dimensionality of height, width and length describes the technical physicality of space and /or the spatiality of structures. On the other hand, the inter-relationship between man, space and time describes a three-dimensionality of the perception space architecture which most closely corresponds to the artistic aspect of the etymological meaning of the word. Photographed architecture is analogous to a social development of the two-dimensionalisation of the architectural experience. Time as an element of experience is increasingly becoming lost in a society that is becoming increasingly fast-paced. The two-dimensionality of photography, based on the reduction of time to the smallest possible unit due to the photographic process, is therefore the medial transformation of an increasingly two- dimensional manner of experiencing space. Spaces are in themselves continuums. They are generally created to last. However, the perception or designation of space, beyond the dependence of socio-cultural, historical or economic aspects or the subjective sum of experience, gender, age, etc., is linked to the possibility of taking one’s time for reflection. As a consequence, not being able to do so puts the designation of space, self-awareness of and within the space, self-determination and subjective spatial positioning up for discussion. Photographing architecture means describing the increasing fleetingness of the perception of spaces and thus the remaining lack of such space being able to be determined or designated. However, this type of photography therefore also includes the possibility of momentarily interrupting the increasing speed of our rhythms of life that are spurred by migration and thus reintegrating the missing element of time into the examination of architecture that is only possible when doing so.

Complex shadows cast intricate patterns on the floor, the curved brass reflects a golden sheen onto the wall. Printed sheets of 60gr paper hang in a glass cabinet and delicate white concrete blocks rest on dark wooden pedestals. Photographic collages hang on the wall in between. The forms and materials used in Maja Wirkus’s work go far beyond what is conventionally understood as photography. What at first appears to be purely sculptural is in fact the result of a complex photographic investigation during which Wirkus explores architecture through photography, and photography through architecture.

Personal reflections on architectural spaces and forms serve as the start and end points of this investigation. How does one approach a space? What impressions does a space make? How can individual perceptions be abstracted, compressed and disseminated? How can one recreate the experience of a space? After Wirkus’s work with her camera and her photographic images, a pro- cess follows in which spatial impressions, research, and fragments of knowledge are superimposed and transformed by manipulating a range of materials. (Sculptural) works and installations emerge as condensed multimedia experiences of photographic-architectural space, but also as subtle displacements in which the processes of perception are disrupted and altered; only then do they become visible. In her work, Wirkus probes at the margins and structures of the photographic as we know it in everyday life. Photography serves as a medium through which spatial constellations are recorded and appropriated.

Extended photography? Three aspects of the expansion of the photographic

Questioning and expanding the boundaries of photography calls into question the very definition of “the photographic”. Rosalind Krauss described it as the “abstraction” of all the characteristics of photography. These characteristics are not limited to the medium of photography, but instead can be felt in other artistic fields and media, in particular in art after the modern period.1 Hence although the photographic may be viewed primarily in the context of photographic images, the term also represents a theoretical framework, extending beyond the image solely as an object.

Since 2013, Katharina Sykora has dedicated herself to the exploration of the “photographic dispositif”, which makes relevant not only the image and its structure but also the photographic act, which is to say the complex conditions and factors that come together at the moment the shutter is released and a photograph is created. According to Sykora, this moment is shaped by a “coincidence of intentional acts and unintentional occurrences” and becomes a “complex of actions”2 in which purposeful actions and unplanned incidents and events converge. From this perspective, both the “actors and agents involved in the mo- ment of taking a photograph, the photographic media and the historical dimen- sion across both pre- and post-photographic time periods”3 are important in order to understand the photographic. When read in this way, the photographic encompasses— besides the material object—particular structural characteristics of the photographic act and the relationship between the image and reality, which may be reflected on an abstract level or in other media. This process incorporates desired and undesired actions, intentions and patterns of perception, which come together in ways more or less deliberately in the photographic act and its visual results.

Without wanting to limit Wirkus’s work to these points, three aspects of this interpretation of the photographic seem particularly relevant: the photographic as a flexible material in the exploration of architectural space; the photographic as an “indexical structure of experience” and on a meta-level, at once obscure and concrete, as a consciously applied structure of language and composition.

The Photographic as expanded material

Let us now turn to photography as an actual material in relation to architecture. Wirkus works as both a professional architectural photographer and an artist. Her pictures of buildings and indoor rooms, which are often the product of commissions or documentary work, are notable for their uniform composition. They alternate between visually-centered, balanced angles like those favored in the architectural photographs of Candida Höfer, and a style influenced by Neues Sehen (New Vision), where specific architectural characteristics or structures are the object of deliberate focus.

An example of this can be found in the documentary report Emilia: furniture, museum, modernism,4 published in spring 2016. The striking zig-zag roof of the glass Emilia pavilion in the center of Warsaw is considered a key example of the post-war modernism in Polish architecture. Opened in 1970, the building was first used as a furniture shop before being transformed into a museum and space for various art events. It is now at risk of being demolished. The publication includes essays by architectural historians, photographs from the archives and taken by visitors, and a comprehensive photographic documentation of the building by Wirkus (fig. 1–2). Her photographs display her delicate feeling for the impact of a place, as well as her ability to capture this in a concrete system of signs. Her exploration of the building, its history and the building materials used is captured through distinctive perspectives and image compositions; they distil the three-dimensional experience of the space into a two-dimensional plane, enriching it with new points of view.

Wirkus goes a step further when it comes to her creative exploration of architec- ture. Here too, the photographic image—the result of wandering through architecturally rich environments—prompts further artistic creation, itself becoming relevant as a material that can be called on to be deployed in a manner that goes far beyond the traditional framework of photographs on a wall or in a book. Photographs are transformed into three-dimensional objects in space, mounted onto other materials, collaged, bent, enlarged, and dissected. Finally, they are photographed, further abstracted, and recombined until their original form is unrecognizable. The photographic image as a fixed, flat, and often framed object enters an entirely new territory, with its old incarnation recollected only in the negative imprint of the paper in concrete. Within the framework of a new conception of photography as defined above, it is clear that a shift in photographic media is taking place. Nevertheless, a surprising image— of an armchair, a wall, a set of stairs—occasionally bobs to the surface in the vast sea of abstraction, revealing the original material.

Paradoxically, it is precisely this “expansion of the photographic zone” to include more than the flat surface of a sheet of paper that represents something inher- ently photographic, particularly taking into account the development and multimedia differentiation of photographic images. Photographs have long defined our everyday lives in a manner extending far beyond since mere two-dimensional black-and-white or color pictures stuck into photo albums. From Daguerre’s metal plates and glass plate negatives to celluloid film and Polaroid photos, to digital data collections, huge billboards in public space and the digital flood of cellphone selfies: photographs seem to possess a multimedia, fluidly gliding quality that seemingly knows no bounds. And yet, as Patrizia di Bello and Shamoon Zamir stress, “[A] photograph can exist in a variety of instances: as an ephemeral image in a magazine; as a fine archival print in a museum; as a postcard in a personal collection; and as pages in different books”.5 Wirkus consciously exploits this potential in her work in order to explore and convey the architectural poten- tial of a space.

She is not alone: in the history of art, a photographic image’s multimedia potential has long since been actively reflected in both production and reception. It seems only logical to make the connection between Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of headframes and water towers winning the Golden Lion for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1990, and works like those of Tamara Lorenz, whose photographs (fig.3–4) extend into a room like sculptural objects. Within this continuum, one may locate works that use time, not space, as their point of reference, in order to call into question the status of the photographic as an object. The recent video portraits by the South African artist Pieter Hugo illustrate this concept: in Permanent Error (2009/10), young people stand motionless on a heap of rubbish while people collect scraps and light fires in the background. In this instance, the photographic is defined by the time-based flow of the video; the motionless portrait situation in the foreground gestures towards the act of taking a photograph or the very moment of photographing, through which the photographic image is created. Wirkus plays with the traditional boundaries of the photographic, abstracting them until any conventional understanding of photography’s descriptive role and its materiality has been obliterated. In doing so, she opens up the viewer’s eye to the spatial dimension, to the ways in which images interact with the buildings, shapes, and materials they represent. The boundaries between space and image shift and become blurred by visual diversions, until the two systems seem to intersect. At this point, the concentration on the moment of the photographic as a recording situation and the relationship between the photographer, the photographed, and the surrounding environment all become relevant. The picture itself is a testimony to this and reveals yet another layer to Wirkus’s work.

The photographic as record and indexical structure of experience

Walter Benjamin understands the photographic process as one in which reality “sears”6 the photographic material at a specific moment in time. This interpretation has important implications when considering Wirkus’s work as extended photography: it highlights the potential of this moment of contact, the shift of its development in space and time, for example when a photograph is viewed. In the interwoven relationships between space, object, time, and image, the artist examines the physicahaptic, concrete experience of architectural spaces, an experience Wirkus seeks first to comprehend photographically, then to translate into experience and finally to transform entirely.

As visual material, photography represents the moment in which the approach and expectation of the photographer meets a given space in the camera and creates a visual record of what is finds there. In retrospect, the image may be regarded as a fixed reference to the existence of this moment, as a “that-has-been” of the moment the photograph was taken, to borrow Roland Barthes’s phrase (even if the legibility and significance of this what-has-been is not necessarily evident).7 Semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce took this structure of the photographic image as an occasion to use photographs as examples of signs indicating of something other than the “index”.8 When the two ideas are put to- gether—the moment reality makes contact with the image and the representation of this contact—the photographic image may be read as an indexical, and therefore denotative structure of experience: it condenses the moment of a particular experience, rendering it tangible even from a position far away in space and time, or it at least stages a kind of derivation, an echo of the moment itself. Wirkus draws on this indexical structure of experience as a characteristic of the photographic in her study of the various ways space can be perceived and its material relativity.

When walking through architectural structures, the visitor comes into contact with the space, forming new and ever-changing impressions within the framework of a constantly evolving constellation of space, object, and time. In her working process, Wirkus seeks to capture these procedural moments of “coming into contact” with the space in her photographs: “Taking photography and its expansions as a starting point,” says Wirkus, “I try to subtly appropriate the space as a photographic discourse”.9 What impressions does the space leave? How do these create an impact both in the moment and later on, as architectonic-affective traces? Is it possible to condense three-dimensional experience onto the two-dimensional surface of the image and beyond?

This approach is exemplified in Wirkus’s project Praesens || Present. The spring- board for this study is an exploration of the group of architects known as Praesens, an association of young artists and architects who dedicated themselves to finding constructivist solutions to challenges in architecture and urban planning in Poland during the 1920s and 30s. As members of the Congrès international d’architecture moderne (CIAM) they discussed the function and potential of modern architecture, although they did not receive as much recognition in the public historical consciousness as their Western colleagues, such as Le Corbusier and members of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements.

In Praesens || Present, Wirkus initially worked with actual photographic images that fix and represent materials, shapes, and places in a visual form. For this, Wirkus used both images she had taken herself as well as other photographic descriptions and reproductions of architectural spaces that she came across. Where experiences could not be communicated directly, Wirkus instead translated these originally photographic descriptions of space into works, objects, and collages that—again in the form of an index—point to the original relationship between space and image and seek to further cement this into an impression. This first stage involves essentially transferring the photographic as a structure of experience onto other materials, with the result that space is appropriated: concrete blocks and curved metals, papers and curtains dissect the architecture into its material and formal components. The initial impression of the space is examined, transformed, and finally creates an impact on the viewer through abstract indexical impressions. Hence, as objects, they convey the temporally and spatially displaced experience of architecture. Furthermore, they make use not necessarily of photographic images, but rather of photographic structures, in order to condense and explore moments of perception. The process of appropriating space turns out to be a palimpsest-like registering and transcribing of information in a tense relationship of deconstruction, that is to say a deviation from the original presence and construction, an expansion of meaning.10 Within this transformative process, the earlier form in many ways becomes the medium of the latter; the photographic is utilized as an indexical structure and at the same time as a medium of its own derivation.

If this process results in the photographic material losing its illustrative characteristics and becoming a simple reference to the form and material of a building, to a certain extent it becomes a system of language that picks up on and translates the architectural conditions, which would represent a third category of the expanded photographic with respect to Wirkus’s works.

The photographic as a language of design

Architecture can be impressive, it can express and represent a political agenda, it can be functional and it can influence people in its central role within their everyday experience. Photography makes these characteristics visible: they govern the composition of the image. At the same time, the photographic image itself is subject to similar conditions: photographs, too, can be impressive, can represent a political message and can manipulate us and our awareness of architecture.11 The photographic image is therefore more than just a way of recording and documenting reality—it is also a construction, leading us to understand both architecture and photography as a constructive system of language. Wirkus takes this as her starting point, using the language of photographic images to investigate architecture and vice versa: what linguistic devices do photography and architecture use to shape a space? How do they describe each other? At what point does an image change from a document to an interpretation? Her installations aim to get to the root of these questions, and Wirkus refers to them as “scenery”,12 a term that makes evident aspects of both construction and staging as well pointing up the creative possibilities that underpin architec- tural and photographic ways of arranging a space. At the same time, emphasis is placed on the individual aspect of perception: no one staging resembles another, even if the stage set remains the same.

This perspective informs Praesens || Present, which explicitly contrasts these different systems of language, enabling a mutual exploration on many different levels. According to Wirkus, this examination of concrete visual language comprises categories such as image and image memory, archive and utopia, space and position.13 Often, photography is the only way of offering a glimpse into past spaces: one point of view can offer multiple impressions of a particular space throughout time. How valid are these past utopian ideas in the present? In the interplay of image and space, the Barthesian idea of “that-has-been” encounters a “what-is-behind?”, the answer to which Wirkus leaves open, calling for a reflexive process that counts as one of her works’ greatest strengths.

Investigating different linguistic systems is more than just a central theme in Wirkus’s work: it is also, on a more fundamental level, a design concept. Thus the composition and construction of her installations and spatial interventions follow consciously established, clear rules. In her exhibition in Koblenz, part of gute aussichten. junge deutsche fotografie 2015/2016, the concept of line and shadow determined the way in which individual pieces were hung (fig. 5–6). Display cases, pages, and sculptures were positioned in such a way as to cast complex shadow patterns on the floor, extending the objects’ reach further into the room. The existing images brought a secondary level of shadow pictures in the space. In this extended form, both the architectural and the photographic become relevant here as a language of design, the vocabulary of which guides the positioning of the objects themselves.

Processes of transformation between difference and repetition

Dealing with different language systems is liable to give rise not only to dialogues, but also to translations and transformations. This enables Wirkus to investigate the significance of individual impressions, ideas, and also concrete words in different languages: the theme of reflection, for example, becomes relevant in Praesens || Present as a theoretical and photographic examination of utopian ideas. Elsewhere, constellations posit a subtle architectural realization of the concept: in one of Wirkus’s works, a hidden, illuminated yellow wall casts colored light onto another wall in the exhibition space, thereby translating the thought experiment into a concrete visual vocabulary. The space between theoretical ideas and architectural realization, shifts and nuances of meaning become apparent, which resist translation and illustrate that the process of moving from one language to another always invokes transformative acts and processes of appropriation.

Wirkus also thematizes this in her space-specific interventions. For the exhibition Differenz & Wiederholung (Interim, Kassel, 2013) she added an ordinary-looking tapered base to an existing cubic shelving unit, and hung photos of the original space on the wall to present the viewer with a time-shifted antithesis, indicating the subtle differences between spatial architecture and its photographic representation (fig. 7–9). The example makes clear how even small interventions alter the impression of a space, and how important each individual element of the space is and to what extent they color our experience. Inherent to the difference in formation between the two spaces is a sense of alienation that “draws attention to the object depicted” and can lead to a “new and more intensive observation”14 in which the architectural conditions are reflected. Against this background, architectural buildings appear less as fixed formal structures than as fragile, almost temporary objects. If architecture is rooted in its specific social, political, and everyday context, Wirkus also seeks to show how architectural meaning can be transformed according to variations in these contexts.

She uses photographic vocabulary as a witness and a “test setting”15 of and for these transformations; differences often become apparent only when translated into the photographic and expanded to its extended forms. Photography is used to reduce architecture to its material and formal components: concrete, metal, and glass are significant elements in the shaping of modern spaces. Does a material construct a space or does the way in which a space is used necessitate certain materials? What spaces can be created when using specific materials? How do they alter the exhibition space? Wirkus’s extended photographic explorations play with these questions and invite the visitor to take part in thinking about the appropriation of the space. According to Rahel Jaeggi, this appropriation can also be understood as a process of discovery,16 a term that seems appropriate for both Wirkus’s approach as well as for the visitor’s reception of her installations.

And the more time one spends there, the more there is to discover. It begins with the first impression, perhaps the urge to touch the mirror-like metal or the rough concrete, on which the organic negative form of a piece of scotch tape has left its mark, and goes right through to the elaborate installation in which lines and shadows are repeated elements of the composition, and further still to the barely visible reflections left behind on another exhibition surface by a hidden yellow wall or a lit brass object.

Moving through the exhibitions crafted by Wirkus opens up spaces of experience that can only be accessed concretely if one takes time to linger. This does not entail standing still, but rather denotes an intensive encounter that enables conscious experience. Through her works, Wirkus investigates the different aspects of the photographic as a material, a structure of correlations, a constructive and readable language in relation to architecture, and it is precisely the transforma- tions, gaps and tears that occur between the language systems that give to the space a particularly creative potential. In the midst of condensed and concrete materials, open spaces of thought and perception unfold, the multimedia vocabulary of which reveals a diverse range of possibilities depending on position and movement. In light of Umberto Eco’s concept of the “open work”,17 Wirkus’s works may be discussed as possessing an inherent openness that fully develops for the first time when perceived by the viewer. Hence the photographic dis- course she herself unfolds becomes an appropriation of the space in which the visitor plays an active part.

In extended photography, as Wirkus’s works make clear, new architectural and photographic spaces present themselves, offering a special potential for experience in a fast-paced and superficial world. Architecture is not simply considered in passing; instead, the artist seeks to render the space visible as a loca- tion of physical experience for the viewer and to provoke an individual physical/ introspective reflection on the surrounding architecture and its material relativity. Wirkus’s installations function in a sensitive and profound way, one that lingers in the memory and encourages us to pay more attention once again to the architecture surrounding us in everyday life.

1 Cf. Krauss (2000). 2 Sykora (2014), n.p. 3 Sykora (2014), n.p. 4 Cf. Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2016). 5 Di Bello/ Zamir (2002), p. 11. 6 Benjamin (2006), p. 202. 7 Barthes (1989), p. 87. 8 Cf. Peirce (1986), p. 193. 9 Pries and Wirkus, n. d., n. p. 10 Cf. Jaeggi (2002), p. 60–69. 11 Also see Pries, Wirkus, n. d., n. p. 12 Pries/Wirkus, n. d., n. p. 13 Cf. Pries / Wirkus, n.d., n.p. 14 Trebeß (2006), pp. 403. 15 Pries and Wirkus, n.d., n.p. 16 Cf. Jaeggi (2002), p. 60–69. 17 Eco (1973).

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland: Die helle Kammer. Bemerkungen zur Photographie (1980), Frankfurt, 1989 Benjamin, Walter: Kleine Geschichte der Fotografie (1931), in: Wolfgang Kemp and Hubertus von Amelunxen (eds.): Theorie der Fotografie, Band I–IV 1839–1995, 2, Munich, 2006, pp. 200–213 Di Bello, Patrizia and Shamoon Zamir, introduction to Patrizia di Bello, Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir (eds.): The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, London / New York, 2012, pp. 1–16 Eco, Umberto: Das offene Kunstwerk, Frankfurt, 1973 Jaeggi, Rahel: Aneignung braucht Fremdheit, in: Texte zur Kunst 46, 2002, pp. 60–69 Krauss, Rosalind: Anmerkungen zum Index (1977), in: Kraus, Herta Wolf (ed.): Die Originalität der Avantgarde und andere Mythen der Moderne, Amsterdam / Dresden, 2000, pp. 249–276 Emilia: furniture, museum, modernism, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Warsaw, 2016 Peirce, Charles Sanders: Die Kunst des Räsonierens (1893), chap. 2, in: Peirce, Christian Kloesel and Helmut Pape (eds.): Semiotische Schriften, 1, Frankfurt, 1986, pp. 191–201 Pries, Eric and Maja Wirkus: Zitate und Konzepte, www.maja-wirkus.com (July 8 2016) Sykora, Katharina: Explosive Photography, lecture, September 14 2014, Museum Ludwig, Cologne Trebeß, Achim: Verfremdung, in: Trebeß (ed.): Metzler Lexikon Ästhetik, Stuttgart, 2006, pp. 403

Julie BLACKMON: Fake Weather. (28th projected / 10 total votes).) Robert Mann Gallery 10.17https://collectordaily.com/julie-blackmon-fake-weather-robert-mann/

Comments/Context: Julie Blackmon’s staged photographs of disorder on the home front share more DNA with New Yorker cartoons and GEICO ads than the solemn Victorian or brainy post-modern traditions of constructed imagery. Up-to-date satires about the latest foibles and pretensions of America’s white middle class, her scenarios are usually more darling than snarling, and geared to flatter her audience rather than alienate it. Each staged scenario delivers a punch line but also has a lot of business happening in the corners, so that viewers are invited to take their time putting the sequence of the story elements together.

More often than not, close attention is rewarded. It’s not easy being funny, as a writer or a photographer, and her jokes are well-crafted and never mean. They don’t fall back on kooky surrealism, like Sandy Skoglund’s, or the sex-and-violence clichés of film noir, like Alex Prager’s. Behind the fraught situation in a Blackmon photograph, you sense that a complicated emotion, not just a glib one, has triggered her stage directions. As in her previous three shows at Robert Mann, the setting for her cine-dramas is the whirling cauldron of family life, with children as the main pot stirrers. (Her oeuvre is thus closer to Sally Mann’s early work than to Gregory Crewdson’s.) Parents are either oblivious to the mayhem or barely visible and inconsequential. That goes double for fathers.

In this latest installment, the kids are still alright and, by sheer numbers as well as control over their backyard and household environments, more in charge of the asylum than ever. Teenage girls laze prettily on a blanket while a teenage boy in a cap sits cross-legged and blows smoke rings (Weeds). No adult is in sight. That may be just as well because even when they are in the picture, they’re not paying close attention to the imminent dangers. In Pool, we see only the legs of an older male in the lower left corner, a few feet away from a long carving knife stuck in a watermelon. The eight children playing in the aqua water or sitting along the pool’s edge are safe for now, but not because of watchful supervision.

Blackmon can be painfully irksome when you sense she has coached her child actors to be adorable. In the title piece for the show, sisterly tykes in snowsuits stand against a backdrop while artificial snow falls around their feet. Along with tall fur hats, they also wear looks of exasperation, supposedly because a parent or two has forced them to pose for this elaborate future Christmas card. The hands and head of their manic father, throwing fistfuls of white stuff from behind the scene, are at the top of the prop, as in a Charles Addams or George Booth cartoon. The title is Fake Weather and that’s not the only thing fake about it.

The best images here are those that keep the children off stage or as bit players. In the photograph titled Trapped we view the random accumulations of family life that have been stored inside a darkened garage. On the walls or the concrete floor: skateboards, sleds, a tennis racket, life preserver, spare tire, baby carriage, pair of garden shears, orange extension cord, and an old copy of Life magazine. Glaring at us from a picnic bench (sans picnic table) is a large gray Persian cat. The only light in this gloom comes through four porthole windows in the garage door. The grime on the glass is so thick that someone has been able to write KCUF on the outside. In the lower right corner, as useless, abandoned but potentially valuable as the rest of the junk, is a Clinton-Kaine campaign poster and a hand-lettered sign that reads “Resist,” perhaps a souvenir from last year’s Women’s marches.

In its frustrated rage, harbored grief, bafflement, impotence, hope, and disbelief that the future greatness for the country lies in a return to the past, the image expresses the confused emotional state of liberal American women since the election of Trump better than almost anything I’ve seen.

A pair of 2017 photographs, Sidewalk and South & Pershing, introduce a gritty flavor to Blackmon’s sugar-rich diet. Each is faintly urban rather than suburban, and the scenario is more open-ended than message-driven. The characters—young grown-ups—seem independent of one another, the gestures modeled on those of street photography, not illustration.

The stand-out in the show, Holiday, is nevertheless one of Blackmon’s droll and poignant takes on the American family and its fragile dreams. The setting is a ranch house on a suburban street where the owners don’t have lots of money for upkeep or child care. The garage door is on the fritz and opens only a sliver. The Christmas lights aren’t plugged in and have been left strewn on the driveway. The step-ladder by the side of the house is unmanned. The extension cord dangles from the roof. A baby doll lies on a lawn of dead grass.

But a bare tree sticks up like a cowlick from the backyard. And a green wreath hangs on a blue door next to a picture window where a half-naked boy (or girl?) stands precariously on the back of a chair or sofa and stares curiously at us.

I can’t tell if Blackmon was consciously invoking classic photographs by Robert Adams and Stephen Shore from the 1970s notable for similar motifs and themes. I can only say that her rendition is equally adept at capturing a historical moment. Norman Rockwell wasn’t always a sunny optimist about America and its future. Blackmon is most effective, and at her most maternal, when her pictures suggest that the challenges in store for today’s children aren’t fake ones.

Maria Martinez-Cañas: Transformative Structures (Estructuras Transformativas) (10th projected / 18 votes total.)

Julie Saul Gallery announces our seventh solo exhibition of new works by Cuban born, Miami based artist, Maria Martinez-Cañas, in an ambitious and powerful show entitled Transformative Structures (Estructuras Transformativas). Supported by a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, these new assemblages created between 2016 and 2017 introduce a dramatic shift in style and medium. With the presence of drawing and sculpture, Cañas questions conventional practices in the field of conceptual photography.

The earliest works in the show derive from her Rebus + Diversion collage series and are formed from personal memorabilia, largely the archive of Cuban curator and critic José Gómez-Sicre and artist Cundo Bermúdez, both of whom have close family ties to Cañas’ family going back to pre-revolution. With this recent work, she is attempting to synthesize all that came before, inspired by her “heroes” such as European Modernists Henry Moore, Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius and Latin Americans Gego, Jesús Rafael Soto and more recently Sandú Darié.

A catalog available in conjunction with the show contains an essay by Manuel González entitled A Walk on the Wild Side as well as 14 plates, and can be ordered directly from the gallery. González maintains that this is her most ambitious inventive and personal body of work to date. Cañas has always experimented with traditional and experimental photographic printing processes from platinum and diazo prints to video and abrasion techniques. The content of her work has ranged from sensual explorations of nature, to identity (as a displaced Cuban), and delving into more personal themes. She often incorporates references to art history as a way of defining her position within it.

Cañas has been recognized for her long, productive and innovative career by several exhibitions in 2017 including Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-85 organized by the Hammer Museum and traveling to the Brooklyn Museum and the Pinacoteca de Sao Paolo, Brazil in 2018, a career survey at Lehigh University, Wild Noise at the Bronx Museum, and a Kabinett Project at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Cañas lives in Miami, and is a tenured professor at the New World School of the Arts. She studied at the Philadelphia College of Art, and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is included in over forty international public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Public Library, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Musée du Centre Pompidou, Paris, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian and many more.

Anja NIEMI: MAUREEN (projected 25.th / 10 votes total)

Suppose I were to tell you about this cowboy who’s not really a cowboy, not in the regular sense of the term, not in the sense that she drives cattle, or rides horses, or wears cowboy hats, not yet anyway. This cowboy is imaginary but she exists, like a sculpture trapped inside a block of marble waiting for her line of flight, waiting for the sculptor to start chiseling away at the stone. by Lena Niemi

Steven Kasher Gallery is proud to present the first US solo exhibition of Norwegian photographer Anja Niemi. In her latest series, She Could Have Been A Cowboy, Niemi continues her investigations of the self. This time she turns the lens to a life lived under the constraints of conformity. Every day her fictional character finds herself trapped in the same pink dress, but what she really wants is to be a cowboy, dressed in fringe and leather, riding horses in the Wild West. Through this series of photographs with multiple layers and possible interpretations, Niemi delivers her most political work to date. Niemi says, "The story is not really about being a cowboy. It’s about wanting to be another." The exhibition is accompanied by a new monograph of the same name, published by Jane & Jeremy.

In order to visualize the imaginary world of her character Niemi had to experience it for herself. Alone in a rental car, dressed as a cowboy, Niemi visited and photographed all the places on her character’s annotated maps. She hiked up and down the mountains of America’s national parks and rode a horse on the same field John Wayne filmed one of his famous horse battles. Always trying to be what her character would have wanted, unafraid and unaffected by others. Niemi works alone, photographing, staging and acting out the characters in all of her images.

Anja Niemi (b. 1976, Oslo, Norway) studied at the London College of Printing and Parsons School of Design in Paris and New York and has exhibited in galleries worldwide. Three previous monographs of her work have been published, Photographing in Costume (Little Black Gallery, 2015), Short Stories (Jane & Jeremy, 2016), The Woman Who Never Existed (Jane & Jeremy, 2017). The poem by Lena Niemi is an excerpt from a longer text in the new monograph accompanying the exhibition titled She Could Have Been A Cowboy (Jane & Jeremy, 2018). Her work has been published in Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now (Thames & Hudson, 2017), and her image The Garden Hose was selected for the volume 1001 Photographs You Must See Before You Die (Cassell, 2017).

“I always work alone...” - an interview with Anja Niemi By Anna Savitskaya – Artdependence: April 11, 2017 https://www.artdependence.com/articles/i-always-work-alone-an-interview-with-anja-niemi/

Best known for her mysterious and delicate stories, Norwegian artist Anja Niemi expresses herself through the medium she finds most comprehensive – photography. Her latest project, titled “The Woman Who Never Existed”, was inspired by the words of the pioneering Italian actress Eleonora Duse. Eleonora worked in theatre, travelling the world’s stages alongside Sarah Bernhardt in the early 20th century. Unlike other actresses of the time who seemed to be constantly striving for publicity, she was private and introverted by nature.

Best known for her mysterious and delicate stories, Norwegian artist Anja Niemi expresses herself through the medium she finds most comprehensive – photography. Her latest project, titled “The Woman Who Never Existed”, was inspired by the words of the pioneering Italian actress Eleonora Duse. Eleonora worked in theatre, travelling the world’s stages alongside Sarah Bernhardt in the early 20th century. Unlike other actresses of the time who seemed to be constantly striving for publicity, she was private and introverted by nature.

In a rare interview she made a fascinating statement: ‘away from the stage, I do not exist’. Anja Niemi has chosen to narrate the story of Eleonora Duse in these ‘non-existent’ moments between her appearances on stage. She captures moments of emptiness, loneliness and anticipation. Each carefully staged scene drips with details including delicate wallpapers, fabrics and interiors that evoke the artist’s considerable style and speak of hours of thorough orchestration and hard work before the photographs are taken.

Her new series ‘The Woman Who Never Existed’ premiered at PHOTOFAIRS | San Francisco (27-29 January 2017), and will now tour with exhibitions at Shoot Gallery in Oslo (9 March – 30 April 2017), Galerie Photo 12 in Paris (16 March – 22 April 2017), and The Little Black Gallery in London (4-27 May 2017).

Artdependence Magazine: How and when did your passion for photography start?

Anja Niemi: I’ve always liked telling stories, but was never very good with words. When I first realized I could do it with pictures, I never looked back. That is around 20 years ago now and I have never done anything else. Making pictures is all I know.

AD: Where does the line between fashion and fine art photography lie for you?

AN: I think the two cross each other all the time. The more I use costumes in my work, the more I find myself drawn to the world of fashion. I think I’ve always been inspired by the aesthetic of fashion photography, going back to photographers like Irvin Penn, Guy Bourdin or Helmut Newton. It's all art in my eyes.

AD: All of your works have some kind of innuendo. Does it happen by itself or is it your intention?

AN: I’m always very prepared. I spend a long time planning, but I always leave room for intuition. The idea is there but how it is conveyed may change along the way.

AD: I like the story behind your latest series: The Woman Who Never Existed. It was inspired by the words of Eleonora Duse: ‘away from the stage I do not exist.’ It feels like you have a deep understanding of her character? Do you associate yourself with her in any way?

AN: My character in 'The Woman Who Never Existed' is all fiction, inspired by what Eleonora said. Her words instantly gave me a story - the story of an actress who started to disappear when no one was looking. Even though the quote is almost a century old, I think many people can relate to that now. My character has no purpose if no one sees her. She is so used to putting on an act, that when there is no role to play she no longer knows what to do.

AD: While working on your latest series you have created the specific atmosphere and feel for each photograph. You also play the role of Eleonora Duse. Is this your usual way of working?

AN: Although my character is not a reflection of Eleonora the actress, the world I saw after reading her words was inspired by her. I loosely staged my character in Italy in the early 20th century. Most of this series is shot in Italy. I rented several houses and apartments as well as a Victorian theatre, focusing on places with rich textures and patterns to contrast my characters bleak personality. The elaborate costumes and lush interiors are her illusion, without them she fades away. I always work alone, so collecting costumes, finding locations, doing hair and makeup, playing the part as well as taking the picture is all just part of my process.

AD: Your series ‘Darlene & Me’ 2014 is incredibly beautiful. What is it about?

AN: 'Darlene & Me' started with the content of an old suitcase. After looking through it for the first time I got a strong sense of the previous owner. The case belonged to a beauty counselor named Darlene. It contained makeup samples, brochures and receipts from her few sales. I found so many signs of uneasiness in her possessions. Most of the case appeared to be untouched but in August 1960 Darlene sold a jar of 'Liquid beauty' and one 'temptress hairspray'. Both were to herself. The case left me with a strong feeling of one woman's attempt at success and a sense of who got in her way. I started to picture her alone, being both beauty counselor and costumer and this led me to my fictional version of ‘Darlene' and her relationship to herself.

AD: Which contemporary photographers do you follow and admire?

AN: One of the shows I enjoyed most in resent years is Taryn Simon's show, 'Paperwork and the will of Capital'. I also loved discovering Clare Strand's work at Paris Photo last year.

AD: Do you have any dream projects you would like to realise?

AN: I do, my next character is being created as we speak, but I can't tell you just yet!

Stan DOUGLAS: DCTs and Scenes from the Blackout (projected 1st / 18 votes) February 22—April 7, 2018

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographs by Stan Douglas—the artist’s fourteenth solo exhibition with the gallery—at 525 West 19th Street in New York. On view will be works from two recent series, DCT (2016–ongoing) and Blackout (2017), that together illustrate the artist’s overarching interest in the nature of photographic representation and its relationship to reality.

Since the late 1980s, Douglas has created films and photographs—and more recently theater productions and other multidisciplinary projects—that investigate the parameters of their medium. His wide-ranging inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible. Since the beginning of his career, photography has been a central focus of Douglas’s practice, utilized at first as a means of preparing for his films and eventually as a powerful pictorial tool in its own right. The artist is influenced in particular by media theorist Vilém Flusser’s notion of the photographic image as an encoded language that is determined by a specific set of technological, social, cultural, and political circumstances.

The abstract compositions that comprise Douglas’s DCT series are in essence synthetic pictures that look at photography as an optical image in the broadest sense. To create these works, Douglas manipulates a sequence of data points referred to as a “DCT” (discrete cosine transform), which specify how JPEG images are compressed. He manually inputs the frequencies, amplitudes, and color values that make up each work—determining each composition solely by entering this series of numbers into a custom-designed program. The resulting images emerge as photographs of a hermetic language, completely divorced from any referent in the real world. Printed on large, square panels that have been primed with gesso, they stretch the notion of the photographic and blur the boundaries between photography and painting. The first works in the series were debuted in Douglas’s 2016 Hasselblad Award solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the compositions that will be on view in this exhibition represent a more expansive and nuanced investigation into pictorial abstraction as well as the complex relationship between technology and image making.

Conversely, in his Blackout photographs, Douglas has scripted and staged scenes from a hypothetical present-day emergency scenario of the total loss of power in New York City. A rare series set in contemporary times, and only Douglas’s second work to be shot in New York, these imagined vignettes are meticulously planned, seamlessly interweaving fact and fiction in their evocation of past events that affected the city, such as the 1977 blackout or, more recently, Hurricane Sandy. Beginning with his 2008 Crowds and Riots series, in which he reconstructed the 1971 Vancouver Gastown Riots, Douglas has used the photographic medium as a tool for understanding the interpersonal dynamics that arise in such moments of societal fracture. In 2017, the artist turned his focus to the pervasive global unrest of 2011—a year that saw Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and riots in cities including London and Douglas’s native Vancouver, amongst other mass protests. In Blackout, as in these related series, Douglas juxtaposes images that are filmic in their sweeping overview of what a collectively felt catastrophe might look like, with others that offer intimate glimpses into individual experiences. Through this visual tension, he effectively redirects focus to a basic human level—foregrounding how new rules and relationships are forged in such liminal moments and evoking a range of emotions through subtle visual cues.

Jason LEE: (projected 2nd / 11 votes total)

Jason Lee’s Photography of a Dust-Covered America by Matt Williams FORMAT MAGAZINE: 18.08.2016

Photographer, actor and skateboarder Jason Lee talks about the launch of his new limited edition instant film book.

Sometimes, when speaking with artists and creatives—musicians, photographers, graphic designers, you name it—there’s a palpable lack of excitement when it comes to speaking about their creative process. It’s totally forgivable: not every part of the process is exhilarating, and, having talked about it one too many times, they might feel they’re beating a dead horse. But Jason Lee is nothing if not excited about photography.

When I off-handedly ask about how he got started with peel-apart instant film, Lee unravels everything you’d need to know over a solid 10 minutes, including what type of camera to buy and why, battery conversions, which films to use and where to find them, the different qualities of each, and why he loves every one of them.

The way he speaks is indicative of someone with an unquenchable drive to create, but that would’ve been clear from simply looking at his multiple careers. Lee first made his name as a skateboarder in the early 1990’s, and traces the big awakening of his creative urges back to hanging out with the original “weirdo skaters” and launching his own Stereo Skateboards, where they made videos with Super 8 film, scored skate parts with jazz, and incorporated still work from photographers like Tobin Yelland, Gabe Morford, and Ari Marcopoulos into their videos. But maybe most influential was the legendary skater Mark Gonzales, who Lee deems the “Bob Dylan of skateboarding.”

“He was the first dude to skate to jazz,” Lee says over the phone from his home in Denton, Texas. “That was the cool thing about Mark. Video Days was his idea. It was the first video of its kind—it was just fun. It was full of character, and had an interesting array of musical genres, and it had life and creativity to it. I think that’s why to this day, it’s a lot of people’s favourite skate video, at least of the early classics. That’s what we were exposed to, so I feel blessed skateboarding was able to expose me to so many different facets of creative life, and all the different genres and mediums.”

Lee says being in that environment of skaters, artists, photographers, musicians that “it gets into you and everything you take on after that, it feels almost appropriate. It felt totally organic to get into something like photography.”

In those days, photography was mostly an interest rather than a career path. Lee is perhaps best known for his work as an actor—you might remember him as the titular character from My Name Is Earl (2005-2009), but if you haven’t seen Mallrats (1995), make it a priority—and it wasn’t until 2001, that Lee picked up a couple professional film cameras, a Leica M6 and Mamiya medium format camera, and started shooting regularly. It quickly became a passion, and that’s where his new book, the first of two volumes with Refueled Magazine, comes in.

As part of the magazine’s One Series, Lee’s first volume, limited to 500 signed and numbered copies, collects 184 pages of Polaroid and Fujifilm instant photos from 2006-2016. The second, Lee says, will come out next year, and will be filled with conventional film photos from the past 15 years.

A look at Lee’s Instagram gives you a clear idea of what the book contains: visions of a dust-covered America, forgotten and abandoned gas stations and motels, barren landscapes, and the occasional detached but striking portrait. There’s an unnerving chill that runs through Lee’s work—not sad, but certainly calm and pensive—that conjures up the same feelings you get watching the windswept southern scenes of Paris, Texas.

“Certainly, my aim isn’t to make it depressing, but there is a little bit of a loneliness to it,” Lee says. “In a way, that’s kind of interesting, because it makes you want to stop and maybe pay a little more attention. It’s isolated, in a way. There’s something isolated about it, so you’re focused on what the thing is as its own piece, but then hopefully there’s a cohesive overall piece.”

Lee speaks passionately about arriving at that aesthetic. In his downtown L.A. studio, in the early 2000’s, he was doing a lot of experimental stuff: “strobe lighting and shooting portraits and pushing and pulling film, using different filters.” Then he had a “holy shit” moment when he discovered he could get 8x10 Polaroid film, which he used to buy for $200 at Samy’s on Fairfax. (Now, expired boxes of 8x10 Polaroid film goes for a slightly more steep $1,000 on eBay.) The connection was sparked when he took the Polaroids into the desert.

“I shot some 8x10 and 4x5 Polaroids out on the road, of old churches and gas stations, and there was just something about the film that made it seem even more distant, and desolate, and quiet and removed, and isolated. There’s something about the peel-apart film that creates that kind of feel.”

While instant film can be hard to come by these days (unless it’s by the Impossible Project), and even harder to afford, Lee is adamant there are no disadvantages to the medium, besides the fact most of it is expired.

“As long as you keep them out of sunlight, they’ll never fade. The Polaroid black and white stuff is my favourite film, and I’ve shot a ton of other conventional films. There’s just something smooth and very charcoal-like about it. I like the one-off factor. No two are ever gonna be alike. You peel it, it’s a print, and it’s right there, and that’s it. You scan it, you can make digital Epson prints, but there’s only one of it and that’s it. What you get is what you get.”

Shortly after getting into the large format Polaroid film, Lee saw a Henry Wessel exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and found exactly what he’d been looking for. “That’s when I knew like, ‘Oh, this is what’s appealing to me, definitely, I know for sure now.’ Just shooting life as it is: not forcing anything, not staging anything, and trying to find something interesting in the so-called mundane.”

At that point, he was more or less addicted to road tripping and embarked on a 4,200-mile jaunt, shooting dozens of rolls of film and Polaroids, all while keeping a certain approach in mind, which he says goes back to the New York Museum of Modern Art, when a 30-year-old Wessel brought a stack of prints to the museum’s director of photography John Szarkowski. It was work that, Lee says, was Wessel’s attempt at a, “Life Magazine kinda thing—poor kids playing on a porch in the South with muddy faces and all this stuff, like American stories, which was great stuff.”

But then Szarkowski got to a photo of an old truck sitting in the middle of a field. “And Szarkowski said, ‘You need to shoot more like this. Instead of trying emulate this other thing and tell a story and get yourself in the mix, just remove yourself and shoot what’s there. Let the subject be the author, instead of you trying to tell a story with your camera.’ That changed the course of Wessel’s shooting.”

More succinctly, Lee sums up his approach with more of Szarkowski’s wisdom:

“The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.”

But his love of photography (and clearly, its history) isn’t limited to his own work or even the work of those who influenced him. Originally an Instagram hold-out—“I thought Instagram was just a bunch of memes and silly selfies and photos of food and people’s cats,” he says—Lee started the account Film Photographic just over a year ago, which describes itself as “a co-curated community gallery and resource page by and for film photographers.” The website should be ready by the fall, he says, and he’s got big plans for it, including publishing their own coffee table books, collecting the work of Film Photographic community photographers in multiple volumes.

“It’ll hopefully be the first of its kind, in that it’ll be multiple galleries, resource pages, message boards, cameras and film for sale—like you can sell on there—and how-to videos, and a list of cool photo books and local camera shops all around the world. Just a really involved film resource website.”

Those who use those resources will be lucky to have Lee involved, as he’s got suggestions about everything from road trip routes (“Fly to Chicago, rent a car, and take old Route 66 all the way to California”) to the “weird line” between kitsch and sincerity while documenting it: “If there’s a genuine appreciation for that aesthetic or that architecture or the landscape or those contrasts, that environment, it’s gonna read as genuine.”

Maybe the best thing for photographers to take away from Lee, though, is that boundless, unexplainable enthusiasm he approaches his work with—his genuine love for the next trip, and the next shot.

“If I’m driving down some back road, and I see an old school bus in the middle of a field, and the only other thing there is an old rusted out basketball hoop, I don’t know why I wanna photograph that, but I do,” Lee explains. “I wanna put the basketball hoop on the left side of the frame, and I wanna put the back end of the school bus on the right side of the frame. I wanna contrast those two things and frame up my composition and take the photo, and I get excited about it! You’ll have people going, ‘Well that’s just a photo of an old school bus and a basketball hoop in the middle of a field.’ But for some reason for me, if I get the shot I like, I get really excited about it. I don’t know why.”

Victoria SAMBUNARIS: Nexus. (projected 24th / 17 votes total.) Yancey Richardson Gallery 6/7.17

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Nexus, an exhibition of large-scale photographs by Victoria Sambunaris. Known for her extensive projects examining the intersections of modern civilization, geology, industry, and the natural environment, in Nexus the artist investigates the crossroads of the petrochemical and industrial cargo trade, and alludes to the expansion of global markets and the intensification of fossil fuel consumption worldwide.

Following the completion of her 2009-2010 series on the US Mexico border, Sambunaris spent four years traveling from the southern border of Texas to the Permian Basin and the Gulf Coastal Plains, photographing and interviewing local residents, pipe layers, rail men, oil workers, shipping executives, fishermen, truckers, port workers and marine biologists. Her research revealed an intricate matrix linking millions of miles of roadways, rails, pipelines, docks and waterways, both above ground and beneath, interwoven to maintain the uninterrupted hum of modern consumer economy.

Minimalist and reductive, the resulting photographs present a visually nuanced portrait of a vast industrial terrain embedded within the grassy plains and estuarial corridors of the region. Nodding to the uninflected minimalism of Donald Judd and Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sambunaris details vast expanses of monochromatic oil and gas pipes stacked in open lots in preparation to be trucked, railed, and laid underground; endless lines of railway tank cars moving silently along the horizon line of an empty landscape; and multinational ships afloat the Houston Ship Channel, connecting Houston, home to the second largest petrochemical complex in the world, with markets throughout the world.

Although Sambunaris’s cool, precisely composed images do not offer political commentary, they invite consideration of man’s ineffaceable mark on the environment. As the artist writes, “The vast transportation network of the petrochemical industry, a near invisible part of a seemingly tranquil landscape, impacts the everyday lives of everyone involved, from oil riggers to Gulf Coast fishermen to consumers across the globe, interconnected and interdependent as the global economy continues its inexorable expansion.” Born in 1964, Sambunaris graduated from the Yale University MFA program in 1999. In 2011, the Albright- Knox Art Gallery presented a ten-year survey of the artist’s work, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Nevada Museum of Art, the Rubin Center, University of Texas, El Paso and the University of Maryland. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe. In 2010 Sambunaris received the Anonymous Was a Woman Award and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship Grant. In 2013, Radius published Taxonomy of the Landscape, a survey of ten years of work.

Zanele MUHOLI: Brave Beauties & Somnyama Ngonyama (projected 26th / 11 votes total.) (‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’) Yancey Richardson, 10.17

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by artist and visual activist, Zanele Muholi. This is the artist’s third exhibition with the gallery. Comprising two bodies of work, Brave Beauties, on show in New York for the first time, and Somnyama Ngonyama (‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’), the exhibition brings together two integral elements within Muholi’s practice: intimate studies of queer life in her native South Africa and self portraiture.

Begun in 2014, Brave Beauties is a series of portraits depicting transwomen in South Africa, and as such represents an overt challenge to a culture that continues to violently discriminate against the LGBTQI community. In a similar vein to the ongoing project Faces and Phases, Muholi creates celebratory photographs of empowered individuals who assert their identities through their confident poses, taking ownership of the spaces they inhabit.

Turning the camera on herself for the Somnyama Ngonyama series, Muholi explores the concepts of self- representation and self-definition by experimenting with different characters and archetypes. The photographs, taken in various cities throughout Europe, the U.S., Asia and Africa, use ad hoc settings and everyday everyday objects as props to reference South African political history, contemporary existence and events in the artist’s personal life. Seen together, these images map her movements as she travels across the world. One image from this series will be exhibited as a floor to ceiling photographic mural. Monumental in scale, the photograph boldly asserts its status as a singular object, forcing the viewer to confront their desire to gaze at Muholi’s black figure.

In both bodies of work, Muholi uses portraiture as a form of exposure to disrupt the dominant images of black women in the media today and to bear witness to both the brutality and the joy of black, queer, lesbian, and transgendered individuals in South Africa.

In a recent article in The Guardian, Muholi states: “This is about our lives, and if queer history, trans history, if politics of blackness and self-representation are so key in our lives, we just cannot sit down and not document and bring it forth.”

In 2009 Muholi founded Inkanyiso, a non-profit organization dedicated to visual art, media advocacy, and visual literacy training for South Africa’s LGBTQI community. In 2017, Muholi participates in Performa 17’s “South African Pavilion Without Walls,” by presenting large-scale portraits in public spaces across New York City, including Times Square. In Spring 2018, Aperture will release the monograph Somnyama Ngonyama, featuring one hundred images from the series and twenty-three texts by writers, artists and poets.

Muholi lives in Johannesburg. Her work has been exhibited at Documenta 13; the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale; and the 29th São Paulo Biennale. Solo exhibitions have taken place at the Autograph ABP, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kulturhistorek Museum, Oslo; Einsteinhaus, Ulm; Schwules Museum, Berlin; Casa Africa, Las Palmas and Brooklyn Museum, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Brooklyn Museum; the High Museum of Art; the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Modern, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London among others.

Christopher SOUKUP: Stills from movies never made Max (projected 31st / 16 votes total) www.christophersoukup.com

Photography has been a slow evolution for me and now has split into two genres. I am drawn to the simplicity of light and shadow with black and white photography. The medium yields a revealing and simultaneous obscuring of reality while best depicting tension and emotion. My portfolio covers digital work, analog and sometimes use of long exposures to capture combinations of time that on the camera can see.

Over a gradual period, I have made photographs focusing on a cinematic like quality. While seemingly a distinct departure from my black white work, I find the two to be inextricably linked and quite similar. Each photograph adheres to a widescreen cinematic aspect ratio of today or cinema past. Thought this restriction my work is designed to show what it feels like to be in this place, a moment with a slant to a dark and quiet mood

Any photograph display on the site is available for sale and is limited to editions of twenty-five prints. Please contact me for more information regarding sizes, paper options and pricing.

Gregory HALPERN: ZZYXZ (practice Round /12 votes total)

The photographer’s new work, named after a village in the Mojave desert, exploits the golden state’s unique light to create mysterious, surreal images Sean O'Hagan, THE GUARDIAN 15 Oct 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/oct/15/gregory- halpern-zzyzx-photography-book-california-los-angeles

‘I saw this woman on her push-bike in a white fur coat and fur hood. She was on her way to the supermarket dressed like that and she was not happy about being stopped by a stranger. I pleaded with her for a picture and she gave me maybe 60 seconds.’ (detail, see gallery for full crop) Photograph: Gregory Halpern / Webber Gallery Space

‘Los Angeles is so massive, confusing, beautiful, harsh and strange that it almost defies you to make work about it,” says the photographer Gregory Halpern. “It is an impossible project in a way.” In his intriguingly titled new book, ZZYZX – named after a village on the edge of the Mojave desert in Saint Bernardino County – Halpern has created a California of the mind, a place both real and metaphorical, familiar yet alien. The photographs hold all kinds of resonances from the dark, surreal films of David Lynch to the anxious urban neighbourhoods evoked in the early essays of Joan Didion.

Even the light in Los Angeles seems compromised: there’s a beautiful haziness to it caused by the pollution in the air Gregory Halpern

“My work begins with the notion of documentary, but I want it to be more than that,” says Halpern, who grew up in Buffalo, New York, and now lives further upstate in Rochester. “It is grounded in reality, but it occupies an inbetween space between documentary and a certain sense of mystery. I want to always leave room in the pictures for the viewer’s thoughts and projections.”

Born in 1977, Halpern studied history and literature at Harvard, before completing a postgraduate degree in fine art at the California College of Arts. His previous books have included Omaha Sketchbook, another less heightened journey into the American landscape, and East of the Sun, West of the Moon, a collaboration with the photographer Ahndraya Parlato, comprising of images taken on the solstice or equinox. ‘I just came upon this couple and it turned out they were moving into a friend’s house ... the image of them walking and pulling their possessions seemed mysterious and timeless. Plus, nobody walks in Los Angeles.’ Photograph: Gregory Halpern / Webber Gallery Space

Halpern spent five years on ZZYZX, often travelling to locations in California he picked at random from Google maps. It took him another year to edit the results, trawling though an estimated thousand rolls of film, about half of which were shot in the final year after a Guggenheim grant enabled him to live in California for a time. “I was struck constantly by the beauty and the harshness of the environment, by the sunshine and the smog, the vast space of the desert and the choking traffic of the cities,” says Halpern. “Even the light in Los Angeles seems compromised: there’s a beautiful haziness to it caused by the pollution in the air.”

That unreal light is one of the defining aspects of Halpern’s Californian photographs, falling on landscapes and faces, heightening the sense of unreality outsiders often detect in LA. The British documentary photographer Chris Killip, who taught Halpern at Harvard, says he has broken away from “the sanctified cliched reverence” of traditional American landscape photography and “seems able to connect with this massive subject in ways that others cannot”. In one striking image, Halpern frames a black-stemmed Joshua tree, scorched by a forest fire, against earth and sky, its spiky golden leaves insisting on life even amid this deathly environment. In another, a raised hand, its open palm tattooed with seven stars, shades an unseen face from the unforgiving glare of the Californian sun. The stars, Halpern adds, could refer to a biblical quotation from Revelation 1:16.

Earlier working titles for the book included Babylon and Kingdom, but Halpern’s publisher, Michael Mack, advised against them, thinking rightly that they were too symbolic. Many of Halpern’s images, though, would be apocalyptic if they weren’t so formally beautiful. That beauty is troubling in a different way, when it is applied to the portraits of the homeless and the struggling that punctuate the book.

‘The guy reached up like this and I instinctively photographed it. There’s a reference to the American flag there, I guess.’ Photograph: Gregory Halpern / Webber Gallery Space There's still a notion of manifest destiny in California but also that it’s the end of the dream… you can go no further

“Most of the portraits are of people I encountered on the streets as I was photographing,” says Halpern. “I am not trying to make a statement about their situation in the way that a concerned documentary photographer might do. Again, it is about the reality and the mystery of the images, and, to a degree, about the questions they raise. There’s a picture of a homeless guy lying on the grass laughing, but is it a happy image or a sad one? Then, there’s the viewer’s reaction to it – is it mean? Is it exploitative?”

Halpern, one senses, is still grappling with the meaning of his work. ZZYZX is certainly a departure from the quieter observational style of his earlier work. “I see ZZYZX as part of a continuum but edging a little closer towards fiction,” he says. “I’m not saying it is fiction, but it has that element of being more somehow than the real – more beautiful, more ugly, more complicated and contradictory. Like LA itself, in fact.”

In a recent talk given at his London gallery, Webber, where images from ZZYZX are currently on show, Halpern discussed his often obsessive working methods. Once he was on a flight from Buffalo to Los Angeles, he recalled, when the pilot announced they were flying over a forest fire that was visible below. From his middle-aisle seat, Halpern couldn’t see it, but when he landed in Los Angeles, he immediately hired a car and drove 90 miles back to where it was raging in order to photograph it.

‘In California, there is an element of dread that makes you feel the whole place could be on the edge of extinction. That’s there in the city but in the natural world, too. The constant threat of fire and the attendant lack of water is another example of the strange extremity of the place.’ Photograph: Gregory Halpern / Webber Gallery Space

Images of fires and their aftermath are scattered throughout the book, another metaphor for the dread that haunts the Californian dream. The book’s title, though, comes from a village built on the promise of California’s scarcest commodity – water. The village Zzyzx, pronounced zye-zix, was formerly called Soda Springs after a natural spring there, but was rechristened by a mineral water pioneer, Curtis Howe Springer, in 1944. The eccentric Springer named it after what he claimed to be the last word that could be spelt in the English language.

“The word has a dystopian, futuristic aspect,” says Halpern, “even though it came out of a utopian dream that Springer had while squatting the land for three years. He somehow willed the word and the place into being. That notion of manifest destiny is there still in California, but also the sense that it’s the end of the dream. You get there and you can go no further. You are faced with yourself and your life, but just in a more beautiful setting.”

ZZYZX is published by Mack (£35). The work is on show at Webber Gallery Space, London W1, until 29 Oct.

Kathrin SONNTAG: Problems and Solutions (projected 27th / 16 votes total.) November 9 – December 22, 2017

"In the Hollywood movie Apollo 13, a group of scientists and engineers manage to square the circle in an emergency situation: three astronauts in space are in danger of suffocating because of an exploded oxygen tank and a defective air filter. Despite all precautions and careful planning the engineers are faced with the problem of finding a way to connect the air filter systems of the space shuttle and the lunar landing craft (one of which is circular and the other square), and succeed by using basic tools. In the high-tech showpiece space shuttle, the three astronauts' lives are saved with the help of a piece of cardboard, a urine pouch, a tennis sock and adhesive tape. This scene illustrates the mechanism of provisional solutions: depending on the means available in the given circumstances, they are the result of the motivation to act in an unforeseen emergency and the decision: this is how we're going to tackle this problem for the time being." 1

Thomas Erben Gallery is excited to present its first solo exhibition with German artist, Kathrin Sonntag, whose practice encompasses photography, sculpture, film, and installation. Her work was last exhibited in New York at the Guggenheim's Photo-Poetics during winter 2015/16.

Playfully disrupting viewers' perception, Sonntag's work sows confusion across space, time, object, and architecture, blurring the line between photography and reality. Her exhibitions frequently incorporate the sites her works are exhibited at, using life-sized photographic wallpaper and careful installation to transfigure the exhibition space into a zone of heightened perception.

With Problem and Solutions, an ongoing photography series by the artist, Sonntag has been documenting examples of makeshift solutions made by ordinary people for quotidian problems. The photographs capture a provisional character — ad-hoc, inventive, sometimes crude solutions that Sonntag wryly chronicles, speaking to the (immediate) questions of life.

Bearing the same name, Sonntag’s exhibition itself ultimately shares this provisional appeal. Working at the gallery for the show during August, Sonntag photographed a range of whimsical setups, using objects at hand in the gallery to display a selection of images from her series. The results were transferred 1:1 to photographic wallpapers, which — displayed with corresponding objects — reenter the gallery's space.

By creating unusual solutions to the problem of presenting Problems and Solutions, the installation echoes the makeshift character documented in the photographs, redoubling: this is how we're going to tackle this problem for the time being.

1. Antje Havemann & Ḿargit Schild. “'You Can Use My Tights' or: The Phenomenon of Temporary Solutions.” Landscape Research, Vol. 32, no. 1 (February 2007): 45-55. Kathrin Sonntag (b. 1981) lives and works in Berlin. Solo shows include Neuer Aachener Kunstverein; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Kunstverein Hamburg; Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen; and Swiss Institute, New York. Sonntag’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt; Kunstverein Hannover; the Third Moscow International Biennial for Young Art; Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; and Sculpture Center, New York, among others. Most recently her work was included in Photo Poetics, Guggenheim Museum, New York, and shown in a solo presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong

Kathrin Sonntag would like to thank PHASE ONE, in particular Heinz Papst, for generously providing the photographic equipment.

Kathrin Sonntag, Problems and Solutions @Thomas Erben By Loring Knoblauch / COLLECTOR DAILY: December 12, 2017 https://collectordaily.com/kathrin-sonntag-problems-and-solutions-thomas-erben/

Kathrin Sonntag’s recent body of work Problems and Solutions starts off as an understated testament to the power of human ingenuity. Like the inventive efforts of astronauts fixing a broken air filter with a tennis sock and duct tape, her pictures are whimsical evidence that when a problem presents itself, a temporary or make-do solution is often where we begin, and if that solution serves its purpose well enough, it may never need to be replaced by something more functional or elegant. And so our world becomes populated by a surprising number of jury- rigged eccentricities that get the job done with a minimum of fuss.

Like many photographers documenting found oddities, Sonntag has developed an eye for these kinds of overlooked discoveries. Is a wheeled dumpster rolling away too much? Tie it to a nearby tree with a piece of rope. Is a leafy tree interrupting your scaffolding? Built it right around the tree. Is an ancient tombstone embedded in the floor in the way? Construct the new woodwork right over it. Or is a heavy tree limb sagging too low? Prop it up with a single two-by-four. When we see these isolated solutions now, they look almost ridiculous, but it’s hard not to marvel at their obvious effectiveness.

If all that Sonntag did was to show us a deadpan parade of these kinds of funky makeshift inventions, her work would be hard to separate from that of many others who have observed similar strangeness. But her quirky evidence photographs seem to function much more as an artistic jumping off spot than as a finished endpoint, deliberately bridging into the realm of installation.

This transformation into three-dimensions begins with how Sonntag prints her images. Each photograph is printed on vinyl wallpaper and many have been mounted on wooden panel (a few are affixed directly to the wall or hung from the ceiling). The trick (and I must admit that I too was fooled until the gallery pointed it out to me) is that the white border seen around the images isn’t actually a physical frame – it’s simply a white border, folded around the edge of the wood to look like a frame. This turns out to be important because Sonntag can then hang these glassless, edgeless, flat objects with much more flexibility, installing them on the sides of the posts in the center of the gallery or leaning them against walls.

The first layer of Sonntag’s installation-centric thinking comes in displaying the images in a manner similar to the solution scenes she has captured in her photographs. This is a roundabout way of describing the following, as an example: Sonntag’s print of planks and boards tied to a tree to keep it upright is actually physically tied to one of the gallery posts using a black strap. This clever investigation of a photograph as an object in space, which then draws its installation inspiration from its own subject, has a satisfyingly recursive quality. Her image of a closet mounted high on the wall (so the closet doors don’t bang into the other furniture and therefore can more easily open) is hung, you guessed it, high up on a wall behind the gallery reception desk.

But Sonntag doesn’t stop there – another group of artworks turns the conceptual crank one more time, adding both an image-of-an-image duality and a selection of sculptural objects to the layered installation mix. Without getting too figure-it-out literal, let’s consider an unpacking of the work Problems and Solutions: Section 1. Sonntag starts with a photograph of a found oddity – an improvised table, set up using a tree stump as a support, a tarp as a covering, and some bricks and stones as weights to hold the tarp down to keep it from blowing away. She has then made a flat object print (as described above) of this image and installed it against a white wall by having it sit on top of another wooden table, and at the foot of this table, she has pooled a pile of green rope, perhaps as an echo of the green grass at the foot of the tree stump in the original picture. So the image of the “table” is sitting on another table. From there, she has made another image of this entire installation and hung this scrolling image from the ceiling of the gallery, using heavy stones to hold it to the floor and drizzling a strand of actual green rope around on the floor. So now, we have multiple layers of objects, images, and installations, all in one three-tiered, self-referencing nest of mind-bending ideas.

Without unraveling all of the iterative details in the other works on view here, suffice it to say that Sonntag uses a similarly brainy approach in her image of a mop hung over a wall to dry (and the associated ladder and paint roller physically installed in the gallery) and in an image of black tape used to patch up a broken glass door (and the black tape used to affix the image of the image to the gallery wall). In each case, she’s asking us to follow her step-wise transformations, progressively moving from straight-up face-value photography to installations that twist and bend those original visual ideas into much more complex constructions in three-dimensional space.

Some will surely find these kind of machinations unnecessarily obtuse, but to my eye, these same layers of misdirection often feel vibrantly and engagingly sophisticated. For Sonntag, each photograph has become the kernel of a system of discrete relationships with real physical properties. That’s an intellectual framework with some profound implications for what photography can be, worthy of some additional puzzling and wondering.

Kathrin Sonntag b. 1981, Berlin https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/kathrin-sonntag

Born in 1981 in Berlin, Kathrin Sonntag received a BA and an MA in visual arts from the Universität der Künste Berlin (2000–06). Sonntag distorts, refracts, and fragments quotidian objects in order to inspire her audience to untether their preconceived ways of looking and seeing. Her pictures regularly confound perception of illusionistic space and undermine assumptions about truth in photography.

Encompassing sculpture, photography, film, and drawing, her work offers a complex analysis of the nature of objects and the division between fiction and reality. Using stools, tripods, tables, and mirrors to create unusual perspectives, Sonntag’s installations strip meaning from readily identifiable objects via photographic experiments within the confines of her studio. Mittnacht (2008) comprises eighty-one slides of found images of paranormal phenomena photographed among the artist’s studio tools and furniture. The supernatural elements are enhanced by their disorienting placement within the studio, which both creates illusions and allows errors and smudges in processing to cast an eerie shadow on certain images in the series. In Wood Mirror (2010), a small mirror appears to point outward toward the viewer but fails to reflect the expected image, instead revealing a nearby object. Similarly, in the photograph flic-flac #2 (2009), mirrors distort the viewer’s perspective of the coffee mug depicted, causing one to question how a mirror can simultaneously reveal, reflect, and conceal. Through such manipulation of material, Sonntag challenges the infallibility of documentary photography and uncovers inconsistencies within the nature of the visual record. In 2009, Sonntag was awarded the Dr. Georg and Josi Guggenheim Prize. The primary reference for the artist’s subsequent exhibition was the Christie’s catalogue from the auction of the Guggenheims’ modern art collection after their deaths. The images that comprise Annex (2010) depict the catalogue opened to various spreads and arranged in casual tableaux around Sonntag’s studio. The objects placed on or near the book’s pages find visual affinities and echoes in the modernist masterworks pictured within.

Sonntag received a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD, Deutscher Akademischer Austaunschdienst) research scholarship in 2011. Her work has been installed in solo presentations at a range of international institutions including Swiss Institute – Contemporary Art, New York (2009); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2011); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2013); and Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2013). Her work has also been featured in multiple group exhibitions, including Leopards in the Temple, SculptureCenter, New York (2010); Moscow International Biennial for Young Art (2012); At Work, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany (2013); Pictures in Time, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); and Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015). Sonntag lives and works in Berlin.

Nick BRANDT: JOHN (projected 23rd / 12 total.)

I've grown up peering into the pages of National Geographic and watching lots of Discovery Channel documentaries to get a sense of a world beyond the crows and squirrels I could see in the backyard. More often than not, these magazines and documentaries showcased African fauna. At this point, I've seen so many PBS shows about lion family dramas and meerkat antics that the wonder at the existence of a landscape containing such creatures has eroded. Brandt's photos cure me of this unfair "been there, done that" attitude I've developed over time. Moreover, the photographs themselves are downright breath-taking, at times poignant and increasingly disturbing. What seems to have been a career that began as an attempt to romanticize the creatures of the Maasai Mara, to see the animals in a fashion both idealized and untouched by human intervention, now has morphed into a confrontation with the havoc we wreak on the landscapes those creatures have no choice but to inhabit. His work communicates a frustration with the destruction humans so capriciously exact in order to collect ivory and stroke the fragile ego of the big-game hunter. Yet, in more recent work, it appears he has also made inroads on more nuanced approach to the shared tragedy both human and animal actors suffer on their shared stage. Introducing previously produced animal portraits into scenes of human construction and demolition works to collapse the struggles of both worlds into one, but doesn't quite go all the way. The photograph Street with Lioness & Cub so wants to inject the animals into the human situation that he manipulates the lion photograph into forced perspective with the street photograph. Apart from feeling even more staged than his other photographs, I go back and forth with how successful he is in placing the animals in the scenes of their former homes. On the one hand, Brandt heightens the jarring experience the land and animals have experienced with the jarring juxtaposition of the two merged photographs, what exists now and what existed before we came along. On the other hand, that urge toward nostalgia, his romanticism may be holding him back from engaging what animal life really is and has been like in those blasted landscapes. He may do well not to lionize the lions so much while making the humans out to be wholly villainous.

Jeff Chien-Hsing LIAO: Central Park New York | 24 Solar Terms (projected 17th / 16 votes total.) Foley Gallery 9/10.17

Foley Gallery is pleased to present Central Park New York - 24 Solar Terms, a solo exhibition featuring photographs by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao.

The title of the show takes its name from the ancient Chinese lunar calendar, which divides the year into 24 segments, each segment given a specific solar term. This system provided a time frame for agriculture, everyday life and festivals. Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao was born in Taiwan in 1977, and immigrated in 1999 to the United States, residing in the Queens Borough of New York City. He lived in close proximity of the 7-subway line, and created his renowned “Habitat 7” series, which stated his claim and love for New York City.

Over the years, Liao has transitioned from large format film to digital photography. By digitally manipulating multiple exposures of Central Park while adapting a vertical format traditionally found in 17th century Chinese scroll paintings, Liao pays homage to both his Taiwanese heritage and identity as a New Yorker. Central Park New York, 24 Solar Terms looks at a dynamic and ever-changing landscape. At once familiar, the “lung of Manhattan” still reveals surprises. Liao invites us into mysterious enclaves primed for intimacy and reflection carefully hidden among the familiar public gathering sites and well-founded landmarks. In 2012, Liao won the Emerging Icon in Photography Award from George Eastman House. His series “Habitat 7” received critical acclaim, and in 2005, Liao was honored with the New York Times Magazine “Capture the Times” photography contest.

Liao’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Queens Museum, NY, Brooklyn Museum, NY, J. Paul Getty Museum, LA, George Eastman House-International Museum of Photography and Film, NY, the Norton Museum of Art and the Deutsche Bank art collection. Liao’s first monograph, Habitat 7, was published in 2008 by Nazraeli Press, which also published his second monograph, Coney Island, in 2013. In October of 2014, Aperture Foundation published his third monograph, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao: New York, encompassing his work in New York for the past 10 years. In September 2017, Nazraeli Press will publish his fourth monograph, Central Park New York that will coincide with his solo exhibition, of the same name at Foley Gallery.

Eduardo J. GARCIA (projected 4th / 12 votes total) Ralph…

Eduardo J. Garcia was born in Havana, Cuba in 1978. He received his university degree at The Foreign Language Pedagogical High Institute “Enrique José Varona” as an English teacher in 2005 and also graduated from The Academy of Art in Havana. He is a self-taught, full-time freelance photographer and member of the Cuban Writers and Artists Association (UNEAC) since 2012. Garcia started his professional career as a street photographer in 2009. Based in Havana, he is motivated by the human condition and engaged with people present in his daily life. The presence of people and what is around them are key elements of his pictures. His work largely focuses on social issues, including poverty and homelessness. Garcia frequently works on the streets of Havana, capturing images that depict the environment of the lower class and their way of everyday life in the city. His images frequently depict the dignity and optimism of the Cuban people, often in the face of great struggles. This is a fitting metaphor for his country and its history. Many of his photographs are centered on the Malecon, a long walking path along the sea wall which protects the city of Havana and serves as a place to escape, socialize, swim, or just sit in the sun.

In 2012 Garcia obtained a Mention in the “Daily Life “category in the 1st Edition of The Latinoamerican Photographic Award. He has been the recipient of a Photographic Scholarship in The Santa Fe Workshops, “The Project Workshop” (2015) taught by Whitney Johnson, Deputy Director from National Geographic. In 2016 he won an Honorable Mention in the Photo Contest at Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. New Mexico, E.U. His series "Home" is finalist in The Magnum Photography Awards 2016

HOME is a recent project which is about Reynaldo, a person who has been living in an abandoned theater in Havana for more than 20 years. In this work he illustrates intimate views of Reynaldo’s daily life and shows him particularly just as one of thousands and thousands of Cubans having housing problems without any choice that have to carry on their lives the way they can with perseverance, determination and faith.

Maciej CZEPIEL: If Only I could Remember (projected 7th / 16 total.) (photographs and text) https://www.lensculture.com/projects/569856-if-i-could-only-remember

I was born in 1987 in Cracow, Poland; the Berlin wall was still up, and my parents wanted to escape, what they didn’t know to be, the last traces of communism left in the country. We flee to Germany, where we stay in a refugee camp for about a year, and then went to Canada for 7 years. Our last destination was Switzerland, where I live now. If I Could Only Remember is a travel through my memories, about the moments I spent at my youngest age, between 0 and 3. It all beguins with my first memory, which strangely coincides with the last day we spent at our refugee camp in Germany with my parents, before flying to Canada. The memory is me, sitting on the edge of a Jacuzzi, I then see my mother, wrapping me with a big towel.

With this project, I am retracing my memories of what I lived, and also the memories my mind created with the stories I’ve been told by my parents and relatives. I’ve tried to represent everything like in a dream, or maybe a blurred memory.

Some of the things are anchored in the real world and then represented as if in a dream. I’m alternating between the two worlds as if I was confused about the truth and the representation I’ve made myself believe were true. In these images, I am trying to show the viewer I am trying to recreate something, to show theme I am looking for some sort of answer or maybe trying to recreate a truth.

This is all a reflexion of my blurred memories I am trying to rediscover, to put a fresh image on. This project is my diploma work presented at CEPV, Vevey - Switzerland in juin 2017. It received the USPP prize which is given to the best diploma projet. It is also be exhibited at the Photoforum Pasquart in Biel - Switzerland in December 2017, and part of it is exhibited and the Biennale of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in la Chaux-de-Fonds - Switzerland.

Mauricio Toyo GOYA: SOFIE (projected 15th / 12 votes total.)

Mauricio Toro Goya’s “photographic theaters” are violent in content and delicate in form. Hand coloring each ambrotype, Goya’s process is personal and intimate to him, but difficult and heavy for the viewer of this work that produces many layers of distance. First, the photographs are of performances, forcing a reconsideration of what the “real” subject is. Next, the scenes are often historic, evoking times past that the viewer might be witnessing for the very first time through these photographs. The scenes are almost life-size, and yet the positive ambrotype process is so difficult to read in the blurred and fuzzy frames, the intensely contrasting tones, the quantity of action happening, and the unfamiliarity of such a photographic process in the modern age. Goya’s scenes force us to remember the history of colonization that this land bears through the persistent use of violent cultural motifs, like devil’s horns, Pinochet’s stern face, bruised bodies, blood, masks and rape. Bodies that transgress are used not as accessories but as main characters that stand firmly against an uncomfortable and brutal background. These tightly packed frames are tense in a way that somehow evokes the tension of daily life in the places Goya represents, be it Oaxaca, Mexico or a plaza in Chile’s Valparaiso. The discomfort of being in a colonized body and land is overwhelming. This work is so powerful and striking, yet I wish the beauty of life in Latin America was more represented.

Edmund CLARK: The Mountains of Majeed (projected 6th / 16 votes).27 January – 3 March 2018

British photographer Edmund Clark has spent more than a decade exploring the unseen processes, experiences and sites of contemporary conflict, with particular focus on the so-called War on Terror.

The Mountains of Majeed is a reflection on the end of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in Afghanistan through photography, found imagery and Taliban poetry. Based at Bagram Airfield, the largest American base in Afghanistan, and formerly home to 40,000, Edmund Clark examines the experience of the vast majority of military personnel and contractors who have serviced Enduring Freedom without ever leaving the base. Clark distills their war down to a concise series of photographs of the two views they have of Afghanistan: what they experience of the country over the walls or through the wire of their bases, and what they see through pictorial representations within these enclaves of high technology and occupation.

At Bagram Airfield, the view, both outside and inside, is dominated by the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Set against their looming presence, Clark’s images from his time spent embedded with the U.S. military, expose the dystopian relationship between the man-made landscape of Bagram and the country beyond its walls. Evoking an intangible awareness of the mountains beyond, and the unseen insurgents hiding within them, Clark’s quiet and contemplative images portray an alternative narrative to the one ordinarily presented by the media.

Echoes of the surrounding landscape resonate in Clark’s photographs of spaces within the walls of the base, finding visual rhymes in the craters formed by construction work, peaks of refuse-strewn razor wire and the precisely ordered vistas of military tents. Inside the buildings, the landscape is simulated by murals and artworks, representing another view of Afghanistan. On the walls of a dining facility, a series of paintings signed by an artist named ‘Majeed’ portray idealized scenes of mountain passes and lakes, in which Clark questions the influence of Western ideas of romantic or naive painting. Reflecting on the significance of the paintings’ location on an American base, Clark says: “How many tens of thousands of pairs of western eyes have registered the pastoral peace of these mountainscapes? Has anyone considered what they say of the country they are playing a part in occupying?”

In this exhibition, Majeed’s paintings have been reproduced as a series of picture postcards. Likening them to mementos for souvenir hunters of an idealized touristic landscape, Clark’s appropriation of the paintings offers a powerful reminder that the mountains remain out of Western reach. Clark says: “There is distance between these mountains. Vistas of tranquillity fabricated by hand from canvas, wood and paint. Images from an enclave captured in high resolution by the latest digital technology. Two cultures divided by landscape and time. Ever present mountains forever beyond boots confined for a duration, within walls of occupation, on a ground of gravel and tarmac. And there is convergence. Both are mountains of the imagination. Both are representations of enduring freedom; and in both the mountains belong to Majeed.”

The Victory Column of Enduring Freedom is a monument to the notion of victory in the war in Afghanistan. It is a reference to Emperor Trajan's column in the forum in Rome which records his campaigns in Dacia, modern-day Romania, through relief sculpture scenes spiralling up the column. The form of the spiralled column has been re- used and reinterpreted through history as an icon of victory, perhaps most notably for the victory column of Napoleon's Grand Armée in Place Vendôme, Paris, made from captured Russian and Austrian cannons.

Razor wire and aggregate are materials commonly used for the perimeter security and surface imprint of enclaves of occupation in the War on Terror.

This show coincides with Edmund Clark’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States at ICP Museum, New York. Edmund Clark: The Day the Music Died provides a timely and thoughtful exploration of the measures taken by states to protect its citizens from the threat of international terrorism, and the far-reaching effects of such methods of control including issues of security, secrecy, legality, and ethics. It brings together over 100 images, film, official documents, and ephemera exploring the hidden experiences and spaces of control and incarceration in the so-called global war on terror. The exhibition is on view from Jan 26, 2018 – May 06, 2018, www.icp.org.

ABOUT EDMUND CLARK

Edmund Clark uses photography, found imagery, film and text to explore links between representation and politics, focusing on ideas of shared humanity, otherness and unseen experience through landscape, architecture and the documents, possessions and environments of subjects of political tension. He has received worldwide recognition for his work, including the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for outstanding photography for public service, the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award, a 2017 W. Eugene Smith Fellowship and, along with Crofton Black, a 2017 ICP Infinity Award and the 2016 Rencontres D’Arles Photo- Text Book Award for Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition (2014). Other monographs include Control Order House (2012); and Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out (2010).

His work was the subject of major solo exhibitions, Edmund Clark: War of Terror, at the Imperial War Museum, London; Terror Incognitus, at Zephyr Raum für Fotografie, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Manheim; and has been exhibited internationally at venues including Aperture Foundation, New York; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Brighton Photo Biennial; Dublin Gallery of Photography; Huis Marseille Museum, Amsterdam; Houston Center for Photography; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art; Saatchi Gallery, London; San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts; and Stadtmuseum, Munich. His work is featured in many important national and international collections including those of the National Portrait Gallery, London; Imperial War Museum, London; The National Media Museum, Bradford; Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland; The George Eastman House, Rochester (NY); and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Ina JANG: Utopia. (projected 13th / 13 total.) Foley Gallery, 4.18

Foley Gallery is pleased to present Utopia, a solo exhibition featuring a selection of photographs and sculpture by artist Ina Jang. This is Jang’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The work in Utopia is inspired from imagery found on popular Japanese magazine websites. The images are alluring, depicting young women in suggestive poses, inviting a viewer to gaze and admire, to long for contact...and perhaps, stay on the page.

Jang’s photographs depict silhouettes of these girls preserving only their suggestive postures, shape and luxurious hair. Gradients of candy colors surround and bathe the figures, while the figures themselves drop their distinguishing features and take on a sublime pastel hue.

What Jang uncovers is a flat, one-dimensional fantasy represented only by her thin paper silhouettes and the promise of intimacy never kept. These anonymous figures question the stereotypes associated with their original premise. By using bright colors and digital collage, Jang blends themes of feminine identity and fashion. She describes her work as “playful, light-hearted and dreamy.”

Her sculptures take this one step further by combining select features in rounded shapes piled atop one another. They become primitive representations of the figure, appearing flat and three-dimensional at the same moment.

Jang was born in South Korea in 1982 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Past solo exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Arts in Le Locle, Switzerland, Christophe Guye Galerie in Zurich, Switzerland, Empty Quarter in Dubai, the New York Photo Festival and Humble Arts Foundation.

Jang’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Dear Dave Magazine, the British Journal of Photography, and Foam International Photography Magazine.

Utopia is on view through May 13th, 2018. Foley Gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11 – 5:30pm and Sunday from 12-5pm. To request images; please contact the gallery at [email protected].

Artie VIERKANT: Rooms Greet People by Name. (projected 21st / 15 total.) Perrotin March/April, 2018

Vierkant sets out to challenge the distinctions between object and document, the virtual and material, along with our existing ideas on authorship and propriety. His work spans a variety of media: co-existing photographic or sculptural techniques with unconventional materials ranging from circulating JPEGs to the negotiated limits of patents and trademarks.

Central to this pursuit is the artist’s assertion that an object’s physical manifestation is no more or less consequential than its representations. For Vierkant, the representation itself can exist “without reference to the ‘original’, so that we can no longer identify anything as an “original copy”. This is most evident in his series, Image Objects, ongoing since 2011. These works are made as prints using contemporary commercial printing technologies commonly applied for advertising and luxury signage. Subsequently the works are documented in photographic images which are harshly and abstractly retouched, often to the point that the original object is more or less unrecognizable and the space of the installation itself appears blended with the object.

The documentation of the art becomes a work in its own right, with object and image equally part of the overall work, calling into question the ability of the one to supersede the other, and collapsing notions of value.“[today] it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author». The Image Object series is intended to embrace this condition, and utilize the venue of dissemination as a platform for work.” says Vierkant.

For his exhibition at the gallery, Vierkant will present a new group of largely monochromatic works that expand on the artist’s Image Objects series. One sequence of works, titled Image Objects Sunday 31 December 2017 2:42PM – 7:01PM, carries an entire wall with a series of dark blue forms which proceed in sequence from each other, all coming from the same source file and constituting exact rotations of each of their component layers. These works are the first Vierkant has made since 2013 that share the rectangular motif and profile employed in some of his earliest work. Unlike previous works that explored incorporating ranges of colors, including at one time a rainbow gradient aesthetic, each of these ignore a huge percentage of the color spectrum made possible by commercial printing.

Alongside his photographs, Vierkant will exhibit new large mirror pieces that appear to have forms of pure light emanating from their surface. These sculptures employ the aesthetics and material properties of a ‘smart mirror’, a common technological trope in science fiction, and speculative consumer product. However instead of displaying time, infographics, or other familiar information, Vierkant has created forms on the surface of the mirror that are fixed and not reactive, mapped gestures transformed into a vector graphics.

A third and independent work is the Image Object app. Available for free, the viewer may load the app onto their smartphone whilst visiting the show, and experience an augmented reality of shapes and layers unfolding around them in real time. As the phone’s camera locates and calibrates the space of the viewer, the aesthetic experience is akin to walking around within the layered installation views Vierkant disseminates, with layers of abstraction appearing over the works and suspended in space throughout the room.

Tomoko SAWADA: Facial Signature (projected 9th / 13 total.) FT Magazine, 5 January, 2018

‘I was told I looked Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Mongolian…’

The face is a signature that with singular particularity signals one’ s identity. Even if a person’s body type approximates someone else’ s whom you know, you will not recognize the person precisely until you glimpse the face. Both nationality and race enhance the precision, but otherwise they do not alter the inherent act of processing perceptions. With intended irony to engender confusion, I re-state that we human beings share 99.99999% of the same genes. All of us despite having different types of so-called “added cultural values—such as nationality, race, religion, and language - are by nature and essence equal to one another.

The genesis of the project Facial Signature grew out of my experience in New York City over a number of years. There were many political problems of different East Asian nations, but I didn’t pay attention to them and made friends with diverse people. At one point while there I had an epiphany, realizing that others were not necessarily seeing me as Japanese. I was told at various times that I looked Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Singaporean, Mongolian, et cetera (and only occasionally Japanese). This made me consider the intuitive process by which people achieve cognition of true or false archetypes. Following this trick logic and to discover what I could (and “could not”) be or become transformed myself 300 times to look like a variety of East Asian women. Tomoko Sawada Kobe, Japan 2015

Marjan Teeuwen: Destroyed House (projected 30th / 15 votes total.) Silverstein Gallery 3.18

Bruce Silverstein is delighted to announce the representation of Dutch contemporary artist, Marjan Teeuwen. Her first gallery exhibition outside of Europe, Destroyed House will open in February 2018. In her aptly titled body of work, Destroyed House, Teeuwen reclaims the wreckage of abandoned buildings assembling each fragment in painstakingly detailed installations, set within the original structures. These temporary living artworks are present for their surrounding community to experience, but they ultimately exist only through the carefully composed photographic images which Teeuwen captures for posterity with her large- format camera. Her images illuminate the precarious balance of the power of destruction with the constructive implications of order and function.

Teeuwen explores themes related to architecture, reconstruction, loss, and memory through performance, painting, installation, and the photographic medium. In 2008, Teeuwen began seeking out buildings in her native Holland that were slated to be demolished. She breaks down the homes, and then reconstructs the inside into architectural sculptures using the fragments of debris from the walls, floors, ceilings within the building’s dilapidated structure. Teeuwen revitalizes these spaces by creating near monochromatic sculptural installations; turning chaos into order. The newly constructed installations echo their original forms, with hints of floor, window, doorway, but are wholly transformed into carefully conceived environments. These spaces exist independently from their previous incarnations, yet they occupy the same physical location.

In 2016, Teeuwen visited Gaza, and created Destroyed House Gaza in a home that had been bombed. Her process of rebuilding took on a deeper gravitas when responding to a territory defined by such a horrific conflict.

Born in 1953 in Venlo, Holland, Teeuwen now lives and works in Amsterdam, Holland. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Tilburg, followed by Academy of Fine Arts and Design St. Joost in Breda. In 2014 Teeuwen participated in a residency in Johannesburg, South Africa, which led to her project, Archive Johannesburg.

Her work has been exhibited at ARCAM, Amsterdam, Holland; the Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, Holland; the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, Holland; Stedelijk Museum’s-Hertogenbosch, Museum Het Valkhof Nijmegen and the Museum Van Bommel Van Dam, Venlo, Holland.

Marjan Teeuwen, Destroyed House @Bruce Silverstein By Loring Knoblauch / In Galleries / COLLECTORDAILY: March 22, 2018 https://collectordaily.com/marjan-teeuwen-destroyed-house-bruce- silverstein/

Comments/Context: The Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen is a specialist in architectural intervention. Taking her cues from Gordon Matta-Clark and others who have sliced and diced abandoned buildings, Teeuwen uses the underlying framework of a building as the guiding structure for her elaborate sculptural installations, where scavenged plywood, drywall, and broken concrete become the raw materials for her expansive artistic thinking.

In many ways, the artists and photographers who stage physical interventions (either in buildings or in nature) are an extension of a larger group who construct table top or studio set-ups that are intentionally made to be photographed. While the scale and approach to the construction effort changes, the intention is largely similar – to arrange objects in three-dimensional space in ways that will allow photographs of those installations to explore ephemeral markings, patterns, illusions, and engaging optical effects. We can jump from Robert Smithson, to Andy Goldsworthy, to John Pfahl, and back to Matta-Clark and Teeuwen, and although the places and methods might change dramatically, the fundamental spatial issues being explored still share plenty of commonalities.

In Teeuwen’s case, the story begins with an abandoned house, most likely slated for demolition in the relatively near future. In her earliest works, she confined herself to constructed installations within a single room, but the works on view in this show find her expanding her interventions to take over multiple floors or a series of interconnected spaces. But because her process is a zero-sum game (meaning she’s not adding anything new to the installation that wasn’t already there to begin with), she has to destroy before she can rebuild, the transformation becoming something akin to a massive re-formation, where pieces are removed, sorted, organized, and then replaced, the old order and internal logic replaced by something new. In locations as varied as Russia and South Africa, and then back to the Netherlands, Teeuwen has constructed increasingly complex arrangements. Several of her setups play with bold contrasts of black and white, where installations are either all white or all black, or pieces are arranged into blocks and cubbyholes of alternating colors to create checkerboards or interlocked geometric forms. A close-up look reveals that the materials and textures are extremely heterogeneous, from sheetrock slabs and wall studs piled like layered geological sediments to clusters of rubber tubing, ceiling light strips, cracked tile, foundation rock, plastic piping, broken bricks, perforated mesh, and even electronics. Spatial depth is introduced when walls and floors close in or arcs and squares are cut through boundaries and floors, creating step-wise telescoping and progression effects. In each installation, the chaos of destruction is replaced by the rigor of order, with every single loose fragment placed with surprisingly exacting precision.

More recently, Teeuwen has traveled to Gaza, using an entire two-story building that was already bombed out as the setting for her interventions. As a result, the formula is slightly different – she’s using the entire hollowed interior space for sculptural construction, and she has been able to extend her patterns to the exterior for the first time. The interior views of “Destroyed House Gaza” are filled with textural concrete, with the central floor removed, allowing the gridded space to resolve into squares atop squares, with pillars of rubble as intermediate interrupters. From the outside, the stacked blocks are decorated with different arrangements of rubble, from smooth interlocked walls of brickwork to rough jumbled layers of debris. And while Teeuwen’s previous works feel resolutely conceptual in their thinking, the Gaza house introduces a strong political context, where war and destruction devastate houses daily and residents live within places not unlike Teeuwen’s elaborate funhouse.

While architecture is, in a sense, always sculpture, Teeuwen’s installations accent that idea, bringing a guerrilla mind-set to the balance between construction and destruction. Her interventions combine brash roughness and formal clarity in harmonious ways, the tension of the process making her most intriguing creations feel like transformational magic. She’s thoughtfully embraced the discarded and the decaying, finding venues for inspired improvisation within the fallen stacks of sheetrock.

Dutch artist creates beauty from rubble of war Hamza Abu Eltarabesh The Electronic Intifada 27 January 2017 https://electronicintifada.net/content/dutch-artist-creates-beauty-rubble-war/19356

Juma Shaath took a deep breath.

The 56-year-old former agricultural trader, now unemployed, was looking at the transformation of the ruins of his house in Khan Younis in the south of the occupied Gaza Strip. It is a third incarnation in less than three years: from home to bomb site to art installation.

The unusual idea is the brainchild of Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen, who for years has worked with the concept that buildings can become sculptures, adding a sense of temporality by working on buildings slated for demolition.

Seven such installations have been created: five in her native Holland, one in South Africa and one in Russia. But Gaza was a departure for her in more ways than one: here, the building had already been destroyed.

Shaath’s house – in its latest incarnation “Destroyed House Gaza” – was bombed from the air during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza. Israeli warplanes almost leveled the two-floor building then and no start to reconstruction has been made since.

“I’m still living in a rented house with my family,” Shaath said. “We’re still waiting for reconstruction to start, but it never seems it will considering all the obstacles, financial, political and others.” Shaath said he hoped those in charge in Gaza would hurry the reconstruction along, but held out little hope that the money to do so would be available any time soon. “We’re drowning in illusions about reconstruction.”

Meanwhile, Teeuwen’s installation has brought some hope to the father of five – one of whom was killed in the Israeli attack on the family’s home.

“This is the first time for me to feel some happiness in this house after it was destroyed. I hope this fine piece of art will bring attention to the savage aggression Gaza suffered in 2014.”

Beauty from rubble

Reconstruction in Gaza has been a painfully slow process. According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, just 39 percent of the 17,800 housing units that were destroyed or severely damaged in the Israeli bombardment of 2014 have been rebuilt as of November 2016.

That leaves more than 10,000 families, Shaath’s included, displaced, according to OCHA, a total of approximately 53,300 people.

And while plenty of money was committed to rebuilding Gaza, promises have not yet translated into reality. OCHA finds that 22 percent of the homes destroyed have yet to see any funding for their reconstruction. According to the World Bank, of the $3.5 billion pledged in 2014 in Cairo, just 46 percent was calculated to have been disbursed by the end of July 2016.

In this landscape of rubble and despair, Teeuwen saw an opportunity to create art from destruction, impose order on a crumbled world. “War,” she writes in a press release about the installation, “is complete chaos and order is beauty.”

She worked with a local team of builders and artisans, putting in six-hour shifts every day for three months to complete the work. She used no new construction materials – a rare commodity in Gaza where Israel restricts the entrance of materials such as cement and steel from entering, thus also slowing reconstruction work – instead reusing material found in the rubble of the house or what wood and paint were available locally.

A testament to barbarity

Iron bars found in the rubble were used to support the walls; abandoned household items, from plates and kitchen utensils to toys and clothes, were utilized in construction. She decorated two concrete columns with white gypsum mixed with paint and erected wooden columns to support parts of what was left of the ceiling and covered them with concrete.

“Coming to Gaza doesn’t mean that I’m a politician or a journalist,” Teeuwen told The Electronic Intifada. “I’m an artist. My life is running in a strange bipolar way, approaching destruction and construction, linking order and disorder, standing and falling. This polarity is an essential issue in my life, as it is in everybody’s life.”

In Gaza, this dialectic was skewed in favor of destruction, Teeuwen said, with three wars in 10 years not allowing any time for recovery.

And the reality of Gaza’s desperate situation is never far away. While Teeuwen was talking, a woman walked in, greeted everyone present, then stood in one corner of the house, praying and crying. Mariam, Shaath’s wife, was weeping for her son Muhammad, who died in the house when it was hit by an Israeli missile on 28 July 2014. He was 30 at the time and he was killed with three friends from one family. It was the first time since then that Mariam, 51, had returned to the house, a visit that was prompted by Teeuwen’s work.

“When I saw the house, I had two opposite feelings, sadness and happiness,” said Mariam. “I felt deep sorrow to remember the loss of my son, but happy when I saw my house converted to art.”

Like her husband, Mariam also urged Gaza’s authorities to speed up reconstruction, though she admitted to feeling conflicted about her own home.

“We’re now living in a small house lacking a lot of basic facilities. But after the great achievements of this artistic work in our old house, I suggest keeping it as a witness to the savage aggression on Gaza and compensating us with a suitable flat to live in.”

A permanent installation might just suit Teeuwen, whose work otherwise has a lifetime determined by demolition orders.

It was a process full of obstacles. Muhammad Abu Daqqa, 37, one of the artisans working most closely with Teeuwen, and a constant companion to the Dutch artist during her stay in Gaza, said insurance companies even refused to underwrite workers’ safety at the site.

It did not deter him. “The job was very hard and costly but the artist was full of determination to accomplish her job,” Abu Daqqa said. “I hope this house will represent a message to the world showing the suffering of Gaza’s people due to the savage occupation and its war crimes.”

“Destroyed House Gaza” is open to the public until the end of January and Teeuwen urged everyone to visit. Palestinians in Gaza, she said, had showed her that they “love life and art in spite of the siege and the war.”

Hamza Abu Eltarabsh is a freelance journalist and writer from Gaza.

Fatemah BAIGMORANDI: LENSCULTURE: Awards Photographs by Fatemeh Baigmoradi (projected 12th / 14 votes.) Text by Coralie Kraft

It’s Hard to Kill: Searching for the Remains of Iran’s Revolution https://www.lensculture.com/articles/fatemeh-baigmoradi-it-s-hard-to-kill-searching-for-the-remains-of-iran-s- revolution

“It’s hard to kill history. The beliefs and thoughts of other people, no matter how obscured, can never be erased.” A powerful look at the stubborn nature of memory, even in the face of repression, censorship, or death.

“When I was a kid, we had a photo album in our house,” says Fatemeh Baigmoradi. “I remember it vividly; it had a bright red cover.” Yet as the Iranian photographer delves further into her story, it becomes clear that the album’s cover was not its most important feature: while most family photo albums are stuffed with photographs, their delicate, sometimes frayed edges threatening to escape their clear plastic sleeves, the pages of this family photo album were entirely empty.

The missing photographs can be attributed, in part, to Baigmoradi’s father. During the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which saw the monarch Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi unseated in favor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Baigmoradi’s father was a member of Iran’s National Front party, a pro-democracy group that wanted to establish free elections and a constitutional monarchy in the country. “Thirty years ago, just a few years after the Revolution,” says Baigmoradi, “My father burned many photos that referenced his membership in the National Front.”

These photographs had been taken during meetings and social events, which once denoted social status and political engagement. Yet almost overnight, they became evidence that could be used against their subjects. “After the Revolution, my father and many others destroyed these pictures due to the imminent risk of arrest,” Baigmoradi explains. “I met many families in Iran who destroyed their photos after the revolution. One family I met in Kerman [Iran] shared an album with me where most of the photos were ripped apart, because the prime minister [who was executed after the Revolution] was depicted in them.”

Baigmoradi had no plans to create work based on these absent photographs until 2016—the same year that she first found out her parents had burned these photographs. The catalyst came about when she decided to put together a collection of photos featuring her relatives. Over the 15 years prior, Baigmoradi and her family (like many people around the world) had relied on digital platforms like Skype to send photos; because of this, Baigmoradi found herself missing the family photograph as an object. This feeling sparked an idea in her mind. On her next trip to Iran, she began to gather an archive of family images—and she noticed quickly that the collection had gaping holes. “It was during that visit in 2016 that my parents shared with me that they had burned their photos in order to get rid of them. The act was so aggressive and so painful, and it instantly explained their lack of interest regarding photographs over the years. It seems that something inside my parents—or at least, inside my father—burned alongside those photos 30 years ago. In its place, fear and numbness settled in.”

Baigmoradi also began to look through the photographic records offered by her friends and neighbors. She recalled one remarkable gift from a close friend: a box full of negatives that had belonged to the friend’s grandfather. Many of the photographs were taken in the decades before the Revolution. “It was breathtaking for me to see my city and its people during that period,” she admits. And yet, many of the albums she looked through had only a smattering of photographs, and it was clear that many photos had been removed. She says, “To me, the empty spaces spoke much louder than the photos present.”

As she imagined her father burning the incriminating photographs, Baigmoradi was drawn to imitate his actions. She began by scanning old photos and reproducing them with chemical processes. After she made each print, she would use a torch or candle to burn part of the image away. When asked how she chose the figures to obscure, she replied that some of the people in the photos were political figures or people who had harmed or opposed the government in Iran. “Some of the photos I worked with were taken at events where I knew that some sensitivity and confidentiality was necessary, as the photos could be a concern for the people depicted,” she notes. “And then, of course, in some of the situations I would just make up stories and pick different figures to obscure.”

The mutable nature of memory lies at the center of the final resulting project, “It’s Hard to Kill.” Although the photographs in the series belong to someone’s family, the obscured faces allow the viewer to overlay their own memories, a creative space that pulls subjective recollection into play. In this way, our memories—and Baigmoradi’s, and the memories of each photo’s owner—weave together and create a new life for these faded scenes, a reanimation that buoys once-disappeared moments and carries them into the present.

In that sense, the “It” in Baigmoradi’s title (memory) is indeed “hard to kill”: neither fear nor censorship can destroy the past, and this series makes sure of that. Baigmoradi puts it best: “It’s hard to kill history. The beliefs and thoughts of other people, no matter how obscured, can never be erased.”

Javier PEREZ: HOLLY (projected 11th / 15 votes total.) Evidence of The Natural and Artificial: Ghosts of Death

Through these selected paintings, sculptures, and installations, Javier Peréz addresses a variety of meanings to the body, the passage of time, and the mortality of human life. Born in Spain in 1968, Peréz earned a Fine Arts education from Universidad Paîs Vasco in Bilbao and obtained his MFA in Paris at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He works in Barcelona, Spain and has shown internationally at shows in Austria, Spain, Switzerland, and France.

His approach includes using a variety of artificial and natural materials including: horse hair, human hair, resin, animal intestines, plaster, glass, and paint. For instance, in his work, named “Mother,” depicts a sculpture made out of a variety of materials. The sculpture includes a male body form containing a skeletal figure protruding out of its neck and head. The human figure is made out of plaster and resin, whereas the skeletal form contains a shawl like cape made out of animal intestines.

Through works like Mother, Peréz provokes questions about the psychological portrayal of mortality and anatomy, but in a way that provides a juxtaposition between the inside self and the outward self. The contrasting materials suggest an underlying meaning of what is natural and what is fabricated, or what experiences feel natural and which experiences feel other wordly - whether it be the skeleton redefined in works such as “Air Cape,” - where miniature resin skeletons dance together in a melody. The dancing skeletons, although typically a symbol of decay are reimagined in a music box like context that offers human characteristics when they embrace each other and dance together.

The psychology of his work includes perceptions of memory too. In “The Night Journey,” at first glance, the sculpture looks as though someone stood on the surface of the pillow and walked away. However, the pillow, made of glass, forever holds these footprints in the surface. The work, “Mother,” prompts questions about what is happening to the human and the skeletal figure. The shawl like cape references a shedding of a shell, or in this case, the human form. Perhaps the human’s “mortal body” that is, a body of flesh and hair, evolves into the state of a skeleton - the part of the body that signifies death.

These works, on a deep level, both haunt and enchant much like ghost stories make one ponder about what creatures or things await the child underneath their bed at night. However, these works of art reinforce, embrace, and respect death as a part of the human life cycle which is something that monsters often fail to accomplish. Take “In Points,” as an example: the ballet dancer with knives attached to her ballet slippers continues to dance despite the possibility of injury or death.

The allure of Peréz’s work provides more answers than questions and thereby urges the viewer to dissect their associations about death and horror. However, in his body of work, death remains as a friend instead of a fear.

Matt CRABTREE: 16th-Century Tube Passengers (projected 14th / 14 votes total.) (photographs & text). https://www.lensculture.com/articles/matt-crabtree-16th-century-tube-passengers

A unique street series filled with timeless images hearkening back to Renaissance portraits from the 16th century—all created, edited, and sent from the photographer’s phone during his daily commute.

One morning in 2016, I was sitting amongst a million or so other commuters on my mundane tube journey into central London, when I looked up to see a lady dressed in a velvet hood, seated in a classical, timeless pose. She was in a beautifully serene world of her own, far away from the noise of it all. Immediately, a 16th-century Flemish painting came to mind.

I looked around and suddenly found I couldn’t see anything else but people held in their own Renaissance-like, personal moments; beautiful Caravaggio or Vermeer-like images of regular and everyday people that at a glance could easily be mistaken for portraits grand enough to grace the walls of any fine, stately home.

So, commute by commute, I began to surreptitiously collect these commuter images while adhering to three simple rules: the photographs had to be taken on my phone, and they had to be retouched on my phone, and they had to posted to social media during that same commute. Strangely, the London tube turns out to be the perfect setting for a 16th-century Renaissance portrait. Bathed in a single, harsh light source from above, many of these everyday commuters find themselves naturally sitting with their hands folded on their knees. And whether they’re looking up to read an advert for a flaky health supplement or home insurance, or gazing down at their smartphones like it were some treasured book of prayers, they’re frozen in that wistful, timeless pose.

Andreas SERRANO: Torture 10.17

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Andres Serrano’s Torture (2015) at our newly renovated 20th Street gallery. Opening reception for the exhibition and first look at the new space will take place Thursday, September 28th, 6-8pm, at 513 West 20th Street. This is Serrano’s first gallery exhibition in New York City in nine years.

Serrano’s influential and transgressive career continues to push the limits of contemporary photography and ethics, and this most recent series unflinchingly examines the relationship between trauma and memory, violence and representation.

Torture unfolded against the political backdrop of Abu Ghraib and the aftermath surrounding the disturbing photographs documenting detainee abuse. Serrano’s images of hooded men arise from our collective subconscious embedded through the repetitive visual bombardment of mass media. These works demonstrate the depth of human cruelty and indignation, the attestation of how far we can go when we have power over another human being.

Yet several of the subjects in Torture are not just symbols, but depict four individuals and their personal histories. Kevin Hannaway, Patrick McNally, Brian Turley, and Francie McGuigan were part of a group known as the “Hooded Men,” Irishmen who were arrested and suffered indignities at the hands of the British army in 1971. They were victims of newly tested methods of interrogation that later became known as the infamous “five techniques": wall-standing, hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep, and deprivation of food and drink. Individual portraits show them each close-up wearing dark hoods over their faces—the tightly cropped compositions at first read as abstractions, the folds of fabric resembling charcoal or mountainous cliffs that deny a sense of scale, space, or identity. No less real is Fatima (2015), the Sudanese woman who was arrested in her home country on the accusation of connections with rebels. She was beaten, tortured with anife, and raped while in police custody.

Photographs devoid altogether of human subjects still convey bodily presence. Blood-drenched gloves are draped on a wall; an eerily lit hallway almost appears to glow with some primordial force; a chair placed in front of a large wooden cross simultaneously implies religious contemplation and solitary punishment. Shots of menacing devices—Iron Shackle, The Clink Prison Museum, London, UK (2015), and Scold’s Bridle IV, Hever Castle, Kent, UK (2015)—are portrayed as inert still lifes that invite the viewer to envision their draconian implementation.

The role images play in contemporary life—their circulation and censorship—remains an ongoing and controversial dialogue. Serrano’s photographs never hesitate; they are unwavering in their insistence to delve ever deeper into that unsettling nexus of decency and representation.

Andres Serrano was born in 1950 in New York City. He attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1967 to 1969, where he studied painting and sculpture. Serrano is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been shown in major institutions in the United States and abroad. His photographs are in numerous museums and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, Holland; CAPC musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, Spain; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. An exhibition of his work is currently on view at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, TX, through October 8th.

Andreas SERRANO: Torture (projected 3rd / 14 votes total) 10.17

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Andres Serrano’s Torture (2015) at our newly renovated 20th Street gallery. Opening reception for the exhibition and first look at the new space will take place Thursday, September 28th, 6-8pm, at 513 West 20th Street. This is Serrano’s first gallery exhibition in New York City in nine years.

Serrano’s influential and transgressive career continues to push the limits of contemporary photography and ethics, and this most recent series unflinchingly examines the relationship between trauma and memory, violence and representation.

Torture unfolded against the political backdrop of Abu Ghraib and the aftermath surrounding the disturbing photographs documenting detainee abuse. Serrano’s images of hooded men arise from our collective subconscious embedded through the repetitive visual bombardment of mass media. These works demonstrate the depth of human cruelty and indignation, the attestation of how far we can go when we have power over another human being.

Yet several of the subjects in Torture are not just symbols, but depict four individuals and their personal histories. Kevin Hannaway, Patrick McNally, Brian Turley, and Francie McGuigan were part of a group known as the “Hooded Men,” Irishmen who were arrested and suffered indignities at the hands of the British army in 1971. They were victims of newly tested methods of interrogation that later became known as the infamous “five techniques": wall-standing, hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep, and deprivation of food and drink. Individual portraits show them each close-up wearing dark hoods over their faces—the tightly cropped compositions at first read as abstractions, the folds of fabric resembling charcoal or mountainous cliffs that deny a sense of scale, space, or identity. No less real is Fatima (2015), the Sudanese woman who was arrested in her home country on the accusation of connections with rebels. She was beaten, tortured with anife, and raped while in police custody.

Photographs devoid altogether of human subjects still convey bodily presence. Blood-drenched gloves are draped on a wall; an eerily lit hallway almost appears to glow with some primordial force; a chair placed in front of a large wooden cross simultaneously implies religious contemplation and solitary punishment. Shots of menacing devices—Iron Shackle, The Clink Prison Museum, London, UK (2015), and Scold’s Bridle IV, Hever Castle, Kent, UK (2015)—are portrayed as inert still lifes that invite the viewer to envision their draconian implementation.

The role images play in contemporary life—their circulation and censorship—remains an ongoing and controversial dialogue. Serrano’s photographs never hesitate; they are unwavering in their insistence to delve ever deeper into that unsettling nexus of decency and representation.

Andres Serrano was born in 1950 in New York City. He attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1967 to 1969, where he studied painting and sculpture. Serrano is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been shown in major institutions in the United States and abroad. His photographs are in numerous museums and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, Holland; CAPC musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, Spain; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. An exhibition of his work is currently on view at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, TX, through October 8th. John EDMONDS: Anonymous (projected 20th / 15 votes total) FT Magazine, January, 2018 / Lightworks: November 1 – December 14, 2017 In his exhibition, Anonymous, John Edmonds combines two distinct series of portraits, both of which conceal the identities of their subjects. The first series comprises striking formal studies of individuals wearing hoods on the street, photographed from behind. We can quickly read this suite of images as a statement on the unjust death of Trayvon Martin and how individuals of color face issues of racism, safety, and injustice in systemic ways. “All the work that I make is from a very personal place,” says Edmonds of his process. “It starts with me.” Edmonds further embeds himself in this work by photographing his subjects wearing his own hoodies and jackets. With little visual clues to guide us, we may only learn from the artist that the obscured individuals in fact vary in race, gender, and age.

In contrast to the charged public space that Edmonds considers with these pictures, a second series of portraits celebrates blackness and beauty through private and sensual pictures of men wearing du-rags. Once again, Edmonds photographs his subjects from directly behind them. We can trace the du-rag’s origin to the head-wraps worn by female slaves during the antebellum period, and later used to preserve hairstyles, but today both men and women wear du-rags as a symbol asserting cultural pride. A melancholy underlies these portraits, though a majestic and spiritual quality also comes forward, calling to mind totems and religious iconography. A softness and warmth emanates from the colors and folds of the cloth. Edmonds exhibits these portraits on a larger-than- life, monumental scale, implying both nobility and strength, while also subtly undermining the grandiosity by printing on delicate, flowing silk.

Edmonds takes an intimate approach to portraiture as a means of exploring symbols of black culture and the body, and through his pictures he poses larger questions about viewership, desire, and power today. Through concealment, he leaves much to the viewer’s imagination, revealing both the complexity of images themselves and the significance of the preconceptions that we bring to them. “At the heart of all of my work,” says Edmonds, “I want to leave people with something that is more human—despite the facade—and to open up feeling and empathy.”

John Edmonds is an artist working in photography whose practice includes fabric, video, and text. He received his MFA in Photography from Yale University School of Art and his BFA in Photography at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design. Most recognized for his projects in which he focused on the performative gestures and self- fashioning of young black men on the streets of America, he has also made evocative portraits of lovers, close friends, and strangers. In addition to his residency here at Light Work, he has participated in residencies at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in Woodstock, New York, FABRICA: The United Colors of Benneton’s Research Center in Treviso, Italy, and The Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Edmonds lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is represented by ltd los angeles.

Dina GOLDSTEIN: BECCA (projected 29th / 15 votes total.) "‘Fallen Princesses’: The Construction of Female Beauty in Dina Goldstein's Pop Surrealism" by Ildikó Geiger from AMERICANA E-journal of American Studies in Hungary Volume X, Number 2, Fall, 2014 http://americanaejournal.hu/vol10no2/geiger

Ildikó Geiger is a PhD student at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, currently working on her dissertation on performative identity constructions of 20th century American women writers. Email: [email protected]

I. Introduction

Our childhood stories always ended with the line, “… and they lived happily ever after.” We were rooting for the hero—most of the time an orphan, a poor peasant boy or a charming prince—who overcame all troubles to attain his well-deserved prize, the princess, and we were relieved seeing the quest ended in a sensational wedding ceremony crowned with the promise of a seemingly eternal life and never-ending happiness. We were spellbound by the fairy tale’s magic that “realized the unimaginable” (The Irresistible Fairy Tale 135), to use the folklorist Jack Zipes’ expression, since it had no importance (to us, children, for sure) whether the events in the story were real or unreal, or whether characters possessed worldly or magical characteristics. The only thing that mattered was that the villains got the punishment they deserved and everything went towards a happy ending. In most of the fairy tales there was a clear distinction between good and bad, and it was without a question that evil had to be punished never to be able to cause harm to the eternally good heroes. We never questioned anything heard or seen simply because the fairy tale fulfilled in manifold ways our desire for magic: First, it provided truly powerful scenarios in which heroes succeed in solving problems; second, fairy tales offered a path away from everyday reality disclosing a world in which problems were there merely to be overcome by the hero; and third, these stories granted access to a collective past, allowing readers, listeners or watchers to get access to the old conduit wisdom of past generations (Bacchilega 5). These stories are still very important in our lives since they help us to realize who we are; they allow our identities to evolve through them and can still provide guidance as to how to conduct our mundane lives.

Folklorists and fairy tale researchers believe, however, that fairy tales did more than simply achieve the above- mentioned desires. As Valerie Rangel explains in her essay entitled “Fashionably Ever After,” the childhood stories not only give meaning to who we are, but also advocate acceptable social and moral norms of behavior. She states here that “[N]umerous tales revolted around female protagonists with the intent of instructing young girls on virtues of modesty, chastity, respectability thereby preparing them for the marriage market and their future role in the domestic sphere” (2). Moreover, these tales not only reinforce women’s roles, but also affect other areas of their lives including their appearance. In a fairy tale, most women are depicted as impeccably beautiful with certain stereotypical aspects of their visible beauty: long hair and large, doe-like eyes. Nevertheless, these attributes are always combined with a weak and a generally submissive character. The emphasis is thus on the(ir) physical beauty and this compliance with social normativity determines their very existence and narrative function, as well. The aim of such conventional representations of femininity is to secure women into a particular gender role that emphasizes submissiveness and compliance, leaving no or little place for the intellect.

My aim in this paper is to discuss the representation of women characters in contemporary fairy tales through the artwork of the Canadian photographer Dina Goldstein. Her series entitled Fallen Princesses is a set of editorial photography posing serious criticism to traditional visual representations of fairy tale heroines whose lives depict false ideals, roles, and physically unattainable bodies. Goldstein places her characters into real-life situations, and by juxtaposing the idealistic world of fairy tales with harsh reality, she creates a world in which the staple ending “happily ever after” is reduced to a relative phenomenon. In my text below I will contrast the images of women and girls as pictured by Disney movies with Goldstein’s pop surrealistic portrayal of the same characters by showing how the North-American photographer (de)constructs traditional portrayals of beauty by subverting the iconic representations of the princess-archetype. By radically transforming the princess-figure built upon one- dimensional representations of women, Goldstein calls for women to create their own representations based on their everyday experiences, and by doing so, she makes her audience consider a world that is not built upon utopian dreams full of false promises but on actual, every-day events.

Goldstein’s art uses the visual language of Pop Surrealism, a movement originated in the 1970s’ Southern California finding a way between the “fine art” of mainstream galleries and the “low art” of comic books and tattoos. Her pictures follow both streams, since they are often comic, but also dark and depressing. She leads the viewers―just like the fairy tales do―from the world of enchantment to the world of real life challenges. She expanded the world of fairy tales as a written genre embedding them into visual arts through the speaking voices of her characters (The Irresistible Fairy Tale 135) that become textual images. Goldstein’s approach to the fairy tales is more than critical; it is also skeptical because her intention is not to provide any “happy ending,” but the contrary: to show viewers that the world is far from being as idyllic as it is pictured in most of the visual or narrative tales we hear each day through various media. Accordingly, her images lack the portrayal of traditional norms and expectations because she consciously wants her viewers to reconsider conventional narratives, best exemplified by fairy tales, from the gender aspect. Many contemporary artists still feel that the aims of the civil rights and especially those of the feminist movements of the 1960s were not entirely fulfilled; therefore, they turn towards fairy tales and their various adaptations as a means to destroy the still pervading biased illusions of reality and use various forms or genres to allow different, so far unheard or less heard voices to speak through them; their conflicts and struggles are re- created with the aim of disturbing viewers and leading them to question many traditional norms and societal expectations. This encounter, as Jack Zipes says, “is clearly meant to be a collision—a fortuitous one—that will make viewers stop and think about the meaning of fairy tales and happiness (The Irresistible Fairy Tale 137). Zipes distinguishes between two forms of these collisions: one of them is called the critical remaking of the classic fairy tale, in which artists, such as Paula Rego, Kiki Smith, or Dina Goldstein try to shake-up viewers and make them re-think their knowledge about the fairy tales to show that their female protagonists are not helpless objects, but women who are capable of transforming themselves into confident women inhabiting a body of their own. These transformations come alive, for example, by changing their expected attire and altering their bodies. Accordingly, these works are disturbing, touching, and subject to change; consequently, by staying fluid, they allow for new meanings to evolve and provide and alternative space for women be that the protagonist or the artist. The other collision Zipes lists is the one called “conflicted mosaics,” which exemplifies art works that are rather bizarre and shocking projecting another world that abounds in happiness, even though this happiness is very evasive. Artists like Meghan Boody or Tracey Moffat, who are the most important representatives of this form of fairy tale collision, place their characters into provocative arrangements in which they do not belong. In both cases of collisions, there is a strange dissonance, but this turns out to be a useful tool to compel us, viewers, to re-think our position in actual reality. Goldstein’s photography series is an example of how she tries to shake up and urge her audience to re-think the configuration of our society.

Goldstein’s series, produced in 2009, was inspired by her three-year-old daughter’s obsession with Disney princesses combined with the news of her mother’s breast cancer. As she once said in an interview,

I began to imagine Disney’s perfect princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, cancer, addiction and self-image issues… Disney princesses didn’t have to deal with these issues, and besides, we never really followed their life past youth. (qtd. in Zipes, “Subverting the Myth of Happiness” 2)

Before going into details of Goldstein’s art series, I would like to contextualize the evolution of fairy tales, a genre rooted in oral traditions. Although several folklorists, such as William Hansen and Donald Haase, use the expression “wonder folk tale” and “literary folk tale,” the term “fairy tale” is used most often by contemporary experts of this topic. People always told stories of their experiences that formed the texture of their lives and these oral texts have served as tools to frame human cognition. Walter Burkert, scholar of Greek mythology and culture, writes about the origins of storytelling that has the same pattern of functions that one can find in most fairy tales or myths. Quest, rescue of the oppressed and conflict with the antagonists are always present in those stories, and basic actions of the community, such as rivalry, mating, abuse, and child abandonment give the basis of these tales. With its origins rooted in oral genres, the term “fairy tale” has been used since the 17th century. Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile were the first collectors of the Renaissance followed by Charles Perrault and Brothers Grimm in the 18th and 19th century. All collectors rewrote the original stories in order to make them more acceptable to the public. The Brothers Grimm rewrote the stories in a way that would be suitable for children (previously, the audience were comprised of adults). The Grimms’ rewriting of stories gave rise to different adaptations of the tales, which did not only apply to written storytelling but also to other art forms as well (for example, the theater and the opera). It should be noted here that from the 19th century until the 1960s, visual artists generally created works that portrayed idyllic settings and dream worlds that allowed viewers to turn away from the harshness of reality. From the 1960s on, fairy tales were approached more critically with the intention of, quoting Jack Zipes again, “disturbing viewers and reminding them that the world is out of joint and fairy tales offer no alternative to drab reality” (The Irresistible Fairy Tale 136).

According to Goldstein, life is full of conflicts, lies, corruption, and false promises, and her main aim is to raise consciousness and thereby to question traditional one-dimensional representations of women. Her photos suggest that women’s lives are peppered with struggles to attain false and unattainable ideals, which propel them to chase an imagined happiness that is built on the normative narrative of dominant ideology. In this context, Goldstein wants her women to create their own narrative(s) of representation; what is more, to make them question their identities and to transgress the dominant ideologies of power in their own milieu. She thus challenges the glamorous portrayal of the most popular Disney female icons to urge the women in the audience to create their own narratives, their own, new vocabularies of expression and their own visions of reality…. (comments on specific photographs edited out)…

III.Conclusion

In her thematic edited pictures, Dina Goldstein contrasts the traditional images of Disney princesses with recent reinterpretations of the same roles by placing them in discomforting situations that lead viewers to challenge the still pervading archetypes and gender roles of western culture. Her pop surrealistic pictures—combining the dream-like fantasy of historical surrealism with modern time iconography—overturn long and deeply embedded ideas and modes of thinking, encouraging women inside and outside her artwork to produce new representations and new modes of expressions that question ossified gender roles and assumptions. Goldstein’s images are compelling the viewer leading her/him from the world of enchantment to a world of serious (self-)criticism; her sometimes quite hyperbolical visual comparisons help deconstructing old patterns of thinking enabling the construction of new visual angles through which decoders of these artworks pose questions, engage into discussions on various forums and turn from passive objects into active agents that can promote changes in the conception of gender roles.

Works Cited

• Bacchilega, Christina. (1997). Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. • Benson, Stephen, Ed. (2008). Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. • Brooks, Peter. (1993). Body Work: Object of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. • Cornfeld, Li. (2011). “Shooting Heroines: Sexual Violence and Dina Goldstein’s Fallen Princesses Photography Series.” Retrieved from: http://dinagoldstein.com/essays/ • Gottschall, Jonathan. “The Heroine with a Thousand Faces: Universal Trends in the Characterization of Female Folk Tale protagonists.” Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 85-103. • Rangel, Valerie. (2010). “Fashionably Ever After.” Retrieved from: http://www.fallenprincesses.com/flash/education/valerie_rangel.pdf • Stern, Marlow. (2013). “‘Fallen Princesses’: The Amazing Photos of Depressed Disney Royalty.” Retrieved from: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/09/fallen-princesses-the-amazing-photos- of-depressed-disney-royalty.html • Zipes, Jack. (1983). Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. London: Routledge. • ——-. The Irresistible Fairy Tale. (2012). Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. • ——-. (2011). “Subverting the Myth of Happiness: Dina Goldstein’s ‘Fallen Princesses.’ Retrieved from: http://www.fallenprincesses.com/flash/essays/goldstein.pdf

Thomas HIRSCHORN: De-Pixelation. (projected 22nd /15 votes total.) Gladstone, 11.17

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present DE-PIXELATION, an exhibition of new work from Thomas Hirschhorn’s Pixel-Collage series. Over the last two years, Hirschhorn has embarked on this deeply personal, political and socially-engaged body of work that explores the limitations and deceitfulness of imagery found throughout popular culture and the media. Employing a mix of collaging techniques, Hirschhorn’s work from the Pixel- Collage series calls into question the legitimacy of imagery that has been altered to protect the viewer from unpleasant depictions of gruesome human suffering and violence. This exhibition marks the conclusion of the Pixel-Collage series.

In a statement from the artist:

“De-Pixelation” is the title of my exhibition at Gladstone Gallery. I will exclusively present new “Pixel-Collage”. The exhibition will mark the ending of the “Pixel-Collage”-series that I have been working on for two years. My engagement in the problematic of ‘pixelation’ and ‘de-pixelation’ comes from the decision to see and look at the world as it is, and to insist in doing so. I believe that ‘de-pixelation’, ‘pixelation’, blurring or masking and furthermore censorship or self-censorship, is a growing and insidious issue, also in the social media today. I don’t accept that, under the claim of ‘protecting’ - protecting me, protecting the other - the world is pixelated in my place. I want, I can, I need and I must use my own eyes to see everything in our world, as act of emancipation.

‘De-pixelation’ is the term I use to manifest that pixelating no longer makes sense. Pixels, blurring, masking, and censorship in general, can no longer hold back or conceal fake-news, facts, opinions or comments. Fake-news, facts, opinions, comments entirely take part in the “Post-Truth”. We have definitely entered the post-truth world. Pixelation stands for the form of agreement in this post-truth world. I want to insist heavily on what makes me work in a kind of urgency and necessity: The world has to be ‘de-pixelated’.

I want to question and integrate the growing phenomena of ‘facelessness’ today. What interests me about the aesthetic of ‘facelessness’ is its formal embodiment through pixelation. This phenomenon shows us that a picture needs to be pixelated, or partly pixelated, in order to be authentic. What interests me is that pixelating has taken over the role of authenticity. Partly pixelated pictures look even more authentic and are accepted as such. Pixels stand for authentication: Authentication through authority, because to pixelate is always an authoritarian act. What interests me is that pixelating - as an aesthetic - meets the demand for authority, for protection, for de- responsibilization and for de-emancipation. What interests me about this aesthetic, is that through pixels, abstraction can engage me in today’s world, time and reality. How can I redefine my idea of abstraction today? What interest me is that I can understand abstraction as thinking, as political thinking. What interests me is that pixels build up a new form opening towards a dynamic and a desire for truth, truth as such, truth as something reaching beyond information, non-information or counter-information. Paradoxically - the authoritarian will to use pixelation in order to hide, ‘protect’, not show, or make something not visible, has become an invitation to touch truth. To touch truth does not mean verifying information; to touch truth is the beautiful gesture of emancipation. What interest me about the form of the “Pixel-Collage”, is its ‘belief’ in the aesthetic of pixilation as abstraction. What interests me is that an existing published picture can become an abstraction. ‘Pixelation’ is a decision, not a technique or a system. Removing or adding a pixel - or even cutting it into smaller pixel parts - is a political decision.

“Pixel-Collage” are collages. A collage means pasting together at least two existing elements to create something new, a new world, a new image, a new light. Doing this means giving a response - through Form: Form is not just an idea, Form is the core. I want to give Form, and in giving Form I must show what I see, what I understand, what comes from myself without explanation or argumentation. In its own and non-systematic logic, the composition of each “Pixel-Collage” serves as the fundament: I want to reinforce the beauty of the pixelated part opposed to the non-pixelated part. I want to focus on its logic. Nothing is un-showable. The only thing which cannot be shown is what has no form. Everything within our world that is Form is showable and viewable, even when incommensurable. In order to confront the world, to struggle with it, with its chaos, its hyper-complexity, its incommensurability, I need to confront reality without distance. It is necessary to distinguish ‘sensitivity’, which to me means being awake and attentive, from ‘hypersensitivity’, which means self-enclosure and exclusion.

The “De-Pixelation” works will perhaps be judged ‘difficult’, but what is really difficult is to do an artwork today, in contact with complexity, in contact with reality, in contact with the time we are living in and in contact with the world. Today, more than ever, I need to see everything with my own eyes in our one world, no one can tell me what to see or not see. Therefore, I want to ‘de-pixelate’ the world, I want to live in a de-pixelated world.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Paris 2017

Thomas Hirschhorn was born in 1957 in Bern, Switzerland, and currently lives and works in Paris. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including at Kunsthal Aarhus; South London Gallery; Kunsthalle Bremen; Institute of Modern Art Brisbane; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Kunsthalle Mannheim; Museo Tamayo; Musee d’Art contemporain de Montreal; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Kunsthaus Zürich; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Secession, Vienna. Thomas Hirschhorn’s ‘Presence and Production’ projects include among others: Musée Précaire Albinet, Aubervilliers, France, 2004, The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival, Amsterdam, 2009, Gramsci Monument in the Bronx, New York, 2013, Flamme éternelle at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2014, and SPERR at Wiesbaden Biennale, 2016. Additionally, he has taken part in many international exhibitions, including the 2012 La Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; the Swiss Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale with his work Crystal of Resistance, Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, where his large-scale public work, Bataille Monument, was on view; “Heart of Darkness” at the Walker Art Center; and “Life on Mars: the 55th Carnegie International.” Hirschhorn was the recipient of the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2000, the Joseph Beuys-Preis in 2004 and the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2011.

Margarita KAREVA: ASTER (projected 19th / 15 total.)

Fairy tales in Margarita Kareva Photography THE SMOKE DETECTOR October 25, 2015 by Ivona 6https://thesmokedetector.net/2015/10/margarita-kareva-photography/

I came across her work online and it was so striking that I immediately went to ask Google for more. I discovered that Margarita Kareva is a photographer from Russia which I kind of sensed in some of her photos (and so will you in the gallery at the end).

She enjoys fairytales, especially the darker ones as she told me. After my internet research I was super happy to see that she agreed to do a little interview with me. We managed to overcome all the language barriers (google translate was involved) and discover, for you, a bit about Margo’s world.

She introduces herself.

My name is Margarita Kareva. I live in Russia in the city of Ekaterinburg and I am a photographer.

How did you first get interested in photography?

I started doing photography four years ago, back in 2011. I go my first semi-professional camera as a gift for New Year’s Eve. It was Canon 600D and it opened a whole new world for me. Until then, I never thought that I would become a photographer.

I ask her to describe her work.

I try to make my work unusual. I see ordinary things every day, so I try to add a bit of fairy tales in your life with photography.

What inspires you? I get inspired by a lot of things: traveling, design, beautiful people, films and books.

Do you believe in the expression “A picture is worth 1,000 words”? If yes, why?

Concise picture – yes. But, I still love a written word. Photos may not always turn out right and sometimes you might not get the results that you imagined. For phantasy, writing on the paper gives you much more possibilities.

In your opinion, what makes photography art?

I would say it’s the ability to think outside the box. You can create many different styles of photography. It all depends on your imagination and sense of taste.

Here’s what she enjoys photographing the most (it’s pretty easy to spot by yourself).

I love to photograph beautiful and charismatic girls. Guys are not that interesting as models as they don’t have that female magic.

Who are your favourite photographers and why?

Annie Leibovitz – a talented photographer, and she is also a woman.

How important are Photoshop and retouching in your work?

It makes about 20% of the success of the overall process. What is more important for me is a good preparation for a photo shoot (well thought out inspiration, finding a good model, clothing, props, finding the right location). With all this, the picture is already getting good, and later on I merely bring it to perfection with color correction and retouching.

Favorite book, song, a movie you would like to recommend?

It was very difficult to make a selection. Hollywood produces a lot of incredibly beautiful movies, but the last one that left a great impression on me has to be Mad Max (production of light in the film, the work of stylists, interesting plot solutions).And, I just love Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.

From books anything from Stephen King and there are too many other writers to mention (smiles).

With music I don’t really have any special preferences.

I ask what kind of superpower she would like to have (it became my favourite question lately).

I actually often dream that I can fly. Maybe it would be cool to discover what it’s like to fly like a bird in real life.

Elle PEREZ: In Bloom. (projected 5th / 15 total votes )47 Canal, 4.18 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/elle-perezs-poetic-visceral-bodies

Between 2002 and 2012, from the age of twelve, the photographer Elle Pérez (who uses the gender-neutral pronouns “they” and “them”) shot more than twenty thousand photographs, often at punk shows in the Bronx, the borough where they were born and raised. Yet the final edit of Pérez’s first solo show in New York, “In Bloom” (at 47 Canal Gallery, through April 8th), is an intimate suite of just nine images, depicting moments in the years since spent in more private spaces. In one photograph, titled “Wyley,” a friend of Pérez’s stands alone outside, their back against a wall, brandishing a red bandanna that obscures their face. The image evokes the handkerchief code, a system used by members of L.G.B.T.Q. communities of wearing colored bandannas in back pockets to indicate sexual fetishes. A red bandanna signals an interest in the practice of fisting, an act that is alluded to in Pérez’s photo “Dick,” in which a hand rests between a shadowed crotch, bloody residue drying above the knuckle into the shape of a tulip. Pérez’s photographs contain these codes of queer desire, but, like Wyley’s face, their meaning is largely obscured to the outside viewer.

Pérez lives in New York and teaches photography at Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design; they also serve as dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and spend time in Puerto Rico visiting family, collaborating with other artists, and working with the grassroots community organization Casa Pueblo. Pérez, who identifies as trans, told me that they are interested in “this idea of making work where you are,” of building a world wherever they bring their camera. “Queer love means making love out of new structures,” the writer Larissa Pham, who collaborated with Pérez on text to accompany “In Bloom,” writes. Several of the show’s photographs were shot at the apartment of Pérez’s partner, Ian, a sculptor based in Richmond, Virginia; one is from a waterfall in Maine that they visited together during summer. In the latter, called “Water Body,” a droplet of water is suspended at the edge of swim trunks, while another falls and refracts sunlight between the wearer’s legs. At the edge of the frame of “Soft Stone,” barren branches from a tree in Central Park reflect in the water. Like all of the show’s images, the scene prompts reflection while maintaining a remoteness. “Intimacy between lovers exists in the details—a bruise, a stain, eyelashes and drops of water,” Pham writes. “These details weight the form; it is how ordinary objects become haloed and special.”

Walking through “In Bloom” one afternoon, Pérez asked me if I’d seen the photography show “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life,” at the Morgan Library & Museum. I replied that I had. Pérez told me that on Hujar’s print of his famous image “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed,” from 1973, he used a pre-digital form of retouching called “spotting” to make sure that Darling’s face “was the brightest moment in the image.” Spotting is a laborious process, and a risky one, as there is no reversing its effects on silver gelatin photography. Pérez told me that they admire the late Hujar for his boldness in risking his image in order to dignify his subject. Like Hujar, Pérez presents the trans body in a way that resists its prurient consumption. “In Bloom” makes public an appreciation of what happens in private, makes love enmeshed in the practice of making images.

New writing by Larissa Pham on the occasion of In Bloom. Writing in italics by Elle Pérez. 1. Opening: I once thought I loved someone so much that I wanted to disappear into them. That I longed to disappear was obvious; whether I loved them was a fact that took longer to discern. In the beginning it was all obvious, fresh, wet and red, like a lake or a flower. But our desire lived outside of language, located somewhere more taut and more personal, like the way the rain collected in your hair that night in January when we made out by the gas station on Bruckner. The edges hot and bleeding, like a color. There were so many things to touch and feel—hair, skin, teeth, tongues, and everything left a mark somewhere. Then I took to collecting the marks as proof that we were ever here.

Does it even matter that that love failed, or are we more ourselves for having experienced it, and was it inevitable? The light changes. Where it breaks, it breaks completely. The body shows its history. Desire and becoming are inscribed inside and outside the body. To show you I love you, I enter your body. This act takes the shape of a flower.

Here is where the water trembles because it wants to rejoin the sea. And here is where it begins. Look at the edges of the frame. Stay in this place.

2. Blossoming

1. A photograph is made of looking. The way it looks is the way it was made. In looking at the photograph again, we give the subject the same consideration. In this way, truths are revealed, sometimes even as a surprise to the photographer.

2. Color, which is light, is useful for designating where to look. It is also the emotion that exists, already, in the world. Love, desire, and fear are all colors.

3. Intimacy between lovers exists in the details—a bruise, a stain, eyelashes and drops of water. These details weight the form; it is how ordinary objects become haloed and special. This halo lingers, like an aura, potent without fading. It can be sensed even and especially through a photograph, where it reveals itself.

4. Within this aura, an ordinary object can take on a meaning far beyond its original import. The language and image are malleable, as they are constantly being created in the relationship between two lovers. Words miss but are reassigned and in this act they take on a meaning more true than any other.

5. Thus a hand becomes a dick in the body of a lover making pleasure, crowned with the shape of a flower. This is fucking. This is a mark: it can be made to stay forever. Even if the blood is washed away, the image remains. Looking at it induces a feeling of falling—the tiny hairs prickling. Love is plunging. Love is a rose is a tulip is the droplets of water running down two pairs of legs and hands and bodies out of frame.

6. We sequester meaning in places where we think it will be hidden, but it shows anyway. Sometimes, it arises by proximity. Other times, it arises out of distraction by the real subject. The landscape can transform; it becomes a dick. The landscape becomes erotic. It is erotic because I am always thinking of you.

8. Visual language never offers a direct translation, in same way that the eroticism of a subject usually surrounds it without revealing it completely. When we depict sex plainly, it becomes banal.

9. In the eyes of a lover, the ordinary becomes sacred. Vulnerability is precious; it is also necessary for love to function. Queer love means making love out of new structures. In recognizing each other’s truth, we rewrite what truth can be, and this is power. In loving each other, we become powerful.

Over time shape shifting has become a quick gesture, one that takes only a second or two to complete. It used to take longer, but the difference now is that its effects have become more evident.

After seven years of binding, my ribs have formed a tighter cage around my heart, guided by a taut piece of fabric that has progressively constricted my back, lungs, my breathing, and my ability to walk up the stairs. All of this in pursuit of a new form, my body and this garment conspiring in a way that produces an emotion or a feeling, and makes my life at least manageable, if not alright.

After getting to know you for seven years we decide it's finally time to make a portrait. Stars sprinkle across my back as we walk down the street, and I ask you if you've got any ideas, but neither of us had imagined the photograph yet. Trust is our formal strategy.

As undercover faggots, our erotic actions have to be completed in two parts; without one of these parts there is no relief. The first part has to do with the way we make our world, and the second part has to do with the way we move through it. In the domain of the photograph, our relationship can live as ambiguously as a picture, especially since this picture cannot be claimed as anyone's evidence but, instead, a truthful lie. The lie of this photograph is helping me hide the truth of this love, so it can be acknowledged and also hidden at the same time.

Over time i've learned to really look, finally seeing my reflection sideways or through a hazy mirror. When I was younger this made me angry, this not being able to see a direct reflection, and have it be perfectly legible. Now I'm just grateful for the traces that provide guidance and the space offered to me to be filled.