Tonight: Panel Discussion Karla & James Murray

Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York by James & Karla Murray
Currently at view at Clic 255 Centre Street, New York - through September 27, 2009.
Panel Discussion: September 22 - 6:30 p.m.

Helen Levitt @ Laurence Miller

Helen Levitt
First Proofs
Laurence Miller Gallery
20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
- through August 20, 2009

Tonight: NIGHT/SHIFT Talk & Booksigning in Tribeca

courtesy Lynn Saville

Also if you would like to revisit our conversation with Lynn Saville, please click here.

Opening Thursday: Lovisa Ringborg

courtesy HSF/©Lovisa Ringborg

Please join us at Harlem Studio Fellowship for the opening of a double solo exhibition of artists-in-residence, Lovisa Ringborg and Elena Ascari. Co-curated by HSF Chief Curator, Raffaele Bedarida with newly appointed Junior Curator, Teresa Meucci, the show presents works achieved by the two artists during their stay in New York (May-July-2009).


- LOVISA RINGBORG
if your secret was an animal
what animal would it be

- ELENA ASCARI
Cells

Curated by: Raffaele Bedarida and Teresa Meucci

Opening reception: July 16th 6.30-9.00 pm

By appointment:
July 17th-31st, 2009


HSF by Montrasioarte
128W 121st street
(subway 2, 3 to 116th street)
New York, NY



LOVISA RINGBORG
if your secret was an animal
what animal would it be

Swedish artist Lovisa Ringborg exhibits at HSF two interrelated works. A photograph, Insomnia is the visual and conceptual counterpart of an environmental piece, If Your Secret Was an Animal What Animal Would It Be, which consists of four photographs and a mirror text. More than doing photographs, Ringborg literally works with photography: her initial photographic shots, used as “raw material” (the artist’s words), are digitally altered and combined into carefully composed and theatrically staged images. As with Caravaggio (a rough mattress hardly visible under classical draperies), the fictionality of the represented scene is revealed in her work, and the masquerade in the artist’s studio emerges interfering with the subject matter. Subtle visual inconsistencies insinuate unreliability in the faux staged-photographs and add surreal echoes to their content. But there is no attempt on shocking effects: no juxtaposition of evidently incongruous images and meanings. If the sleep of Goya’s reason produced monsters, the inoffensive stuffed animals that Ringborg photographed at the Museum of Natural History, are turned into the elementary vocabulary of a potentially monstrous language. A language from which narrative is removed and humans, beasts, and objects are kept frozen on the threshold between familiar anxieties and uncanny premonitions. RB


ELENA ASCARI
Cells

The series of paintings presented by Italian artist Elena Ascari starts a new phase in her visual research. Ascari’s previous canvases portrayed the reflecting world of the malls’ escalators through a photorealist technique. The shiny world of glasses and mirrors was turned into a no-less-kitschy surface of gummy paint. The effect was one of complex visual fragmentation: repetitions, reflections, and distortions of the same figures resulted in an optical multiplication that could be read as an open sequence, a deconstructed story. With Cells, Ascari does a step further. Focused on the refracting skin of design objects, these new reflections destroy any perceptive continuity. An ordinary experience given by the popularization and domestication of Deconstructivist architecture is translated into a trope: close-up views become miniaturized oneiric visions. In the resulting kaleidoscope, humans as well as any other recognizable thing are fugacious and isolated apparitions. The story no longer exists, connections are lost. The aesthetic of very small reflective surfaces become, with Cells, a metaphor for the connective isolation of the i-phone era. RB

June Events/ Center for Photography at Woodstock

Break the boundaries and barriers of mediums in Encaustic & Photographic

(June 20-23)

Learn how to design your own website with Dina Pearlman
(Wednesdays from 6-9pm June 17 - July 8)

Step into the world of Fine Art Digital Printing with Richard Edelman (Thursdays from 6-9pm June 18 - July 9)

Venture into the world of publishing and the photographer/editor collaboration with Elinor Carucci & Alan Rapp (June 27-28)

Advanced registration is required. Contact CPW about special student/educator discount prices!

Download a pdf of the 2009 catalog by clicking here. Or view the catalog online by visiting CPW's website

www.cpw.org Center for Photography at Woodstock | 59 Tinker Street | Woodstock | NY | 12498

Jennifer Williams: New York, Seattle

Jennifer Williams is part of a group show at Platform Gallery in Seattle that runs through March 28, 2009. The show is titled "Cut - Contemporary Collage" and picks up on the renewed interest in collage. If you you are in Seattle this is a great show to check out.

Platform Gallery
114 Third Avenue South,
Seattle, Washington
February 19-March 28, 2009

But you can also see the work of Jennifer Williams in New York, starting next week:

"Quality Service"
Feb. 24-28th (opening feb. 24th 6-8)
The Cooper Union
6th and 7th floors
7 East 7th Street
New York, NY 10003


glob
2008
25" x 44"
handcut digital prints collaged on watercolor paper
©Jennifer Williams

And you can revisit our conversation with Jen, by clicking here.

Last minute gift ideas

While reading Amy Stein's blog, I was reminded of the great print collections in the Library of Congress, Museum of the City of New York, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The prints are affordable at $28-$125 and they would make gorgeous gifts (for any time of the year). I own a good number of the ones from the Met (I helped produce some of them) and I think they are top notch. I'm sure other museums and institutions offer prints sales as well. It's a great way to support them.