YOLA MONAKHOV STOCKTON: Fields of Inquiry opens at Alice Austen House Museum

  Blue China, 2011

Northern Cardinal, Manomet, Massachusetts 

Photograph © Yola Monakhov Stockton

Tapestry, 2013

Tufted Titmouse, Manomet, Massachusetts 

Photograph © Yola Monakhov Stockton

 Ivory Gate, 2013

Yellow-Rumped Warbler, Manomet, Massachusetts

Photograph © Yola Monakhov Stockton

"By collaborating with scientists, ecologists, and naturalists, I gain access to wild birds captured for banding or captive birds in a research lab, and bring them into conversation with motifs common in religious iconography, ideas of the sublime, and transcendentalism, including horticulture, wilderness, Renaissance depictions of landscape in frescoes and tapestries, and Modernist painting and sculpture."– Yola Monakhov, "Field Guide To Bird Songs" (Schilt Publishing, 2015)

  Young Man in Quarry, 2009. Westchester, New York

Photograph © Yola Monakhov Stockton

Sing Sing Prison with Bird and Fawn, 2011.

Ossining, New York

Photograph © Yola Monakhov Stockton

"For years, New York based photographer Yola Monakhov honed her craft documenting the conflict in the Middle East and with personal projects in Russia. But after completing her MFA in photography at Columbia in 2007 and accepting a position teaching introduction to photography there, Monakhov realized that she longed for the complete control that the black and white medium allows. In Empire Pictures, she approaches her subject matter much in the same way as she did when shooting news stories abroad but chooses instead to slow down the process." read more, "Yola Monakhov's Empire State" by Natalie Matutschovsky, TIME LightBox

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Join the Alice Austen House for the opening of their newest exhibition, "Fields of Inquiry: Photographs by Yola Monakhov Stockton." The show features work from two series Field Guide to Bird Songs and Empire Picture of the Hudson. Stockton's work provides commentary on the photographic process through traditional documentary photography and constructed compositions. Curated by Natalie Matutschovsky, senior photo editor, TIME

"Fields of Inquiry"
Photographs by Yola Monakhov Stockton

09/21/14– 12/28/14

Exhibition Opening 

Sunday, September 21, 11am-5pm

Alice Austen House  

2 Hylan Blvd at Edgewater Street

Staten Island, New York

Austen lived in “Clear Comfort,” a Victorian Gothic cottage that dates back to a 1690. The house, which is one of the oldest in New York and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1973, overlooks the New York Narrows and has a stunning panoramic view of lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Verrazano Bridge.

Directions from Manhattan by Staten Island Ferry: Subway to South Ferry (1), Whitehall Street (N/R), or Bowling Green Station (4/5) or bus or taxi to: Staten Island Ferry (25 minute ride). At the ferry terminal in Staten Island #S51 Bus to Hylan Boulevard (15 minute ride). Walk one block east to water and Alice Austen House.

Alice Austen House keeps alive the daring spirit of early American photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952) with exhibits and programs in her historic home. Austen was one of America's earliest and most prolific female photographers, and over the course of her life she captured about 8,000 images. Though she is best known for her documentary work, Austen was an artist with a strong aesthetic sensibility. Furthermore, she was a landscape designer, a master tennis player, and the first woman on Staten Island to own a car. She never married, and instead spent fifty years with Gertrude Tate. A rebel who broke away from the ties of her Victorian environment, Alice Austen created her own independent life.