SHEN WEI: Invisible Atlas at Flowers Gallery

 Shen Wei, Tear, 2013
Ink on archival pigment print

 Shen Wei, Sarangkot, 2014
Acrylic on archival pigment print

Shen Wei, Mask, 2013
Metallic ink on archival pigment print

Chinese artist Shen Wei series Invisible Atlas is inspired by the Chinese philosophy of Qi - an unseen life force and a method of healing. For Shen Wei, this mysterious vital energy is poetic and seductive. Using his own body and personality as a subject, he envisions the internal and external forces channeling through the body and its surroundings. Drawing from memories of his childhood, as well as religious, historical and mythological imagery, the narrative is interwoven with elements of fantasy. Photographic subjects of the figure, objects and landscape are combined with minimally rendered drawings, where luminous dots, circles, arcs, arrows and waves give tangible form to imagined flows and concentrations of Qi....read more here 

To coincide with his solo exhibition, Shen Wei is also curating a group show Second Thought at Flowers Gallery, featuring work by Shiyuan Liu, Tingwei Li and Peter Glenn Oakley.

Shen Wei: Invisible Atlas to February 28, 2015

Flowers Gallery/NY

529 West 20th Street, NYC

Shen Wei discussing his work with me at Flowers Opening

All images Courtesy of the artist and Flowers Gallery, London / New York 

CLAY PATRICK McBRIDE: 3rd Rail at FOLEY

3rd Rail © Clay Patrick McBride

3rd Rail © Clay Patrick McBride

 

The 3rd Rail, a site-specific installation by photo giant Clay Patrick McBride, opened at Foley Gallery this week; part of the gallery’s ongoing storefront window curatorial series. McBride sculpts and pastes his black and white 35mm photographs of people riding the NYC subway to replicate a sense of anxiety and anonymity. The work, exhibited inside the long glass corridor windows on either side of the Gallery entrance-way, is meant to convey the subway rider’s dark and chaotic claustrophobia experience.

W.M. Hunt, Curator and author of The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious told me, “His final project ... was a seemingly enormous 6-foot combination with wood, photographs and drawings that looked like the bowsprit on a ship.  At the beginning of the evening reception, Duane Michals walked in, took a moment to consider what was in front of him, sized it up, and pronounced it “Primal!” It doesn’t get better than that.” read more here....

3rd Rail

Clay Patrick McBride

FOLEY Gallery

59 Orchard Street, NYC

January 21 – February 22, 2015

Read my Interview with Clay Patrick McBride

L'Oeil de la Photographie

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER: OSCAR Nomination!

Photograph by Vivian Maier, Chicago, 1973

Copyright (c) Maloof Collection. www.vivianmaier.com ‪

The OSCAR Nomination here

Congratulations to Finding Vivian Maier Directors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel on their OSCAR nomination for Best Documentary Feature!

Finding Vivian Maier is The Boston Globe's pick for Best Documentary Oscar! Check out "Sorting through OSCAR Documentary Nominees" in The Boston Globe. 

Self-Portrait by Vivian Maier

Copyright (c) Maloof Collection. www.vivianmaier.com 

Watch The Trailer   
 ‪

Finding Vivian Maier 

is playing on Showtime on Demand to March 5, 2015

View more Vivian Maier Self-Portraits on TIME LightBox

KLOMPCHING GALLERY | DUMBO: ONE UNIQUE PHOTOGRAPHS

Photograph © Matthew-Robert Hughes

Photograph © Ken Rosenthal

Photograph © Diane Meyer 

Photograph © Robert Calafiore

Photograph © Carole P. Kunstadt

Photograph © Max Kellenberger

Robert Calafiore • Matthew-Robert Hughes • Max Kellenberger
Carole P. Kunstadt • Diane Meyer • Ken Rosenthal

Opening Reception: January 8, 6pm–8pm

ONE | UNIQUE PHOTOGRAPHS

January 7-February 14, 2015

KLOMPCHING GALLERY

111 Front Street, Brooklyn

FOLEY GALLERY: Select Cuts and Alterations

FOLEY GALLERY

Mia Pearlman Installation in Storefront
Paper, India ink, paperclips, tacks

Chris McCaw - Sunburned GSP #672 (Pacific Ocean), 2013
11 x 14 inches Unique gelatin silver print

Mia Pearlman - COEVA, 2014
Paper, India ink, paperclips, tacks

Select Cuts and Alterations brings together more than 20 artists who cut, crumple or crease their materials. Select Cuts was a great success receiving many excellent reviews including The New Yorker.

Foley Gallery invites you to a final celebration for the exhibition on Sunday, January 11, from 2-4pm, with many of the artists attending.

Select Cuts & Alterations

Foley Gallery, 59 Orchard St, NYC

through January 11, 2015

Wednesday - Sunday, 12 - 6

Final Celebration Open to All with the Artists

Sunday, January 11, from 2-4pm

Cal Lane - Untitled, 2008
17 x 13.5 inches. Plasma-Cut Steel Oil Can

SOHO PHOTO: Upcoming Exhibition

New York Morning Photograph © Norman Borden

Photoville: Picturing The Built Environment

click to enlarge images

Photograph © Maria Cienfuegos

Portrait of the Family, Cuba: 2009-2011

Photograph © Carol Julien

In Sight

SohoPhoto Gallery

January 7, 1015 – January 31, 2015
Opening Reception: January 6, 2015, 6-8pm

Opening the New Year, the SohoPhoto Gallery presents three new artists to the gallery: Carol Julien, Stephen Rae and Steven Gilbert; the images the gallery exhibited at its first Photoville exhibit; a new show by the Professional Women Photographers organization; and the American debut of Cuban photographer Maria Cienfuegos’s haunting images of Cuban family life.

SohoPhoto Gallery, 15 White Street, NYC 

is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization.

LUIS MALLO: Interruptions from Wm Hunt

Photograph © Luis Mallo

 Photograph © Luis Mallo

Photograph © Luis Mallo

 A note to me from Photography Curator and Collector, William Hunt:

Luis Mallo’s exhibition “Interruptions” opens next Thursday at Praxis Gallery in Chelsea. Go see it and tell your friends to also. 

I love Luis. When I became a dealer, he was one of the first photographers I championed. I debuted a classic looking body of work “Passengers”. These are black and white studies of subway riders' hands: wonderful typologies, printed gorgeously. 

He went on to develop other substantial portfolios, including “Reliquarium”: moody, spectral images of enigmatic spaces, also in black and white. Then switching to color, he created “Laminas”: studies of stained glass windows from behind. 

“In Camera”, and “Open Secrets” are also considerations of seemingly closed off spaces - the first ones are cityscapes that play with depth, looking at openings in wall and fences seeing what’s beyond. Then moving into storerooms in museums, similar considerations of what’s not seen.

It has been a steady career, and like most artists he made room for a full life with marriage, a son, a full time position as an art director.  “Interruptions” is not intended as a description of the career but rather the way he photographs, stopping to see as he goes. “Interruptions” includes new work and some older work, all part of the same trajectory.

I hope to see you there,

W.M. Hunt, 

Dancing Bear

wmhunt.com

LUIS MALLO: Interruptions

Praxis NY, 541 West 25th Street, NYC

January 8 – February 21, 2015 

In this exhibition Luis Mallo presents a group of visually arresting images meant to stimulate us to question notions of familiarity. With this series Mallo wants us to understand that the manner in which we perceive our surroundings is contingent by nature. Most of what we see and experience is illusory and therefore, deceptive. His scenes reveal this illusory nature by offering partially concealed and most often perplexing representations of the surrounding landscape and its various props. For Mallo, Interruptions is not an outcome, but a vital process, a way of looking that may offer a fresh perspective. As previously done with other series, he invites us to look deeper and unearth that which lies latently waiting to be discovered under the veil of familiarity.

LUIS MALLO

SHEILA PINKEL: Folded Paper, Glass Rods

 Folded Paper Pieces © Sheila Pinkel

Folded Paper Pieces © Sheila Pinkel

Glass Rods © Sheila Pinkel

Folded Paper Pieces © Sheila Pinkel

"I realized that if I sculpted photographic paper in the darkroom and then illuminated that sculpture with a one point light source, the planes of the paper would be exposed to differing amounts of light. When I developed that paper it flattened and the image became a two-dimensional representation of the paper when it was three dimensional, or a time-space paradox. As I continued to make paper sculptures in the darkroom the resulting images became less structural and began to reveal more intuitive dimensions of my imagination." – Sheila Pinkel

+  +  +

Higher Pictures will present Folded Paper, Glass Rods, 1974 – 1982, two seminal bodies of cameraless photographic work by artist, writer, and professor emerita Sheila Pinkel. The prints on view evolved from experiments Pinkel began as an MFA student at UCLA. Fascinated by the possibilities of using light to make images without a camera or enlarger, Pinkel studied with a physicist and subsequently conducted rigorous visual experimentation with light phenomena including incandescent, X-Ray, ultraviolet, prismatic and digital sources.

To make Glass Rods and Folded Paper Pieces, Pinkel exposed her compositions—solid glass rods arranged directly onto photosensitive surfaces and sculptures made from sheets of photographic paper—to a brief flash of light from a single light source. From within this seemingly narrow set of parameters come rich and varied studies. In monochrome and candy-colored palettes, some of the glass rods are clearly identifiable, others begin to break down into vibrating woven patterns and further into geometric abstractions, and still others are stretched and warped into melting psychedelic planes. Pinkel found that layering the rods at increasingly perpendicular angles led to greater light refraction, bringing the final photograms closer to what she describes as visual music.

The Folded Paper Pieces are lushly textured trompe l’oeil, pictures that Pinkel calls “time-space paradoxes,” two dimensional representations of the paper as a three dimensional form. When the artist flashes the dimensionalized folded paper with light, planes of paper are exposed to varying degrees, giving the final image its dramatic shading and sense of volume. But developing the print itself requires flattening the sculpture back into a two-dimensional sheet that now holds an image of its own prior form. Distilling her process to the very essentials of photography allows Pinkel to work precisely at the intersection of the medium’s double nature. It reproduces vision and has an endless capacity to defamiliarize it.

Sheila Pinkel: Folded Paper, Glass Rods, 1974 - 1982

January 10 - February 14, 2015

Higher Pictures, 980 Madison Avenue, NYC

Opening: January 10, 2015, 6 - 8pm

SheilaPinkel.com

Photograph © Loretta Ayeroff

Sheila Pinkel was born in Virginia, lives and works in L.A. Over the course of her 40-year career, Pinkel has created a strikingly diverse body of work that encompasses experimental light studies, documentary photography, social and political critique, and public art. Pinkel’s work is held in the collections of numerous museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2015: Things Won and Lost

Things Won and Lost  Photograph © Sean Perry

To begin the New Year 2015, I've chosen from photographer and contributor Sean Perry, Things Won and Lost from his series Fairgrounds. Perry was selected as a finalist for the Hasselblad Masters award for this work, including his limited edition book, Fairgrounds (published by Cloverleaf Press).

Perry's imagery is hallmarked by wrapping diverse subjects in his particular quality of light, releasing a simple expression of a given object's unexpected nature and grace. That voice is further refined by his dedication to the darkroom and alchemy used to breathe life and light into his prints. "I work hard to be known for my printing," he says. "I take great pride in it, and hope when someone sees one of my images, they would instantly identify the craft and thumbprints of being mine. It's why I sign them that way, the inked thumbprint next to my name - a metaphor that my hands have made this." read more here

Watch Perry's SVA Masters in Digital Photography i3 Lecture Video on YouTube here. More about Perry's recent work posted here

SEAN PERRY PHOTOGRAPHS