MICHELLE KINGDOM : Dearer Than Truth

Without Question - 12” x 16”
Embroidery © Michelle Kingdom

The Stars Were Long Gone - 11” x 15”

Embroidery © Michelle Kingdom

Precisely Red - 12” square

Embroidery © Michelle Kingdom

Michelle Kingdom | Dearer Than Truth

"My work explores psychological landscapes, illuminating thoughts left unspoken. I create tiny worlds in thread to capture elusive yet persistent inner voices. Literary snippets, memories, personal mythologies, and art historical references inform the imagery; fused together, these influences explore relationships, domesticity and self-perception. Symbolism and allegory lay bare dynamics of aspiration and limitation, expectation and loss, belonging and alienation, truth and illusion."

"Decidedly small in scale, the scenes are densely embroidered into compressed compositions. While the work acknowledges the luster and lineage inherent in needlework, I use thread as a sketching tool in order to simultaneously honor and undermine this tradition. Beauty parallels melancholy, as conventional stitches acquiesce to the fragile and expressive.” – michellekingdom.com

Michelle Kingdom | Dearer Than Truth

Opening April 4th from 6-8pm

April 4 – May 13, 2018

Foley Gallery
59 Orchard St, NY NY

Foley Gallery is open Wed through Sat 11 – 5:30pm

and Sun from 12-5pm.

Also at showing at Foley Gallery

Utopia | Ina Jang

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

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

LISA ELMALEH: American Folk at Foley Gallery

Matthew Kinman and Moses Nelligan, West Virginia , 2013
Photograph © Lisa Elmaleh

 

 Janice Birchfield, Tennessee, 2013
Photograph © Lisa Elmaleh

Jim Costa's Porch, West Virginia, 2013
Photograph © Lisa Elmaleh

Lisa Elmaleh has been creating tintypes of traditional folk musicians who live in and around the Appalachian Mountains since 2010. Her project grew out of a love of the land, American folk music, traditional American culture and her own romance with this 19th century photographic process.

Portraits captured by tintype call for great patience from both the sitter and the photographer. An entire day is spent with each musician - each 8x10 plate is hand coated, exposed in a large format camera, and developed on-site. The tradition of American folk music echoes in the historic nature of the tintype photographic process, connecting photographer with subject, each with their pursuit of keeping their own respective histories alive and well in the 21st Century.

These warm-toned portraits combined with a selection of their natural landscape counterparts, provides a full setting for understanding a way of life.  The crops are garlic and tobacco and the wardrobe is dungaree and flannel.  Hands are well worn, larger from labor and the rigorous playing on their instrument of choice.  Elmaleh’s approach is simple and straight forward which echoes the lifestyle and the plain dresses worn by her female subjects.
 

Elmaleh lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  She holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in NY.  Her photographs have been exhibited widely including a solo exhibition at Candela Books + Gallery in Richmond, VA. Group exhibitions include ArtCenter South Florida, Miami, FL; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; Bronx Biennial Group Show, Bronx, NY.  Her work has been published in Harper’s and Black & White magazines.  She is a past recipient of the Tierney Fellowship. (Text courtesy the Foley Gallery)

Lisa Elmaleh - American Folk

July 17 - August 9, 2014

FOLEY GALLERY, NY

LAUREN HENKIN: The Park at Foley Gallery

 

The Park 31 © Lauren Henkin

"One photograph stuck with me the most (This Park #31). There was something about the way the branches coexists with the building’s reflection.  There was a harmony between the built and the natural that I hadn’t expected to see in New York. I became very aware, and very sensitized to the architecture that lives on the periphery of the park.  And scale—the extreme differences between the buildings and us...." read more here

The Park 4 © Lauren Henkin

"For me, it’s as much about seeing the light on the softball field as it is about the softball. It’s as much about the deep grooves in the rocks as it is about the rock-climbing.  It’s as much about the sun on your back as it is about sunbathing. My work is not so much about subject.  It’s about developing an intimate relationship with a viewer so that there can be some kind of emotional response to the photographs...." read more here

Read my Interview with Lauren Henkin

on L'Oeil de la Photographie here

Lauren Henkin: The Park   

April 30-June 8, 2014

Foley Gallery

 97 Allen Street, NYC

The Park 35 © Lauren Henkin

RICHARD BARNES: Murmur + Refuge at FOLEY

Murmur no. 1, 2005. 44 x 44 inches, Pigment print

Murmur no. 13, 2006. 44 x 44 inches, Pigment print

In Murmur, Barnes observes the flocks of starlings that cloud the skies of EUR, a suburb of Rome.  In this series, Barnes depicts nature as it behaves on it’s own, alive and breathing.  The photographs capture the birds’ aerial displays, which seem to take on the form of suspended mesh sculpture, and the uncontrollable fluctuation of nature as it moves on its own.

Green Leaf Nest, 2000. Pigment print

Refuge examines the complex architecture of bird nests, constructed from elements of the natural world and debris discarded by humans.  The nests are intricate structures, unique in shape and form. Murmur and Refuge are part of Barnes' larger series, Animal Logic.

 

Richard Barnes: Murmur + Refuge

FOLEY GALLERY
through February 23, 2014

+  +  +

Elizabeth Avedon: Is your work collaborative or do you work resolutely by yourself?

Richard Barnes: I enjoy working collaboratively. While in Rome, I entered into what was perhaps the most fruitful collaboration of my career to date. I produced “Murmur” with Alex Schweder, an architect and video artist, and Charles Mason, a composer. “Murmur” forms another chapter in my book (Animal Logic, Princeton Architectural Press) and is an investigation into the flocks of starlings which every winter fill the evening sky over Rome. No one is quite sure why the starlings stopover in Italy but before roosting for the night, they converge on the city from the countryside in flocks numbering in the hundred of thousands. This would be impressive enough in it’s own right, but they also do these incredible aerial displays that resemble drawings or computer animation written large overhead. The effect is awe-inspiring, though the Romans detest this “invasion of the starlings”.

Elizabeth Avedon: There is a surreal quality to these images. Do you regard yourself as a Surrealist or feel an affinity with the notion of the images as a kind of dream?  

Richard Barnes: I certainly have an affinity for surrealist imagery. I don’t see how it can be avoided as it’s so ubiquitous in our time, from movies and books to advertising. What sets my work apart is that it grows out of a documentary tradition and from this straight ahead or forensic approach I subvert the document through either juxtaposition or de-contextualization of an object from its surroundings, thereby rendering it hyper-real. I believe real life is strange and surreal enough if one looks a little longer and harder than to attempt to make something surreal on purpose, which usually comes off as contrived. As far as my images conjuring up the realm of a dream reality in someone, I would take this as an indication that they are working. 

My complete Interview With Richard Barnes here

Murmur Installation, 22 4th St at Market, San Francisco
Permanent installation commissioned by Jamestown LP