Tag Archives: photography

John Einarsen

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Okazaki Park (2023)
Laax (2023)
Tokyo (2018)
Morning (2018)
Zurich (2023)
San Bernardino Pass (2024)
Constellation (2018)
Foam (2018)
Kure (2024)
Vienna (2024)

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Artist’s Statement
 

Deep Seeing

John Einarsen has taken many kinds of photographs throughout his life, but for the past 13 years he has incorporated Miksang contemplative photography into his practice. It is concerned with slowing down our minds in order to see the world “as it is.”

“Seeing” is with us each day and a source of great joy. It is a journey of noticing more deeply whatever is around us, understanding and appreciating the essence of things.

What is the source of a contemplative image? When we are able to be still and receptive, the world appears more vivid, like removing grime from a window. There is a gap in thinking, and if the eye, mind, and heart are aligned, a unique perception can arise and manifest naturally. For a brief window the world can appear as it is unfiltered by human constructs, fresh and exhilarating, and be expressed with precision as a photograph. In this way we genuinely connect to the boundless, graceful, and fleeting nature of reality.

This condition can be elusive and is hard to sustain, and on many days is out of reach entirely. The images presented here were taken in those moments of clarity.

John Einarsen has studied “seeing” with the founder of Miksang Contemplative Photography, Michael Wood, and his partner, Julie Dubose, for over a decade. In October 2022, he published a collection of his Miksang photographs, This Very Moment. He has given Miksang workshops in Japan and Luxemboug and spoke about contemplative photography at TEDxKyoto in March 2023.

His recent exhibitions have been “Kyoto Stillness: The Photography of John Einarsen” at the Portland Japanese Garden Gallery, “This Very Moment” at the Shoyeido Kunjyukan Gallery in Kyoto and “Openings” at Komyo-in Temple (with Minako Hiromi and Myong-Hee Kim). He received the Kyotographie Lifetime Achievement in 2024.

Einarsen’s photography books include Kyoto: The Forest Within the Gate (with Edith Shiffert and others, 2010), Small Buildings of Kyoto Vol. I & II (2016 and 2017), Zen Gardens and Temples of Kyoto (with John Dougill, 2017), Curtain Motif (2019), and This Very Moment (2022).

Einarsen is also the founding editor of Kyoto Journal which he began with other artists and writers in 1986. Originally from Colorado, he has lived in Kyoto since the early 1980s.

Doug Hall

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Time, Memory, and the Winter Oaks of Olompali Valley

I.

Standing among the oaks of Olompali Valley, I was reminded of a passage from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. He writes, “I feel there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and are effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.”

 

II.

Clive Wearing, an eminent British musician and musicologist, suffered a brain infection that erased his long-term memory and deprived him of accumulating any new memories. Without recall, each blink of the eye revealed a new scene, while the scene before was entirely forgotten. When asked what it was like he responded, “No difference between day and night. No thoughts at all. No dreams. Day and night, the same – blank. Precisely like death.”

 

III.

Given that we share ninety percent of our DNA with cats, seventy percent with slugs, sixty percent with bananas, fifty percent with trees, forty-four percent with honeybees, and twenty-five percent with daffodils, can’t we fairly say that all living things are connected?

 

IV.

Emerging scientific evidence suggests that the universe is finite – sort of like an expanding, cosmic donut with no edges – and that there is nothing beyond it. But if that is the case, how can the universe, which is some thing, be contained within, and expand into, no thing?

 

V.

The age of the universe is thought to be about 13.4 billion years, which means that the average human life will occupy approximately 0.000000634328358% of cosmological time.

 

VI.

I think of memory as falling into two broad categories: melodic and studied. Melodic memory arises unexpectedly and unconsciously, appearing like the fleeting fragment of a song. Studied memory, ingrained through repetition, is willed into existence by conscious effort. Melodic memory, first cousin to dreaming, stirs the poignancy of remembrance and loss; studied memory provides resources for the challenges of everyday life.

 

VII.

The star named Earendel, located in the constellation of Cetus, is the most distant star ever observed. When seen from Earth, we are looking at light that was emitted 12.9 billion years ago – a mere 900 million years after the Big Bang.

 

VIII.

In several billion years after the universe collapses and memory no longer exists, will the universe, without memory to account for it, have existed at all?

 

 

All images: edition of 6 + 2 APs at 48 x 61 inches; edition of 10 at 20 x 24 inches

Doug Hall, a media artist, photographer, and writer, has an extensive history spanning over fifty years. His work in diverse media is held in numerous public and private collections in the United States and Europe, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, and Tate Modern. His autobiography, This Is Doug Hall: A Memoir is being published by ORO Editions and will be available by mid-December 2024. He is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco and Benrubi Gallery, New York. He lives in San Francisco.

Alex Mattraw & Adam Thorman

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Phone Feed: Bombogenesis

“On its way up, even before the water breaks the surface, it can seep into the cracks of basements, infiltrate plumbing, or, even more insidiously, re-mobilize toxic chemicals buried underground.” —Rosanna Xia, Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2023, documents “hidden flood risk from sea level rise and groundwater”

Scrawl a checklist to cross out how you feel. Stargaze
glass, nape story, always on the ridge of defunding
the sunrise. Live, laugh, flood, so in this terra, I am
tracking every loop                        Store, flood, wake.
Store, fret, wake              Store, wept, wake, flood,
store                                    I’d drink for the harbor
to recover the pasture. But portrait light identifies
my dark              water mode : two people running
away at the same time. Loud steps flash
shortcuts recorded into one act:
How much did you win?
Everything dangerous because     Are you my angel?
It’s still raining?
in the round world                          sand = cyanide = storm
scrolled in. 341 days                      pay to fall
terrified at the work meeting where packed sardines open
and close
flora in their mouths. Administer your raise,
red path to trap                   burnout. Their tin
hooks.                        Ready stacked moons.
Cut up frames on your camera roll, pocket
handsome covers. Sign the contract, await
the rise.              Shiver on the bank, hillside
bulletins, nightships, wool trade, etc.

It’s too late, you say.
Cancel atrial trust. Oxygen wheels allowances,
sells pasture
blades. Cycles                        select cells designed to taper
us at both ends. Turn              fusiform where forests would
message ever.                        Neon green must splash.
Then shave the land.              Wake, flood, shore
the shepherd you want to see in the world.

VOIDS

On the phone in the coastal hole, you ask me to respond
to your VOIDS. Photos ever expanding. Out of “the thing
with feathers,” we disagree, roll thought I step between
poison                    oak tuffs, try on a reason distance attracts
sour                             [petrichor] honey
bee [death rates], etc. Center                             your instinct, you say,
then Faceaudio shutoff                              faces warmer pine
O                                                 [zone] windtrap. Cut
metaphor. I argue she never names the bird because
hope is [never singular.] 2020 is an adjective and air
smooths shellbone, thistle pins bare feet with pain that makes
each real. [What you see and look for you’ll only find
more of, and [                              the real question
is will then                             you find
lonely.

I follow bottomless storehouse VOID I name
OVID, VIDEO,
[one letter away] from transformation. Avoiding gravity
so intense nothing [can escape, even light].

On the shore
my daughter [tries to call out Milky Way but] calls Whiskey
Way. The sun isn’t even big enough to make a black hole but
[in the dark] all exists, pandemic. How important we think
we are ablyss. Now a joke                            about all things,
blots govern [word                        states] that made us
sick. Evolution                                          requires exclusion,
and so does rent. The hug you give her [near the parking lot,
hawk]                                       cawing petals.
This violet stare                              under nightlids’
need to be free of

the coastal hole

we

roll        in thought
sour
honey bee rates

I loop and

windtrap the bird

because hope is               2020 shellbone

thistle pins

to make each               feather vane feel for the new

illuminute

vocabulary

VOID
I name OVID

 

one letter away from violet
transformation

 

answers my daughter                            “The Whiskey Way”

the sun isn’t even big enough to make

a black hole               pandemic               lunaptic

we think               we are

. A joke

about evolution free of

parenatal heat or the bruise               you give land

petals under

nightlids               in the parking lot

hawkcawing

ablyss

Radio Homing

Wonder demands a tiny terror, so you call every turn
a return. The alien-most home, so we hike hill-black mounds
raising dust and clouds we call platypi, a jest for all limbs
God abandoned, and no one can spell. In the brightest heat
you receive each animal                             list of rocks, ridge of
leather                                                           doe smile you collapse
two years into this second                         dusk whispering pillowtalk,
ash feedback, unmedicated stories more beautiful than astonished
clasps of warmth                    around your wrist.                     Imagine
your mind as radio, you say, losing              loam footing. I recall
Hippocampal index binds
but won’t explain              experience.               Every tune shines
the lake, homes-in radial,                                  glass-lit and sure.

VOIDS

Adam Thorman and Alex Mattraw

An emptiness opens in the presence of our supposed post-truth era when facts can be defeated by baseless feeling. Defenses crack under a daily barrage against meaning. What new language is needed to unearth what gets buried? What new conversation can we have about the climate crisis, and the histories responsible for it?

This VOIDS excerpt comes from a book-length collaboration between the artist and photographer Adam Thorman and the poet Alex Mattraw. VOIDS is an experiment about juxtaposition: about hope at the edge of a future already erased. The work started with a small selection of Adam’s photograph series that he calls VOIDS, and Alex’s ekphrastic responses to it. Each created constraints for the other as the work unfolded. Some photographs inspired poems and some poems inspired photographs as both delved into their individual inhabitations of void [meaning, vacate (from Latin) and unoccupied (from Middle English)].

Moving in and out of conversations about anxiety, bliss, illness, and parenthood, fluid poetic forms and neologic play were central to Alex’s practice. Sometimes, Alex erased her original responses to Adam’s work, creating “guillotined sonnets,” Niedecker-inspired tercets, or looped erasures, with the aim of echoing images throughout the arc of an emerging narrative. Other times, she wrote lyrical prose responses to her research about the Gold Rush trading ships still buried under the Embarcadero markets.

For Adam, différance dictates that meaning is multiplicitous: Like a Magic Eye image, where you can perceptually shift between the beauty of the multiplicity and the nihilism of the negation of meaning, depending on your point of view. Either pole is overwhelming. “In the face of our current political environment, I experience a complete inability to make sense of how and why plain facts are ignored and spin outweighs all else. The calm of a landscape is not enough to placate, and I make images, just to carve the felt absences out of them.”

Out of all of this comes VOIDS. When surrounded by the incomprehensible, the only choice is erasure. Wash everything out in a field of darkness, let light obliterate and embrace. When everything means nothing, you start over at the beginning.

Alex Mattraw is the author of the poetry collections Raw Anyone (2022), We fell into weather (2020), and small siren (2018), all with Brooklyn’s Cultural Society. Her poems and reviews have appeared in places including The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket2, Lana Turner, Tupelo Quarterly, and VOLT. A frequent collaborator with other writers and artists, she is also the founder and curator of the Bay Area reading series, Lone Glen, now in its twelfth year.
Adam Thorman is an artist, photographer and educator based in Oakland, CA. He makes art about the landscape, abstracted, and his practice includes a mix of photography and hand- and digitally-altered prints and images that occasionally veer into the sculptural. Adam’s work is in the collection of SFMOMA and has been written about in The NY Times, LA Times, and KQED Arts, among others, and his work in collaboration with the poet Alex Mattraw has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Radar Poetry, and Heavy Feather Review. Adam has a solo show at KOIK Contemporary in August 2024 in Mexico City and his first book, Creatures Found, will be published by The Eriskay Connection in late 2024.

Vi Khi Nao & Jessica Alexander

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Vi Khi Nao is the author of six poetry collections & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), & the novel, Swimming with Dead Stars. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her collaborative work with Jessica Alexander, That Woman Could Be You, has just arrived from BlazeVOX. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.
Jessica Alexander’s novella, “None of This Is an Invitation” (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Fence, Black Warrior Review, PANK, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. She lives in Louisiana where she teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Judith Henry

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  • Post Cubist (2014)
  • Pretty Girl (2015)
  • Singular Vision (2015)
  • Split Persona (2015)
  • Torso (2017)
  • Hold On (2015)
  • Heart of Darkness (2015)
  • Petal Face (2017)
  • Cleavage (2014)
  • Town Hall (2016)

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Artist’s Statement

During my art career I have used various multi-media techniques to both explore and hide identity. I examine the friction between the interior life and public self. To stress anonymity, I have often used masks in my work. In this issue of Posit I am showing work from two series done recently. Beauty Masks is a book consisting of self-portraits made by covering my face with “found” faces. There are 120 self-portraits in this book. I juxtapose images of model’s faces ripped from fashion magazines over my own face as a mask. The images I have chosen to disguise myself are diverse in their race, hairdo, accessories and dress. There’s a stark contrast between the retouched and made-up faces and my actual hands and body — a reminder of the commodification of idealized beauty and a reflection of the fear of death. The second series, Casting Call, is a collection of almost 300 miniature sculptures made of detritus found in my studio, on the streets and in my kitchen. I utilized adhesive tape, push pins, paint tubes, sponges, cotton balls, swabs, nails, clips, screws, anything and everything I was able to glean. These recombinant icons emerged as an installation at BravinLee Projects in 2018.They extend my exploration of personal identify by creating humanoid surrogate identities that stand in for my hidden persona(s). The diversity of forms reflect the huge disparity found in any crowd. Having pursued a detached, perhaps secretive, or voyeuristic observation of people throughout my career, I believe that my work has evolved into a unique and revelatory depiction of human nature in all its diversion and mass commonality.
Judith Henry is a multi-media artist, born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After receiving a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, she moved to New York and started making art that explored the misalignments between cultural representation and inner psychology. She utilizes drawing, photography, typography, video, painting, sculpture, and bookmaking. Henry has shown her art in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Cleveland, Philadelphia and internationally in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London and Switzerland. Her most recent solo shows were at BravinLee programs, New York, 2015 and 2018, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2016 and The National Arts Club, New York, 2017.

Erica Baum

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  • Forever Foe (2019)
    Forever Foe (2019)
  • Demigod (2019)
    Demigod (2019)
  • Thread (2020)
    Thread (2020)
  • My Mask (2020)
    My Mask (2020)
  • Ostrich (2020)
    Ostrich (2020)
  • Shrug (2020)
    Shrug (2020)
  • In It (2020)
    In It (2020)
  • Forlorn (2020)
    Forlorn (2020)
  • Flashbulbs (2020)
    Flashbulbs (2020)
  • Ugh (2020)
    Ugh (2020)
Dog Ears

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Artist’s Statement

My photographic work utilizes found language and imagery. As an undergraduate I studied Anthropology and I look at my source materials, books, blackboards, card catalogues, player piano rolls, sewing patterns etc. as potent artifacts that can yield poetic information reflecting the circulation and dissemination of information and material in our shared popular culture. I’m thinking about structures and systems and how a playful engagement can yield insights as well as generate new meanings.

Transposing the tradition of street photography, I navigate intuitively framing and partially decontextualizing my subject matter harnessing moments that suggest meanings beyond their original situations.

What interests me are the juxtapositions and sense of history derived from the words themselves even without knowing everything. I want to give you a sense of a particular environment but not in its entirety. The view is oblique and re-contextualized. In this close up immersive situation the viewer can retain a level of awareness, just enough to inform but also to allow a different visual and semantic experience to take hold. The source is familiar and recognizable but the experience is new. It is that tension between something that we recognize, that we routinely encounter and the fact that we can look at it in a different way that creates a strangeness, a difference in which exist multiple possibilities.

While respecting the constraints of a given subject, the page sequence of a book or the reference system of a library, the work suggests a visual meta-language, mixing history and humor to display the disparate, often unheard cacophony of voices present within cultural structures.

Reflecting intimate and direct encounters with familiar actions and objects – opening a card catalogue drawer, opening a book, folding a page – the viewer is reminded that meaningful visual surprise surrounds us if one pays attention.

Erica Baum is well known for her varied photographic series capturing text and image in found printed material, from paperback books to library indexes. She received her MFA from Yale University in 1994 and her BA in Anthropology from Barnard in 1984.

Recent museum exhibitions include Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Face à face, frac île‐de‐france, Villetaneuse, France; Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works, The New York Public Library, New York; The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing, Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Lever le voile, Frac île‐de‐france, Paris; The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, The Jewish Museum, New York; Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Kunsthalle Berlin and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Recent solo and two‐person exhibitions include A METHOD OF A CLOAK, Square is the Chatter, Galerie Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf; A METHOD OF A CLOAK, Klemm’s, Berlin; A Long Dress, Bureau, New York; Naked Eye Nature Morte, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, France; AAa:Quien, Erica Baum & Libby Rothfeld, Bureau, New York; The Following Information, Bureau, New York; and Stanzas, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris. Selected biennials include: AGORA 4th Athens Biennale, Athens, 2013 and the 30th Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence of Poetics, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012.

Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MAMCO, Geneva; Albright‐ Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and others.

 

Cheryl Molnar

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  • Bluff (2019)
    Bluff (2019)
  • Cabanna (2018)
    Cabanna (2018)
  • Carousel (2019)
    Carousel (2019)
  • Case Study House (2019)
    Case Study House (2019)
  • Cliff (2018)
    Cliff (2018)
  • Malibu (2019)
    Malibu (2018)
  • Mulholland Drive (2012) (Better Homes and Gardens exhibition at Smack Mellon)
    Mulholland Drive (2012)
  • Mulholland Drive (Detail) (2012) (Better Homes and Gardens exhibition at Smack Mellon)
    Mulholland Drive (detail)
  • Rollercoaster (2015)
    Rollercoaster (2015)
  • Taken Back (2014)
    Taken Back (2014)
  • Treehouse (2019)
    Tree House (2019)
  • Watch Hill (2018)
    Watch Hill (2018)

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Artist’s Statement

In my most recent body of work, I continue to construct my paintings with an engineer’s sensibility and rigor, but the architectural structures come from the world of leisure and recreation—and of memory. The structures and patterns seem borrowed from an earlier generation, evoking nostalgia and yet also inspired by autobiography. My paintings collapse both geography and time. What at first appears to be an intricate painting reveals itself, upon close examination, to be finely cut slivers of paper on wood veneer, hand painted and then laboriously collaged together to create fields of grass, multifaceted rocky cliffs or lush botanical growth. The architectural structures are often incised directly onto wood panels and inserted into these wild landscapes.

My process begins with documentation: I photograph locations newly traveled, as well as well-known and loved. These photographs are digitally stitched together, combining landscapes with structures from various “memories.” I collage photographs the way we experience memories: we confuse the place and time, the structures bleed together, places patched together in our minds. Like concretized memories, my photographs give physical shape to the improbable landscapes of our memory.

Cheryl Molnar’s work has been exhibited nationally, including solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon in New York and The University of Arizona, as well as group shows at C24 Gallery in Chelsea, The Islip Art Museum on Long Island, and the General Electric Headquarters in CT. She recently completed a permanent ceramic tile instillation for PS19Q in Queens, a commission from Percent for Art and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Currently a member artist at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, her other art residencies include the Winter Workspace program at Wave Hill, Smack Mellon, Weir Farm Art Center and Cooper Union. Cheryl received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Pratt Institute. Notable collections featuring her work include Cantor Fitzgerald and Microsoft. She is a longtime resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn and splits her time between NYC and the North Fork of Long Island.

Jessica Hines

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Artist’s Statement

My Brother’s War is an eleven chapter series (so far) of personal photographs reflecting my investigation into the circumstances of my brother’s early death after the war in Viet Nam. The work is about loss, healing, hope, and living in the aftermath of war – both for a veteran and for his family and friends. Gary was sent to Viet Nam at the height of the war in 1967. He arrived in Qui Nhon on November 4th. It was my 8th birthday. Honorably discharged from the army in 1969 with a “service connected nervous condition”, we later came to know his plight as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. My pre-war brother, a normal and well-adjusted person, had become, according to the U.S. Veterans Administration, 50% disabled. He took his own life about ten years later. Determined to find more information about what happened to him, I contacted his comrades 35 years after the war, traveled to a reunion of his platoon, found the home where he died, his burial place, and twice traveled to Chu Lai, Viet Nam, where Gary was stationed during the war. I used his photographs and letters to serve as my guides, sometimes combining his photographic vision with mine. The project, nearly twelve years of effort, has evolved and changed with time, using a variety of formats to tell the story. In titling this work My Brother’s War, I make reference to other families worldwide that have lost, and are presently losing loved ones to war. My works seeks to inspire, as the only alternative, a peaceful coexistence.

Jessica Hines received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her MFA in photography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She won 1st Place in the Kuala Lumpur International PhotoAwards, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 1st Place in NEXT: New Photographic Visions, Castell Photography Gallery, curated by Elizabeth Avedon, Asheville, North Carolina, The Kolga Award for Best Experimental Photography, Kolga Tbislisi Photo in Tbilisi, Georgia, Humanitarian Documentary Grant in the WPGA Annual, Pollux Awards, juried by Philip Brookman, Chief Curator and Head of Research at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, First Prize in Fine Art Portfolio in the World Wide Photography Gala Awards, and Grand Prize for portfolio in the Lens Culture International Exposure Awards 2010. Her work was exhibited in the New York Photo Festival 2011 in Subjective/Objective, curated by Elisabeth Biondi, New York, New York. Hines has lectured and exhibited throughout North and South America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.

Judith Henry

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Artist’s Statement For almost 50 years I have created conceptual multimedia artworks exploring the friction between our interior lives and public selves. I have secretly observed, listened to, photographed, filmed and recorded strangers in public places while remaining largely invisible. When using myself as subject, I have appeared masked or hidden, as in several recent series. After graduating Carnegie Mellon, I moved to New York from the suburbs of Cleveland and found myself in a densely populated metropolis. For me, each person was a matchless original as well as a stereotype. In 1970, with a small, cheap camera, I began surreptitiously photographing people on the streets, often listening to their conversations. In an attempt to tease out patterns of human experience, I aggregated thousands of photographs. For years, I repurposed my street photographs in many forms: books, videos, photographs, installations and sculptures, and even created Who I Saw in New York from 1970-2000, a book and gallery installation consisting of photographs of thousands of people. When I moved from SoHo to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2008, I became dependent on the L train to visit Manhattan. This made it easy to go to galleries, museums, visit friends, see doctors, etc. I now found myself in close quarters with a vast and, for me, new, population. As a pastime, I began photographing other passengers with my iPhone. At the same time, I continued my art in the studio by developing several series of myself behind masks. In 2017, it was announced that the L train would be closed for 18 months for repairs. What would this mean? How would my life be affected? Would my work practice change? It would not, but the focus, the idea would have a different urgency. I decided to start a new project, painting portraits of the passengers I had photographed. With free, quick, gestural strokes and a palette of both muted and intense colors, I tried to bring life to the gray underground. The speed of my painting reflected, for me, the crowded, ever-moving population of passengers; hurried, contemplative, sometimes angry, occasionally musical and lyrical. Almost half a million of us would be dislocated or stranded every day. Underground became integrated with above ground. Everywhere I walked, construction crossed my paths. I photographed my altered landscape. The images became backgrounds on which I mounted several of the portraits. This recombination created context which has always been crucial to my art practice. I called the series L Train Bye, Bye. But then, overnight, everything seemed about to change. The governor had somehow discovered a new technology at the last minute. No shutdown, he said. No fast track. But my work would stand with a new title, They Rode the L Train.
Judith Henry is a multi-media artist, born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After receiving a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, she moved to New York in the late 1960s and started making art that explored the friction between interior life and public persona, developing themes of self-disclosure, identity and loss. She utilizes drawing, photography, typography, video, painting and sculpture. Several of her works resulted in large installations. In addition to exhibiting internationally for decades, in 1976 Henry and artist Jaime Davidovich created Wooster Enterprises, whose conceptual paper products were sold internationally. Her conceptual Crumpled Paper Stationery was produced and sold by The Museum of Modern Art for years. MoMA also commissioned her to produce Overheard on the Way to MoMAQNS when they closed the 53rd Street museum for renovation and temporarily moved to Queens. Judith Henry’s Overheard book series was published by Universe/Rizzoli from 2000 to 2002 and in 2006 Atria Books published her Overheard in America. Henry has shown in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Cleveland, Philadelphia and internationally in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London and Switzerland. Her most recent solo shows were at BravinLee programs, New York, 2015 and 2018, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2016 and The National Arts Club 2017.

Jerry Siegel

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Artist’s Statement

I am a strong believer in place, and how a region, community and a home will shape who you are. The place I know, where I was raised, is the Black Belt region of the American South. It is how I was raised, as a Southerner and as a Jew in a small southern town, instilled with belief in family and tradition that motivates me to document the place I call home.

Born in Selma, AL, Jerry Siegel is a photographer living in Atlanta, GA, and working throughout the Southeast. Siegel focuses his work in the traditions of documentary and portrait photography. His work in the Black Belt region of Alabama was recently published by the Georgia Museum of Art. This monograph, Black Belt Color, focuses on the unique, cultural landscape of the Black Belt region. His first monograph, Facing South, Portraits of Southern Artists, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2011, and features portraits of 100 Southern artists.