Tag Archives: photography

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.

Nicolette Wong & David Heg

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The Classroom

You have left for tomorrow
like the rhythm of rust

reverberating through
the blinds—darting,

gasping, fleeing the day
we pressed our hearts

against the glitter
of wisdom, our being

choked on a voiceless
command—be still,

be pliant, be the words
translucent as dust.

 

The Waiting Room

It must be rain inside the walls. The rain of a child’s cries, a red swing against the grey sweetness of sky. A hollow to stifle, rocking in the cold front. Of ciphers discarded on the doorsteps, lips bleeding into porcelain shards to let live. Come back, come back, to the call of faceless drinkers pleading for histories, in a room of dust singed by erasure. For I will wait, I will wait to touch their voices, punctured by rain.

Nicolette Wong is the editor in chief of A-Minor Magazine & Press. Her writing has appeared in Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, Escape Into Life, Thrush Poetry Journal and other venues.
David Heg is a photographer and educator currently manifesting in the wooded hills of eastern CT. His work has appeared on the cover of Nicolette Wong’s poetry chapbook, Stone Bride Madrigals, and the online zines, Negative Suck, Dark Chaos, A-Minor Magazine, Revolution John and Otoliths.

Sarah Stengle & Eva Mantell

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from Pages from the Frozen Sea

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Artists’ Statement

The “pages” in Pages from the Frozen Sea are photographs of ordinary objects or materials suspended in ice, or artworks made by working with ice. This collaborative project is a celebration of the beauty and constantly changing nature of ice, and embraces an experimental, process-oriented approach to art-making. The project was inspired by a quote from Franz Kafka: “A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.” The images selected were done during the winter of 2017. The project will continue during the winter of 2018: it requires cold weather. This year Sarah Stengle and Eva Mantel hope to extend the scope of the project by inviting other artists to also contribute pages. The project can be followed on Facebook and Instagram.

Sarah Stengle lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and is a book artist and sculptor. She is represented by Central Booking Gallery in New York City, and her work is included in many collections including the Chicago Art Institute, the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Morgan Library. She is interested in inter-disciplinary art and has collaborated with mathematicians and writers on art projects. Her most recently completed collaboration was with author Michael Joseph and was featured at VISPO: Visual Poetry, a traveling exhibit that originated in Aachen Germany, September, 2016 and concluded in Bergau, Germany in May, 2017.
Eva Mantell lives in Princeton, NJ and has exhibited her sculpture, painting and video at the Monmouth Museum, the Hunterdon Museum, the Bernstein Gallery at Princeton University, the Abington Art Center, the Jersey City Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She has a BA from Penn and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in NYC. She curates, teaches and speaks about art including the recent Art as Activism, at the exhibit Fight or Flight at The Painting Center, NYC. She has a special interest in arts engagement and community outreach and her teaching has been included in Designing and Delivering Arts Programs for Older Adult Learners, published by the National Center for Creative Aging in Washington, DC.

Ruben Natal-San Miguel

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Artist’s Statement

This photography series is focused on capturing the last vestiges of the vibrant street culture, the traditions and lifestyles that are quickly being eradicated due to the aggressive gentrification that’s invading almost every corner of NYC. For the past twelve summers, Ruben Natal-San Miguel has traveled around New York City by bicycle searching for what it’s like to live in these parts of the city. The artist has been able to find not only a vibrant and colorful vision, but also a happy and very meaningful life lesson.

Ruben Natal-San Miguel is a self-taught photographer currently living in NYC. His photography works had been extensively published and shown national and internationally.