Tag Archives: photography

Christine Schiavo

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Artist’s Statement

My work deals with the loss of time and memory, and the attempt to retrieve it through making art.

The NYC subway is a timeless, random universe where countless strangers move in un-choreographed patterns through precariously defined spaces. Infinite combinations of sight, sound, light, shadow, movement and interaction occur as we travel through these subterranean and elevated spaces. Glimpses of familiar strangers and fleeting narratives emerge, evolve and disappear like ghosts, only to be repeated slightly differently, over and over again, like a film loop of vague memories imprinted on our subconscious.

THE PASSENGER, a series of single exposure, unaltered cell phone images of the NYC subway system, conveys the gritty, lyrical and strange experience of subway transit, using a medium that now seems crucial to both our existence and survival in this particular realm.

Note: all images are iphoneography. Untitled. No dimensions. 2015.

Christine Schiavo is a NYC born and based artist working in photography, film, sound and multi-media installation. She is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA NY, and shows her work internationally.

Gilbert Garcin

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(all images courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery)

Artist’s Statement

In his photographs, Gilbert Garcin poses as an ordinary ‘Mr. Everybody,’ dressed with an old overcoat. By placing himself, via the character he embodies, in absurd and inextricable situations he invites us to ponder such philosophical quandaries as time, solitude and the weight of existence. His work raises a number of universal questions about the meaning of human existence.

Gilbert Garcin (b. La Ciotat, France, 1929) was originally the owner of a lamp manufacturing company in Marseille, France. Following a workshop during the Rencontres Internationales in Arles, under the direction of Pascal Dolemieux, Garcin, at the age of 65, gave up his business and began his photographic career.

Garcin has published multiple books and has had numerous international exhibitions. In 2009, he celebrated his 80th birthday with a traveling “Retrospective” exhibition. Garcin’s work is in many private and public collections including: Fonds national pour l’art Contemporain, France; Fonds Communal pour l’art Contemporain de Marseille, Marseille; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Artothèque de Veendam, the Netherlands; Artothèque de Nantes, Nantes; Artothèque de Vitré, Vitré; Médiathèque de Miramas, Miramas; Fondation Regards de Provence, Marseille; Galerie du Château d’Eau, Toulouse; and The West Collection; Philadelphia.

Marcus Leatherdale

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Artist’s Statement

Asia Society – Michelle Caswell interview:

MC: Isn’t this a romantic notion of Indian culture? How does your work differ from colonial portraits of India?

ML: Initially I looked at colonial pictures [from India] and I thought these could be such extraordinary pictures if there wasn’t such a barrier between the person who shot it and the “specimen”…. I certainly hope my pictures aren’t coming off as that. I’m just trying to depict the pure cultural aspects of India up to the point where they’ve all decided that in order to be modern, they’ve got to be Western. And that irritates me. You can be modern without being American; I think that is possible. To see people who are willing to trade off thousands and thousands of years of glorious traditions just so they can be modern is deplorable. So if you want to call that romanticism, fine.

Montreal-born photographer Marcus Leatherdale has been exhibiting for more than 30 years in galleries worldwide. His work has been published in such magazines as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Details, and Elle Decor, featured in publications from Artforum to Interview, and is in the permanent collections as museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago and Austria’s Vienna Museum of Modern Art.

First known for his arresting portraits of New York City celebrities (Hidden Identities series-Details) in the 1980s, in 1993 Leatherdale began spending half of each year in the Indian holy city of Banaras. Based in a 200-year-old house in the old city, he began photographing the diverse and remarkable people there, from the sadhus (holy men) to celebrities, royalty to the Adivasi (tribals). Each year, for the months he lives in India, he works out of his studio and then travels extensively, setting up makeshift studios in villages and carefully negotiating among some of India’s most elusive figures to make his portraits. Marcus relocated to Chottanagpur, Jharkhand, where he has been focusing on the Adivasis (tribals) of India. When not in India, Marcus is now based in Portugal (Luso Studio) and commutes between Europe and USA. In April, 2015, his show, Hidden Identities, will be up at Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in New York City. http://www.marcusleatherdale.com.

Editors’ notes

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Welcome to Posit 1!

It is with the greatest pleasure that I present this inaugural issue. From now on, whenever I am asked what kind of writing Posit is looking for, I will point to the work in this volume, which shares a quality I hope to make Posit’s hallmark: its combination of homo- and heterogeneity. Homogeneously excellent, by which I mean both original and accomplished. Yet heterogeneous in form and style. Diverse, as well, in origin, harking from Ottawa, Toronto, Rockhampton, Australia, New York, Kentucky, California, San Antonio, and Olympia, Washington. I believe that re-contextualization gives rise to re-conception – that a luminous energy emerges from the cross-talk sparked by the juxtaposition of voices as divergent as the ones assembled here.

I hope you agree, and that you enjoy the great Michael Boughn’s Whitmanesque “City II.2.iv – Flirtations of light,” singing the promise and dread of urban life in this masterful and tantalizing excerpt; Mary Kasimor’s dazzling sampler of rigorous, lapidary explorations of lyric’s cerebral and aesthetic potential, crafted and turned to frameworks of implication as sharp and graceful as razor-wire lace; the grave entertainment of Amy King’s intellectual joy-ride of verbal pyrotechnics, warning and pleasing us at once, offering treats and lifelines to help “make sense of the contagion/we call today;” Travis and JenMarie MacDonald’s playful yet probing lyric departures from Dr. Who, as grave and light of touch as the Doctor himself, and, like the Tardis, improbably expansive; rob mclennan’s entries from his Glossary of Musical Terms, whose intensity of encapsulation and fragmentation shatters preconceived ideas of word and note, generating an energetic lexicon for new connections; Bernd Sauermann’s compressed, delicate, chiseled blocks of verbal and intellectual alchemy, as quietly shocking as a “revelation making its way like mad current up my arm;” R.L. Swihart’s spare, incantatory, verbal fragments taken up and dropped like stitches connecting our shared experience of the dread unspoken; Rob Talbert’s deceptively plain-spoken, unflinching perspicacity, hiding twist after brilliant turn in plain sight, working the seam between heart and mind, lament and appreciation, elegy and critique; Brad Vogler’s meditations on what cannot, will not, or need not be said, magically drawing our quieted attention to the syntax and typography of stillness itself; Mark Young’s deliciously understated verbal artifacts, turning our expectations of allusion and ekphrasis, realism and surrealism, artifice and nature, art and commerce on their heads via splashes of “Frankendolling,” the “sonnets of Michelangelo,” and other inversions; and finally, Joanna Fuhrman and Toni Simon’s spare, precise, and gravely playful “The Ruler of Rusted Knees,” deftly uniting the verbal and the visual.

Finally, a few appreciations.

To the accomplished and celebrated contributors who so generously entrusted their work to this fledgling publication: my deepest gratitude.

To those contributors who are editors as well: Joanna Fuhrman (Ping Pong), Travis and JenMarie MacDonald (Fact-Simile), rob mclennan (Chaudiere Books, above/ground books,etc.),  Brad Vogler (Opon), and Mark Young (Otoliths): the excellence you bring to both endeavors is my inspiration for this undertaking.

To the talented artist and website designer Nathan Gwirtz: thank you for converting my ideas into (virtual) reality.

And to my friend and collaborator, Arts Editor Melissa Stern, thank you for joining me in this venture!

But perhaps most importantly, to you, dear reader: thank you for visiting Posit 1. I hope you are glad you did.

Prosit!

Susan Lewis

* * * * *

Beginning with this, our inaugural issue, Posit will showcase a variety of visual artists working in all mediums, whose work we find thoughtful, provocative, funny, dangerous, or just plain beautiful. Each issue will bring together galleries by three to six artists whose work presents a vision that is both individually and collectively unique.

I am honored that Susan Lewis has chosen me to accompany her on this voyage, and hope that you will join us from issue to issue.

For Posit 1, it is my pleasure to present the work of three artists whose work shares a sense of elegance and grace. In these galleries, Michael Janis creates sublime narratives of extraordinary depth and dimensionality through the laborious fusing of layer upon layer of laminated glass, bringing precision and construct to a parallel universe where science and reason adhere to their own logic; while Leah Oates’ gentle layers of image and tone build mysterious photographic journeys through countryside and city; a theme taken up by Kyle Gallup’s celebration of the past and possibility of New York, from Coney Island to old theater marquees, alternately documenting a world long-gone and fashioning a fantasy of what it might have been.

Happy viewing!

Melissa Stern

Joanna Fuhrman and Toni Simon

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The Ruler of Rusted Knees

THE RULER OF RUSTED KNEES

You were the king of all the abandoned bathtubs and I was the king of air/ space/ time/ questions unlucky fuzzy key chains and speech. Were you jealous? Um, sorry (?) I'm was never actually kidding. You were the king of all the abandoned bathtubs

and I was the king of air/space/ time/ questions

unlucky fuzzy key chains and speech.

Were you jealous?

Um, sorry (?)

I was never / actually kidding.
thoth3

 In the beginning, we made birds chirps translated into the language of broken chairs.

No one exactly understood us, so they called us wise.

This was before the bloody fedoras,

before the arrival of floating leaf territory.
rustedknees4

 Try to balance
like an idea,

like a balanced
idea, like the idea

of balance like
an idea balanced

on another idea,
on balanced ideas

on many ideas
balancing.
rustedknees5

 Back then—you were
the ruler of plastic wrap,

lost words and
radiators.

I was the ruler
of disobedient vowels,

folded origami-style
guidebooks.
rustedknees6

 A man with double eights
in his halo is lucky.

A man without a head and double eights
in his halo is unlucky.

Can a man have a halo without a head?
Can a haloed man be unlucky?

If a man is lucky and unlucky at once,
he is doubly unlucky and doubly lucky.

If you try to be lucky,
you’re unlucky.

If want to be unlucky,
you’re in luck!

thoth7

 In the beginning, we didn’t need to be friends with all the parts of ourselves.

It was enough to listen to the wind tear the world to pieces.

Later, the wind swallowed parts of ourselves we had no name for

but missed terribly.
rustedknees8

 We had happened in many
different somewheres,

and everywheres,
and were here now.

Like the taste of teeth
is here, or the migrating

space around a loose flag.

rustedkness9

 You can be the king
of whatever–the-hell

you believe
you are the king of.

Take light,
for example.

If you whispered to the light,
no one would

say you were
wrong to believe

its flashing was a product
of your will.
Artists’ Statement

In our mixed-media literary project, Egyptian gods, stripped of their context and role, wander various New York City neighborhoods trying to figure out where they belong, how to make sense of what they have lost, and how to get along with one another.

In the first step of our project, Toni Simon constructs three-dimensional, small-scale figurines out of paper, modeled on Egyptian gods. She then paints them with abstract, graphic details. We then take the little gods out into different neighborhoods and take hundreds of photographs of them. We select eight to ten images, which become the basis for a series of poems written by Joanna Fuhrman.

So far, we have created picture/poem serial combinations in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Chinatown, the Reversible Destiny Studio, Red Hook and Gowanus (featured here). Parts of the project have appeared online in paperbag and Talisman and in print in the 100th issue of Hanging Loose.

Toni Simon is a multimedia artist living in Brooklyn. Her illustrated book of prose poetry “Earth After Earth” was published by Lunar Chandelier Press in 2012. Over 80 of her illustrations appear in “Contradicta: Aphorisms” (Green Integer, 2010) by Nick Piombino. She has exhibited her drawings at the Drawing Center and at the AIR Gallery in NYC. http://tonisimonart.blogspot.com

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of four books of poetry, most recently “Pageant” (Alice James Books 2009) and “Moraine” (Hanging Loose Press 2006), as well as the chapbook “The Emotive Function” (Least Weasel Press 2011). She teaches poetry writing at Rutgers University and through Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Other sections of her project with Toni appear online at paperbag and Tailsman and in print in the journal Hanging Loose. For more see: Joannafuhrman.com

Leah Oates

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Artist Statement

The world thus appears to be a complicated tissue of events in which connections of different kinds alternate, overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole. All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux, and at moments this flux is visible.
                                           —Peter Matthiessen

The Transitory Space series deals with urban and natural locations that are transforming due to the passage of time, altered natural conditions and a continual human imprint. In everyone and in everything there are daily changes and this series articulates fluctuation in the photographic image and captures movement through time and space.

Transitory spaces have a messy human energy that is perpetually in the present yet continually altering. They are endlessly interesting, alive places where there is a great deal of beauty and fragility. They are temporary monuments to the ephemeral nature of existence.

Leah Oates’ “Transitory Space” series was recently on view at Pieroi Gallery in Brooklyn, Islip Art Museum in NY, Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Florida, the Housatonic Museum in Connecticut and Unsettled Gallery in New Mexico. In 2011-2012, she had a solo show at Susan Eley Fine Arts, NYC and was part of group shows at Denise Bibro Fine Arts in NYC, the US Embassy in Muscat, Oman, the Flash Forward Photography Festival in Boston, MA with the Humble Art Foundation, the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY, Momenta Art in Brooklyn and The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. She has had solo shows at A Taste of Art Gallery in NYC, Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill, Long Island, The Center for Book Arts in NYC, Arsenal Gallery in Central Park in NYC, Tomasulo Gallery in New Jersey, The Sol Mednick Gallery in Philadelphia and Real Art Ways in Connecticut. Her work has been shown at the Affordable Art Fair NYC, the Scope Art Fair NYC, the Pool Art Fair NYC and Miami, the Bridge Art Fair NYC and Miami and in Photo NY. Recently her work was featured in Phaidon Online, Eyesin, Bomblog, Diffusion Magazine, NY Arts Magazine, Daily Constitutional and Art Squeeze.