A Summer of Photography
July 8 - August 20, 2010
July 8 - August 20, 2010
Press Release:
The Flomenhaft Gallery will present an ambitious exhibit of photographs by the following artists: Keliy Anderson-Staley, Neil Folberg, Builder Levy, Rimma Gerlovina & Valeriy Gerlovin, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Builder Levy’s photographs of Appalachia are extremely timely in view of the recent tragedies in the coal mines of West Virginia and Kentucky. Levy believes that miners, having given their sweat and blood to build and sustain our nation are among America’s unsung heroes. What began in 1968 as a ten-day trip became an odyssey of more than four decades of his visiting and photographing in coal mines, miners’ homes and communities in the hills and hollows of Western Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, South Western Virginia and Western Pennsylvania. He was inspired by the miners’ multiracial collective struggles, ongoing since the late nineteenth century, to make life better for themselves, their families and the American working people. Visiting the region, Levy set out to explore and experience the hard-scrabble realism of the "real" America. These are intensely felt, strongly composed, richly printed gold-toned silver gelatin gelatin and platinum print photographs that manifest a visual poetry of human dignity. As the project has inspired and changed him, Levy's hope is that his photographs made over the past forty years can inspire a deeper understanding and greater appreciation for coalfield Appalachia, its people and its mountains, and its unique and significant role in our nations’ heritage.
Keliy Anderson-Staley was an award winner in last year’s Aperture summer competition. This series of portraits seeks to raise questions about the ways photography has shaped our conceptions of identity since its earliest days. Her interest lies in finding the unique visual markers of personality and in portraying faces that reflect the diversity of contemporary America. She uses the nineteenth-century wet plate collodion photographic process, the same photo process that was used when many believed that photography could scientifically record and catalogue the racial or ethnic identity of a person. Like the photographers of the 1850s, she uses hand-poured chemistry that she mixes herself, brass lenses, and wooden view cameras to expose positive images directly onto blackened metal and glass. Her portraits present dialectic between similarity and difference and Anderson-Staley explores the way individuals resist easy categorization.
Carrie Mae Weems has a remarkably unique way of addressing and confronting issues of identity, in contrast to Keliy Anderson-Staley who actually points up the use of photography to categorize people or the Gerlovins who see photography as the means to viewing one’s psychological and visionary interiors. From the late 1988 to early 1990 Weems created a series entitled Colored People which celebrated the range of skin color hidden behind the term “black.” The triptychs and single image from this series portray the terms the African American community has used to create its own hierarchies by way of color. In the triptychs she uses minimalism’s formal repetitions and the ‘front and side mug shot’ she says, “to better trap the miscreant.” The works in our exhibit are Blue Black Boy, Chocolate Colored Man, and High Yella Girl and for Weems they hold up a mirror to the beauty of black people’s multiplicity. The other work in this exhibit is a four part suite from her Sea Island Series of 1992. Weems had decided to create a new kind of historical chronicle for which she visited the unique folk culture of the African Americans of the Gullah dialect who inhabit the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina.
By way of contrast and to convey another mood, we are displaying several of Neil Folberg’s photographs from the “Celestial Nights,” a series of starry night landscapes with a cosmic outlook set in ancient ruins and scenes of the Middle East. This work was collected in the book, Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land (Aperture Press, New York 2001), winner of the New York Book Show Prize, First Place Photography, 2002. This became an Aperture traveling exhibition through 2008 in the United States and Israel. He was also commissioned to follow in the footsteps of the Impressionist artists and create a photographic view that captures their inspirations. Folberg there discovered a community of artists linked to one another in concept, friendship and discord, and he met and photographed some of their descendants. The Impressionist paintings provided a fount of inspiration and he realized that they had been created in a spirit of what photography would later become but had not yet attained. He looked at modern France through the Impressionists’ eyes and attempted to integrate their visions with his own in a manner both lighthearted and serious. So successful was he at the challenge that Abbeville Press decided to create a spectacular book to document his endeavor. Several of these works will also be part of our summer show.
The engaging images of the Gerlovins are 'still performances' that briefly sum up certain trends in their art and closely link to the whole sequence of what they call their life's 'perhappenings.' They are their thoughts that became visible shown through allegoric games that transport the viewer into a theatre of consciousness. The Gerlovins feel that creativity in general is an extension of the inner qualities of an artist and they exist in all that exists. Therefore, their photographs which convey a mood are not portraits. They are not models but modules used for personification of different stages of psychological and visionary experience. Their roles are of the observers and the observed and are extended into the unifying state of being the observatory itself.
The Flomenhaft Gallery will present an ambitious exhibit of photographs by the following artists: Keliy Anderson-Staley, Neil Folberg, Builder Levy, Rimma Gerlovina & Valeriy Gerlovin, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Builder Levy’s photographs of Appalachia are extremely timely in view of the recent tragedies in the coal mines of West Virginia and Kentucky. Levy believes that miners, having given their sweat and blood to build and sustain our nation are among America’s unsung heroes. What began in 1968 as a ten-day trip became an odyssey of more than four decades of his visiting and photographing in coal mines, miners’ homes and communities in the hills and hollows of Western Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, South Western Virginia and Western Pennsylvania. He was inspired by the miners’ multiracial collective struggles, ongoing since the late nineteenth century, to make life better for themselves, their families and the American working people. Visiting the region, Levy set out to explore and experience the hard-scrabble realism of the "real" America. These are intensely felt, strongly composed, richly printed gold-toned silver gelatin gelatin and platinum print photographs that manifest a visual poetry of human dignity. As the project has inspired and changed him, Levy's hope is that his photographs made over the past forty years can inspire a deeper understanding and greater appreciation for coalfield Appalachia, its people and its mountains, and its unique and significant role in our nations’ heritage.
Keliy Anderson-Staley was an award winner in last year’s Aperture summer competition. This series of portraits seeks to raise questions about the ways photography has shaped our conceptions of identity since its earliest days. Her interest lies in finding the unique visual markers of personality and in portraying faces that reflect the diversity of contemporary America. She uses the nineteenth-century wet plate collodion photographic process, the same photo process that was used when many believed that photography could scientifically record and catalogue the racial or ethnic identity of a person. Like the photographers of the 1850s, she uses hand-poured chemistry that she mixes herself, brass lenses, and wooden view cameras to expose positive images directly onto blackened metal and glass. Her portraits present dialectic between similarity and difference and Anderson-Staley explores the way individuals resist easy categorization.
Carrie Mae Weems has a remarkably unique way of addressing and confronting issues of identity, in contrast to Keliy Anderson-Staley who actually points up the use of photography to categorize people or the Gerlovins who see photography as the means to viewing one’s psychological and visionary interiors. From the late 1988 to early 1990 Weems created a series entitled Colored People which celebrated the range of skin color hidden behind the term “black.” The triptychs and single image from this series portray the terms the African American community has used to create its own hierarchies by way of color. In the triptychs she uses minimalism’s formal repetitions and the ‘front and side mug shot’ she says, “to better trap the miscreant.” The works in our exhibit are Blue Black Boy, Chocolate Colored Man, and High Yella Girl and for Weems they hold up a mirror to the beauty of black people’s multiplicity. The other work in this exhibit is a four part suite from her Sea Island Series of 1992. Weems had decided to create a new kind of historical chronicle for which she visited the unique folk culture of the African Americans of the Gullah dialect who inhabit the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina.
By way of contrast and to convey another mood, we are displaying several of Neil Folberg’s photographs from the “Celestial Nights,” a series of starry night landscapes with a cosmic outlook set in ancient ruins and scenes of the Middle East. This work was collected in the book, Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land (Aperture Press, New York 2001), winner of the New York Book Show Prize, First Place Photography, 2002. This became an Aperture traveling exhibition through 2008 in the United States and Israel. He was also commissioned to follow in the footsteps of the Impressionist artists and create a photographic view that captures their inspirations. Folberg there discovered a community of artists linked to one another in concept, friendship and discord, and he met and photographed some of their descendants. The Impressionist paintings provided a fount of inspiration and he realized that they had been created in a spirit of what photography would later become but had not yet attained. He looked at modern France through the Impressionists’ eyes and attempted to integrate their visions with his own in a manner both lighthearted and serious. So successful was he at the challenge that Abbeville Press decided to create a spectacular book to document his endeavor. Several of these works will also be part of our summer show.
The engaging images of the Gerlovins are 'still performances' that briefly sum up certain trends in their art and closely link to the whole sequence of what they call their life's 'perhappenings.' They are their thoughts that became visible shown through allegoric games that transport the viewer into a theatre of consciousness. The Gerlovins feel that creativity in general is an extension of the inner qualities of an artist and they exist in all that exists. Therefore, their photographs which convey a mood are not portraits. They are not models but modules used for personification of different stages of psychological and visionary experience. Their roles are of the observers and the observed and are extended into the unifying state of being the observatory itself.
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| summer_of_photography_pr.pdf |