In Cold Blood. Y Gallery: September 11 – October 8, 2013

Originally Published in Musee Magazine

It was a group of sweaty individuals that crowded the sidewalk, smoking, chatting and generally being genial that greeted us for In Cold Blood; a dual exhibition split or shared between Mathais Kessler and Andrea Galvani. Kessler’s work took up most of the space, the Y-gallery where the show runs from now until October 8th was underground, and hot. Ironic, one might say for a show called In Cold Blood, but I found it strangely appropriate viewing Kessler’s work of an iceberg melting, or his small instillation of a mirror that melts as you look at it. Watching the mirror sweat it seemed right to be sweating an uncomfortable, we were all loosing moisture.

Kessler is influenced by romance era landscape painting, and uses that influence on his work with icescapes, taking what would be a romance landscape and changing it into a light box, or a shadow. In the words of Kessler “Photography robbed painting of it’s realism, and allowed it to become more abstract”

Mathais Kessler

Galvani’s most prominent piece in the show is a large print of what looks like someone standing on a boat with a flashlight – and it is just that, but speaking with Galvani I learned that it was just one of a series, and a moment of time captured, now on display. The weakness of this show is that although the print is excellent – we are never told the story.

Andrea Galvani and Cecilia Jurado

First Galvani developed/invented a flashlight that could pierce the Ionosphere then travel through space. Galvani’s other work in the show is a photograph of the northern lights, which also take place in the Ionosphere. The importance and beauty of the flashlight is that the light from it escapes earth, and then travels forever in space.

So, flashlight in hand Galvani set out on a voyage with a crew; charging the flashlight with solar panels. At the end of this long voyage, when there was enough power, an engineer took the light and panels and turned on the flashlight, moving it up slowly until the power ran out.

So, this seemingly insignificant print of someone shining a light, is actually part of a huge piece that is still traveling through the universe. When, once I had heard the story, I went back to examine the pieces I was moved, and understood the significance.

Review by John Hutt

Photographs by Tanya Kiseleva

Fugitive Art. SohoPhoto Gallery: SEPTEMBER 10th -28th, 2013

Originally published in Musee Magazine.

 Fugitive Art opened to an enthusiastic crowd at the SohoPhoto gallery on September 10th and will remain until the 28th. The concept of the exhibition was the fine art market imposing restrictions on numbers of prints. Yet those prints get shared, often in low quality online to anyone who wants them, no gallery or artist gets paid. Because of this there are less opportunities for the general public to see exceptional prints of high quality. From the statement “We wondered what could spur a renaissance in the creation and appreciation of photographic prints without undermining the value of limited-edition archival, collection worthy work”

The exhibition was mostly large scale prints by a variety of artists. Susan Guice showed her Delta Blues series which were ariel shots of disappearing wetland in Louisiana, the images were striking as the snake like salt water, seen from above, encroaching into freshwater swamps form fractal shapes, or strangely geometric patterns as they twist and bend ultimately destroying their destination.

Reto Sterchi took pictures of the ArtBreak hotel, a hotel that was going under, invited artists to decorate the rooms. Rather than simply being found object photos Sterchi composes each one beautifully and gives an unsettling air of blue tinged artificiality to the entire first floor of the exhibit.

Among the most beautiful and classically composed photography was Sonia Toledo’s series Oh Fish! That took shimmering pictures of carp as they hid far underwater to avoid freezing; the clear water and the fishes fins combine to make an effect that evokes more fire and smoke than freeing temperatures.

However the best piece was the most ‘fugitive’ in the sense of fleeting. A spinning disk that speeds up to reveal a brilliant blue globe of the earth, then slowing down, nothing but lights, then eventually nothing: ephermental.

The thesis of the exhibit is clear only through the theme and the name, these artists share little, if anything in common with one another, in fact some are diametrically opposed to the others style. All became clear when the curator/artist Susan Keiser explained that all the prints were printed by them using a special kind of ink, whatever prints they printed will be sold or not sold then when the show closes the files will be deleted and the prints destroyed.

Which sort of makes the exhibit more beautiful, knowing that these works are ultimately doomed gives a sense of time and purpose to the proceedings that would be lacking in a traveling show.

Reviewed by John Hutt

Elad Lassry at the 303 Gallery

Originally published in Musee Magazine

Lassry works in a variety of mediums, although if you asked him he would say he mostly works with

photography. Lassry’s definition of photography seems to be, if anything he does contains a print the

it’s photography.

The exhibition showed his newer work, which was photography that had been enhanced with

mixed media, padded silk added to the top of a portrait of a woman Untitled (Woman, Blonde) shows a

woman getting a massage, the masseuse totally obscured by the silk.

The piece Bits showed horse bits on a silver metal background; then black holes were cut out;

instead of evoking farm life, all I could think about was S&M.

Another pice utilizing mixed media was Untitled (red) which was a portrait of a woman, the

subject almost totally obscured buy a red ribbon running through the middle; this of course makes the

subject “red” not the woman.

The rest of the photographic works were all worth looking at, String B a silver gelatin print, was

exceptional.

In addition to photography Lassry incorporated sculpture into the show in the form of Yellow

Bed and SW White Cabinet. I prefer Lassry’s photographic and mixed media work more than the

sculpture, or is it furniture?

The crowd in the 303 Gallery didn’t seem to mind, filling the room almost as soon as the show

was opened.

Review by John Hutt
Photographs by Tanya Kiseleva

Artist Profile: Vera Lutter

Since moving to New York in 1993 Vera Lutter has been working in her own unique medium with pinhole camera, and camera obscura.

Lutter graduated from the NY Academy of Fine arts in 1995 with an MFA in photography. While living as a student Lutter transformed her small NY loft into one of histories oldest type of cameras – the camera obscuraand through a pinhole lens that documented the urban landscape of New York in negative images. She would project these negatives on massive sheets of photographic paper.

Lutter moved on from there to more ambitious work, taking her camera obscura everywhere from The Great Pyramids of Giza to Industrial wastelands all over the world.

 

Her work is recurrently eerie, transforming what she shoots into their negative seem to place these commonplace scenes of urban decay, bustling city, and construction sites into spectral images where sunspots and halos shimmer across the once familiar scenes. In looking at her work we see the world in reversed, paradoxical, and that forces us to question the solidity and reality of what we are looking at, as T.S Eliot appropriately wrote in The Wasteland: “ only a collection of broken images”

 

Her exhibitions have been too numerous to mention – she has had at least one a year since 1998. Her unique method of photography is haunting and beautiful. Her early work focused on New York city, confined or defined by her position Lutter transformed her location. The Sky Scrapers, World Trade Center site, and city streets; all received the camera obscura treatment. These images in the reverse force questions like are these monuments to man’s success or excess in; the paradoxical nature of her work is where the strength lies.

Then she began to travel with her method; Venice, Paris, Long Island, Egypt, all received large scale negative treatment. Looking through her lens at these iconic places, especially the pyramids, is unsettling. These phantasmal ancient monuments disquiet the viewer, as if these giant works were simply apparitions in sand, bringing to mind Shelley’s words: “Look upon my works ye mighty and Tremble”.

Lutter’s more recent works are The Metropolitan Museum of Art where she focuses on the Roman statues housed there. She takes photographs in the negative – highlighting the marble forms of ruined humans, touching on what the human form is, when removed from the context of a historical art gallery and put into the context of a fine art. Her headless Marble Statue of a Crouching Aphrodite and Marble Torso Of Eros, all seem to highlight that the human form is a collection of pieces put together by a long dead architect, and nothing more, an uncomfortable thought. Nonetheless, just because they are broken and counter to the viewers expectations does not make them any less beautiful.

Lutter also turned her camera skyward for her recent series Albescent, where she took both digital and analogue photographs of the moon in various phases with varying degrees of cloud cover. Seeing these lunar specters it is easy to see that we once worshipped the moon as some kind of terrifying antipodal goddess.

Lutter continues to disquiet gallery goers around the world, using sound and light installations, photography exhibitions and her work is part of the permanent collection at some of the worlds most illustrious museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of fine arts Huston, The San Francisco Museum of Modern art and others.