Giorgio Negro, Tommaso Protti: The Price of Sugar

November 6 - December 31

Inspired by the slave’s quote in Voltaire chef-d’œuvre Candide “that’s the price you eat sugar in Europe”, this exhibition of photographs brings together the works of Giorgio Negro and Tommaso Protti. The humanist and surrealist photography of the first completes the photo-journalistic frontality of the second. 

In line with Voltaire’s denunciation of a slavery system through Eduardo Galeano’s Latin American manifesto The open veins of Latin America, the works of these two Italian photographers testify to the limits of a system that does not learn from its own mistakes. 

The price of sugar therefore obviously evokes the disasters caused by foreign interference and what follows; corruption, prostitution, deforestation, leveling of cultures, gangs, drug trafficking, gold diggers or extreme violence, but also all the positive forces that can emerge from it. From chaos comes mutual aid, revolutionary theories, heightened faith and ever stronger love. The price of sugar is therefore above all a tribute to resilience. This emanates from strong links between cultures and nature and manifests itself in daily combativeness.

The antagonism between violence and love is precisely at the heart of the complementary aesthetics of artists. The journalistic, raw and aestheticizing aspect of Protti documents the suffering body while the humanistic poetry of Negro unveils this insatiable energy of the spirit. 

In Protti’s project Terra Vermelha, and commonly in high-flying photojournalism, the aestheticization of suffering, which is reminiscent of the work partly also carried out in Brazil by Sebastião Salgado, is not intended to seduce but rather to raise awareness. On the other hand, the manifestation of the spirit in Negro also pays homage to the history of photography. His mastery of framing and his choice of composition specific to a restricted category of photographers, who knew how to mix humanism with surrealism during the 20th century such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész or Robert Frank, allow to keep hope.

Press Release

Josephine Sacabo: Josephine Sacabo: Those Who Dance

October 8, 2020 - January 2, 2021

Virtual ZOOM Opening, October 8, 2020 at 7pm
Email: info@agallery.com to request an Invitation to the Zoom event.

www.agallery.com

Press Release

Marti Cormand (Brooklyn, NY), Oasa DuVerney (Brooklyn, Judith Eisler (Vienna, Austria and Warren, CT), Andy Mister (Beacon, William Powhida (Brooklyn, Gil Scullion (Middletown, and Diana Shpungin (Brooklyn: Twenty Twenty

October 12, 2020 - February 7, 2021

Audre Lorde, Robert Alexander: Powerful and Dangerous: The Words and Images of Audre Lorde

March 22, 2020 - February 15, 2021

The Alice Austen House presents Audre Lorde in photographs and historic texts.

Powerful and Dangerous explores the intersection between language, activism and photographic messaging. The exhibition holds up a lens to the contemporary women’s, LGBTQ+, and Black Lives Matter movements and considers how Lorde’s words resonate today. Due to COVID-19 the exhibition has been extended with online programs until 2021. A series of public programs, including scholars talks, readings, outdoor film screenings and artist-led photo walks in the Staten Island neighborhood of Stapleton where Lorde’s home, now an LGBTQ Historic landmark, will take place through 2021.

This exhibition is curated by Victoria Munro with contributions by Clare Coss, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jean Weisinger, Dagmar Shultz, Jennifer Abode and JEB. 

Scholars talks will include: Clare Coss, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jewelle Gomez, Cheryl Clark, Elizabeth Lorde Rollins, M.D. and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Film presentations by Dagmar Schultz and Jennifer Abod with audio interview by Jennifer Abod.

Rodrigo Valenzuela: Stature

October 29 - December 19

Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to present “Stature”, our first solo exhibition with Rodrigo Valenzuela, whose career encompasses photography, installation and video. “Stature” features eight photogravures taken of the artist’s studio constructions. As is typical of the artist, the series masterfully balances on a fulcrum between fiction and documentary traditions, “commonplace” materials and rarefied results, flattened photos of ambiguous scale and three-dimensional references. The forms in “Stature” could refer to Brutalist architecture, outdated machinery, or modernist monsters, but in fact they are concrete and plaster casts of discarded consumer packaging. Their immobility, too, is an illusion – all the forms are carefully stacked and tenuously balanced, rather than glued in place. There is ample metaphor to be quietly contemplated – i.e., undoing a politically repressive regime’s monuments with one push – but Valenzuela resists didactic urges, and instead embeds his interests in labor, capitalism, and socio-political symbols into serene images that slowly reveal their many languages.

Click here to read more about the exhibition.

Group exhibition of photographic artists. Juror: Francis Thompson: Francis Thompson Selects

October 17 - November 28

Atlanta Photography Group (APG) presents Francis Thompson Selects, APG’s feature exhibition for Atlanta Celebrates Photography (ACP), the month-long, citywide photography festival. The exhibition is juried by Francis Thompson, Art Program Project Manager at JLL, a contemporary corporate art collection installed within office buildings throughout North America.

Virtual opening & Juror talk will be available online 10/17/2020 -https://www.atlantaphotographygroup.org/events/2020/10/17/exhibition-francis-thompson-selects . Exhibition will be available online.

See website for more details and registration information.

Ana Castillo Lopez, Andy Steele, Becky Wilkes, Carolyn Hollingsworth, Chip Standifer, Dan Kaufman, Darnell Wilburn, David Clifton-Strawn, Douglas Powell, Elena Sergeeva, Hannah Elijah, Hopeton St.Clair Hibbert, Jennifer McKinnon Richman, Juan Carlos Rodriguez, Karey Walter, Kemachat Sirichanvimol, Mark Caceres, Mary Farmer, Shine Huang, Susan Pelteson, Susanne Swing Thompson, Tom Meiss, Tresha Glenister, Zoltan Gerliczki: PhotoBUCKHEAD

November 18, 2020 - January 2, 2021

Atlanta Photography Group presents PHOTOBUCKHEAD, photographic works selected by juror, Gregory Harris. This exhibition takes place at the Buckhead Library in Atlanta.

The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Exhibition: November 07 – January 02, 2021

Virtual Viewing room available: https://www.atlantaphotographygroup.org/events/2020/11/07/exhibition-photobuckhead

Beth Herzhaft, Beverly Korfin, Bob Newman, Chris Anderson, Chuck Grove, Cyril Bailleul, David H. Miller, Dinesh Chitlangia, Douglas Powell, Eric Burkard, Eric Kunsman, Ferney Coy, Gail Mitchell, Gerald Alderman, Hannah Butler, Jari Poulin, Jeremy Janus, Jinwoo Hwon Lee, Karey Walter, Leslie Andrews, Manuel Morquecho, Marilyn Maxwell, Mark Caceres, Mary Farmer, Michael Joseph, Nathan Dean, Nina Cammarata, Rene Borrero, Shirley Nannini, Trish Lawrence: APG>ATL: Airport 2020

November 18 - December 16

Ebru Yildiz: For the Record

November 1 - November 30

Brooklyn based music photographer, Ebru Yildiz, photographed the women who work behind the scenes in the music industry. In photographing musicians for years Ebru now celebrates the strong and intellectual force of women who make the music world happen. Photographing in black and white film and digital each portrait reveals the intense vibration of these important female figures.

For the Record

On view November 1–30, 2020 at Big Day Film Collective in greater Philadelphia.

Press Release

Erik Hoffner: Ice Visions

October 24, 2020 - March 6, 2021

I’ve loved snowflakes since the day, as a child, I learned that no two are alike—millions and millions of them in a storm and no twins, every crystalline structure a unique expression of its own making. Erik Hoffner taught me a new lesson in the magic of nature: that thin sheets of freshly formed ice are without peer.

Hoffner is the Snowflake Bentley of our generation. His photographic creations capture patterns in the ice that forms overnight atop the holes bored by ice fishermen on the waterways of New England. Each rondel of new ice possesses its own internal, pictorial logic and materiality. Hoffner’s photographs open a viewing space to consider the dynamics of nature in its unlimited expressive and metaphoric potential.

— Mara Williams, Chief Curator

Ice Visions is an informal collaboration between myself, the ice fishing community, and elemental forces. When fishing holes refreeze overnight, they create fertile ground for nature’s wild artistic side, and these perfectly augered circles become worlds at once interstellar and cellular, dreamlike and tactile.

The images on display depict ice designs I’ve documented during 20 years of exploring New England lakes and ponds. In the morning light, with tiny bubbles from below fixed in place by several inches of new ice, these scenes come to life as eyes, galaxies, stars, cells, and more when rendered in black and white.

Due to milder than usual temperatures during the past winter, on many mornings I found barely a skin of new ice covering the prior day’s fishing holes. Bubbles pooled up at the surface before freezing, creating striking new kinds of formations I’d never seen before, ones that perhaps reveal the fingerprint of a warming climate.

— Erik Hoffner

Federico Pardo: Ice Shanties: Fishing, People & Culture

October 24, 2020 - March 6, 2021

The ice shanty towns that spring up on Vermont’s frozen lakes and ponds are markers of the seasonal communities they harbor each winter. Practical and ingenious, shaped by function and aesthetics, ice shanties are a window into the personal, familial, and local cultures of ice fishing.

These simple yet intriguing structures captured the attention of Colombian-born photographer and part-time Vermont resident Federico Pardo, who in 2016 began documenting the shanties on a frozen floodplain of the West River in Brattleboro, known locally as the “The Meadows.”

Over the course of two winter seasons Pardo photographed the shanties using long-duration exposures, beginning his work after sunset and continuing long into the night. The resulting images, lit by both sunset and moonlight, carry a surreal quality of blended night and day.

Pardo’s photographs offer an atmospheric survey of the structures, the stark landscape from which they spring, and the human presence residing tentatively on an icy surface. His photographs tempt us to imagine otherworldly narratives about the shanties, their owners and the seemingly timeless space they inhabit.

Dreamlike and speculative, Pardo’s images are drawn down to earth by the voices of the shanty owners themselves—many of whom agreed to be interviewed by Vermont Folklife Center researchers for this exhibition. In these conversations the fishers speak of their shanties as structures, remark on the amenities and people they house, detail the practice of ice fishing, and, directly and indirectly, reflect the relationships, connections and community they reinvent each year at the Meadows.

Together, the images and voices give us a chance to connect with the material and human cultures of these ice fishing enclaves.

— The Vermont Folklife Center

The Vermont Folklife Center’s Vision & Voice Exhibition Program presents multimedia exhibits and programs that highlight the quiet miracles of everyday living. The Center’s work is grounded in collaborative ethnographic inquiry–spending time with people, interviewing them, and documenting their lives, with the goal of seeking to understand, as best we can, how they make sense of the world. Through its Vision & Voice Exhibition Program, VFC partners with individuals and communities across the state to share their perspectives, creating exhibits that aim to build mutual understanding, foster empathy, and cultivate a future where all Vermonters are valued.

Rachel Portesi: Hair Portraits

October 24, 2020 - February 14, 2021

Since the beginning of human history, hair has held cultural and symbolic meaning. It is a marker of ethnicity, social class, identity, gender, sexuality, age, sickness, and health. Women’s hair especially is woven into mythology, religion, politics, culture, and art.

Rachel Portesi makes hair portraits utilizing the early photographic method of tintype. She works collaboratively with her models to create intricate—one might say baroque—hair styles. Pinned to walls or other scaffolding, the extravagant hair designs are often embellished with flowers, becoming living sculptures rooted in the human body. Hair is often referred to as a woman’s “crowning glory.” Portesi’s “crowns” befit Ceres/Demeter, goddess of growing plants and motherly relationships; and Diana/Artemis, goddess of the hunt, wild animals, and the moon.

Creating a tintype requires the subject, or model, to remain absolutely still for thirty seconds after the lens cap is removed and light floods onto the prepared wet plate. This wet process results in inconsistencies, with the deeply toned surface of each image retaining the traces of its distinctive making. Unlike digital photography, tintypes are singular objects, each print as unique as the portrait sitter.

— Mara Williams, Chief Curator

I reached a point in my life when all of the things I knew to be true—the entire structure, the scaffolding of my life—seemed to suddenly disappear. I was no longer the same person I was when I entered motherhood. With children who were growing up and needing less, the person I was before no longer seemed relevant. It was time to take a close look at myself from another perspective.

I began to look at the ways that loss, in many forms, is recognized. In Victorian culture, mourning became a craze. Mementos were often made using tresses of hair. Early photography played an important role through commemorative portraits to honor the dead. The custom of keeping a lock of a child’s hair, or saving our own shorn locks as a memento of our own past, is a remnant from the Victorian period.

I use hair both to honor and to say goodbye to past parts of myself. These images address fertility, sexuality, creativity, nurturing, harmony, and discord with nature. Above all, these images are a record of metamorphosis from a past fractured self to an integrated, self-confident woman.

— Rachel Portesi