CRG Gallery, New York

ORI GERSHT: Liquidation

Gersht’s photographic process uniquely incorporates specific environmental conditions with an awareness of memory, experience, and imbedded history. There is a defined relationship of this in how the photographic medium is engaged. With an understanding of the chemical and physical limitations of film, of which Gersht is never shy to push the boundaries of, that often turns out to be a more dimensional and resonant vehicle for portraying a mechanism of meaning through the imprint of time, light, and phenomena that perhaps expose the capacity and limitations of human memory as well. 

Ori Gersht, Trace II, 2005, c-print mounted on aluminum. 32 3/4 x 39 1/2 inches

© Jeffrey Milstein, Boeing 767 #2

Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles

Jeffrey Milstein : Aircraft & Ethan Levitas : Untitled/This is just to say

Jeffrey Milstein : Aircraft

Jeffrey Milstein, a New York based photographer, has a recent series entitled Aircraft, large-scale photographs that are not of model airplanes but rather of incoming planes outside of LAX. His recent series entitled Aircraft has caught the eye of the art world. His passion for this project has led Mr. Milstein to where the runway meets the edge of the airport. Outside the fenced field, he waits for approaching airplanes and snaps crystal clear shots of the incoming beasts. The planes become portraits as such, all seemingly leaning in for their close-up. In the photograph, the plane stands upright and alone as if in a studio with a backdrop, taking on a new persona.

PhotoCairo was launched in 2002 as a platform for this budding movement and as a space for exploring alternatives to conventional uses of the reproducible image. This year’s festival offers a series of exhibitions, screenings, panel discussions, presentations and workshops that reflect the diversity of approaches and media contributing to the region’s ongoing and unprecedented paradigm shift in artistic practice.

PhotoCairo 3/ IMAGE STATEMENT POSITION explores the ways in which artists challenge, employ and re-imagine the reproducible image as a vehicle for positioning individuals and institutions within national, cultural and socio-economic ideological contexts. By presenting a multiplicity of artists’ positioning strategies, the festival aims to transcend geographic boundaries to create an international platform for the debate surrounding contemporary visual culture

Image - Basim Magdy. Image Courtesy Townhouse Gallery

Brian Finke Bodybuilding 20, 2004 .C-print mounted to Plexiglas 30 x 30 inches. (Edition of 8) 20 x 20 inches (Edition of 9)

CLAMPART, New York

Most Muscular : New Photographs by Brian Finke

Brian Finke has been traveling across the country photographing male and female bodybuilders at both professional and amateur competitions. As with his earlier work, the artist transforms what might be a standard photojournalistic project into something much more complex and wholly unique. Expert attention to color and composition is set-off by Finke's signature lighting, lending these images an immediate and unmistakable power. However, their ultimate strength again derives from the artist's lighthearted humor which breathes life into the photographs.

Nordenhake Berlin

Willie Doherty , “APPARATUS”

The artist, born in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1959, presents a suite of forty new photographic works together with a video installation called "Closure". Doherty's artistic practice is rooted in the history of Northern Ireland, and much of his work refers to undercurrents of fear, oppression and uncertainty that have been the daily experience of everyday life there over the last three decades. However, his photographs and films convey a timeless quality and carry a broader significance. While still based on his daily experience of division, his recent art has begun to transcend its political specifics to explore wider notions of representation, identity, memory and truth. His work reveals a deep mistrust of the journalistic approach. Through photography and video he adopts documentary codes and the strategies of film noir cinema to undermine the boundaries of truth and fiction and creates highly poignant open-ended narratives.

Willie Doherty, APPARATUS, 2005, acrylic glass and laminated C-prints on aluminum, panel 5 of A-series, 56 x 70 cm, Ed of 6..

Justine Kurland, West of the Water, 2003, C-print framed, 25.25 x 29.5 inches / 64 x 75 cm. Ed. of 8

emilyTsingou gallery, London

Justine KURLAND : Idylls of the King

Justine Kurland came to prominence with her photographs of landscapes and girls shot in New Zealand, as well as the 'Golden Dawn' series, depicting nudist communes across America. Both series offer an idea of utopia and explore themes of ritual, adolescence, empowerment, independence, camaraderie and intimacy, through the journey of a traveling photographer.

Kurland's new body of work exhibited in the gallery is entitled 'Idylls of the King', and includes a series of photographs shot during medieval and Renaissance re-enactments in America. Returning to Victorian portraiture conventions, the camera and sitter work in collaboration, capturing a romantic image of characters playing-out roles of knights and heroes: men dressed in armour and women in languid poses.

Anton Kern Gallery, New York

Nobuyoshi Araki

A group of rarely seen photographs by Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki will be on view at Anton Kern Gallery; in particular a body of work entitled Painting Flower, as well as 101 Images Dedicated to Robert Frank and other works selected from the Diaries.

Araki's Painting Flower series of 2004 is devoted to close-ups of lilies, orchids and other waxy flowers, which he has first daubed in glowing paint. 101 Images Dedicated to Robert Frank of 1992-93 gives a respectful nod to the equally rebellious Swiss-American photographer. The exhibition is complete with images culled from recent Diaries and a group of images depicting bound women, autoerotic transgressions that transcends confinement, discipline, hierarchy and ritual compression. 

 

Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, 2005. Cibachrome Print, 50 x 60 cm, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York

Elisa Sighicelli, Untitled (Homage to Beccafumi 1), 2005, C-print on lightbox, 21.26 x 22.44 inches

COHAN AND LESLIE, New York

Elisa Sighicelli

In developing a unique method of exhibiting her photographs on aluminum light boxes, Sighicelli constructs works that are at once photographs and architectural objects. By masking out (via hand-painting) portions of the photograph’s reverse before it is placed on its support, the artist carefully chooses the area of illumination, thus manipulating her main subject: light. This practice remarks on the nature of photography: while a photograph is a fixed moment arrested in time, the unique engagement of light in Sighicelli’s work keeps the photographic instant continually present and alive.

Frith Street Gallery, London

BRIDGET SMITH : Cosmos

Much of Smith’s work deals with escaping from the everyday world and a series of images inspired by the outer reaches of the universe continues this theme. The film ‘Cosmos’ (2005) creates a scene from outer space using particles of dust floating in a beam of light. Photographs showing two of the most easily found constellations in the night sky; Orion, The Great Hunter and Ursa Major, also known as The Great Bear or Big The Dipper are perhaps the most easily identifiable constellations in the night sky – Smith imagines them as an anchor – as a way to place oneself in the vast tracts of deep space.

Forthcoming..

Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York

 EXPLOSIONS – SARAH PICKERING : Exhibition: January 5 – February 25, 2006

The images explore the idea of threat, fear, surprise and response. The photographs are reproductions of simulations, merging fact, fiction, fantasy and reality. The images have a surreal contemplative quality as the eruptions are suspended in banal landscapes. London’s Art Review magazine writes, “Pickering’s photographs of controlled explosion practice runs play a fresh riff on the long standing photographic motif of truth versus verisimilitude.”

Currently showing Pli – Photographs by Tim Lehmacher