Image Culture

On the show today is the artist Sam Stewart. Sam’s sculptural work resembles household furniture and domestic objects. Drawing on his observations of everyday design ranging from subway seating to exercise equipment, he creates works that play with the condition of design itself, often subverting the intended use of the items the work references. For his current solo show Cryptid at Fort Gansevoort, the artist has installed a new body of work in an apartment leased by the gallery. Zoned for residential use, the space is required by the Department of Buildings to include a shower, a sleeping surface, and a working kitchen among other prerequisites for daily living. Reflecting on these codes and their distinctions from commercial space, Stewart has created a series of objects that imagine the personal affects of a mythical occupant. Through his synthesis of disparate aesthetic tropes, accidental uses of household objects, and their psychological associations, Stewart considers how, through successive rationalizations, mythologies gain momentum and permanence.

On the show today is the photographer and film director, Jerry Schatzberg. Jerry started his career in the late 50’s, shooting fashion photographs for magazines such as Vogue, McCall’s, and Esquire. Many of his most iconic photographs were made during this time, perhaps most famously his portrait of Bob Dylan for the cover of Blonde on Blonde. In 1970 Jerry made the transition to film with his first feature, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, starring Faye Dunaway as a model on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His follow up film, The Panic In Needle Park, a gritty, realistic look at two heroin addicts in New York starred Al Pacino in his first major role. The film earned Jerry the first of his four Palme d’Or nominations, including one win for 1973’s Scarecrow. Jerry just celebrated his 90th Birthday and I was happy to visit him and make a portrait at his apartment on the Upper West Side. Here I am with Jerry Schatzberg.

Each year, Victoria Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey through the American landscape. Using a large format 5x7 camera she searches for the intersection between the natural and the manmade. In her own words she has “an unrelenting curiosity to understand the American landscape and our place within it.” Her work has brought her to the farthest corners of Alaska and across the entire length of the US-Mexico border. A recent project has focused on the intersection of geology, industry and culture encompassing the petro-chemical and shipping industries around the Gulf Coast. Sambunaris’ monograph Taxonomy of a Landscape was published by Radius Books in 2014 and was one of Time Magazine’s best photo books of the year. She earned her MFA from Yale in 1999 and is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York.

Image Culture in conversation with artists and curators Liz Nielsen and Carolina Wheat. Together Liz and Lina operate Elijah Wheat Showroom. In their own words, “Voices embodied at Elijah Wheat Showroom are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions outside the status-quo. The Showroom represents artists & curators that enjoy instigating conversation beyond a commercial focus.” (Elijah Wheat Showroom) In her own practice Liz Nielsen “replaces the traditional negative with hand cut collages comprised of different colored gels. She projects her forms on to chromogenic paper creating bright and luminous abstractions. As the paper she uses is a negative rather than a positive paper, the colors of the gels are reversed often creating surprising new combinations where Nielsen’s compositional control comes face to face with the magic of photographic chemistry.” (Danziger Gallery)

“Loie Hollowell (b. 1983, Woodland, California) earned a BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Originating in autobiography, her paintings explore themes of sexuality, often through abstractions of the human body and an emphasis on female forms. With strong colors, varied texture, and the symmetry of sacred geometry, her works evoke bodily landscapes and allude to iconography such as the almond-shaped mandorlas found in medieval religious painting. Hollowell was the recipient of a 2011 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Award. She lives and works in New York.” - Pace Gallery

"York's site-sensitive installations of graphite forms, both sculpted and drawn, engage the existing architecture of a chosen site: a room, a wall, or a piece of paper. Her studies in graphite are a reverent homage to subtlety, with irregularities interrupting otherwise austere geometric forms and producing results that are perhaps more felt than seen. In the exhibition catalogue, Susan York: 3 Columns, Lucy Lippard wrote, “This nuanced fusion of the intellect and sensual experience is precisely what York achieves. In doing so, she takes Minimalism past the post, and into a realm of her own”.