Light Work Podcast

Gideon Barnett: After Edith

November 2 – December 18, 2015

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Gallery Talk: Thursday, November 19, 6pm

Reception: Thursday, November 19, 5-7pm

Gideon Barnett’s exhibition After Edith brings together a collection of images that he produced by documenting vandalized photography books found in public libraries. The project began in Miami, Florida, with the discovery of a copy of Emmet Gowin’s Photographs in which the iconic nude portraits of Gowin’s wife Edith had been defaced by prurient library visitors. Parts of the images had been cut with a razor blade and, in some instances, entirely torn out of the book. This deliberate removal of “provocative” imagery and the psychology of what may have sparked such an act fascinated Barnett, and prompted a closer look at the visual by-products—the way in which the cuts open through to another image, for example, or how the tearing of a page can create a compelling juxtaposition of photographs. The vandalized images are unquestionably elegant and beautiful when taken out of context and framed on the wall, yet all together Barnett’s photographs also point to a disconcerting fearful, destructive, or even violent intention behind them.

Some librarians would attempt to mend the most heavily vandalized books by pasting inky black-and-white photocopies of the original pages back into the books. These replacements, reminiscent of smudged charcoal drawings, were equally intriguing to Barnett, so he physically removed the sheets of paper and collected them along the way as a counterpart to the photographs he was making. In his exhibition at Light Work, Barnett shows the photocopies as unique objects, pinned by small magnets into playful forms onto pieces of chalkboard. Barnett visited libraries across South Florida and discovered a number of books that had been altered, and his collection of photographs grew to include traces of other well-known images spanning the last century of photography, from Edward Weston to Gregory Crewdson. Though the reference points within the medium of photography are certainly interesting to see, After Edith aims to consider larger cultural and political concerns of censorship and human nature. Through a thoughtful combination of photographs of vandalized book pages and original found photocopies, Barnett simultaneously recounts that so much of what a photograph signifies will be determined by what the viewer brings to the image. “I’m interested in the generative potential of this vandalism,” explains Barnett, “and how just by reframing it with a camera it can become something new, something on its own.”

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Gideon Barnett is an artist from Jasper, Tennessee. He received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2011 where he was awarded the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship (selected by Robert Storr). Since 2012 he has exhibited at the Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL; The Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, FL,; and The Wolfsonian–FIU, Miami, FL. In 2013 he was awarded a Visual and Media Artists Fellowship from the South Florida Cultural Consortium.

gideonbarnett.com

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Special thanks to Marcia Duprat

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media

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Light Work

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Music: Kai Engel

Music: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessions

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March 17 – July 18, 2015

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Artist Talk: Tuesday, March 17, 6:30pm

Gallery Talk: Thursday, March 19, 6pm

Reception: Thursday, March 19, 5-7pm

Light Work is pleased to announce the exhibition Sight Specific featuring the work of artist Letha Wilson.

Letha Wilson’s photographic, sculptural work begins as an exploration into our understanding of landscape. By alluding to conventions of romanticism and mythology, and expanding the possibilities of interpretation through abstraction, Wilson exposes the photograph’s inability to truly contain the place it represents. Her images of the American West—vast canyons, desert plants, and sky—are formed into sculptural objects that utilize the physical space of the gallery. At times embedded into walls, floors, and ceilings, even wrapping around (or through) architectural details, her inventive and playful approach to installation informs the tactile experience of her work. Wilson intervenes the static image by folding, distorting, and bending iconic landscapes into complex forms that elicit the sheer weight and beauty of the sublime. Wilson will spend the month of February as an Artist-In-Residence at Light Work in Syracuse where she will be making a selection of new works specifically for this gallery exhibition.

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Letha Wilson is a mixed media artist who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, raised in Colorado, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her outdoor excursions amongst the Rocky Mountains have placed the natural world and its photographic image at the root of her artistic interests. She earned her BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. Wilson’s artwork has been shown at many venues including Art in General, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, International Center for Photography, Essl Museum of Contemporary Art, Hauser and Wirth, Eleven Rivington, and Higher Pictures. In 2013 Letha was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography and chosen as the Deutsche Bank Fellow, and in 2014 awarded a Jerome Foundation Travel Grant. Wilson is Light Work’s February 2015 Artist-in-Residence.

lethaprojects.com

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Special thanks to Marcia Duprat

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media

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Light Work

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Music: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessions

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January 12 – March 5, 2015

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery and UVP Everson

Artist Talk: Tuesday, January 27, 6:30pm

Reception: Wednesday, January 28, 5-7pm

Light Work and Urban Video Project are proud to present Accumulations and Number Sixteen, concurrent exhibitions featuring the work of multidisciplinary artist Xaviera Simmons.The works within these exhibitions present an artist working with— and through— formal languages of performance, video, sculpture, photography, and social and art histories.

Accumulations presents a group of photographs from Simmons’s Index/ Composition series. At first glance, the images emerge as a series of complex and abstract sculptural collages. Closer inspection reveals something else: textiles pulled taught over what appears to be a torso, with a barrage of objects hanging from the body. Fabric, a cache of photographic texture and imagery, feathers, palm fronds and other diverse materials tumble across the center of each photograph—composing an explosion referent to the sculptural within the photographic. Accumulations works to both obscure and define the formal qualities of photography by using elements of sculpture, assemblage, chance, and other methods to produce the works.

Number Sixteen is an hour-long, unedited video documenting a performance produced without an audience which engages endurance, abstraction, and the energies beneath abstraction. In the video, a vocalist and performer work together in a studio space. The video’s audience becomes witness to a layered convergence: materials and texts, script and chance, sound and image, time and space, the body and its limits. Like the photographic and sculptural works in Accumulations, Number Sixteen reveals a complex network of accumulated inspirations, cultural allusions, and visceral histories.

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Xaviera Simmons received her BFA from Bard College in 2004 after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art in 2005 while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio. Simmons has exhibited nationally and internationally. Major exhibitions and performances include The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; MoMA PS1, NYC; The Studio Museum In Harlem, NYC; The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; The Public Art Fund, NYC; David Castillo Gallery, Miami, FL; among many others. Her works are in major museum and private collections including Deutsche Bank, UBS, The Guggenheim Museum, The Agnes Gund Art Collection, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCA Miami, and The Perez Art Museum, Miami.

davidcastillogallery.com/xaviera-simmons

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Special thanks to Marcia Duprat

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media

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Light Work

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Urban Video Project

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Music: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessions

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November 3 – December 17, 2014

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Gallery Talk: Thursday, November 13, 5pm

Reception: Thursday, November 13, 5-7pm

Light Work is pleased to announce Where Objects Fall Away, an exhibition spanning the career of photographer and book artist Raymond Meeks, exploring his relationship to the photobook and its form.

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In the words of artist and publisher Raymond Meeks, “I continue to be inspired by collaboration with writers of poetry and short fiction and the merging of visual and word narratives. Recently, I’ve focused my efforts towards making artist books and a collaborative journal, orchard, which presents a visual conversation with fellow artists.” Meeks has collaborated with artists Deborah Luster, Wes Mills, and Mark Steinmetz. His books and pictures are housed in numerous public and private collections, including the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, George Eastman House, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Howard Stein Collection.

raymondmeeks.com

orchardjournal.com

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Special thanks to Marcia Duprat

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media

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Light Work

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Music: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessions

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March 17 – May 30, 2014

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Gallery Talk: Thursday, March 20, 5pm

Reception: Thursday, March 20, 5-7pm

With multiple bodies of work brought together in New Geographics, artist Michael Bühler-Rose explores what he calls a “new geography”—that, in our rapidly globalizing world, cultures and places are crossing over others right in front of our eyes.

A working artist and professor in New York City, he has for many years led a parallel life as a Vaishnava devotee. He regularly attends temples in New York City, where he lives with his family, and a few times a year makes a pilgrimage to a variety of religious sites in India to study ritual and philosophy. Bühler-Rose’s photography may arise out of his own duality, as a working professional in one of the most extravagant and material cities in the world and as a regular visitor to quiet, holy places in India.

“My work itself, in many regards, has nothing to do with India; it is very much about an American experience of a place,” Bühler-Rose explains. “In the same way, I am an American devotee of the Hindu God Krishna and have to constantly negotiate how that works outside of its original cultural context. My personal, spiritual practice is heavily invested in ritual and raises the same issues in terms of how to navigate traditional observances within a very different atmosphere, and how to keep the same goals in mind while adjusting details. In one read of the photographs they show a dichotomy of East and West, but in reality they show a newer world that is more likely neither—one that is specifically global while simultaneously local.”

Bühler-Rose utilizes photography to unravel our ideas of place, culture, spirituality, exoticism, and authenticity. His photographs leave us with many questions, and ones which may not have easy answers. Together they are a part of a larger dialogue about our increasingly globalized world and its elasticity, and a striking visual of modern culture at a moment where everything around us is simultaneously expanding and shrinking.

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Michael Bühler-Rose, born in New Jersey, lives and works in New York City. He received a Fulbright Fellowship to India, obtained his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and his MFA from University of Florida. Recent work and curated projects have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Delhi; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Sackler Museum, Cambridge; Vogt Gallery, New York; Chatterjee and Lal, Mumbai; Nature Morte, New Delhi and Berlin; Scaramouche, New York; and Carroll and Sons, Boston. His work is held in the Sammlung Goetz, Munich, the SK Kultur Stiftung / Photographische Sammlung, Cologne, and the Harvard Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA. He is an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design and The Cooper Union.

michaelbuhlerrose.com

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Special thanks to Azhar Chougle

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media

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Light Work

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Music: Jani Hirvonen, J. Koho, Jalikebba Kuyateh and the Toubabs, Bruce Miller

Music: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessions

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January 13 – March 6, 2014

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Gallery Talk: Thursday, January 30, 6pm

Reception: Thursday, January 30, 5-7pm

Aspen Mays approaches her art-making practice with some of the same methods she learned acquiring a degree in anthropology. By embracing the art and science of photography her projects often begin by tracking down information, ideas, and experts in a variety of fields, including astronomy. She collects, unearths, and creates images and objects that celebrate the complex and sublime beauty of the physical universe. Her images question our capacity to comprehend, while expressing our deep desire to find meaning in the unknown.

Her fieldwork has included a year in Chile in the Atacama desert and in Santiago at the University of Chile’s National Observatory, known locally as Cerro Calán. Because of its high altitude, dry air, and almost non-existent clouds, the Atacama desert of Chile is one of the best places in the world to conduct astronomical observations. In the desert, with only the naked eye, Mays could view the night sky in stunning clarity and detail. “The Milky Way is so bright in the desert that it casts a shadow on the ground,” she says. As she stood in the light she realized, “I knew something that is impossible to know, an awareness of how tiny I am and how connected.”

Mays’s search for sublime ambiguity took her on a recent cross-country trip through the Petrified Forest in Arizona to view Newspaper Rock, a giant prehistoric petroglyph covered with hundreds of messages, symbols, or stories. Confounded by the meaning of these drawings incised in rock and occurring all over the world with amazing similarity, scientists argue they could be of religious significance or perhaps astronomical guides. Mays was drawn to the mystery and presence of a hand-drawn message from prehistory and began to think about them in relation to her collection of darkroom tools. Cobbled together with tape and cardboard, her collection of hand-made dodging, burning, and masking tools had its origins in the Cerro Calán darkroom. Placing them on photographic paper and working directly with light itself, Mays creates her own abstract patterns, forms and pictograms, enigmatic taxonomies of a disappearing photographic process. In a conversation about this exhibition Mays asked, “Which is more profound, using cameras to image the cosmos or the anonymous woman in a hydrangea garden?” Throughout this exhibition Mays explores this dilemma with great curiosity and delight as she invites us to consider small and big questions we can only dimly comprehend.

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Aspen Mays grew up in Charleston, SC. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and a BA in Anthropology and Spanish from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2004. Her solo exhibitions include "Every leaf on a tree" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; "From the Offices of Scientists" at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; "Sun Ruins" at Golden Gallery, New York; and "Ships that Pass in the Night" at the Center for Ongoing Projects and Research (COR&P) in Columbus, OH. Mays was a 2009-2010 Fulbright Fellow in Santiago, Chile, where she spent time with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky. Mays lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Columbus, OH where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Ohio State University.

aspenmays.com

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Special thanks to Azhar Chougle

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media

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Light Work

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Music: Journeyman (With Forss), Opening Credits, and Waking Up by johnny_ripper

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Music: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessions

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Jackie Nickerson: Terrain

November 5 – December 20, 2013

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Gallery talk: Thursday, December 5, 6pm

Reception: Thursday, December 5, 5-7pm

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Jackie Nickerson makes photographs that examine people and their relationship to the earth, through the physical and psychological conditions of living and working on the land. With her exhibition Terrain, Nickerson revisits eastern and southern Africa, focusing on how the exertions of labor leave traces on people and the environment.

After fifteen years working in the fashion industry for clients like Interview and Vogue, Nickerson felt unfulfilled and sought something more. In the late ‘90s she took a trip to Zimbabwe with a friend, expecting to be there for just a few weeks. She ended up staying for four years, traveling through other countries of Sub-Saharan Africa in a small flatbed truck. She has since returned many times to continue photographing farm life through her unique lens. Hands and plants, limbs and fabric, bodies and soil, the subjects of Nickerson’s portraits are, in the fullest sense, terrene—of the earth. The workers are obscured by the sheer size and weight of their harvest, emphasized by the large scale of the photographs themselves. Many of her landscapes are photographed through a thin veil of plastic farming material, easily read as a metaphor for our modern separation from the natural world. “I believe that we have an indelible link to the earth but we’ve begun to undervalue it—even forget about it,” says Nickerson. Her contemplative pictures ask us to consider our own relationship to the land, and to the food we consume in our daily lives.

Nickerson reveals by carefully concealing. “The lack of personal identity in the photographs is a deliberate question mark,” she explains. Her portraits are not about individual identity but are an attempt to go beyond the traditional path of concerned documentary photography, revealing her subjects as sculptural, monumental, and empowered. “It is about us in the landscape,” says Nickerson, “how we change the world we inhabit at every moment of our being human and how, for better and for worse, the habitus that we make, in turn, changes who we are.”

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Jackie Nickerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1960. Her work has been exhibited internationally including at the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; National Portrait Gallery, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and the Hereford Museum, UK. Her work is held in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Vatican Museums, Rome; and the National Gallery of Ireland. She is the recipient of a Culture Ireland award and three Visual Art Bursaries from the Irish Arts Council. Nickerson is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York and Brancolini Grimaldi in London.

jackienickerson.com

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Special thanks to Azhar Chougle

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media

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Light Work

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Music: Brahim Fribgane from Live at WFMU's Transpacific Sound Paradise

Music: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessions

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Jason Lazarus: Too Hard to Keep (Syracuse)

April 4 – May 31, 2013

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery at Light Work

Gallery Talk: Thursday, April 4, 5pm

Reception: Thursday, April 4, 5-7pm

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In 2010 Chicago-based artist Jason Lazarus initiated a growing archive of photos deemed “too hard to keep.” T.H.T.K. (Too Hard to Keep) is a place for photographs, photo-objects, and even digital files to exist when they are too difficult to hold on to, yet too meaningful to destroy. Participants have dictated whether the photographs submitted to the archive may be shown freely with other pieces of the archive, or if they are only to be displayed face down, adding to the charged significance of each object. Out of this expanding collection site-specific installations occur. With T.H.T.K. (Syracuse) Lazarus shares a slice of the larger archive alongside anonymous local submissions in a carefully considered installation at Light Work.

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Jason Lazarus is a Chicago-based artist, curator, writer, and educator who received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2003. Lazarus has actively exhibited around the country and abroad while teaching photography at Columbia College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected exhibition highlights include Black Is, Black Aint at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL; Image Search at PPOW Gallery, New York, NY; On the Scene at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; and solo exhibitions at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Kaune, Sudendorf, Cologne, Germany; and D3 Projects, Los Angeles, CA. Notable honors include the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, 2010; an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship award, 2009; the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award, Emerging Artist, 2008; and the Emerging Artist Artadia Grant, 2006. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and the Bank of America LaSalle Photography collection, among many others. Lazarus is represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL.

jasonlazarus.com

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Interested in submitting to the T.H.T.K. archive?

Drop off your print anonymously in the drop box located at Light Work prior to and during the length of the exhibition. If you are not local, you can submit to the artist directly by following the instructions at toohardtokeep.blogspot.com

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Special thanks to Azhar Chougle

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media

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Light Work

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Music: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessions

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.