Keep The Channel Open
The Black and White Gallery, directed and curated by Carla Pivonski, is proud to present Keep The Channel Open, a group exhibition of photography and performance at One Art Space, Tribeca, NYC.
“Keep the channel open,” Martha Graham exhorted the choreographer Agnes DeMille in 1943, urging her that for a true artist there is no near finishing point but “…only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” This compulsion towards constant movement, experimentation and even transgression links every photographer in this exhibition, and each image and performance expresses the painful, transcendent aliveness that is the price of vision.
Here we see the experimental techniques of Ursula Ferarra, who works with wet plates and ‘primordial chemistry’ to create images that seem caught between exquisite living and decay. Naum Dorkhman draws on his engineering background to use photography to ‘paint with light’ with unlimited possibilities. Andrew Wohl is also a scientist, deeply inspired by the beauty of the materials, machines, and mathematical dynamics that surround him in the aerospace industry.
We see also Gaspar Marquez, Fernando Espinosa and Gen Nishino who use the age-old tropes of the male and female nude (whether in classical painting or Playboy centerfolds) and turn them into something unsettling and unexpectedly profound. Carla Pivonski, inspired by Stephen Crane’s poem ‘In The Desert’, shoots beautiful landscapes and portraits of a male in stony, sacred wildernesses. Evelyn Oritz and Paola Peli capture equally hallowed and light-filled images of living nature. Shae Jones and Krystal Bitz explore externally marginalized bodies and inward therapeutic journeys, as with Jason Michael Blair for whom photography is a quiet connection to the world. Daniel Chen shoots women curled in their own thoughts while Emiliano Santapaola juxtaposes his poetry with his fashion photography, the words spilling into and out of the eyes of his models. Monty Dames photographs single human hands as though they were portraits, each palm inked with a map or web of words and symbols on the skin. Joseph Dinki and Gary Lippman will be combining poetry and text with images, creating startling fusions both in live performance and, for Lippman, in the form of photo collage.
Miles Thorn and Sasha Kay have collaborated to explore the ‘deceptive madness’ of the experience of depression, dramatizing the concept of the mask which reveals as it obscures. Finally, from the delicacy of shadows criss-crossed in corners to the light falling on great pools of water Cosmo Campbell and Joseph O’Neill each in their own way find beauty in loneliness, liminality and the vulnerability of all existence, Campbell through his delicate landscapes and O’Neill in his sharp abstractions.
READ MORE HERE. https://oneartspace.com/keep-the-channel-open-the-black-and-white-gallery-dec-9-10-2022/