calendario eventi  :: 

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9/3/2011

Two exhibitions

Raandesk Gallery, New York

OPTICAL: STAGED
Photography Finalists from Annual Juried Competition

Raandesk Gallery of Art announces Optical: Staged. Optical is an annual juried competition held by Raandesk Gallery for photography. Each year a new theme is selected and works from around the world are submitted for consideration. The theme, Staged, was selected by one of the competition's jurors for the 2010 competition and served as a single word platform for photographers to present their work. The exhibition is comprised of photographs created by the top five finalists of the competition and serves to be dramatic as well as insightful into each artist's individual definition of the theme. The exhibition will feature both small and large-scale black & white and color photographs by Katarzyna Majak, Tom Prado, Margaret McCarthy, Frances Berry and Vincent Zambrano.

About the Finalists
Katarzyna Majak
First place winner Katarzyna Majak has chosen to photograph the different phases in a life of a real piece of clothing. Through staging and performance the project reveals fascination, idealization and "disengagement" from external factors that influence us (be it objects or people). Majak received her B.F.A. in Photography at Poznan Academy of Fine Arts (now a PhD candidate). She has exhibited and curated throughout the U.S. and Poland where she is a member of the Association of Polish Art Photographers.

Tom Prado
Second place winner, Tom Prado has created a series of diptychs entitled Double Take, that challenge the veracity of the photographic image. Photography has the ability to deceive and capture the truth. Double Take embraces this dichotomy by photographing different objects, in public and private spaces, that repeat. Although different objects, when photographed from the same perspective, they give the illusion of sameness. Prado was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1982. He received his B.F.A. in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, 2009.

Margaret McCarthy
Margaret McCarthy's series, Late Night Animals, is a display of animals as guests on late night talk TV shows. She explores the reactions of the TV hosts interactions between the exotic animals as a mirror of our own reactions. The animals are brought on the show to educate the mass TV audience, but in humorous and strange ways their "15 minutes of fame" end up entertaining our basic human desire to know these animals on our own terms and in our own comfort zone. McCarthy tries to speak to our conflicted reactions about co-existing with wildness and the natural world, and the irony of a culture that seems to love these animals to death but can't seem to leave them alone. She has exhibited her photographs extensively, including the Fogg Art Museum, the Overseas Press Club and the Hudson River Museum, as well as numerous galleries, universities and public exhibition spaces.

Frances Berry
Berry is a formalist at her core, naturally abiding by the laws of good design: line, color, repetition, symmetry. Drawn to single saturated colors, modular forms, and unusual compositions, her photographs are bold representations of the everyday dream that she is living in.

Vincent Zambrano
The Sleep of Doubt series is Zambrano's latest photo-collage, a rework from etchings by the Spanish artist, Francisco de Goya. The five original images are a spin off of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment of Age of Reason. Zambrano has put his own spin on the images with his Sur-American culture and Spanish heritage. He has put himself as the subject to represent a different view on society. In each image he appears as the Sleep of Doubt figure with the specter of unreason hovering nearby; its presence being a constant reminder that humans are not perfectly rational, or enlightened all the time. A native of Manta Ecuador, Zambrano grew up in Queens, New York where he studied Fine Arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He continued his studies at The School of Visual Arts to widen his creative talent as film director. Throughout the years, Zambrano has exhibited his works in several group shows and private collections in the U.S. In 2002 he was accepted in the HBO International New York Film Festival for his film "La Arana". Among his other films he wrote and directed "The Heart of a Broken Tale" which was accepted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006.

About the Optical 2010 Jurors:
Evan Mirapaul is an art collector who specializes in photography. Since 1989, travel has been a catalyst for this collector. It has become his goal to seek out artists, particularly photographers, and galleries wherever he goes. Highlights of his personal collection include the work of world-renowned American documentary photographer Ray K Metzker (b. 1931, see http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/), young American photographer Tim Davis (b.1969, see http://www.agvdgallery.com/), and Brazilian artist and recent BALTIC exhibitor Vik Muniz. He documents his encounters with photography on his blog, "Fugitive Vision". Mirapaul is the co-chair of the Friends of the Library Committee for the International Center for Photography.

JP Pullos - After studying at the George Eastman House and at ICP, JP Pullos joined Patrick McMullan's team of event and celebrity photographers and has spent the past three years documenting the urban jungle that is New York City. His editorial work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Women's Wear Daily, GQ, the Village Voice, and Time Out New York. More recently, he has turned his attention to teaching photography while simultaneously working on documentary portraiture.

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From Germany
Niklas Klotz and Karsten Kraft

Raandesk Gallery is pleased to announce our guest artists from jens fehring gallery in Frankfurt, Germany. Raandesk Gallery regularly seeks international collaborations that extend the gallery's reach in the global art world and allow its collectors and customers to have access to recent developments from outside the US besides its portfolio artists. The exhibition of artworks by Niklas Klotz and Karsten Kraft will take place from March 10 through April 23 with its opening on Thursday, March 10 from 7 - 9 PM

Niklas Klotz and Karsten Kraft are two promising German artists, each with their own, very different concepts and approaches yet still producing results that harmonize aesthetically, overlap each other on occasions, and seem to mutually complement each other.

Following his training as a sculptor, Niklas Klotz focused his efforts, above all, on creating and animating avatars as digital sculptures. His focus on the existing digital content in this field brought him into contact with the first completely digitalized human being - an American convict - who, after his execution, was frozen, cut into slices and photographed before being electronically compiled into a human model. Based on the data set that was available on the Internet, he used a rapid prototyping method to create the death mask of the executed convict and, in doing so, brought part of the body back into material being. In his efforts to consistently improve on this concept, Klotz creates aluminum sculptures and reliefs made of marble, wood and glass eyes, which are based on digitally generated faces and bodies. He recently created a life-sized choirboy in aluminum. The statue is colored in high-tech paint and forms part of a monument that Klotz redesigned and which now stands in front of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden.

Karsten Kraft is based in the long tradition of monochrome painting. Although his works also repeatedly feature ethereal, mostly floating creatures, his artistic quest and inspiration focus on the color black. For Kraft, black is the ultimate common denominator of all colors and unites all of their constitutive emotions. The result is too much for eyes to cope with, as it were, more than the observer can perceive. His pictures, which usually start with the widest range of base colors that evolve into deep black areas, gradually draw the observer's attention to darkness. After just a brief moment, the black starts to fade into the background, encouraging a much more intensive perception of color. In a way the non-color paves the way to color.

Image:Karsten Kraft, Ektoplasma (2008), oil on wood

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 10, 7 - 9 PM

Raandesk Gallery
16 W. 23rd Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10010
Hours: Saturdays 12 - 4 PM and by appointment
admisison free

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