Meet Ellen Jaffe
dal 10/12/2002 al 11/12/2002
Segnalato da
10/12/2002
Meet Ellen Jaffe
Edward Carter Galleries, New York
The Edward Carter Gallery in SoHo is starting a series of art appreciation events to give you the opportunity to meet our artists, and to explore their work, their techniques, and their vision. The first of these events will feature Ellen Jaffe and her body of work entitled 'Ordinary Places.'
The Edward Carter Gallery in SoHo is starting a series of art appreciation events to give you the opportunity to meet our artists, and to explore their work, their techniques, and their vision.
The first of these events is next Wednesday, December 11, 2002 from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm, and will feature Ellen Jaffe and her body of work entitled "Ordinary Places."
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Opinion: A Fresh Look
By Robert Long
Real art tells you something new and fake art gives you secondhand information. Real artists make you question your perception because their way of seeing things is so specifically different from your own. "Wake up," they seem to be saying. Fake art is boring because it tells us what we already know, in the same ways it's been told before.
The good stuff brings revelation, of any degree, in any size package, irrelevant of category and style."There is only one school: that of talent," as Nabokov wrote more than once.
Ellen Jaffe offers revelation in the form of color digital prints in a new show at Gallery Merz in Sag Harbor, transforming her humdrum subjects so simply and radically that you will not see them the same way again, making you question your own perceptions by subverting your expectations of both the subject matter and the medium she works in.
Jaffe takes liberties with her subjects. Her prints of apartment buildings, row houses, storefronts, and other urban structures have the supersaturated, hypnotic colors we've grown used to seeing in Cibachrome prints, but can be manipulated further thanks to digital technology. She deepens colors for their own sake, and does it so well in one carefully cropped composition after another that she casts an effective spell.
No one appears in the photos, and we often see buildings only from the second floor up, the camera tilted or the photographer shooting upper stories as she passes on the elevated M train. The luscious colors of awnings and window sills, pumpkin or turquoise or crimson or cobalt, and the juxtapositions of architectural details and textures are captivating.
Even though humans are absent, Ms.Jaffe's jazzy palette makes for a festive feeling. But then you begin to feel perplexed, because the blue sky filled with dramatic thunderheads behind a row of attached houses somehow doesn't look right - how could the clouds be that low? Are these houses, which seem to be in Queens, actually high on a hill in San Francisco? And since when does Bedford Street run parallel to a river? Wait, that's the ocean!
It took a little while to realize that most of the photos are made of assembled images. Though there were clues everywhere, I kept trying to find reasons why, for example, the Bouwerie Lane Theater could be as isolated as the Leaning Tower of Pisa against the Manhattan sky. But when I realized that the streetlights framing the view of Bedford Street were identical reversed images, and noticed small misalignments in the sidewalk and impossibly seamless meetings of apartment buildings, the jig was up.
If the artist's first job is to suspend the viewer's disbelief, then Ms. Jaffe could have sold me the Brooklyn Bridge. She's so good that I wanted to remain in her spell and was disappointed when it was broken.
The photos get even better once you see how they were made. The juxtapositions are so unlikely that somehow they seem possible. Skies as dramatic as anything the Hudson River School or Constable came up with seem right, somehow, in pictures whose subjects Ms. Jaffe describes as "the 'supposed' ordinary." Like Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange, Ms. Jaffe finds the extraordinary in the everyday and encourages us to readjust our vision accordingly.?
While specializing in original images by Ansel Adams, The Edward Carter Galleries in SoHo, NY; Lewes, DE; and Singapore represent several of today?s most talented photographic artists.
December 11, 2002 from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
N.B. The Manhattan Debut of Robert Weingarten's magnificent work opens Thursday, December 12 with a recption for the artist from 6 - 8 pm
10:00 AM to 6:00 PM - Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday & Saturday, Open until 8pm Thursday
Edward Carter Galleries
560 Broadway, 4th Floor, SoHo, New York, NY 10012-3946
PHONE (212) 966-1933 FAX (212) 966-2145