MELISSALAND

Ah, I can’t believe this show is almost over. It’s been great fun these past few weeks - definitely one of my favorites. We have scheduled an artist talk for the closing weekend and both Robert Flynt and David Lebe will be joining us in person. Gary Schneider (and possibly Warren all the way from Greece) will be joining remotely via Skype (don’t you love technology!)

Anyway, if you would like to attend (yes!) come by the gallery this Saturday at 5 O’Clock. Promise it will be fun, these guys are great and I could listen to them talk all night long (they won’t though)

AND, if you can’t make it to the gallery, or you live far, far away….you can listen in online on WGXC, the new community-run (kick ass) radio project:

http://www.free103point9.org/communityradio/

So there. Now you have no excuse not to catch this

White Shirt No.2 by Martin Rich, gelatin silver print

Funny how absence can have so much weight.

Play - Starlings.mp3 by Elbow

“…Before our collective paradigm shift (the financial “crisis”, or “clusterfuck”, etc.) this is what the future looked like; rich black tarmac paved and waiting to be surrounded by a subdivision. The trees would have to go, of course, and a dozen more just like this would have to be built, clustered tightly inside whatever preplanned area fit best with the land purchase. The real gift, given to us by the meltdown, is that of a better future; even if that future is still purely hypothetical, as this empty cul-de-sac, above. Of course, we don’t know what this new future will look like, yet. There are thousands of ways to go from here and the evidence is still underdetermined as to which is the best. It’s fortunate, I guess, considering how badly we failed in our previous utopiuan dreams. Eventually, though, we’re going to have to settle down and figure out exactly what we want our bright-shiny-new future to look like and then set about constructing it.”

——–

Photo by: Stacy Arezou Mehrfar - Magnolia, Texas. April 2006 #1 — from the series American Palimpsests

Text by: William Ball

Untitled by Florian Maier-Aichen

There is a movie I can only vaguely remember seeing when I was a little kid, but images from it have stayed with me to this day (sometimes I wonder if it were instead a dream - which is more likely as I’ve yet to track down the movie)

What I remember of it is pretty hazy…..but the color red sunk into everything. A bright red stain covering the entire earth. It was beautiful.

Nothing I’ve seen or found has reminded me more of this dream/movie than these photographs by the German artist Florian Maier-Aichen. I found them online this morning and felt this strange bit of recognition - like passing a stranger on the street, only to have their face gnaw at you for the rest of the day. I know you.

The oddest things can feel so familiar sometimes. This dream/movie - whatever it was - somehow, definitely became apart of me. When I close my eyes and picture walking around its landscape I hear amazing sounds like this:

Alexander Turnquist - We Are Magnets mp3

This song is by local Hudson musician Alexander Turnquist. Alexander recently sent me a link to “The Silent Ballet Volume II” which includes his track ‘We Are Magnets‘ (they also use his photography for the albums’ artwork)

It is a great album (and free download!). As I type this it is playing in the gallery (one of my other favorite tracks off the album is #5 - ‘Watching it Unfold‘ by Australian musician Lawrence English. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.)

Anyway, it is beautiful out in Hudson today. I hope it is where you are too….

p.s. Alexander will be playing May 1st at 8pm at the Spotty Dog Bookstore here in Hudson

Legend has it that a gentleman once approached Picasso on the street and criticized his paintings as distorting reality. Seeming to change the subject, the artist asked the gentleman if he had a girlfriend. He did, and produced a small picture of her from his wallet. “She’s beautiful,” replied Picasso, “but she’s so tiny.”

Tonight I came across this interesting story about one Fred and one Anne and their photo album of erased memories……..

http://www.squareamerica.com/es.htm

Love, love, love Richard Edelman’s series from “Beneath Canal’ - Gorgeous prints. Just started working with him at the gallery. I think I may have to buy one of them…..

…hard part is deciding which!

(It’s such an eerie, quiet New York, isn’t it?)

Richard Edelman is a graduate, in photography, of the Rochester Institute of Technology, with a graduate degree from Pratt Institute. He received fellowships from CAPS (NY Creative Artists Public Service Program) in 1982 and from the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 1985 & 2002.

Richard’s photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal), Brooklyn Museum (NY), Polaroid International Collection (Offenbach), Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris) and Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY)

He was a member of the faculty at the New School and has also taught photography at the School of Visual Arts and International Center for Photography, all in New York City

See more work here

I hope to make it to this exhibit at the Met before is closes (on March 22nd). The show looks pretty interesting - I was going through the images online and came across this one by Mark Wyse

Mark Wyse (American, b. 1970)
Marks of Indifference #4 (Accident #1), 2006
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Joyce F. Menschel Gift, 2008 (2008.84)

The accompanying text to the photo states:

A professional printer as well as a photographer, Wyse makes technically assured yet enigmatically reticent images showing traces of past life or activity. The title of the series, Marks of Indifference, refers to an essay on photography and conceptual art by the artist Jeff Wall. Wyse uses this reference to denote the idea of the camera as a dispassionate recording device as well as the larger question of how artists’ conscious and unconscious intentions manifest themselves in photographs. The “indifference” of the title also applies to the subjects of the pictures themselves: a car with a large dent in its side, a road sign surrounded by overgrown foliage, the marks left by shelves torn from a wall. In this photograph of a squirrel left for dead on a paved suburban street, the large scale, sharp focus, and unusual worm’s-eye view combine to give the picture a powerful, dreamlike intensity.

Funny, my friend Mark Gregory has an photograph very near to Wyse’s. I liked it when he first took it, and I still like it now (even despite its rather gruesome nature):

Oh the funny world of syncronicity, eh?

I was going through the 2008 winners of the Camera Club of New York’s Juried National Competition and was surprised to find MY personal pick of the bunch was not one of their 1st, 2nd or 3rd place winners, but one of their honorable mentions: Toni Greaves.

Here are images from Greaves series, Radical Love, which explores the reasons why the nuns, both young and old, of The Monastary of Our Lady of the Rosary have chosen to lead a cloistered life.

There is also a video which I found curious - in it one of the young women describes the moment she knew this calling to be hers, when upon listening to her favorite song play on youtube, the lyrics called out ” will you marry me”.

I enjoy getting a glimpse into lives I otherwise would never see, such as that of a young nun. This series reminded me of another around the theme of religion that I simply LOVE. It is by a photographer named Przemyslaw Pokrycki and the series is titled, Rites of Passage. I’ve been meaning to post about it for ages 

My stupid computer is not letting me take screenshots of more images and it is far too late for me to spend doing this anyway (its now after 2am and I need to catch a train at 7), but promise me you will go through the entire series (there are baptisms, then first communions, then weddings and finally funerals) - it is an EXCELLENT series and I hope to show them at the gallery one day.

http://www.photo.sittcomm.sk/pokrycki_rites.htm

Seriously, have still yet to see work that has excited me as much as these photos in a long time. Each shot is both hilarious and beautiful - I found myself going through them finding odd + lovely details each and every time (notice the plethora of plastic soda containers at each wedding table!) - the cultural nuances are what I love most and Pokrycki captures these Polish families in such a wonderful way that it suddenly becomes easy to imagine your own seat at their table. His statement for the series notes how these universal rituals tie humans together, despite the sometimes vast cultural differences between us. You certainly can not escape the power of such life passages, no matter who you are or where you live…..

(yay! computer let me paste one more. goodnight!)

The photographs above are by Sergey Larenkov. He’s reshot WW2-era photos (these are from the siege at Leningrad) from their original perspectives, and then faded the original image back in. A haunting and arresting mashup of images. Just trying to even imagine what life would have been like in Leningrad back then is difficult. According to Wikipedia, the blockade was ‘one of the longest and most destructive sieges of major cities in modern history’. Terrifying.

The siege at Leningrad is not included in the book I am currently reading, The Dark Valley - A Panorama of the 1930’s, but the author, Piers Brendon, does a great job covering the period leading up to the Second World War. Although it is massive, (just shy of 900 pages) it is very accessible and completely engrossing.

Tonight I plan on a few good cups of tea and digging into the next chapter, maybe some quiet music in the background - like this song, which was recorded by The Ink Spots in 1941, the year the siege at Leningrad first began……

Listen to The Ink Spots - I don’t want to set the world on fire mp3

(off the Fallout 3 soundtrack - thanks Jason)

Some nice medium-format color photographs by Bryan Schutmaat - I especially love the middle image. Looking through his photos makes me want to pack up (my non-existent car), hit the long road and head out west to find, well, the west - in all its mythical glory.

And what would be playing in the car? This song.

For more: visit Bryan’s flickr page - flickr.com/photos/lastleaf