Jennifer Williams included in Queens Museum Exhibition

Queens International 2016
Queens Museum
April 10 - July 31, 2016

Created specifically for the Queens Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York, New York: City of Tomorrow is a large-scale photographic installation that addresses the rising skyline of the urban landscape from a pedestrian viewpoint. While entire neighborhoods have been reinvented due to ambitious renewal and development projects, the Panorama offers a miniature, three-dimensional opportunity to travel back in time to an earlier version of the five boroughs. Originally constructed as a descriptive tool for the 1964 World’s Fair, new construction has been added sparsely since its last restoration in 1992. Juxtaposing photographs of the miniature architectural models with street views of newly constructed buildings occupying the same locations today --including Long Island City, Downtown Brooklyn, and Manhattan’s “Billionaire's Row”-- Williams’ dynamic collage exposes the monumental scale of rising capitalist interests and the shrinking perspective of the individual citizen. For more information about the exhibition, click here.

The New York Times Review of Elisabeth Hase: An Independent Vision

Art Once Hidden From Hitler, Now on View
The New York Times | Art Review
Vicki Goldberg | March 31, 2016

A woman out shopping has fallen — splat! — onto her face on a stairway, hat still primly on head, stocking seams properly straight, purse and one shoe gone astray. She is armored for a foray in search of department store bounty but this photograph is not a decisive moment. It is a bit of role-playing, a self-portrait in disguise, by Elisabeth Hase, a German photographer (1905-1991) who wore shirts and sometimes ties rather than heels and hats and looked down on women trapped in such decorum.

To continue reading, click here.

Aesthetica Magazine interviews Maroesjka Lavigne

Interview with Maroesjka Lavinge, Land of Nothingness, Robert Mann Gallery
Aesthetica Magazine | March 8, 2016

Photographer Maroesjka Lavigne’s latest exhibition Land of Nothingness is currently on view at Robert Mann Gallery, New York. This new show, Lavigne’s second presentation with the gallery, invites viewers to step into the unforgiving landscape of Namibia – a country of deserts with barren stretches that yield only to subtle variations of the same aridness. From this desolation, Lavigne composes a visual symphony, where animals and the very landscape in which she finds herself appear to respond to her camera lens.

Longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2015 and previously featured in Aesthetica, Lavigne’s work has been shown internationally in Japan, Italy, and Belgium. Last year, she was awarded the Harry Pennings Award with her series, Not Seeing is a Flower, and she has also won a LensCulture New & Emerging Photographers Grand Prize. Previous projects have taken the artist to Iceland, where Lavigne captured the blue and fading lights of wintertime. We showcased Blue Lagoon in the Aesthetica Art Prize 2015 anthology.

A: What was it that drew you to Namibia for your work Land of Nothingness?
ML: I wanted to travel to a place where nature was still in charge. Following my journey to Iceland a few years ago, I started to miss this feeling of travelling through such a dominant landscape. Namibia is a place where you see more animals than humans and I think that’s great to experience.

A: Your images illuminate a sense of calm and tranquillity. Does this translate the sentiments you felt as an artist working in south west Africa?
ML: I think that’s definitely a result of nature still having the upper-hand here. Life goes at a much more natural pace. The distances we had to travel were so long you got into some sort of very slow state of mind. Not hurried, and with no stress. There was nowhere to rush to. The travel itself was the experience.

A: How does it feel to have your work represented and exhibited at the Robert Mann Gallery?
ML: It feels great of course. I actually still have to thank Aesthetica. Robert told me he saw my pictures in your magazine! So thank you! I’m very thankful to be represented by them, as I would never have been able to get this audience without them. It’s great to get a range of exposure so different kinds of people discover your work.

A: In which ways does this work connect with other projects and pieces, such as Blue Lagoon?
ML: As I said, I had the same state of mind in Iceland as in Namibia, and I think you can feel this through the pictures. There’s a sense of wanderlust and tranquillity in these projects because of the overwhelming nature in these places.

To view the interview on Aesthetica's website, click here.

Wall Street Journal on Maroesjka Lavigne: Land of Nothingness

The Beauty of Everyday India, the Vast Emptiness of Namibia
William Meyers | March 6, 2016

Maroesjka Lavigne has a talent for making do with very little. In “Ísland,” her 2014 exhibition at Mann, Ms. Lavigne (b. Belgium, 1989) showed pictures from Iceland, vast white swaths of snow in the middle of which would be a wee house or a single vehicle. The “Land of Nothingness” is Namibia, in southwest Africa, and the arid deserts are barren, with only an occasional tree and sparse shrubs. The sun is so intense it seems to have bleached the land; the colors are varied, but all are muted. Ms. Lavigne will typically place an animal, or some other object of interest, in the center of her image, the very place artists are taught in Photography 101 to avoid. For her, though, the compositional device seems to signify that the nothingness is not complete; look, a lioness! Or, look, an ostrich!

The ostrich’s black feathers stand out like an inkblot against the whitish plain and pale-blue sky. But the lioness’s tawny fur blends in with the faded colors of the shrubs in which she sits, staring inquisitively at the camera. Four giraffes travel single-file across the desert, their immense height miniaturized by their distance from the photographer. In “Gaze, Namibia” (2015) it is a man with binoculars who is dwarfed by the vastness of his surroundings. For “White Rhino, Namibia” (2015), however, Ms. Lavigne got so close to the beast that its monumental body almost fills the frame, its color mimicking the environment. Click here to view the feature.

Photography & Film Constructs in SRQ Magazine

The Power of the Constructed Image
SRQ Magazine
Philip Lederer | SRQ Daily Friday Weekend Edition | Friday March 4, 2016

Ringling College of Art and Design offers the antidote to Instagram culture with Photography & Film Constructs, the latest exhibition coming to the RCAD Willis A. Smith Galleries and featuring 20 works in photo and film from more than 15 award-winning international artists. Through a curated collection of constructed images, the show highlights artistic intentionality in the form while simultaneously celebrating the richness of the medium and evoking its power through history. “All of these images I chose because they’re layered and the artists are commenting on contemporary culture,” said Mark Ormond, curator of exhibitions at Ringling College. “In our daily lives, we have to be very focused, and these open our eyes to things in the world that we miss.”
To continue reading, click here.

Julie Blackmon in Photography & Film Constructs

March 4 – April 2, 2016
Ringling College of Art + Design | Sarasota, Florida
Willis Smith Construction, Inc. Galleries
Gallery Hours: Monday–Saturday 10-4, Tuesday 10-7

We are please to share the the works of gallery artist Julie Blackmon will be included in the exhibition, Photography & Film Constructs, on view at Ringling College of Art + Design.

“Each artist in this exhibition approaches creating a single image or composite film or video in a different way. The artist may construct a fiction involving a person, objects in a setting, a location and/or narrative, and in each case is challenged to address purely formal issues as well as an invented image."

Opening reception: March 4, 4:30-7:00 pm (during Artwalk)
Curator Tour: March 14, 11:30 am

Holly Andres Featured on Photo District News

A Mysterious Family Discovery Inspires Holly Andres's "The Fallen Fawn"
Photo District News
Brienne Walsh | February 16, 2016

When Robert Mann Gallery in New York City invited Holly Andres to do a solo exhibition in the fall of 2015, she was initially at a loss over what to show. In the period since her last exhibition with the gallery in 2012, she had been focusing mostly on commercial and editorial work for clients such as Nike, The New York Times Magazine and TIME. When mulling over a starting point for a new body of work, she kept returning to a story her two sisters—they are 8 and 10 years older than she—had recently relayed regarding a suitcase they had found as kids while playing by a river near their childhood home in Western Montana.  Click here to continue reading.

Sitting in the dark with strangers in Feature Shoot

Inspired by Hopper and Hitchcock, Photographer Creates Magical Miniature Scenes at the Movies
Feature Shoot
Ellyn Kail | January 29, 2016

As the story goes, the 1986 audience at the 50-second silent documentary The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat were so terror-stricken by the picture of a black and white train approaching that they leapt backwards for fear of certain annihilation. The fable, regardless of its veracity, speaks to the power of film to elevate even the most banal scene into the realm of preternatural.

For Sitting in the Dark with Strangers, New York City-based photographer Richard Finkelstein plays on cinema’s inherent ability to merge fact and fiction by fastidiously constructing model sets in which tiny figurines watch movies, pass by posters on the side of the road, and perhaps steal kisses under the illumination of a drive-in theater.
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Jörn Vanhöfen at Museum Haus Ludwig

We are pleased to announce gallery artist, Jörn Vanhöfen's exhibtion Loop at the Museum Haus Ludwig. This show will be on view from January 31 - May 22, 2016 

...the future is not an apocalyptic vision here. It is the vision of a nature that will recapture in a posthuman age their space in a compelling manner.

Not only man, even the man-made breaks and returns to dust. The inorganic part of nature is no exception from the general affairs of becoming, passing away and re-emergence. As long as these processes run, as long as rocks are formed, weather, be removed and re-formed, the planet Earth will live.

Photograph magazine Finkelstein review

Richard Finkelstein: Sitting in the Dark with Strangers, Robert Mann Gallery
Photograph | Reviews
By Jonas Cuénin

One could argue that Richard Finkelstein’s work is as much about modeling as it is about photography. In this exhibition of 18 medium-format prints on view at Robert Mann Gallery through January 30, Finkelstein draws us into his miniature, cinematic world, bringing villages, streets, houses, and movie theaters to life. In order to reproduce this environment and explore the experience of film, the subject of the series, Finkelstein conjures a dark, intriguing atmosphere. Movie screens, which are sometimes contemplated by his imaginary characters, are a constant presence in the images, either literally or by implication. The figures and scenes in these photographs are so delicately fabricated that they are endowed with an intangible sense of reality. To continue reading, click here.