The Embroidered Image reviewed in The Village Voice

The Embroidered Image is "Sew Revealing" at Robert Mann Gallery
By Jessica Dawson

For women, photos are the things we live up to—and get shown up by—every single day. We get it: Once you're in the pages of Vogue, your thighs and breasts belong to surgery or Photoshop, or both. It's not reality.

Traditionally, sewing is women's work, and many of these artists (all but two are women) address the constraints of gender.

Yet our mammalian brains, impervious to logic and fond of fantasy, remain willing to think, if for a moment: Could this be real? And, more important: Should this be me?

So let the weak among us bid welcome to photography shows alert to the lies photos tell us. "The Embroidered Image," at Chelsea's Robert Mann Gallery, is one such enterprise; it collects 11 artists who alter photos with needle and brightly hued thread, adding the most flagrant of adornments to found and new images. Each reminds us of a photograph's inclination to enhance, exposing the artifice inside every frame.

Traditionally, sewing is women's work, and many of these artists (all but two are women) address the constraints of gender. Several use portraits of 1950s-era ladies done up in bouffants, or old Hollywood movie stars, or generally gorgeous folk. Jessica Wohl sews starburst-like masks across sitters' faces, lending them a mystical, almost animal quality that suggests a wildness lurking below the costumes of polite society. Hagar Vardimon stitches cheerful colored threads in fishnet patterns across headshots of black-and-white movie stars like Joan Fontaine, as if plotting out a face lift or a skin disease. Whether it's to ruin or enhance her subjects' beauty remains unclear.

Continue reading the article here.

The Embroidered Image reviewed in Photograph Magazine

Multiple Exposures: Jewelry and Photography/The Embroidered Image
Museum of Arts and Design/Robert Mann Gallery, New York

The steady stream of images that comes our way electronically every day can make any single picture feel intangible, endlessly reproducible, and easy to dismiss. But two current exhibitions are emphasizing the materiality of the photograph—its object-ness and uniqueness. The Embroidered Image at Robert Mann Gallery through August 15 includes 10 artists who transform photographs using the humble domestic tools of needle and thread... Handiwork is the subject of The Embroidered Image as well, in terms of its decorative and its transformative properties. In a show that could have tilted toward the sentimental, curator Orly Cogan instead chose works that were pleasantly odd and humorously unsettling. The most successful images went beyond altering the surface of the image and engaged with the medium on a deeper level. The sneaky needlework in Diane Meyer's photographs of barren Berlin streetscapes, for example, mimicked photography's pixelization. Jane Waggoner Deschner quilted black and white photographs together in a contemporary twist on the domestic arts of the family photo album, quilts, and keepsakes, but her works include symbols or existential questions (What can I hope?). Orly Cogan's works involved pages from auction catalogues that she embellished with wry needlework doodles. A Babar-like embroidered elephant pops out of a window on a page documenting a Peter Beard elephant, for example. The Cat in the Hat and Lyle the Crocodile make appearances in other works — all pages from auctions catalogues, all featuring artworks by men (Saul Steinberg, Robert Indiana, Adam Fuss), complete with pricing information and provenance. Cogan playfully undercuts both the art market and the prevalence of the male artist in that market with her pointed play on traditional women's work.

—Jean Dykstra

Read the full article online here.

The Embroidered Image reviewed in Musée Magazine

The latest exhibition at the Robert Mann Gallery is one of home sewn sensibility. Orly Cogan, presenting the work of various artists, curates the show titled The Embroidered Image. The exhibition takes vintage photographs, catalogue pages and x-rays, reclaiming them with hand embroidery to turn them on their head.

The work intrudes upon the picturesque life of the past. Delicate lines of thread insert color, destruct staged portraiture, expand the line of vision and block out the images altogether, interrupting typical ethereal suburbia. It's as if the photos were found in a dusty family photo album hidden in the attic. This combined with the idea of home crafting, give the indication of domestic life, expanding the idea of embroidery to serve a more artistic purpose.

The artists each take their own angle on The Embroidered Image. Melissa Zexter uses the context of the scene, overlaid with pattern to fit the theme. Pinky/MM Bass dissects naked human bodies, sewing in anatomical forms. Diane Meyer's work uses pixilation, blurring the stark solid architectural environments. Hagar Vadimon uses brightly colored geometric imagery, masking out portraits and inserting totem poles into perfectly manicured suburban lawns. Matthew Cox and Orly Cogan use cartoons to add childlike pop culture on x-rays and art catalogues, poking fun at more sophisticated matters. Photo collages are sewn together by Jane Waggoner Deschner, in an almost scrapbooking manner, another connection to domestic life. Jessica Wohl uses thickly embroidered starbursts to block out entire subjects to isolate certain areas of the photo. And finally Hinke Schreuders' rough embroidery, ink and linen give the look of images printed on raw silk.

—Ashley Minyard

Read the article online here.

Maroesjka Lavigne: Ísland reviewed in Artnet News

May 12, 2014
Elizabeth Manus

Some words for Ísland, or Iceland as it's written in Icelandic: hoarfrost, white-hot, névé. And now, some pictures for Ísland, each of them on display at Robert Mann Gallery. Here work by the young Belgian photographer Lavigne, who (according to press materials) drove alone across Iceland for four months, evokes the kind of world that a 19th-century snowshoe-clad loner could love—spare, brightly lit, and miles from cities jammed with multi-story filing cabinets stuffed with people and their belongings. Snowmen, Reykjavik (2011) shows a circle of sun-faceted snow menhirs (clean white) foregrounding a lone soccer goal on a grassy field, a line of blue water and, farther in the distance, ghost-white houses. Phantom, Krossneslaug, Westfjords (2011) has a man just below the surface of a glacial pool, the dapple of light and liquid erasing his facial features. A Kelly green Excavator, On the Road (2011) raises the question of what Iceland needs to clear away in order to develop. Perhaps some precincts of the world deserve their blank spaces, Lavigne suggests, deserve to be left to themselves and their own quiet thoughts—like the faraway-eyed young woman in Hildur in Her Car, Mosfellbaer (2012), or the individuals taking the thermal waters in 2011's Blue Lagoon, Reykjavik. Or artists.

To read the article online, click here.

Laurent Millet at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers

Les Enfantillages Pittoresques
Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers
Angers, France
May 17 - November 16, 2014

The city of Angers is hosting an exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts devoted to artist Laurent Millet, in collaboration with La Galerie Particuliére in Paris, who will host an exhibition of the artist's work in May and June.

In his work as a photographer and visual artist, Laurent Millet (b. 1968) can be said to compose the chapters of an imaginary encyclopaedia, peopled with objects that he constructs in either a natural setting or in his workshop. His assemblages are hybrids of traditional, scientific and architectural objects, as well as works of artists close to Millet's heart.

How can one define his work? Is it sculpture? Drawing? DIY? Installation art? The artist stages 'poetic machinery' which he then photographs, this final image justifying all of the stages preceding it.

In his own way, relying mostly on a certain awkward erudition rather than skill, he attempts to question the images—those he produces, and those, which are latent, waiting to be awakened in the landscape and in the objects. He thus examines their modes of appearance, persistence and practical nature, as well as their uncertain identity.

To continue reading and for more information about the exhibition, click here.

Robert Mann Gallery at Downtown Fair

Booth DT 16
May 8-11, 2014
Downtown Armory
New York City

Please join us this Thursday through Saturday at Downtown Fair, where we will be mounting a dynamic solo exhibition of works by Julie Blackmon. The artist's subjects, rich in character and animation, dominate their settings with playful behavior infused with impending disaster. Translucent in their referral to Dutch Renaissance master Jan Steen's paintings, Blackmon's photographs modernize the raucous, familial scenes of the proverbial "Jan Steen household," while also borrowing from the strange interpersonal compositions of French painter Balthus. Our Downtown Fair exhibition will include several sold-out works by Blackmon, as well as her newest images. For more information or to purchase tickets please click here. We hope to see you there!

Maroesjka Lavigne: Ísland reviewed in The Wall Street Journal

The young Belgian photographer Maroesjka Lavigne spent four months driving alone across Iceland. "Yellow House, On the Road" (2011) is one of many pictures dominated by snow. The little yellow house sits doll-like amid a vast expanse of white snow; the white is modulated with hints of blue and melds imperceptibly into a sky that is also white with suggestions of blue. The vehicle in "Autobus, On the Road" (2012) is a red touring bus, but most of its side and windows are plastered white with snow. It is parked in a white field before a small white building whose red roof is also mostly covered with snow. Snow is falling in "Black Church, Búðir" (2012); white streaks are set against a pale-blue sky, and the simple church endures in stoic isolation. The white in "Shrimps, Reykjavík" (2011), however, is a porcelain sink; 11 translucent-and-pink shrimp with black dots for eyes cluster around the stainless-steel drain stopper.

There are three fine portraits: "Hildur in Her Car, Mosfellbaer" (2012), "Magni the Magnificent, Prikið, Reykjavík" (2011) and "Phantom, Krossneslaug, Westfjords" (2011). The first is an attractive young woman with auburn hair wearing a lace-fringed Peter Pan collar; light from an unknown source falls across her eyes. The second is a 17-year-old writer shown in a booth in a literary club, his hair slicked into place, and wearing suspenders and a polka-dot bow tie. The face of the male swimmer in the third is obscured by the rippled surface of the water.

—William Meyers

Read the article online here.