Announcing Representation of Cig Harvey

Pomegranate Seeds, Scout, Rockport, Maine, 2012from the series Gardening at Night

Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Cig Harvey. Enigmatic and atmospheric, Harvey's photographs conjure subtle elements of fantasy through ingenious orchestrations of people, objects, and scenery. Magical realism is abandoned in favor of carefully curated moments of real-world magic: with clever cropping, inspired composition and vivid color, mirrors become moons and dreamers appear to climb white-washed stairs into the clouds. Yet in her visual stories, the extraordinary lies exactly in the absence of true unfamiliarity. We look again and pomegranate seeds on a wooden table are just pomegranate seeds on a wooden table. As in our own lives, wonder is only in the ability to see the world wonderfully.

Cig Harvey's work is included in permanent collections of major institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; and the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Her first monograph, You Look At Me Like An Emergency (Schilt Publishing, 2012) sold out in all printings and was accompanied by a solo museum show at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway in spring 2012. Her newest series, Gardening at Night, will be released as a monograph in Spring 2015. The artist lives and works in rural Maine.

WetLand by Mary Mattingly in Philadelphia

Mary Mattingly's latest outdoor installation project, WetLand, is now on view along the Delaware River at Columbus Boulevard in Philadelphia. This temporary, sustainable habitat uses solar distillation to purify Philadelphia river water that, with the input of the Philadelphia Water Department and Delaware River Port Authority, is used by Mattingly for the duration of the installation. The project is accompanied by activities such as music events, urban farming seminars, and yoga sessions.

WetLand is supported by FringeArts, the Knight Foundation, the Seaport Museum, DRWC, PWD, Skidmutro, the City of Philadelphia, and others, and open through September 21, 10am-5pm at Independence Seaport Museum Pier, 211 S. Columbus Blvd., at Dock Street. For more information, click here.

The Embroidered Image reviewed in Knotwe

Hagar Vardimon: Climbing, 2012

Hagar Vardimon: Climbing, 2012

This week a show that lit the New York skyline in the fibers world will be closing this Friday, August 15th. We hope it is one of many more to come that showcase the diverse range of contemporary artists who have emboldened not only the embroidery world's imagination but represent a, dare we say it, movement, well afoot of contemporary artists utilizing the conceptual strengths and mark making splendor of embroidery on photo images. The show's curator Orly Cogan selected an international brew of artists who are each working and drawing the thread through images in their own distinct way. The exhibition at the Robert Mann Gallery is well worth the visit for multiple reasons including sheer inspiration. There are pieces in the show that are cleverly mounted such as the works of Mathew Cox and Pinky/MM Bass who both touch on the biological image as backdrop for their technical feats of embroidery goodness. Artists Flore Gardner, Melissa Zexter and Jose Romussi create stunning works that use pattern as an overlay that Photoshop can never compete with however adept it is at hyper-aestheticizing the image. And speaking of the pixelated subject, the work of Diane Meyer terrifically disperses stitch like a blanket of blurred memory or identity obscured by anonymity.

To continue reading the article and short interviews with several Embroidered Image artists, click here.

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.