The Camera Club of New York-Special Evening Preview of Photographs 11/10-11, 2009

Amy Elkins- David, 2008



Untitled, from the series Space, 2009 © David Levinthal





Tuesday and Wednesday, November 10 and 11, 6 – 8pm

See you there!

Please Join Us for a Special Evening Preview of Photographs for The Camera Club of New York's 2009 Silent Benefit Auction
This year's auction features work by a choice selection of hot emerging photographers, a collection of vintage photographs, and exciting works by established photographers.

Participating artists: Arturo Acosta, Cara Alhadeff Judea, Erica Allen , Mariette Pathy Allen, Merry Alpern, Steve Arnold, Peter Baker, Brett Bell, Leslie Bellsey, Anita Blank, Sam Branman, Timothy Briner, David Brommer, Hunter Brown, Susan Burnstine, Christine Callahan, Eric William Carroll, Sean Carroll, Lindsey Castillo, Jesse Cesario, Jesse Chan, Megan Cump, Pradeep Dalal, Kia Davis, Emile Dubuisson, Rian Dundon, Max Dworkin, David Ebeltoft, Robert Edelman, Amy Elkins, Sean Ellingson, Smith Elliot, Lisa Elmaleh, Jon Feinstein, Hugo Fernandes, Mark Fernandes, Larry Fink, Ryan Foerster, Martine Fougeron, Allen Frame, Anders Goldfarb, Samuel Gottscho, Lorraine Gracey, Robin Graubard, Jasmine Gregory, Lori Grinker, Leonora Hamill, Marissa Herrman, Henry Horenstein, Meng Ling Hsieh, Joelle Jensen, Charles Johnstone, Jessica M. Kaufman, Salma T. Khalil, Michelle Kloehn , Anne Lai, Erika Larsen, Leigh Ledare, Ed Lee, Sebastian Lemm, Nataly Levich, David Levinthal, Sam Levinthal, Wayne Liu, Colleen Longo, Joseph Maida, Jerome Mallman, Anne Rochelle Marmorek, John Meyers, Dana Miller, Azikiwe Mohammed, Carolyn Monastra, Alex Morel, Santiago Mostyn, Walter Naegle, Kae Newcomb, Lori Nix, Nadhar Omar, Stuart O'Sullivan, Leah Oates, Carissa Pelleteri, Alexander Perrelli, Michael Rauner, Saul Robbins, Francesca Romeo, Caren Rosenblatt, Lynn Saville, Robert A. Schaefer, Abigail Simon, Aaron Siskind, John Stanley, Tema Stauffer, Will Steacy, Amy Stein, Harvey Stein, Joni Sternbach, Patricia Sullivan, Arne Svenson, Diana Teeter, Lucas Thorpe, Christina Thurston, Hugo Tillman, Sally Tosti, Linda Troeller, Lothar Troeller, Maki Ueno, Wilhelm Von Gloeden, Ellen Wallenstein, Eric Weeks, William Wegman, Susan Wides, Emma Wilcox, Amy Williams, Bernard Yenelouis, Shigeki Yoshida

Tuesday and Wednesday, November 10 and 11, 6 – 8pm at
The Camera Club of New York
336 West 37th Street, Suite 206
(bet. 8th and 9th Avenues)
New York, New York 10018
212.260.9927
www.cameraclubny.org

Still Life Curated by Jon Feinstein-11/5/09 @ Camera Club of New York

Stephen Sitting June 2009, © Lyndsy Welgos


See you there!

November 5th – December 19th, 2009

Opening Reception:
Thursday, November 5th from 6–8 pm

Erica Allen, Michael Bühler-Rose, Robyn Cumming,
Louis S. Davidson, John Hutchins, Lyndsy Welgos, Ann Woo

Still Life, an exhibition of photography curated by Jon Feinstein, examines a tendency in contemporary portraiture to remove the subjectivity of the persons photographed, literally transforming them into objects. Fashioning these photographs as still lifes, the artists depict people as matter rendered through light and color, with emphasis placed on their formal or cultural qualities above all others. The exhibition juxtaposes this contemporary work with studio portrait work from the Camera Club Archives, fostering a discussion about the relationship between classical idealized studio portraiture and contemporary critical portraiture.

With their bust portraits, Lyndsy Welgos and Ann Woo turn their subjects into nothing more than swatches of light color and gray tonality, and engage little with their individual identities. While their subjects are nude, the images are less about their personal sexuality or vulnerability and more about their physical surface. Michael Bühler-Rose's portraits cast western women who were raised in India, as cultural objects. Unlike Woo and Welgos' stark socially removed explorations of light and form, the women in Bühler-Rose's pictures contain heavy social and cultural signifiers, as the women are adorned with various elements of eastern and western culture. They display heavily directed gestures and costuming and pay homage to orientalist painting, but we know little about their identity below the surface cues.

Erica Allen's Untitled Gentlemen uses anonymous faces from found barbershop portraits to explore representations of identity. Appropriated and repositioned, the actual identities of the men remain as lost as they are on the walls of barbershops. The portraits comment on larger issues of gender while avoiding any appearance of personal identity. Lastly, Robyn Cumming's work addresses these ideas on the most direct level as she photographs women fused with flowers and other symbols of femininity, literally turning them into objects.

This exhibition runs from November 5th – December 19th.
Gallery hours: Monday–Saturday 12-6 pm

Please visit us at:
The Camera Club of New York
336 West 37th Street, Suite 206
(bet. 8th and 9th Avenues)
New York, New York 10018
212.260.9927
www.cameraclubny.org

In Search of the Miraculous Exhibition comes to the Camera Club NYC, 2/21/09

Photo-Gold Sansaram, 2005 © Ian Baguskas

2009,ARTmostfierce will be more involved with more Non For Profit Organizations than just, buying art like crazy. The Camera Club of New York is having a interesting group show opening 2/21/09.Since 1884, the Camera Club of New York has been the place where people come to learn photography and enhance their careers.Photographer Ian Baguskas is part of the show and I had always been interested in his work. Please see press release listed below and see you @ the opening!~

PRESS RELEASE – In Search of the Miraculous, February 21st – March 28th

In Search of the Miraculous, an exhibition of photography and video opening Saturday, Feb. 21st at the Camera Club of New York Gallery in midtown, brings together the New York-based photographers Ian Baguskas and the collaborative team Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher, with San Francisco-based video artist Laura Calhoun. Russian curator Yulia Tikhanova looks at how various documentary approaches inquire into the spiritual practices of communities existing outside of mainstream western experience, in India, South Korea, and Brazil.

Bezzubov and Sucher, collaborating since 2002, have created several projects that explore the politics of tourism and pilgrimage. In 2006, they spent a year in India on a Fulbright Scholarship Award for their project The Searchers. In the Camera Club exhibition, their classically composed, environmental portraits depict Western converts to eastern religions, and in a large-scale group portrait, an assortment of mostly western devotees sit meditating in an airy, light-filled temple. (Bezzubov's recent solo landscape work, made in places after natural disasters, will be published in 2009 by Nazraeli Press as his first monograph, Wildfire.)

Ian Baguskas's portraits made in South Korea of local mountain hikers depict the intersection of recreation and spiritual communion with nature. His project Sansaram from 2005, meaning "people of the mountain", combines landscape views with documentary portraits of native visitors to the Sobaek mountains, encountered on hiking trails. The popularity of this activity can be attributed to the indigenous religion, which is centered on the worship of nature and mountain spirits, and has come to be fused with Buddhism. (Baguskas was named in 2008 to the PDN 30, a selection of outstanding emerging photographers, and is represented by Jen Bekman Gallery.)

Laura Calhoun's video The Rope documents the biggest religious event in Brazil, a festival in Belem at the mouth of the Amazon, which fuses elements of Christianity and local religions. On every second Sunday of October, around 4am, a rope is stretched by religious guards and, within minutes, is held by devotees who have been waiting to begin a vigorous tug-of-war. Calhoun moved with her family to Belem when she was 10 and studied art and dance in Brazil before moving back to California as an adult. Since then, she has also lived in Alaska, Japan, Germany, and New York, but now lives in San Francisco. The Rope was shown previously at Cuchifritos in New York in 2008.

Curator Yulia Tikhonova has lived in Russia, New Zealand and more recently, New York, where she has worked at the Museum of the International Center of Photography and is currently pursuing an MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She has worked on several curatorial projects between Russia and the U.S., including a group exhibition of political portraiture for the 7th Graphic Biennale of Novosibirsk and video projects with Jesper Just at the Winzavod Contemporary Art Center and Alfredo Jaar at the National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow.

The exhibition's title appropriates a book title by the Russian mystic P.D. Ouspensky, whose In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching from 1947 is a guide to the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher with whom he studied. The reference to the book is an ironic nod to the zest and dedication of Ouspensky's mission.

The exhibition opening reception is Sat., February 21st, 5 – 8 pm, and it will run through Saturday March 28.

Exhibition hours are Monday – Saturday 12 – 6 pm.

Camera Club Gallery
336 West 37th Street, Studio 206
New York, NY 10018