Chris

Chris
Washington Street
Paterson, NJ
May 2012

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT curated by David Andrew Frey

June 28 – August 3, 2012

Opening Reception Thursday, June 28, 6 – 8pm — numberthirtyfive gallery
141 Attorney Street (between Stanton and Rivington), New York

Culturehall 4th birthday after party — 151
151 Rivington Street, (between Suffolk and Clinton), New York

This summer, Culturehall is pleased to join numberthirtyfive gallery in New York to present Hidden in Plain Sight, an exhibition presenting the work of Jon Bocksel, Joy Drury Cox, Stephanie Prussin, and Elliott Wright. Curated by David Andrew Frey, the selected artworks explore foundational systems that shape the everyday but which largely remain invisible through ubiquitousness.

Artists participating in the exhibition are featured members of Culturehall, an online resource for contemporary art. Additional images and information regarding the artists are available online through their Culturehall portfolios.

Numberthirtyfive is located at 141 Attorney Street between Stanton and Rivington on the Lower East Side in New York City. Summer gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, 12 - 6 pm and by appointment. Please contact Brad Silk or Cindy Rucker at 212.388.9311 or info@numberthirtyfive.com for more information.

Upstate

Girls Who Smoke at The Picture House

Girls Who Smoke, a short film directed and co-produced by Tawny Foskett, screens on Sunday, June 24th and Thursday, June 28th at The Picture House in Pelham, NY. Filmed on location in Asbury Park, the film is adapted from Jenifer Hixson's story originally told at The Moth and later on This American Life. According to the director, Girls Who Smoke "has a slice-of-life, realistic feel, and is a simple story; essentially a long walk home by our main character, Jenny, and set against the background of domestic abuse, the working class and small town America."

Most members of the creative team are women, including the award-winning German cinematographer Sanne Kurz, producer Laurie Rud, associate producers Melissa Levins and Tawny Foskett and art director Irina Arnaut.

Kristin Taylor (Jenny) and Loren Lockwood (friend) star as the girls who smoke. From spending the day with her new friend, Jenny learns that her life may not be as bad as she thinks and finds strength within herself to make big changes.

The 15-minute screenings precede the Sunday 6:30pm and Thursday 7:30pm showtimes of feature film Damsels in Distress, also starring female leads.

ArtSlant Review: America through a Chinese Lens

My review of America through a Chinese Lens, a group exhibition curated by Herb Tam at the Museum of Chinese in America, was published today on ArtSlant. Please see: How Do I Fit Into This?

The exhibition is on view through September 10th.

culturehall feature 87: NEW ARTISTS FEATURE, SPRING 2012

Culturehall's New Artists Feature, Spring 2012 highlights work by Jesper Norda, Florine Demosthene, Joshua Citarella, and Yoshi Kametani.

The next juried application opens mid-June.

L.H.

L.H.
Passaic Street
Paterson, NJ
May 2012

Carl

Carl
Market Street
Paterson, NJ
April 2012

Nikia

Nikia
Dr. Martin Luther King Way
Paterson, NJ
May 2012

Culturehall Feature 86: THE SPACE WE LIVE IN

I had the opportunity to meet a curator based in Moscow, Yulia McCutcheon, on her trip to New York in the summer of 2011 and to discuss her ideas about photographers working today in Russia. Culturehall is pleased to present an issue on contemporary Russian photography that she co-curated along with her colleague Dasha Kutasina. THE SPACE WE LIVE IN features work by Natasha Pavlovskaya, Valeri Nistratov, Andrey Abramov, and Nikita Pirogov. Pirogov's photographs were also recently shown in an exhibition of Contemporary Russian Photography at the Houston FotoFest 2012 Biennial.

Cathy selected for semifinalist round of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2013

Cathy, Market Street, Paterson, NJ, 2011

I'm excited to share some wonderful news that the portrait of Cathy from my Paterson series in progress has been selected for the semifinalist round of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2013. The final round of judging takes place at the Smithsonian Museum's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC on September 13th. The finalists will be included in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from March 23, 2013 through February 23, 2014, and the winner will receive an award of $25,000. The public will also have the opportunity to vote from amongst the finalists for the People's Choice Award.

My deepest thanks to the jury for recognizing this portrait and to Cathy for sharing part of herself with me on Market Street in April 2011. A special thanks also to my friend, artist June Glasson, for encouraging me to apply to the competition.

Portraits on JENREN

Elpraa, Market Street, Paterson, NJ, 2011

Minneapolis-based curator and producer Jenny Barnes has included a selection from my two portrait series shot in Binghamton, New York and Paterson, New Jersey on her art site for creative inspiration, JENREN. The portfolio of 12 images can be found at: JENREN / Tema Stauffer. Thank you, Jenny.

The Paterson series in progress is also now on my website: Paterson

On and Around East Caesar Chavez Avenue with Francesca Romeo

culturehall feature 84: NEW ARTISTS FEATURE, WINTER 2012

Congratulations to the four artists selected for culturehall's NEW ARTISTS FEATURE, WINTER 2012: Margot Hester, Stephanie Prussin, I-Hsuen Chen, and Ruben Nusz.

The next juried application opens in mid-April.

Flak Photo's Winter Pictures

Thank you to Andy Adams for including Tree, 2003 in Flak Photo's Winter Pictures series featuring 20 photographs each weekday in January. All of the winter images can be found in The Collection.

Jorge

Jorge
Main Street
Paterson, NJ
December 2011

Country Life: Poetry by Amy Beeder

Field of Sad Trees, 2008

One of my photographs, Field of Sad Trees, was published in the Design Observer/Places accompanying a poem by Amy Beeder, author of Burn the Field and Now Make the Altar and professor of poetry at the University of New Mexico. Country Life is poem about Eastern European immigrants in the American Midwest.

Thank you to Places editor and friend Josh Wallaert for making the connection between my image and her words.

Country Life, by Amy Beeder

They came for land. For hog-high wheat to Dixon, Weeping Water, Garland Falls;
came to Midland hamlets, made their farms from bogs & marshes,
fens & bottomland: immigrants from Kraków, Darkov, Lasko

who fled famine, coming wars, or the Eastern factories, left
the city rivers thick with indigo & slaughter’s crimson, tenement
air: TB & boiled tubers, fled the bellows & gutter cast, sawdust & accident;

left forever what Riis called the strip of smoke-colored sky so that
their children’s children might grow up corn-fed, reverent,
thrifty; that they might join 4-H & raise lambs, might

crochet & macramé; might play the clarinet or their fathers’ accordions, always
optimistic despite the blizzards & drought, locust & blight.
Where there’s space to push the earth aside: that’s the place

to raise a child — here amid arrival’s plenty: starch & punch in a church basement; even so, a century later their descendants hear another music
over the television, the civics lesson, over the highway’s drone:

a white noise off the flat plain, an echo of the empty well’s temptation,
as if something in them yearns after all for chimney spill, the gritty stink of war,
how else to explain how some came to worship this caustic god,

taking in their bodies his small poison, in abandoned barns & chicken coops:
battery acid, lye, brake cleaner, Sudafed, salt & red sulfur —
Was it to hear clearly the deep corn’s chorus, maybe; maybe

to be nightwind, milkweed, goldenrod, chaos & immersion: to be the intolerable wild unplowed field, to be the one elm black with starlings?
Those whose parents thought they’d never be suppliants, never

wilt or starve — but we’ve seen them in mug shots, baffled
& sallow, broken as those girls in sweatshops going blind,
or the rawboned young Spinner in a Carolina Mill 1901

or the miners’ families evicted, or the garment workers corralled:
faces smeared & scattered as blossoms before the plow; all
catastrophically struck in the light of their own interminable

now, weary, girding themselves, helpless before the lens.

Culturehall Feature 81: NEW ARTISTS, FALL 2011

Congratulations to four artists presented in culturehall's Fall 2011 New Artist Feature Issue: Livia Corona, Mandy Cano Villalobos, Justin Gainin, and Elliot Wright.

Applications for our Winter 2012 New Artists Feature open in mid-January.