Still Life & Stilled Lives ~ A Group Show
January 28 – March 19, 2005

Click here to view images from the show.

 

In considering the “Still Life and Stilled Lives” as a theme for a group show, the conventions of these genres have been tweaked - several playful and metaphoric liberties have been taken in selecting the nearly 40 photographs and objects d’art on view. The works made by these 21 artists celebrate the quotidian, finding ephemeral beauty, poignancy, and humor in unexpected objects and places.

The images which represent the Still Life are an eclectic group including a delightful, yet simple Gus Powell photograph of sunlight illuminating a seated marble Adonis, Richard Caldicott’s large scale color abstractions of Tupperware, architectural monuments made from stacked dictionaries by Abelardo Morell, a careful arrangement of books, by Victor Shrager, which seem to draw upon the muted palette and precision of a Giorgio Morandi painting, to the more unexpected rendering of cast-aside packing blankets as soft sculpture by Chad Kleitsch. The viewer will come upon the morning-after remnants of a summer dinner party by Joel Meyerowitz, the comical contents covering an election day voting-booth storage table by Tim Davis, as well as a Jerry Spagnoli box enclosing a daguerreotype of the decaying sunflower viewable inside through a peep-hole.

Stilled Lives is a term often used to describe street photography, but here the viewer will find a broader interpretation. New to the gallery is work by Swedish photographer, Julia Peirone, who creates digital collages taken from hundreds of portraits she took of people on Paris’ streets and gardens, and arranges these otherwise strangers in new relationships. Removed from their ordinary circumstances and placed within a monochrome field, these stilled gestures create imaginative harmonies or tensions. Gail Albert-Halaban photographs four women doing Tree Pose. When considering that a potential goal in yoga is to still one’s mind and thus life, the women’s facial expressions raise the question of just how far off they really are. Demonstrating the scientific study of still life, Dr. Harold Edgerton is represented with a whimsical multi-flash photograph of a woman skipping rope. In a nod to the concerns of mortality, Peter Kayfas bears witness to a young Cuban boy standing, with shovel in hand, amidst the rubble ruins of a Havana building – what was the life that once was there? In an image from Andrea Modica’s Treadwell series, Barbara, whose young life was stilled from juvenile diabetes, lies on the carpet perhaps writhing in discomfort or in mid-dream. Exemplifying a combination of both themes, is an etching on glass from the Memento Mori – Breathing Pictures series by British sculptor, Jason Shulman. Upon first glance, the viewer only sees a reflection of himself, yet it is only when he slowly breathes on the mirror that someone else’s face appears and returns the gaze – in this case, it is the artist’s deceased father. Done by commission only, Shulman makes it possible to share a private glance with a deceased loved one.

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