Recent Exhibitions

VISUAL STUDIES WORKSHOP GALLERY
RECENT EXHIBITIONS

31 PRINCE STREET ROCHESTER NY 14607, tel: 585.442.8676
GALLERY AND BOOKSTORE HOURS: 12-5, TUESDAY-SATURDAY

gallery@vsw.org

current exhibitions
lectures and special events

March 5–May 15, opening Reception, Friday, March 5, 6–8PM
Lawrence Brose / Chris Burnett

Lawrence Brose, De Profundus and Cage: A filmic Circus on Metaphors on Vision
Chris Burnett, Messages to Extinct Places in the Present Tense

Lawrence Brose, stills from "DiProfundis"

The Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) is pleased to present in its main gallery the media art of Lawrence Brose and Chris Burnett. These distinguished artists use different means of translation in transferring signs, images, text and sound through cultural peripheries. ÊAn opening reception, with the artists present, is being held on Friday, March 5 from 6-8 pm.

Lawrence Brose is showing DeProfundis and CAGE: A Filmic Circus on Metaphors on Vision. DeProfundis is a series of film stills and Iris prints that sensually "breaks loose into mesmerizing filmic ideas propelled by rhythms of original or found and recycled footage." The film-based images are solarized, chemically-treated and digitized. Brose's series translates and recaptures the transgressive aesthetics of Oscar Wilde to counter the conservatism in the gay community. CAGE: A Filmic Circus on Metaphors on Vision is a US premier of a gallery installation originally commissioned by the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland in 1999. ÊIt consists of 5 one hour videos that compose a film "portrait" of the avant-garde composer and artist John Cage. ÊBrose subjects the images to chance procedures opening an "imageworld" of ideas that translate Cage's ideas and aesthetics from the world of sound into the visual realm.

Chris Burnett's Messages to Extinct Places in the Present Tense is a series of word-image prints, LED message-board programs and computer animations that explore the scenario of altered functions of language in transforming space and shaping information. ÊThe installation takes as a background theme places and things in industrial landscapes, rust-belt towns and extinct animals œ that are out of kilter with current flows of capital and communication. These relic-images are rendered in text streams from the Internet and captured and manipulated using custom software of Burnett's design. The resulting word-pictures are a translation and graphic travelogue of other people's stories about bygone places in an alien, graphic tongue.

Creative translation unites the artists, but they are also associated in their leadership roles as directors of two Upstate New York artists' spaces: Brose is Executive Director of CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Burnett is Executive Director of the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY. ÊA gallery event, a public discussion to be announced, will bring together their vision of the cultural importance of regional artists' spaces. Lawrence Brose is a 2003 Artist's Fellowship recipient from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is co-sponsored by Artists & Audience Exchange, a NYFA public program.

November 14 – February 22, opening Reception, November 14, 6–9PM
Positions 38°: Korean American Crossings
Photographs and media art by 6 Korean-American artists: Misugi Forssen; Kathy Halamka; Kate Hers; Ensuk Joo; Min Jung Kwak; and, Soon-Mi Yoo.

These talented artists address issues regarding identity, global politics, and representational cliches that persist in Western culture. An opening reception, with the artists present, is being held on Friday, November 14 from 6-9 pm.

The exhibition provides a contemporary venue for the expression of these new international voices. The artists attempt to negotiate traditional oppositions of western and eastern stereotypes. The work stems from the artists' desire to assert their individual identities as Korean-American artists living and working in contemporary America. The work engages and questions the concept of an over-arching Korean-American Identity but, at the same time, addresses each artist's personal sense of individuality.

This compelling exhibition will be offered to other national arts organizations as part of VSW's Traveling Exhibition Program following its appearance in Rochester. The Visual Studies Workshop's exhibition of Positions 38°: "Korean-American Crossings" is supported by a grant from The New York State Council on the Arts - a state agency.

Misugi Forssen, from the series "Illuminati"
	Kate Hers,Vogue

Min Jung Kwak, untitled	Kathy A. Halamka. Empty Bowl

Eunsuk Loo, untitled	Soon Mi Yoo Cemetary, DeinNien-Scoho

Light Index
Erika Blumenfeld, Ellen Carey, Amanda Means, February 7 – April 5, 2003


Erika Blumenfeld	Ellen Carey	Amanda Means

"LIGHT INDEX" features work that examines the most essential component of the photographic process: light. Amanda Means, Ellen Carey, and Erika Blumenfeld all choose light as their fundamental subject, and use it in dramatically different ways to create an image. The images are unique and compelling; ranging from portraits of light bulbs to colorful, abstract photograms and large-scale biomorphic washes of color to grids of gentle blue and white arcs. The methodologies used to create such imagery forces us to take a closer look at both the history and nature of photography.

Amanda Means uses the light source itself as the subject of her work.. In her black and white work she takes mass-produced light bulbs—hard, brittle objects of little aesthetic merit—and by placing them inside an enlarger and projecting them horizontally outward onto photographic paper, transforms them into a range of mysterious images. She concentrates on luminosity and radiance. Oddly, at times the resulting images appear organic, like otherworldly life forms caught and arrested in the glare of a flash. Means moves effortlessly from black and white to color.. Working with 20" x 24" Color Polaroid she manages to coax an even more startling variety of expressiveness from this very mundane subject matter.

Ellen Carey's work is full of abstract imagery that is an homage to both William Henry Fox Talbot and Minimalism. Carey is not afraid to question the very nature of photography, and says that her work is "picture making rather than picture taking." It is this approach that leaves us wondering: what is the image and how was it made? But we also are in awe of the beauty and sublime nature of the work; it is charged with a spiritual and conceptual energy. The images exemplify Carey's concern with the process of photography. She uses light, color, both the positive and negative of Polaroid film, and physically manipulates the materials to create incredibly poignant imagery. Carey's colorful push-pin photograms and large-scale "pulls" and "rollbacks" push photography toward the abstract while highlighting how light, color theory, and randomness all interact to create something enigmatic and interesting.

Erika Blumenfeld records light directly onto Polaroid and Ilfochrome paper without the use of a traditional camera or lens. What we see is a "documentation" of the amount of light present at the moment of the exposure. Whether the exposure is taken at noon or midnight, the images function as pure index of light. The visual result is a gradation of light as color, ranging from gentle arcs of blue, purple or black to pure white. BlumenfeldÍs work installed in grid form, sometimes with hundreds of 4"x5"s, demonstrates the importance of light and time in the photographic process. Her images are "cumulative records of daylight waxing and waning over periods of time."

This exhibition presents imagery that ranges from the everyday light bulb to pure darkness and many shades in between. It is the movement within this range that demonstrates a certain originality. Means, Carey and Blumenfeld push toward the limit of what we understand as photography. They push the traditional by playing with the potential of the abstract photograph and the use of color. This is not done in a haphazard way, but with great attention to process. Each artist becomes intricately involved in the process, much like the action painters of the last century. With light and color as their tools, each produces images that are the result of everyday experience, but in a way that is typically reserved for painting. In this show photography is being defined as a purely visual art in an essential and minimalist way.

—Scott Laird, Curator

marks on silver
Norman Sarachek, February 7 – April 5, 2003

Unlike typical photographs, my cameraless photographs do not use a camera and negative to control the amount of light reaching the light sensitive photographic paper. Instead, I have experimented with many techniques to control the pattern and intensity of light allowed to expose the paper. In some pieces I have use materials such as ink, brushes, markers, and steel wool, on clear acetate or sheets of paper to make a mask placed between the photographic paper and light source.

--Norman Sarachek

Degas' Visual Environment
October 26, - December 21, 2002—January 7 - 11, 2003
Opening Reception: October 26, 2002 6-9pm

The Visual Studies Workshop exhibition entitled "Degas' Visual World" has been mounted to complement the Degas show at the Memorial Art Gallery. Edgar Degas was deciding to become an artist in the 1850s just as a host of new photographic images was flooding his world. These photographs provided new, non-traditional ways of visualizing the flux of daily events in the active urban environment that Degas inhabited. Degas responded to this new visual environment in both his choice of subjects and in his manner of painting. Later Degas himself became an amateur photographer in the 1880s. The VSW exhibition includes photographs, prints and publications from Degas' time

Degas was five years old when Louis Daguerre announced his startling new discovery of "portraits made by the sun." Degas grew up looking at those magic daguerreotype portraits and at the lovely soft prints of buildings and views made in Fox Talbot's rival calotype process. But both these processes, magical as they seemed to their time, were slow and very limited in what kinds of subjects they could successfully represent. In the early 1850s, just as Degas began to paint, Frederick Scott Archer worked out a usable wet-collodion photographic process which could catch and freeze a slightly larger slice of the flow of daily life into an image. Millions of these new images quickly flooded the world as commercial photographers developed ways to find new mass markets for their photographs. Stereograph views, cartes-de-visite, and topographical scenes moved from a novelty to a commonplace tool of commerce, science and education. This flood of photographs provided a staggeringly large number of new images of how the world could be represented; images that -- sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately-- challenged traditional modes of representation. Degas, along with other perceptive artists, looked hard at this new visual source and drew from it ideas to enrich his own artistic vision. Again, in the 1880s, as further improvements in photography opened up the medium to amateurs, Degas briefly but ardently experimented with the visual potentials of medium itself, attempting to force a new "look" out of the process as he photographed his friends and acquaintances.

—William Johnson, Curator

removed: an exhibition by Joy Episalla
November 8 - December 21, 2002—January 7 - 11, 2003
Opening Reception: November 8, 2002 7-10pm

Joy Episalla is a New York based photographer and installation artist. Her photographs chart a line "between the domestic and profound" of interior spaces. Her images of blankets, pillows, and drapes evoke a sense of tactility, due to their large formats and close range. Episalla is unique among artists working with fabric because of her ability to reveal both the surface and the underlying narratives of these mundane items which could be considered banal, but under her almost forensic eye reveal a larger truth and beauty about life as it is now.


Susan Lynn Smith	Paul Cunningham	Judy Gelles

Keith Johnson	Ilan Jacobson	Dennis Witmer
Above: work from "Are You Alone..."

"Are You Alone..." features the work of nine artists, all focusing on the idea of the sublime in a
man-made landscape. In the tradition of early landscape painting and photography, the images are devoid of human presence and reveal the desolation and loneliness associated with progress. The work reflects a recent artistic desire to reject the ironic in representing the social and cultural environment. This exhibitions brings together emerging artists from NYC, England, and Philadelphia.

Paul Cunningham's photographs are portals looking onto empty, forgotten landscapes. The images are earnest and direct, due in part to Cunningham's lack of formal training. "These pictures are Éan emotional record of how it felt to be standing there at that moment of time, in quiet contemplation." Cunningham has recently been featured in BLINDSPOT and voted one of the top thirty emerging photographers by PDN(Photo District News). Jim Dingilian utilizes old objects as a canvas for his smoke "photographs." The resulting images are haunting and ephemeral, and contain multiple layers of meaning both visually and conceptually. Strangely beautiful and compelling, they invite you to wonder about the dense narrative that each object contains. Ilan Jacobsohn explores elements of urban life in his large format images of urban interiors. Jacobsohn attempts to recreate and enhance the lived experience of spaces. The images inspire "both a sense of awe and beauty while simultaneously evoking foreboding and anxiety." Matthias Hoch's interior landscapes contain sleek modern lines and geometric compositions that evoke a sense of stability and permanence, denying their own inevitable decline. In contrast, Susan Smith uses photography to create permanent records of fleeting time. The urban landscape changes rapidly, and individuals' relationships to it must therefore constantly shift. SmithÕs images of desolation and deterioration are as beautiful as they are forlorn. Judy GellesÕs photographs of mobile homes evoke a sense of danger, like stills from some modern-day film noir. The bulky yet flimsy buildings are sinister beings emerging from the darkness, an eerie blue light glowing on their pre-fabricated surfaces. Dennis WitmerÕs images of shopping carts convey a similar sense of unease. Empty carts in empty parking lots seem to confront each other, engaged in robotic conflict.
Keith Johnson also taps into this sense of confrontation in a solitary image of a truck that is locked behind bars in the middle of a parking lot. In a more physical sense, Rick Hill's installation replicating a dark parking lot immerses the viewer in an unnerving nightscape. Like the photographs in the exhibition, the installation imitates and emphasizes reality without being real. The artificiality of the environment heightens the viewerÕs natural senses.

Each of these artists, in revealing something of the character of life in man-made environments, leads the viewer to consider anew the isolation of modern life viewed through work that is simultaneously beautiful and disturbing.

—Scott Laird, Curator

Selected Works by Adam Fuss
September 20–October 21, 2002,
Opening Reception: Friday, September 20, 5–8pm
This exhibition is presented in association with Deborah Ronnen Fine Art

Adam Fuss, English, Born 1961

At a moment in time when large format, digitally manipulated color photographs compete with paintings for our attention, Adam Fuss continues to make pictures of unrivaled beauty and mystery with traditional and historical photographic techniques. His exploration of the processes for making daguerreotypes, platinum prints or photograms, for example, is not the result of a fascination with technology or a romance with the past but a desire to compose and a passion to realize an idea.

Fuss has most often made unique images with a simple process that completely eliminates the camera — a photogram. Dependent upon the physical qualities of the actua l object placed on light-sensitive paper and the length of its exposure to light Fuss has created stunning abstractions and poignant compositions from such materials as babies in water, the trail of snakes across a surface, sunflowers , rabbits and their entrails and light moving in space. Since 1999 he has worked on a series entitled "My Ghost" an evocative reference with spiritual associations realized in such images as christening gowns, transparent and absent the warmth of the intended wearer or columns of smoke captured during their brief existence. Many of these unique and intimate prints are large in scale.

While his subjects are recognizable and often familiar, their associations are metaphysical and, even, emotional. Much has been said of his work as a type of deepening internalization of photography through his penetrating acknowledgement of the required chemical process traditionally necessary to create a print. About his images, he commented: "It's only when I make a picture that I have to keep looking at that I feel I've succeeded. I've always needed to make images that have a sense of revelation to the viewer, namely me. (I'm not surprised by them) It's more like the sensation of looking into the face of someone very beautiful. Or, perhaps, when....you're faced with the unknown. I got into pinhole and photograms because I was bored with the pictures I was seeing."

A resident of New York since 1982, Fuss was born in London and departed England for Australia where he first studied photography while working as studio assistant to a commercial photographer. After arriving in New York he worked as a commercial photographer documenting art exhibitions. He has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally and his work is in private and public collections. This exhibition will be the first survey of Fuss' career and will include approximately 55 images from sev eral of his primary series including the spirals, flowers, waterdrops, snakes and images from the ongoing series, "My Ghost." The Kunstahalle Bielefeld, Germany, is organizing this exhibition and it will premier at the MFABoston, September 25, 2002 – January 12, 2003, before circulating to Europe.

—Cheryl Brutvan
Robert L. Beal, Enid L. and Bruce A. Beal Curator of Contemporary Art
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

We're so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we donÕt realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet....It's what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards, and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I'm saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored.

—Adam Fuss

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