Maroesjka Lavigne, Once on this Island
"When you take a picture in a beautiful place, you have to realize that nature isn't the background for your photograph," says 24-year-old Belgian photographer Maroesjka Lavigne. "Rather, you are its prop. The only thing added to the scene, after all, is you."
During a four-month excursion to Iceland that began with an internship at The Reykjavik Grapevine, Lavigne became enamored of the country's stark scenery and how its people dealt with the challenges of going about daily life in an environment reigned by vast, inescapable nature. Steering away from typical depictions of Iceland's great mountainscapes and volcanoes, her work seeks instead to deconstruct the auras of intimidation surrounding these overwhelming forms, uncovering what makes Iceland a home to those who live there. The photographs carry a sense of familiarity and nostalgia for Reykjavik and its nearby towns that is marked by an uncanny awareness of our limited time on earth, through side-by-side portrayals of human life and the more lasting, terrestrial features. For Lavigne, nature is unconquerable, and everywhere: a small figure peers contemplatively over a bridge, allowing the falling snow to envelop his image in white, while a suburban street sleeps trustingly beneath an ominous, rust-colored sky. In "Ísland," her first solo show opening at Robert Mann Gallery this Thursday, April 3, Lavigne presents the rare findings of her travels in "moments when color, light and subject merge into the perfect image."
Read the full interview here.
Chip Hooper: Surf reviewed in April 2014 issue of ArtNews
Chip Hooper's eight large-scale photographs of the ocean were assembled here under the title "Surf". These rather kinetic images revealed water caught in motion while also suggesting how quickly our visual metaphors for water can change with painterly shadow plays and expressive gestural effects. Hooper has long drawn inspiration from the sea; his series of photographs capturing the coasts of California and New Zealand take strong visual cues from the landscape photography of Ansel Adams. But in this show, Hooper's documentary impulse went deeper, as seen in extreme close-ups taken over the last ten years that focus on the nature of water in ways that can only be expressed by the camera.
In Surf #1176 (2003), the sea assumes a striated texture, as vertical ripples interspersed with wiry stitches of spray spreads across the surface. Dramatic works, such as this one, were tempered by the presence of a suite of three photographs of feathery, amorphous waters, in white and pale grays that almost appeared to be sketched in charcoal. Though these cloudy images may be less striking visually, they served to make the more charged photos, with their sharp contrasts, that much more pronounced.
Surf #1082 (2003) captures a moment of high drama in a sea of waves: by isolating an instance of water threatening to crash in on itself, Hooper calls attention to water's powerful but ephemeral forms with a sculpture's eye. By contrast, Surf #2154 (2012) stood out: in this photo, the foamy surface is not just an element of the water but a detail of the image itself. Hooper's work is less aligned with that of Adams than with the impulses of the Abstract Expressionists whose work emphasizes pattern and mood.
—Ali Pechman
Wijnanda Deroo: Rijksmuseum featured in Art in America
There's something intangibly eerie about empty museums; when the spaces are under construction (torn-up floors, sculptures draped with cloths, errant ladders) it's even more unsettling. For the last 10 years, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has been under construction (it reopened last spring). During that time period, Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo visited the space several times a year, documenting the demolition and renovation of the museum's interior spaces in rich chromogenic prints. Especially stirring are her shots of diffusely lit empty walls, hallways and doorways that look like color field paintings.
Read the feature online here.
Mary Mattingly in the February issue of Art in America
Art for the Anthropocene Era
By Eleanor Heartney
News from the ecological front has been alarming of late. There was September's report from UN scientists on the acceleration of climate change and the near certainty that these developments are man-made. Then there was the impending arrival of Fukushima radiation on the West Coast, accompanied by half-hearted assurances that "most" of the radiation would be diluted to levels safe for human contact. These reports arrived as New York City prepared to commemorate the first anniversary of the devastating landfall of Superstorm Sandy, reviving memories of other recent damaging "natural" disasters, among them hurricanes Katrina, Wilma and Irene...
...Mary Mattingly looks beyond the kind of immediate problems addressed by [Lillian Ball and Mel Chin] toward what she refers to as the posthuman future, reflecting her conviction that humanity will survive only if we reduce our footprint on Earth. Over the last 13 years she has been engaged in a number of projects that explore the possibility of self-sustaining environments. Her "Wearable Homes" are garments designed to keep the wearer comfortable no matter what the temperature. The 2009 "Waterpod Project," a collaboration with numerous people, was an amphibious home built atop a 30-by-100-foot barge—complete with living quarters, a greenhouse, a windmill and a chicken coop-on which she, three crew members and various guests lived for five months.
Read the complete article online here.
Wijnanda Deroo selected by PDN for “Photo of the Day”
Photo District News
Night (and Day) at the Museum
Ever dreamed of prowling through an art museum when no one else is there? Photographer Wijnanda Deroo was able to explore the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam repeatedly during the years it was closed for extensive renovations, from 2004 until it reopened in April 2013. Built in 1856, the museum, home to "The Night Watch" by Rembrandt and "The Milkmaid" by Vermeer, had undergone many additions in the past. The goal of the renovation was modernize its facilities and restore its floor plan to its architect's original design. Deroo returned several times each year, photographing the progress from demolition to reconstruction. Her images from the project, showing emptied galleries and priceless works of art surrounded by dropcloths, are now on view at Robert Mann Gallery in New York City through March 29. An opening reception will take place February 20.
Throughout her career, Deroo has traveled around the world, photographing interiors. As the gallery says in a statement, "Her images, devoid of people yet full of the vestiges of their presence, are at once intimate and haunting."
Read the article online here.
Announcing representation of Maroesjka Lavigne
Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Maroesjka Lavigne.
Lavigne, whose work marries a graphic aesthetic with a drive for honesty in representing people and place, is a young Belgian photographer who lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. After graduating with a Masters in Photography from Ghent University in 2012, the artist spent four months driving alone across Iceland to create her Ísland series, which was selected by FOAM Magazine as a finalist in the prestigious FOAM Talent Call. The series also won a LensCulture New & Emerging Photographers Grand Prize, and was shown at the 2012 Photo Academy Awards and the Unseen Photo Fair in the Netherlands, as well as the 44 Gallery in Bruges, Belgium.
Maroesjka Lavigne: Ísland will open on April 3, 2014.
Mary Mattingly Film in Art21's New York Close Up
What's the latest trend in New York City real estate? Over the course of the summer and fall of 2013, artist Mary Mattingly constructs and occupies Triple Island (2013), an outdoor sculpture overlooking the East River. Situated in the newly developed Pier 42 public park—a waterfront area flooded by Hurricane Sandy in 2012—the sculpture rests on buoyant 55 gallon drums, which allow it to float in the event of rising sea levels. Mattingly and friends build Triple Island out of a mix of recycled, donated, and custom-made materials.
Read MoreJulie Blackmon in Photoalliance lecture at San Francisco Art Institute
Julie Blackmon
Friday, January 24th, 7:30pm
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco
About Domestic Vacations: The Dutch proverb "a Jan Steen household" originated in the 17th century and is used today to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, helped inspire this body of work. I am the oldest of nine children and now the mother of three. As Steen's personal narratives of family life depicted nearly 400 yrs. ago, the conflation of art and life is an area I have explored in photographing the everyday life of my family and the lives of my sisters and their families at home. These images are both fictional and auto-biographical, and reflect not only our lives today and as children growing up in a large family, but also move beyond the documentary to explore the fantastic elements of our everyday lives, both imagined and real.
For more details and to continue reading, click here.
Jennifer Williams: The High Line Effect reviewed in ArtNews
Inspired by the richness and variety of the High Line, and its overall effect on the Chelsea neighborhood and the city itself, Jennifer Williams created a series of collages composed of digital photographs of the area that she manually pieced together. Eschewing traditional frames, she decided to install these works, which vary widely in shape and size, in such a way that they seemed to grow out of the gallery's ceiling, floor, and walls.
In fact, the collages often appeared to tumble to life, like so many angular, sculpted creatures. One of them, called 7000 Oaks to Tenth Avenue Square, was so large that it looked like a dinosaur about to take a stroll, while another, Approaching Hudson Yards (both 2013), hung from the ceiling like a plane caught mid-takeoff. Running through all of the works was the path of the elevated park, like the spines of the various creatures that Williams invented. The buildings almost overwhelm the green foliage in the images, much the same way they do in real life.
But as these works make apparent, amenities like the High Line are inevitably accompanied by increased development and higher rents. Williams's exuberant and attractive collages comment cogently on the ambiguous impact of the High Line.
The gallery also included a set of the artist's unrelated collages. Boxes #2 (2012) is particularly sensual, with layers of brown paper, varying in tone, folded and bent and squeezed together. These works beg viewers to touch them and glide their fingers across the surfaces, giving them an opportunity to sense Williams's emotional states.
—Valerie Gladstone
Fred Stein at The Jewish Museum — In the Press
To see the full original webcast please click here.
Haaretz Israeli News
The wedding present that Lilo and Fred Stein bought themselves was never left unused: The newly married Jewish couple brought the 35mm Leica camera with them when they left Germany in the fall of 1933. They ostensibly were going on their honeymoon, but in fact were fleeing the Nazis only a few months after Hitler came to power. Read the full article here.
Spiegel Online
A photo session? No thanks! In 1946, Albert Einstein turned down a request by photographer Fred Stein to shoot pictures of him at Princeton. But it wasn't long before Einstein relented, agreeing to a meeting that he insisted should last no longer than 10 minutes. It turned into a two-hour encounter during which they swapped jokes, and which produced an image that has been branded into the collective consciousness, that of the physicist in his mid-sixties with his trademark tussled hair and sad, lonely gaze. Read the full article here.