“OUT and OUT” six visual artists working in art photography today JAN.6 – 31, 2015

Clockwise from top left:

Heidi Sussman, Another Cracked Face, Archival Pigment Print, 20" X 16"

Trix Rosen, Changed Landscapes, Silver Gelatin Print, 72" X 48"

Ellen Denuto, Woman With Large Crucifix

Alice Jacob, The Pleasure Seekers, Archival Print, 18" X 22"

Masayo Nishimura, The Crossing at Noon - Tokyo, June 2014 #3, Digital C-print, 33.5” x 25”

Pauline Chernichaw, Waiting For The Train,  2014, Archival Pigment Print, 22" X 28"


“OUT and OUT”

JANUARY 6 – JANUARY 31, 2015
Opening Reception:  Thursday, January 8, 2015    6 – 8 pm

Ceres Gallery New York is pleased to present “Out and Out”, a group exhibition on view January 6 - January 31, 2015.
Curated by Pauline Chernichaw, the show brings together six visual artists working in art photography today.
The works by featured artists Trix Rosen, Ellen Denuto, Heidi Sussman, Alice Jacob, Masayo Nishimura, and Pauline Chernichaw explore individual and communal identity transfigured within the framework of public and private spaces.  

For more information please contact:

Stefany Benson
Director, Ceres Gallery
547 West 27th St Suite 201 New York, NY 10001

phone: 212-947-6100
fax: 212-202-5455

art@ceresgallery.org
http://ceresgallery.org/

Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12pm - 6pm and Thursday 12-8pm.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“OUT and OUT”

Ceres Gallery New York is pleased to present “Out and Out”, a group exhibition on view January 6 - January 31, 2015. Curated by Pauline Chernichaw, the show brings together six visual artists working in art photography today. The works by featured artists Trix Rosen, Ellen Denuto, Heidi Sussman, Alice Jacob, Masayo Nishimura, and Pauline Chernichaw explore individual and communal identity transfigured within the framework of public and private spaces.  

Trix Rosen’s evocative photographs examine individual identity and gender ambiguity pressing beyond the public and private parameters of self-liberation. In the portrait “Changed Landscapes”, Rosen expands the convergence of unconfined boundaries querying “what should be made public and what should remain private”.   In her photograph, “Ravaged”, Rosen explores the plausibility of male and female transposition within the home environment. Her work elegantly exposes her subject’s transformations into self-validating portraits of alternate selves. What haunts Rosen is “finding the essence of a visible and invisible timeline; finding the quintessential moment that can be revealed in the stillness of a portrait, or in the melding of male and female imagery.”  

Equally captivating, Ellen Denuto’s alluring photographs examine gender identity by incorporating personal self-portraits within her private spaces. Denuto’s exploration and emphasis on portraits of self, tempered by solitary and self-contained cryptic rooms, create constructed narratives bursting with psychological meaning. In Denuto’s entrancing photograph, “Woman with Large Crucifix”, the symbolic crucifix embraces the contour of the female body, occupying a disquieting spatial void that clearly engages, directs and masterfully holds the spectator’s attention. Instead of seeming as intruders, Denuto invites the outside world into her secluded refuge, not only to witness her self-discovery but simultaneously summon the viewer to partake in an openly visual exchange of self-examination.    

Heidi Sussman’s riveting images depict subjects, whose identities are not observantly and clearly delineated, compelling the viewer to take a closer look. In Sussman’s close-up photograph, “Another Cracked Face”, Sussman elicits an allegorical portrayal of seemingly scorched human surrogates, replicas of unsettled beings amid indistinct spaces. Her fossilized portraits, reminiscent of classical sculptures, appear distant and abandoned in secretive locations. Sussman scavenges randomly deteriorating and out-of-the-way locales, often discovering body ‘breakables’ like mannequins with their unpreserved expressions. Her images of illusive, life-like figurative forms exist in their own space and time. Sussman’s moving photos are a guessing game that requires more questions than answers.

Similarly, Alice Jacob’s images focus on people in publically identifiable spaces. Jacob worked in the past as a Carney girl in an Illusion Show for a traveling circus, and gained insight into the unfamiliar world of the strange and unconventional.  This experience has influenced her work, especially the time she spent photographing ‘Carnival’; the masquerade of the voluptuous and mysterious in Venice, Italy.  This 16th century tradition plays out where identity and gender are unresolved. In Jacob’s “The Pleasure Seekers”, beauty becomes unclear and unsettling. Shadowy figures with faces concealed by masks, rendezvous in the backstreets of Venice. Jacob invites the viewer into a secretive, guarded and paradoxical city that seems self-contradictory or absurd and meant to be ‘guessed at’. Her photographs spellbind the spectator with an overall sense of mystery and drama. 

While Alice Jacob captures elusive figures that diffusely appear in the alleyways of Venice, Italy, Masayo Nishimura photographs portray people traversing Tokyo Japan’s open cityscapes. Her sequential series of photographs, “The Crossing at Noon”, are checkered with pedestrians scattered and on a scramble crossing busy business streets seemingly unaware of one another’s presence. Her successive depictions denote a clear and precise period of time when the traffic signals at intersections change from green to red. Nishimura’s quick–fire succession of shots, and paused frames, capture a time-based march of pedestrian traffic at city crosswalks, vying for the same public corridor as the vehicular traffic. At first glance Nishimura’s people seem removed and robotically detached. On closer examination, these paused frames reveal engaged expressions of a percolating populace on the move, appearing to fuse with Tokyo’s densely populated “corporate” backdrop.

Pauline Chernichaw’s eye-catching pictures call attention to individual and communal identity as they relate to the New York area’s openly urban environment. In Chernichaw’s engrossing photograph, “Waiting for the Train”, she intrudes on the public’s usable space, intentionally creating an unintentional physical intimacy among strangers. Unknowingly, these disconnected individuals form a geographical identicalness, an egalitarian camaraderie, due solely to the surroundings in which they find themselves. In her thought-provoking street photograph, “Upper East Side”, Chernichaw reveals a disparate division of disengaged human beings   who avoid any eye contact, collective acknowledgement or mutual identification. Chernichaw’s self-absorbed figures co-exist as organically sprouting visual markers, carefully placed and synchronized within the pictorial and architectural framework of the city’s sidewalks.
      
The photographs in this provocative group exhibition bring to light an awareness of unconstrained individual and communal identities, unbound by the Out and Out constraints of public and private spaces. The show allows the viewer an entry point into how we live our lives.  We survive in our own malleable and sacred safe havens that we knowingly or unknowingly continue to create for ourselves.

Pauline Chernichaw, Curator