VIDEO: Chelsea Galleries Pick Up the Pieces Post-Sandy

Chelsea Galleries Pick Up the Pieces Post-Sandy http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/838295/video-chelsea-galleries-pick-up-the-pieces-post-sandy

Chelsea Art Galleries Struggle to Restore and Reopen http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/arts/design/chelsea-art-galleries-struggle-to-restore-and-reopen.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Sandy’s Toll on NYC Art http://communityartsnyc.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/sandys-toll-on-nyc-art/

...I went Chelsea gallery district today.

I have all my artworks stored in the ground floor of storage facility on West 29th at 10th Avenues. Although the area still had no power that I had to use a flashlight, luckily, I found all my property was safe and dry. I was told by the storage's manager that flooding didn't reach the block.

Then I walked to the 27th street. My co-op gallery is on the 2nd floor of the gallery building, between 10th and 11th Ave. The building's door was locked but it looked normal from outside. I heard the 27th street was flooded a bit, but the water reached only edge of the 11th avenue. Around there, the basements seem flooded more than ground floor.

Then I walked to the south of West 25th street between 10th and West Side Highway.

The scene I saw there was unthinkable.

I knew that ground floor galleries around 23rd street between 10th and West Side Highway were struck by Sandy really hard, heavily flooded, left damaged many of their valuable artworks as well as their gallery spaces.

But seeing that reality was beyond my imagination.

I was shocked when I saw the Tsunami hit area in the northern Japan a few months ago. But seeing one of a kind artworks piled up on streets while workers were taking water out of galleries, was just too much to bare.

....Is this going to be the end of Chelsea era as a NYC gallery district ? ?

"For all these efforts, it was easy to wonder, on first encounter, if Chelsea would ever come back as an art district."

Water Station, 1994

One day in the dark room in 1994, I spontaneously started combining negatives of subway stations and waters -which I shot at East River off Battery Park- on the same paper.

The result encouraged me to do more. After I finished the series of pictures of subways stations with waters, my creative energy expanded to entire New York City. Soon I ran around the city and shot various monuments and combined them with natural objects such as clouds and water in the dark room.

That was a labor of love, that I had to stay in the dark room for hours in order to get just one perfectly blending image.

When I first exhibited this image in the group show in 1995, some people assumed this was actual flooding scene that occurred in some NYC subway stations in 1992. (Actually, that flooding was happened in the downtown area stations, not in the 86th street station!)

Then some young people asked me if I created this with computer. They seemed love this "Cool" image. Computer generated image manipulation was still new and hip then.

Although, I started learning Photoshop the following year and acquired the skill to make images like this instantly, I had never felt the same excitement that I felt in the dark room.

Still, I love this one of a kind image best of all my works.

PetMassage, LTD. 4-Day Hands-on Foundation Workshop at Toledo, Ohio

http://www.petmassage.com/

September 21-24 at PetMassage, Toledo, Ohio

In the classroom with our teacher, Mr. Jonathan Rudinger and classmates.

It was a full 4 days hands-on workshop and there were only three students.
I think I learned quite a lot about massaging dogs not only about techniques but also how to communicate with animals.
Thank you, Jonathan!

Giving a Shiatsu massage to Chuppa- the German Shepherd

This is our first meeting! I had never imagined that I could massage a male German Shepherd who weighs 75 pound!

Ishinomaki, miyagi, June 12, 2012

I say, these are "Daido Moriyama-esque" pictures -- turned original color photos into B&W and added high contrast in photoshop...just experimenting.

One year anniversary of my mother's passing in Osaka, June 2012

Cindy Sherman February 26–June 11, 2012

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1170

--Cindy Sherman reminds me of a pop icon Madonna in terms of transforming herself so promptly with extraordinary determination while keeping herself perfectly under control. They both may be strong feminist women, but their art works are feminine Cliché.

Well, I can't tell who Cindy Sherman is through her artworks since her works never talk about her own life, hidden under the mask, makeup, prop, costumes, or staged setting.

I liked her groundbreaking series "Untitled Film Stills" (1977–80) best from this exhibition. I thought those B&W photographs are much much more creative and imaginative than her later works. I found "Cindy" appeared in her earlier works more natural, attractive and she seemed genuinely enjoy what she was doing. I wouldn't say I liked her color works in a large format. Those are too intense, forcible, repetitive, and confusing. Her most recent larger-than-life society portraits (2008) are carefully staged and fun to look at, but not as interesting as her earliest works.

Besides, I liked so much of her collage and video works that she created while she was in college. The stop motion animation was surprisingly good. She might have taken a more different direction as a conceptual artist if she concentrated on more of this type of work. Unfortunately (or fortunately), her early photo work series seemed to get too much attention too soon.

Madonna hosted Sherman's 1997 show at the MoMA

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-galenson/the-unique-value-of-cindy_b_871803.html

The Unique Value of Cindy Sherman by David Galenson

"She has reclaimed the oldest trick in the book, storytelling, and given it new life in visual art. An amazing number of younger artists have followed her lead; the galleries are full of what has come to be called setup photography, in which complex and often highly enigmatic scenarios are plotted, constructed, and photographed, and much of the newer painting and sculpture on view these days has a strong narrative content."

Cindy Sherman Doesn't Thrill Me

http://blog.stellakramer.com/2012/03/cindy-sherman-doesnt-thrill-me.html

Francesca Woodman at the Guggenheim

Francesca Woodman
March 16–June 13, 2012

http://www.berk-edu.com/RESEARCH/francescaWoodman/index.html#22

Francesca Woodman will be the first major American exhibition of this artist’s work in more than two decades, and the first comprehensive survey of her brief but extraordinary career to be seen in the United States. The retrospective will include more than 100 vintage photographs, many of which have never been exhibited, and includes several of the large-scale blueprints she created at the end of career, as well as the intimate black-and-white photographs for which she is best known. Now nearly thirty years since her death, the moment is ripe for a historical reconsideration of her work and its reception.

Born in 1958, Woodman’s oeuvre represents a remarkably rich and singular exploration of the human body in space, and of the genre of self-portraiture in particular. Her deep and personal interest in serial imagery, Surrealism, Conceptualist practice, and photography’s relationship to both literature and performance are also the hallmarks of the heady moment in American photography during which she came of age. This retrospective offers an occasion to examine more closely the maturation and expression of a highly subjective and coherent artistic vision. It also presents an important and timely opportunity to reassess a critical juncture in American photographic history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Woodman

--- She seemed to know what she wanted to create at the beginning of her brief career. At 15, she already had her style -- self-portraits in black & white photographic images using her own naked or half-dressed body staged props and posed inside of old ragged houses. She used medium format cameras with long exposure. The result was provocative, imaginative, innocent, sensual, fictitious, improvisational, biblical, symbolic, intense, effeminate, expressive, ethereal, and most of all, eccentric.

She was born on April 3, 1958, in Denver, Colorado, and raised in a family of artists. In her youth, her family often spent in European cities. After she graduated from RISD in 1978, she went to NYC and became a fashion photographer. But soon, she returned to her fine art photographic works. On January 19, 1981, a few months after she finished a series of work, she committed suicide in NYC.

So her entire works were created between she was 15 to 22. She was unknown until her first major retrospective exhibition held at Hunter College gallery in 1986.

When I entered her exhibition at the Guggenheim yesterday, I thought her works were similar to those of talented art students' thesis works. Like those emerging young artists at the beginning of their career full of promise, they were mostly interrupted with many reasons before fully blooming as mature artists. I wondered if her works were dramatized more than necessary because of her tragic end at the tender age of 22.

Or because of the reason that she used her nude for image-making (rare in the '70s) captured attention.

But I soon changed my mind. Some of the images were so interesting not because of the naked body's provocative use but because of the unique sensitivity in posing, props, lighting, and compositions.

Some of the images were well-composed, almost look like the 17th-century Dutch paintings like Vermeers' who used a camera obscura. Some of them looked more contemporary abstract paintings. Looked spontaneous, casual, and improvisational but seemed to have careful eyes on composition. It was too bad that the artist didn't print those images into at least 30 x 30' in size. Most of them were way too small.

And of course, it is too bad that she didn't live enough to mature as an artist. But how would her artworks have become if she had survived into her 50s? If her works relied on her youthful body and mind, how she could have changed her direction over the 30 years? Would she have used her own aging body over the years? Or she could have been like Sally Mann, who subjected her children for her art? Or she ended up as nobody who was an art prodigy once, sparked her talent only when she was young?

After that, I felt like I knew someone like her in my art college days. A girl like her was so talented, fearless, and independent despite her young age. When the rest of us were following teachers' guidance submissively, she was absent from school and doing her work alone. She seemed ahead of life, and I admired her talent and independent mind. At the same time, I was envied and intimidated by her that I was so behind in maturity both as an artist and a woman. Yes, Francesca Woodman's works remembered me those a bit painful, sweet old days almost 30 years ago.

*Please visit https://www.artsy.net/artist/francesca-woodman
for over 70 of Woodman's works, bio, exclusive articles, and up-to-date Woodman exhibition listings.

Lost & Found: 3.11 Photographs from Tohoku

Lost & Found: 3.11 Photographs from Tohoku
http://www.aperture.org/events/detail.php?id=851

Monday, April 2, 2012–Friday, April 27, 2012
FREE
Aperture Gallery Project Room
547 West 27th Street, 4th Fl.
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

Aperture Foundation presents Lost & Found: 3.11 Photographs from Tohoku, a profoundly moving exhibition of photographs recovered from the devastation following the earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent nuclear catastrophe that took place in the Tohoku region of Japan a year ago, last March.

--Those are actual family photos found in the Tsunami-hit areas. First I thought those were scanned copies created like actual photos found in the dirt. But no, they were real ones that traveled long way to New York from Northern Pacific coast in Japan.

At the time when I entered the Aperture Gallery Project Room, where all those photos were coated in transparent plastic folder and hanging all over the wall, I felt some strange energy. I could not tell that the energy I felt was positive or negative, but I could tell that those photos were somehow breathing in the gallery room.
I got this overwhelming feeling, so I couldn't stay there long.

I'm going back to Japan on June 1st for the one year anniversary of my mother's passing.

Recollections vol. 2, Tokyo, June 2011  - Reviewed at www.manafinearts.com

Review: Ceres Gallery
April 13, 2012
Masayo Nishimura: Recollections vol. 2, Tokyo, June 2011  Ceres Gallery 
By Tema Stauffer
http://www.manafinearts.com/the-mana-log/2012/04/review-ceres-gallery/

Vernita N’Cognita “Invisible Woman” Thursday, April 12, 7PM, at Ceres Gallery

Vernita N’Cognita
“Invisible Woman”

A performance artwork with Butoh Movement & Butoh Voice
To be presented Thursday, April 12, 7PM, at Ceres Gallery

Vernita Nemec AKA N’Cognita’s performances incorporate Butoh movement, a form of expressive, non-traditional dance that originated in the fifties and sixties among the Japanese avant-garde & now Butoh Voice created from her poetry. In recent years, she has been exploring aging and how our society, so focused on the beauty of youth, negatively perceives women as they age. “The Invisible Woman”, was developed in a residency at the North American Cultural Laboratory (NACL) awarded by The Field. In this work, she focuses with humor and angst on this dilemma all women who survive into their 60’s and beyond must endure.”

“…women become invisible
as they get older
I feel it already
tho I still feel quite young.
I walk down the street
and no one looks at me
like they used to…”

Vernita N’Cognita aka Vernita Nemec is a visual/ performance artist/ curator who has exhibited her art throughout the world. Her artwork ranges across a variety of disciplines, from creating installations, m/m collages and tangible art objects such as the “Endless Junkmail Scroll to the creation of performance art that conceptually investigates theatre and its edges – using language, space, and time, silence and stillness as well as movement and voice as an instrument of self-expression.

--Wonderful show with many audience, thank you Vernita.

Recollections vol.2; Tokyo, June 2011 - March 27 - April 21, 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Masayo Nishimura
Recollections vol.2; Tokyo, June 2011
Photography

March 27 - April 21, 2012
Opening Reception, Thursday, March 29th, 6pm - 8pm

Ceres gallery is pleased to present Masayo Nishimura’s Recollections vol.2;Tokyo, June 2011, a solo exhibition of Nishimura’s photographs. The Opening Reception will take place on Thursday, March 29th from 6pm until 8pm. The artist will be present.

This exhibition features Nishimura’s color photographs of various passersby almost all of which were captured in one sunny afternoon on the streets of Tokyo, Japan in June 2011.

For this project, Nishimura shot around Shinjuku Station--the busiest business and shopping area in Tokyo. However in her images, the pedestrians on the sidewalks and crosswalks appear strangely frozen in the middle of their action while they are moving their feet one step forward toward their destinations.
Some are captured while holding umbrellas, some are frozen while conversing with others or talking on cell phones, and some are caught while running hurriedly with long strides - all of these actions are momentary paused. Along with beaming sunlight and dark shadows cast on the ground, the scenes look surreal, fictitious and curiously soundless, even though the actual location is filled with traffic sounds and crowd noise.

In her sequential series of Scramble Crossing, Nishimura experiments with the consecutive shooting of people on a scramble crossing. During the brief period of time when the traffic signal changes from green to red, she captures various types of pedestrians as well as vehicles crossing in opposite directions. These paused frames and sequential images reveal interesting “raw” expressions of people in their facial and body language, which they are not normally conscious of. On the scramble, each person seems to tell his or her own personal story even though they appear frozen in time.

By using a wide-angle lens with fixed aperture and a relatively high shutter speed with no flash or tripod or close up shot, Nishimura was able to capture all of the images casually and spontaneously as a distant observer without interacting with her subjects. Her approach becomes a sampling of everyday life out on the streets.

An added bonus is that these everyday scenes often transform themselves into a unique expression and unexpectedly tell stories by themselves, as also exemplified by her previous NYC subway photographs.
* All the shots are taken with a 35 mm film camera with Fuji color film and hand-printed by the artist on her final stock of Kodak paper.

About Masayo Nishimura:
Masayo Nishimura is a native of Osaka, Japan. In 1986, she moved to New York to study dance. In 1993, she began her study of photography at CUNY Hunter College under Professor Mark Feldstein, where she discovered her visual interest in NYC subway stations. She also took several workshops at the School of Visual Arts & the International Center of Photography. Since then her subway-themed photographic works have been exhibited in various galleries in New York City.

In 2000, she started working on a series of color photographs dealing with the lights and shadows created by subway architecture. The work entitled Uptown Bound was first exhibited in September 2001 in New York City and has been receiving enthusiastic responses from viewers. In 2008 she returned to her native land and captured everyday scenes in the Tokyo subway. Those works was first exhibited in 2011 in an exhibition titled Recollections: From New York to Tokyo, which evoked responses from viewers as the transformation of an everyday scene into a unique expression. Currently she lives and works in New York City.

For more information please contact Stefany Benson, Director at:

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.

New York Photo Plus 1994 -

VIDEO: Chelsea Galleries Pick Up the Pieces Post-Sandy

Water Station, 1994

Osaka, June 2012 #1

Tokyo, June 2012 #3

Tokyo, June 2012 #2

Tokyo, June 2012 #1