“Tattoo”     50″ x 52 “    oil on linen

“Bluejay, Flicker and Guardian”     16″ x 20 “    oil on linen

“Ivy”     60″ x 72 “    oil on linen    2007

“Overlook”     28″ x 48 “    oil on linen

Artist Statement
I have always been awed and inspired by the mystery and amorality of nature. My paintings deal with carefully selected subjects from my observations, visions, and experiences with the natural world. In the most recent decade, creatures living and dead, have entered into my images. Birds, butterflies, insects, and mammals have become part of the scenes that haunt my thoughts. I investigate the kinship between my envisioned nature and it’s inhabitants and their physical and spiritual machinations and intrigues. I see the natural world filled with both unconscious and symbolic rituals and phenomena. My paintings are meant to give insight into this often unseen world. Creatures become a liaison between our natural world and our human world and imply a kinship to human experience.

Website
http://www.HollySears.com

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A new Bob Dylan video features photographs from Bruce Davidson’s 1959 “Brooklyn Gang” series to illustrate the song.  In the spring of 1959, Davidson met a group of Brooklyn teens called “The Jokers”.  That summer, he photographed the entire gang in their natural habitat, from hanging out late at night on the street corner to taking a  Coney Island beach trip with their girlfriends.   The “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” video will appear exclusively on Amazon’s homepage until Wednesday, April 22, in the Bob Dylan Store for 30 days thereafter.

The complete series is on the Magnum website.

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Artist Statement
My own work is largely concerned with the meaning and existence of the self in today’s unstable, fragmented world, specifically how the individual is able to reconcile the external and internal forces that cause us to function in different, often contradictory, roles. Performative in essence, frequently employing role play and adopting multiple or different personas, my work not only reconstructs and documents other’s lives, but regularly becomes an intense examination of my own. The photographs in my latest body of work are an exploration of my own private experience with love and intimacy. Derived from what began as collaboration with my romantic partner, Michael, the work is an embodiment of my own subconscious forces at work, mixed with real events.

More specifically, the work chronicles the obsessive nature of our romantic relationship, and its overwhelming effect on my life, visually attempting to eliminate the distinction between dreams and reality, reason and madness, and objectivity and subjectivity by merging everyday occurrences with psychological aberrations. Fragmented, the events it depicts are not literal but figurative illustrations of a unique psychological state resulting from the self-reflexive nature of our relationship and the psychological breakdown between oppositional forces that comes with love; the internal and external, the self and the other, presence and absence and lucidity and blindness.

Website
http://www.haleyjsamuelson.com/

Upcoming Exhibit
Opening reception June 25th at Hous Projects gallery in Soho,  from 6-8

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Closure

Equilibrium

Identity

Rebirth

Severance

Transformation
All works 60 x 60 inches, acrylic on canvas

(NOT) ANOTHER WEDDING IN GOA

I don’t believe that the act of creating artwork can ever be totally isolated from myself–I live in art, transforming my entire world into a channel of creative expression, spanning genres as widely disparate as painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance, and even my own wedding, in search of further tools of artistic communication. Thus, when I dared to become an artist, I was prepared to expose my inner-most spaces to the gaze of my audience.

As an extension of this exercise of baring my private world to the public at large, I have constructed an exhibition around my wedding. I feel that the wedding can be approached from two very different perspectives–it can be understood by its physical presence, its external appearance, or it can be viewed in the light of the internal impact it had on me.

For months after the wedding, the external threatened to overwhelm the internal, which was still too fresh to be expressed. I was still in the process of feeling it! And so even to myself, I presented the wedding as the larger than life experience that it tangibly was. Externally viewed, the wedding was grandeur–the height and power of the synchronized firework display bursting over our heads, the confrontational poses of the village tiger dancers, the exquisite 24-course Tanjore meal. It was the experience of the fashion show created by fashion-designer friends, the entrance and exits of my celebrity collectors, the street carts, cotton candy, tarot card reader, and fortune teller in the hall, and most of all, the fact that the entire wedding had been the largest and most challenging art installation I had ever envisioned.

Before and throughout the wedding, I orchestrated and manipulated all of the four elements I believe make up a piece of artwork: the intent of exploring the meaning of a wedding in my personal and public life, of proving that life is larger than life, of bringing together creative forces from around the world and unleashing them in one space,; the constraints of my canvas of 5,000 odd guests (I obviously had limited control over their actions) and the fact that the wedding was not only about me, but about the legacy of tradition and the wishes of family; the aesthetic elements of my auto and the set I created; and the sounds, sights, tastes, and smells that stimulated the senses.

But now, several months after the fact, I am able to create this exhibition of art in retrospect, to address the internal conflicts that were the backbone of this wedding. And through this exhibition I relive the struggle to find my own balance between tradition and originality, to reconstruct and reevaluate relationships, and to arrive at closure to my grandmother’s death. As these works themselves are a product of the conflict between the conscious and the unconscious, the self and the other, the public and the private, I will not attempt to de-construct them. Rather, I will only say that these works are essentially poetic, exciting pleasure through the rhythmic composition of beautiful, imaginative, and elevated thoughts. And upholding the spirit of today’s obsession with reality television, they once again expose my most private moments, my most intimate battles, and my rawest emotions directly to my audience for their enjoyment and pleasure.

Artist Website
http://www.raghavakk.com

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East West (2007)
Paper collage and oil paint on canvas
30″x40″

“East West” explores the visual similarities between Western graffiti and images from Eastern societies. This series, which I just started, is inspired by a recent trip to Pakistan.

Subway Space 2
Paper collage and oil paint on canvas (2006)
36″x36″

In my series “Subways”, I contrast the vulnerability, helplessness and passivity of the subway riders to the hardness of their surroundings: the metal structures, beams, platforms and tunnels. The riders are reduced to “subway legs” which evolve in an angular, distorted and somewhat threatening environment. These paintings and collages were triggered by the subway bombings in London and Madrid and my own experience riding the subway in New York City.

Harmony 4 (2007)
Paper collage and oil paint on canvas
30″x40″

“Harmony” is an attempt to reconcile and join two geometrical symbols, the
circle and the line through the imagery of architecture and music.

Artist Statement
My work reflects the tension, uncertainty and unease permeating our societies today. These feelings are in part generated by international terrorism, violence and militarism.

My photographs are usually at the base of my creative process. I travel extensively and the shots taken on my trips are integrated into my paintings. In recent years, I have been particularly fascinated with graffiti and photographs of graffiti have now become an important visual element in my work.

These images are printed on paper and glued onto the canvas. Graffiti from New York, Paris and Berlin, glass architecture from modern European cities, Mogul buildings from Pakistan, headless mannequins from the streets of Paris are collaged together. They may or may not “fit together”. Out of this visual cacophony, I create a harmonious whole. It is like a puzzle. I use oil or acrylic paint. I proceed through trial and error and constantly build and destroy. Each piece is different with its own unique problems and solutions.

In my latest series “ Veni, Vidi, Sgraffiti”, I started incorporating drawings into my work. This new development has enabled me to inject humor in a serious discussion about war and violence.

Website
http://www.helenemukhtar.com/

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