Construction Workers Vegas

Caracas Marketplace

Eiffel Tower

Acropolis

Taj Mahal

Artist Statement

“TILT-SHIFT”ing the World

Tilt-Shift, What type of photography is that? people always ask me. How do I make people look so small or why do I make people look so small, simple…WE ARE. In the big picture we are just a small blip of what the world truly is. I enjoy the power I have to change the perspective of the way people look at the world and maybe at themselves.

Photographers need inspiration like all artists of all types of art,  mine is travel. From my series “Tilt-Shift”ing the world you can see only a small piece of the world that I have seen. Travel-Photography, Photography-Travel, they go hand in hand with me. The love of both is one. My passion to try and make the iconic places and structures that man desires to see and has for centuries traveled to see, is the same desire that drives me to go there and photograph them. I have been an avid photographer for over 25 years and have taken thousands upon thousands of photographs of iconic buildings. I’ve had the pleasure to “X” off from a list that grows and grows as new architects from around the world build new buildings for me to see and explore.

Life is said to be too short and I agree with that simple statement. I have goals like every artist does and mine is to “X” off as many places around the world until I run out of places to see or I run out of time.

Biography
1961 Born in Brooklyn, New York, USA
Lives and works in New York, NY USA

Exhibits
2002 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
2003 Camera Club of New York, New York
2006 Kolo-submission work
2008 Kolo-submission work
2008 The Skyscraper Museum, New York
2008 Schmap “Miami Guide“, Miami
2008 Ansonia Pharmacy, Solo Show, New York
2008 www.NowPublic.com, “Potent Greenhouse Gas” Publication
2009 Lana Santorelli Gallery, “New York, NY” Group Show, New York
2009 Chelsea Wine Vault, Solo Show, New York
2009 Baboo Digital, “Different Flavors“, Group Show
2009 www.artscenetoday.com finalist
2009 www.InfinityArtGallery.com finalist
2009 Lana Santorelli Gallery, New York, NY Group Show “Gastronomy”
2009 New Artist featured with www.LUMAS.com

Website
www.richardsilverphoto.com

[Read more →]

Leah Oates, Transitory Space, Beijing, China, color photography, 2008-09

Artist Statement

Of human life time is a point, and the substance is in flux…and what belongs to the soul is dream and vapor….
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations

The work I create first originates as a response to overlooked space that is in a continual state of change. I believe that in everyone there is a sense of flux and a familiarity with this type of space physically and emotionally.

These images are not manipulated on the computer but are multiple exposures onto one negative at a specific location. In this way each image captures a state of flux within a moment and location which has actually transpired.

Transitory spaces have a messy human energy which is always in the present yet constantly changing. I find them endlessly interesting, alive places where there is a great deal of beauty and fragility. They are temporary monuments to the ephemeral nature of human existence in a constant state of change.

Artist Bio

Oates has a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and M.F.A from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Oates currently resides and works in Brooklyn, NY. Oates has had solo shows at venues including Real Art Ways, A4L Gallery, A Taste of Art Gallery, Sara Nightingale Gallery and the Sol Mednick Gallery at the Philadelphia University of the Arts.

In 2009, work by Oates will be featured in the Aqua Art Fair in Miami and in a group show at Randall Scott Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work will be featured in the Tampa Review and Diffusion Magazine in late 2009. In addition, Oates was part of group shows at Michael Mazzeo Gallery, Collective Gallery 173-171, The Pool Art Fair and The Bridge Art Fair in NYC and C. Emerson Fine Arts in Florida.  In 2009-2010, Oates has solo shows at Tomasulo Gallery in New Jersey, the Center for Book Arts in New York City and a two person show at Mad Art Space in Missouri.  In February 2009, Oates’s work was included in “Trouble in Paradise”  curated by Julie Sasse at Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona which includes work by Mitch Epstein, Kim Keever, Richard Misrach, Edward Burtynsky and Thomas Ruff. In 2008-09, her work was reviewed in NY Arts Magazine, The Riverdale Press, St. Petersburg Times and Art Squeeze.

Oates has been in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Flux Factory, Wave Hill, International Print Center, Storefront for Art, Proteus Gowanus, Nurture Art Gallery, Elizabeth Heskin Contemporary, Gallery Aferro, Metaphor Contemporary Art and The Center for Book Arts and internationally at the Royal Scottish Academy & Open Eye Gallery in Scotland, Open Studio Gallery and Spin Gallery in Toronto, Galerie Joella and Turku City Art Museum in Finland, Swinton Art Centre and University of Northampton Art Gallery in England  at as part of NEME and National Centres of Contemporary Art in Russia and Cyprus.

Work by Oates was recently featured in American publications the Daily Constitutional, Zingology Online Arts Magazine, Studio Views Magazine and The Drain Journal of Contemporary Arts Magazine and in Lirvraison Rhinoceros from Belgium and Front Magazine from Toronto. Oates’s work has been mentioned in The Village Voice, Umbrella Magazine, NY Arts Magazine,The Southampton Press and the Chicago Reader.

In 2008, Oates photographed in Newfoundland, Canada and in Beijing, China. Oates has attended residencies at the Ragdale Foundation in Illinois, the Caldera Foundation in Oregon, and The Taipei Arts Village in Taiwan. She is the recipient of several awards including a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Scotland,  two Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Grants, an honorable mention for Hey Hot Shot from Jen Bekman Gallery and an Artists  Grant from Artist Space in NYC.

Oates’s work is in the private collections of Julianne Moore, Ruben Natal, Susan Bode-Tyson, Bill Groom, Laurence Asseraf,  Natalie Domchencho  and Mark Waskow and her works on paper are in many public collections including the National Museum of Women in the Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The British Library, The Walker Art Center Libraries, The Smithsonian Libraries and the Franklin Furnace.

Website

http://www.leahoates.com

[Read more →]

Oh, Very, Yes!, detail 1

Oh, Very, Yes!, detail 2

Installation View

Artist Statement
I think of cameras, along with photographs, as cultural artifacts. In the same way that an anthropologist can look at jewelry or clothing to learn about the culture that created those things, the design of a camera and the photos it takes can tell us about the culture that created them.

The camera, as we know it today, evolved out of Renaissance painting experiments in linear-perspective. A few curious chemists simply put a piece of light-sensitive paper in the light path. As a result of this particular history, photographic images still bear a strong aesthetic kinship with western painting. Stripped of its cultural history a “camera” is simply an enclosed object with a hole in one side through which light enters. As such, the camera predates photography by thousands of years. With these factors of origin, evolution, and technology as a starting point, my work asks the question: “what would photography look like if it had grown out of a different aesthetic tradition?”

The photos I make explore the representation of space, time, and narrative through a panoramic style. Using a specially modified camera I shoot directly onto long rolls of color slide-film. The image fills the entire film-strip, without any frame breaks, looking much like a photographic scroll. The strips of slide-film, which can be up to 100-ft long, are displayed on light-boxes. The long horizontal strips of film serve as both as a measure of the dimensions of the subject and also as a record of the subjects movement over time.

Biography
With an extensive background in the visual and performing arts, Kwabena Slaughter brings together fresh new ideas on the nature of art and aesthetic experience. His current work in photography investigates the relationship between the camera, photography, and the painting traditions that precede it. Instead of accepting the historical narrative that leads from linear-perspective, through the camera obscura, to photography; Kwabena imagines an alternative history, one in which photography grows out of scroll-painting. Working with cameras that the artist modifies himself, Kwabena makes single images that occupy the entire length of a strip of slide-film. These strips of film can be up to 60-feet long.

Kwabena’s video and photographic work has been shown at premier institutions in the U.S. and abroad, including the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He has been a resident at the Art Omi International Artists Residency, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program,
and Smack Mellon Gallery. His grant credits include the New Media and Technology Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Kwabena’s performing arts credits include acting in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, dancing with a trapeze-dance company, and stage-managing for a clown school. His writing on aesthetics has been published in the journal “Philosophy and Social Action”.

Website
www.kwabenaslaughter.com

[Read more →]

The Fowlers Trap Tangled with the Rabbit Holes

The Shortest Distance Between Two Kindred Souls Is Love

Wormholes in a Tree

Artist Statement
Big Dreams focuses around the idea that humankind shares a sort of imagery bank; elementary ideas from the beginning of time or archetypes as described by Carl Jung. With that said, the concept of elementary ideas or archetypes does not belong solely to modern psychology or modern anything actually. Primitive cultures too recognized and drew upon imagery that commonly resonated with their society. In this project I am looking for big ideas reflected in the natural and modern landscape.

Website
http://www.ralphmaratta.com/live/

[Read more →]

Before & After Room, Tribeca. 2007

White Consultation Chair, Upper East Side. 2006

Implants, Upper East Side. 2008

Singular Beauty

“The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or
rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

This collection of photographs resulted from both a personal struggle with body issues, and a long history in the beauty business. In photographing these doctor’s offices, I not only developed my visual understanding of the world, but I was able to reconcile my own feelings about beauty. I found myself less interested the actual place or thing, than in capturing the emotional significance of it–for myself as an artist–and for those who sought their salvation in these chairs, beds, machines and tools.

Website

http://cara-phillips.com/

[Read more →]

Valery Rizzo @ http://www.valeryrizzo.com/

Wonder Wheel, Coney Island, Brooklyn, 2007

Valery Rizzo @ http://www.valeryrizzo.com/

Pin-Up Girls, Coney Island, Brooklyn, 2007

Lara Wechsler @ http://www.larawechsler.com

Sprinkler Fun

Lara Wechsler @ http://www.larawechsler.com

Flying

John Tebeau @ http://www.tebeau.com

Nathan’s

John Tebeau @ http://www.tebeau.com

Summer Grill

[Read more →]