RICCO/MARESCA GALLERY is pleased to present Rebecca Norris Webb: My Dakota. This exhibition brings together works from Webb’s acclaimed book recounting the sudden loss of her brother through intimate landscape portraits of her home state of South Dakota. My Dakota serves as a lyrical elegy, depicting the hypnagogic process of grieving and visually chronicling the fragility of life and the inexplicable changes that occur while mourning.
 
Rebecca Norris-Webb moved to South Dakota at the age of 15. The artist originally found expression as a poet, before exploring photography after college. For Webb, language could not fully capture the totality of the world around her, nor satisfy her innate curiosity for visual exploration. The artist’s latest book, My Dakota, blends poetry with photographs of her home state as a multi-layered portrait that marries aesthetic representation with lyrical record. The heart of the book lies in the enigmatic photographs where the artist is seemingly searching for significance behind continuation and meaning beyond an emotional chasm. Reflections and windows play a significant role in the series as a way of capturing memory within the present while exuding a sense of abandonment and disconnect from life’s fleeting moments. Rooted in sentient exploration, each work is open to interpretation – giving viewers an outlet to draw their personal recollections and emotive conclusions.
 
My Dakota transcends artistic privy and instead maintains a core universal empathy. The artist states, “Looking back at My Dakota, I now realize that I was photographing this dark time in my life in order to try to absorb it, to crystallize it, and, ultimately, to let go of it. Not only did my first grief change me, but making My Dakota changed me as well, both as a human being and as an artist.”
 
My Dakota was first shown in 2012 at the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City, South Dakota, and will be exhibited at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, North Dakota from June 5 - August 6, 2013. Friday, June 21: Lecture at Aperture Foundation, 547 W. 27th, 4th fl., 7:00-8:30 pm (with Alex Webb) and Q&A led by Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs, the Museum of the City of New York, and Denise Wolff, Aperture Senior Editor; book signing to follow; Saturday, June 22: Artist talk/walk through of “My Dakota” at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, 5-6pm.
 
REBECCA NORRIS WEBB, MY DAKOTA
June 20 - August 17, 2013
Opening reception Thursday, June 20, 6-8PM

SVEN-OLE FRAHM A Hole in the Wall is Nothing to Worry About June 20 – August 16, 2013
 
Galerie Richard New York is pleased to present Sven-Ole FRAHM’s first exhibition in the USA from June 20th to August 16th, 2013. Galerie Richard Paris has been representing the German artist since 2007. By cutting painted canvases and sewing them together, Frahm develops a new role for the canvas as a material to replace the pictorial paint gesture. His works are distinctive by the dynamic compositions that play with the unexpected.
 
The title “A Hole in the Wall is Nothing to Worry About” highlights the artist’s practice of notable experimentation and risk-taking. Sven-Ole Frahm instinctively employs various methods of intervention upon his paintings. Often, he will cut them into geometric sections and sew the pieces together. We are faced with a destruction-creation process advocated by the economist Joseph Schumpeter and with a deconstructive process expresses by the philosopher Jacques Derrida. In the newly exhibited works, he deliberately and meticulously cut holes, rectangles, or u-shapes to produce voids and flaps that hang forward. He sews added strips of canvases in such a way to reveal both sides. The deconstruction-construction process is absolutely under the artist control.
 
Frahm develops a new role for the canvas as a means of reinventing standard mark making. Curved gestural painted lines are replaced by collaged canvas strips. Previously, he had cut and sewn painted canvases with formal shapes. In most of his new works, every color, every shape, is no more a painted gesture but is expressed by a new way to use the canvas as a creative medium. At the same time the canvas is not separated from the stretcher. At the opposite of the Support –Surface movement, he maintains the canvas’ integrity.
 
In several paintings the artist shows the natural colored texture of the linen. The line of repeated needle marks and strands of thread add a sense of determination for attachment and render the texture and physical presence of the work more salient and profound. The materiality of paint on pure linen, the exposed anatomy of sewn canvases, as well as the suspended flaps and convex pyramidal volumes all add to the sensual physical experience. Although Constructivist compositions are his trademark, Frahm’s new work tends to a Minimalist aesthetic.
 
The sewing process is not a provocative or frivolous act. Instead it is technique that allowed the artist to fuse a Constructivist composition with a fluid organic one, thus creating a visual represention of an oxymoron. Frahm directs our attention to the subtle artistic details, such as the canvas’ brightly painted reverse side visible from the holes and reflected upon the wall. Frahm is a master of multilayered compositions as a systematic extension of the pictorial space. He contends with these challenges with a sense of joy and humor. Sven-Ole Frahm is right with the title. As long as you know how to compose a painting and arrange colors together in space, a hole is nothing to worry about.
 
Sven-Ole Frahm (1972) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He graduated from the Art Academy in Dusseldorf in 2001. Frahm has won the prestigious German prize for painting, the ‘Bergischer Kunstpreis’, at Soligen Art Museum in 2006. He took part in the exhibition Compilation III at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf in 2007. His work has been exhibited in galleries throughout Europe including Düsseldorf, Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris.

Rosanne Olson
Rapture ( series )
May 8 – June 16, 2013
 
The Robin Rice Gallery is pleased to present Roseanne Olson’s third photography exhibition, Rapture. The opening reception will be held Wednesday, May 8th, from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM.
 
“The magic of the pool—the un-weighted body, the solitude, the distortion, that has always fascinated me.” In the invitational image, Bournee, a woman is suspended in soft hues of blue water but appears to be floating upwards, ascending into the clouds. Arabesque, her model in the pool is turned gracefully upside down, arms outstretched, in a gossamer dress fanning against the backdrop of faint clouds in the sky. Her color images come off dreamy, surreal and mysterious. In most of the images there are reflections on the water and refractions of light, like watercolors bleeding together, with undefined shapes leaving us with more with the feeling of a painting.
 
Olson describes Rapture as, “a biography of my dreams,” intrigued by the world that lies just beyond our consciousness—where time shifts, gravity loosens and we slip into dreaming. She conveys the dreams she’s had since childhood—women donning 100 year-old vintage dresses suspend languidly as though they are defying space and time, floating through the sky. In reality, Olson is photographing them from above in swimming pools in Seattle, Oregon, where her female models appear to be tumbling and turning, falling and slipping out of dresses. The effect is ethereal. Her models could be construed as angels.
 
Despite each image’s balanced composition, Olson claims the process of capturing floating objects on film is haphazard and spontaneous. She shoots instinctively on the fly, reacting as clothing and body position continually change. Yet when it comes to her models she strives to create a meditative situation, “the subjects need to be relaxed so the water is calm, which is hard to do when gravity is pulling down.”
 
Rosanne Olson works in both fine art and commercial photography. She obtained her master's degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. Over the past 25 years, her photographs have won many awards and were included in numerous photography annuals including, Graphis and the cover of Communication Arts. Her work has also been featured in View Camera Magazine, Lens Work and Photo District News. In 2008 Rosanne authored a book titled, “This is Who I Am—Our Beauty in All Shapes and Sizes,” a book about women and body image. She teaches lighting, portraiture and creativity at various photographic schools, colleges, and conferences. Roseanne is represented by Robin Rice Gallery in New York and galleries in Aspen and Boston. This is her third solo show at the Robin Rice Gallery.
 
To view all the images from the exhibition go to www.robinricegallery.com

Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds
A solo show, Color Photographs
May 8-June 30, 2013
 
The exhibition will open on Wednesday, May 8th with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.
Sasha Wolf Gallery is proud to present, Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds.
This is Wolkoff’s second solo show with the gallery.
 
Katherine Wolkoff’s show Deer Beds consists of seven pictures made on Block Island, located off the Rhode Island coast. The pictures are of the imprints made in the grass by sleeping deer. Wolkoff found these deer beds by following the paths of the deer to the nests where they spent the night. Each time she came upon a bed she felt as if the deer had just departed, leaving its warm impression on the earth. She was always aware of their proximity. The photographs are at once a physical reminder of a living breathing animal and an abstract rendering of a field of grass. In this work, Wolkoff continues her decade-long investigation of the flora and fauna of this small, unique island, where she also photographed the collection of birds for her previous show, Found.
 
This is Katherine Wolkoff’s second exhibition at the Sasha Wolf Gallery. Her photographs have been widely exhibited, including exhibitions at Danziger Projects, the New York Photo Festival and Women in Photography. Her photographs are included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of Art and the Norton Museum of Art and the Yale Library. Born in 1976, Wolkoff graduated from Barnard College and received her MFA in photography from Yale School of Art.

 
JONATHAN VANDYKE
The Painter of the Hole
 
Opening: Sunday, May 5, 5 - 8pm
Exhibition dates: May 5 - June 23, 2013
 
Scaramouche is pleased to present The Painter of the Hole, Jonathan VanDyke‘s second solo exhibition with the gallery. VanDyke’s new work evolves from his wall-mounted and free-standing sculptures, first exhibited at Scaramouche in 2009, that “perform” as they continuously drip paint directly onto the floor, and from his many recent live performances, in which actors and dancers move silently for hours while paint drips upon them and passes from body to body. The works offer signifiers we associate with painterly process - canvas, stained and marked with color, appears in objects and is represented in photographs - yet VanDyke has pushed and pulled painting in such a way that these signifiers are displaced. Undoing media-specific boundaries, VanDyke re-orients modernist conventions, conflating painting with fiber arts, fashion, dance, textile design, and photography. With multiple collaborators and processes involved, the work subverts notions of painting‘s singularity and challenges the idea of individual authorship.
 
The title of the exhibit is borrowed from a series made by George Grosz in the late 1940s. Grosz portrayed a figure who, searching for a new vocabulary of making, found himself endlessly painting an image of a hole. Into this void VanDyke proposes, “painting not as a form so much as a restless mood, a conduit, a matrix that includes the making, presenting, perceiving, desiring, acquiring and physical decaying of paintings...I want to perform The Painter and perform painting, this stubborn manner of coloring that doggedly mirrors, marks, and circles us.”
 
A series of large-scale, sewn canvas works in the exhibit evolved from a long-term collaboration with the dancers Bradley Teal Ellis and David Rafael Botana, who are also a couple. In a durational, live performance entitled Cordoned Area, the two improvise from VanDyke’s score, wrestling, dancing, and negotiating each other‘s bodies while liquid paint drips and seeps from their costumes: they start clean and conclude covered in sweat and color. In the midst of spectators, Ellis and Botana publicly navigate that space between a performed and an actual relationship. Following Cordoned Area, VanDyke invited the two back to the studio to work with him away from public view. There Ellis and Botana, with paint inserted in their clothing, interpret VanDyke’s directions, dancing and making contact atop raw canvas. The paint serves as an unconscious trace, a trail of their interaction. This studio process results in a group of massive, marked canvases. VanDyke uses the canvases as raw material, cutting them into pieces and intermixing them to form opulent geometric patterns, and then sewing them back together. The patterns themselves reference 19th-century Amish quilts, Sonia Delauney fabric designs, the pants of Picasso‘s harlequins, the brickwork of a modern Danish housing block - patterns found next to and near the body.
 
Each painting is displayed on a partition placed in the midst of the space. The backs of the paintings, with their web of seams, are revealed, while the walls of the gallery remain empty. Hanging behind each painting is a photograph. For the creation of this series, Ellis and Botana’s canvases (in their uncut stage) were used as backdrop and floor in elaborate studio sets. Models (friends and performers from other works) strike poses that exist somewhere between private ritual and fashion shoot. This image of the still body in front of the marked canvas recalls VanDyke‘s own 2011 solo performance The Long Glance, in which he stood and stared at a major Jackson Pollock work for 40 hours, making himself immobile in front of an “action” painting. The photographs also reference the work of artists who used the camera to explore private realms aside of their primary practice, such as the 1920’s self-portraits of Gertrud Arndt ­- an important fiber artist at the Bauhaus - and the charged tableau of George Platt Lynes, who made elaborately staged photos of performers, his lovers and friends. The heavily made-up models in VanDyke‘s series wear Mondrian necklaces and Jackson Pollock jeans amidst ab ex curtains and geometric partitions. We are reminded that, despite the value and language we add to it, despite the relentless preservation of its surfaces, painting exists, too, as swaths of fabric: like an outfit or piece of clothing, it moves out into the world, embedded with its own histories, posing and projecting meaning, always becoming something else.
 
Jonathan VanDyke is a visual artist based in New York City. Recent solo projects include The Long Glance at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo; With One Hand Between Us, a project for Performa11 in New York; and Obstructed View, a performance and installation commissioned by The Power Plant in Toronto for the exhibition Coming After. VanDyke received an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College in 2005, attended the Skowhegan School in 2008, and in 2007 attended the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where he was mentored by the artist Paul Pfeiffer. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, Modern Painters, TimeOut New York, White Hot, Artslant, Art Papers, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. VanDyke’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park, and Islip Art Museum, both in New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, Florida; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Rutgers University, New Jersey; University of Wolverhampton, England; and Exile Gallery, Berlin, among others. He has received awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and has served as a Visiting Artist Fellow at the University of Chicago and Illinois State University. Upcoming VanDyke's work can be seen in No Name at On Stellar Rays, New York, and do it (outside), the newest iteration of the instruction-based exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City.
 
Image: Jonathan VanDyke, Painting No9 (detail), Performance canvases, stained linen shirting, and waxed cotton in S. Delauney cloak pattern, 47 x 66 in.
 
Special thanks to fiber artist Brenda Colling for her work sewing the paintings.

The Cut
 
The cut on her face
The blood from under her skirt
A red fountain carries me
Towards my destiny
 
The cut in the sky
Out pour father‘s eyes
Dive deep in the snow
Cold seed for the spring
Harvest of my creativity
 
The cut on her face
Portal of our race
Spurned majesty sighs
For that cut!
 
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present The Cut, a solo exhibition of work by Antony on view from May 31st through July 12th, 2013.
 
Antony has created a body of work including drawing, collage, and sculpture alongside his critically acclaimed musical career as both a singer and composer. Both his music and visual art are marked by intuitive and accumulative practices that reflect a shared visual and psychological vocabulary. The initial inspiration that provided the framework for the exhibition was a poem written by the artist entitled The Cut, which describes the source of creation as a slit in the sky. The marks that the artist makes on the surface of his artwork can at once be understood as scars as well as applications that have the ability to heal the surface of the paper, fabric, or canvas. A delicate line can be juxtaposed with a harsh application of paint or a torn edge. Many of the works are intimate in scale and ephemeral in their materiality, but they are monumental in the emotional depth that they convey. Like Joseph Beuys, Antony’s work originates in personal experience yet it also addresses universal artistic or social ideas and poetically suggests the healing potential of art.
 
Born in Chichester, West Sussex, England in 1971, Antony currently lives and works in New York. Since 2000, he has released four studio albums with his band Antony and the Johnsons. A special edition of the band’s 2010 album Swanlights was accompanied by a book published by Abrams Image featuring drawings and collages by Antony as well as photographs by Don Felix Cervantes in collaboration with Antony. Solo exhibitions of his artwork have been presented at Isis Gallery, London in 2009 and The Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles in 2012. His work was included in It’s not only Rock’n’Roll, Baby! presented at BOZAR, Brussels in 2008 and at the Triennale Bovisa, Milan in 2010. In 2009 he curated the group show 6 Eyes at galerie du jour agnès b., Paris. Antony’s performance projects include Miracle Now (1996); TURNING (2004/2006), in collaboration with Charles Atlas; and The Crying Light (2009). Antony was musical director of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2011) in collaboration with Abramović and Robert Wilson. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, his performance Swanlights debuted at Radio City Music Hall in 2012.

Simon Preston Gallery is delighted to present On The Passage of a Few, an exhibition of works by Alexandre da Cunha, Terence Gower, Luis Molina-Pantin and Lisa Tan. The exhibition opens on 19 June and runs until 4th August, 2013.
Borrowing its title from Guy Debord‘s 1959 film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, the exhibition explores the relationship between citizen and environment, while it simultaneously critiques and pays homage to decaying modernist ideologies. Each artist dismantles the structure of modernist systems by exploiting and transforming the materiality of cultural and architectural tropes in order to make way for new narratives.
Terence Gower’s installation The Red Wall (El Muro rojo) dominates the gallery space. An enormous red wall frames a black and white restaged photo of Armando Salas Portugal’s famous 1953 image of Casa Barragán. By reducing Luis Barragán‘s exuberant colours to grey tones, the work highlights Barragan’s aesthetical concerns with emotional experience and architecture. Known for playful appropriation of everyday objects such as plungers, mops, fans or bottles, Alexandre da Cunha uses critical wit to topple hierarchical modernist language. With Full Catastrophe (drum XIV), the simple gesture of liberating a rusted industrial cement mixer from its original function raises complex questions of trade and labor. Luis Molina-Pantin is an obsessive chronicler. Whether using photography, books, everyday objects or postcards, Luis creates inventories of our over-looked cultural landscapes. Non-fiction reviews, is an installation consisting of sixteen fictional vintage books, each cover depicting an airplane disaster. Objectifying the book through the lens of the archive, the series becomes a strategy of representing failed ideologies - the imagery of flight, a classic modern aspiration displayed as a dystopian failure. Lisa Tan incorporates personal and collective histories in order to explore her long-standing preoccupation with the indefinable. In this instance, Alter Nordfriedhof casually documents a cemetery in Munich on a spring day. Overgrown vines and flowers obscure the tombstones into abstract shapes. Through the use of repetition and the apparatus of archival structures, an elegant ontological study transforms into a poetic meditation on mortality.
 
Biographical Information:
Terence Gower (b. 1965, Canada) lives between New York, France and Mexico. He has exhibited widely including; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; ICA Boston; UCLA Hammer Museum, LA; Queens Museum, New York; Labor, Mexico City; Galeria HR, Mexico City; The Power Plant, Toronto; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver; Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin; Aun Gallery, Tehran, Iran.
 
Alexandre da Cunha (b. 1969, Brazil) lives and works in London, UK. He has exhibited extensively and had recent solo exhibitions at CRG Gallery, New York; Centro Cultural Sao Paolo, Brazil; Camden Arts Centre, London; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo; Sommer & Kohl, Berlin; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Witte de With, Rotterdam. He has also been included in Sao Paulo Biennial, 2012; the San Juan Triennial, San Juan, 2009, Prague Biennale 2, Prague, 2005; the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003 and the Liverpool Biennial, 2002 among others.
 
Luis Molina-Pantin (b.1969, Switzerland). Lives and works in Caracas, Venezuela. Recent solo presentations include; Faria-Fabregas Galeria, Caracas; Lisa Sette Gallery, Arizona; Valenzuela Klenner Galería, Bogotá; Arte Contemporáneo, Caracas; Fondazione Villa Bardini, Florence. His work has also been showcased at the 7th Gwangju Biennial, Korea; The Cisneros Foundation, Miami; The 4th MERCOSUR Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil; 25th Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil. He is currently included in ICP Triennial, New York and a solo exhibition will open at Henrique Faria, New York on 20 June 2013.
 
Lisa Tan (1973, New York). Lives and works in New York and Stockholm. She has been included in solo and group exhibitions at institutions and galleries such as Artists Space, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo CGAC, Santiago de Compostela; Arthouse at the Jones Center, Texas; Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Galería Parra & Romero, Madrid; D’Amelio Terras, New York; LA><ART, Los Angeles; and FRAC Bourgogne (Dijon). She is co-curating an exhibition with Lisa Oppenheim for Art in General that will open this September.
 
For further information, please contact the gallery via email at office@simonprestongallery.com or call on +1 212 365 4495.

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of photographic works by ten Nigerian artists who are among a new generation of African photographers that explore unique visions, strong emotional and aesthetic perspectives to tell their own stories and challenge assumptions about the African continent. Each of the artists is widely traveled and well exposed to Western art modernism both by training and contact. Each represents a resonant voice, one that achieves it's own distinction and clarity amidst changing realities. Their creative voices are simultaneously instrumental, reconstructive if not interrogative and in some cases seek to retrieve both individual and collective memory. For many of the artists, this would be their first show in New York.
 
The reception is on Thursday, May 30th, 6-8pm
 
GO-SLOW: Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos
New Directions in Contemporary Photography
 
Aderemi Adegbite
Ade Adekola
Akintunde Akinleye
Uche James Iroha
Chriss Nwobu
Adeniyi Odeleye
Abraham Oghobase
Charles Okereke
Uche Okpa-Iroha
Adeola Olagunju
 
Exhibition dates: May 30th - July 31st, 2013
 
In spite of the dynamic, lively, and often intensely volatile elements of life in Nigeria’s largest city, all who live there share in a daily narrative of delay. Lagosians experience go-slow in the form of impenetrable traffic jams, on the part of political leaders who make promises quickly followed by excuses, and when even a simple task becomes a major undertaking.
 
While the phenomenon of go-slow is a common cultural reference, its effects and impacts are as individual as the people who experience them, resulting in reactions that range from frustration, exhaustion, and anxiety to resignation, acceptance, and innovation in the face of a seemingly immutable reality.
 
Most showing for the first time in New York, ten Nigerian photographers explore the particular phenomenon of the Lagos go-slow through the context of personal or collective experiences demonstrating a keen awareness of the role that photography plays in strengthening the crucial links between culture, politics, and social agency.
 
Curator: Amber Croyle
 
10 LIVELY FRAMES - ONE SUBJECT: GO-SLOW-GO-SLOW
 
“Go-slow: Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos”, as this photography exhibition is titled and focused, is a reality as well as a metaphor for the drudgery that characterizes diverse aspects of structural mobility in cosmopolitan Lagos. Fela Anikulakpo-Kuti, the veteran Afro-beat musician, satirist and social critic in 1978 put out a record track titled “Go-Slow”. The track explored the metaphoric gradations of “Go-Slow” as a reality in the day to day life of the Lagosian. The refrain of the track “go-slow, go-slow” aptly conjured the truth of the phenomenon while assuming landmark status of a resonating rhyme in the collective consciousness of Nigerians.
 
The diverse social and historical contexts that frame this seeming eternal characterization of Lagos have often provided photographers the contexts to invest their creative time and thoughts. The result is a corpus that keys into the testament projected by the city of Lagos as it allows for the exploration of the nuances of “go-slow” beyond a spatial identity.
 
The lively frames that the concept “go-slow” yields are thus presented in this exhibition from the experiences or encounters of cosmopolitan Lagos by the artists. Thus, from Aderemi Adegbite, Ade Adekola, Akintunde Akinleye, Uche James Iroha, Chriss Nwobu to Adeniyi Adeleye, Abraham Oghobase, Charles Okereke, Uche Okpa Iroha and Adeola Olagunju comes a bouquet of visual interpretations of the Lagos “go-slow” experience in representational and conceptual frames.
 
The exhibition plan designed to introduce to the New York audience “new directions in contemporary photography” by a crop of modern generation photographers from Nigeria is apt considering how identities are constructed. However, this objective presupposes a hierarchy that hosts these artists. Hence, I engage a brief narrative which situates the genre in Nigeria. Early uses of photography in the West Coast of Africa, from Gambia to Nigeria were documentary commissions from the English colonial authorities (Erin Harney, 2010). These include the works of J. P. Decker, a Gambian, and N. Walwin Holm, a Ghanaian who had a branch of his photography studio in Lagos. Apart from the portraitures associated with his studio, he also worked for the British as a documentary photographer. A Nigerian of note of Ijo nativity from Bonny, Jonathan Adagogo Green (1873 – 1905) was similarly engaged by the British colonial administration in Nigeria. His many choreographed portraits and group images are counted among over three hundred photographs from his atelier between 1897 and 1905. One of his very famous works that entrenches the memory of the British punitive expedition against Benin City is the apparently dehumanized Ovoramwen N’gbaisi, the Oba of Benin in the expedition year 1897.
 
It is interesting to note that Adagogo Green’s seal for his photographs bore his name with an added inscription; “Artist Photographer”. In spite of this claim, considering also the strong foregrounding of photography in the practice of the visual arts, it is only recently that its status as high art was acclaimed. This recognition has inspired new initiatives to track the multilayered history of the genre in Nigeria. Equally, exhibitions of photography now compete with those of other arts. However, an austere history of photography in Nigeria accommodates the following personalities; George S. A. Da Costa, J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Dotun Okubanjo, Sunmi Smart-Cole and Don Berber. Don Berber is, within this history, a mentor to many new generation photographers who have featured in this exhibition with their visual interpretation of go-slow in Lagos.
 
In reality, the history of photography in Nigeria is in tandem with the global history of photography. This is that photography, as an expressive mode that documents phenomena as fleeting time permits, is governed by epistemes, which are palimpsest, and allow a loose ordering of identities. The image-turn, which is on the ascent in the contemporary, bears witness to deep creative exploits with the lens and the digital interface. Invariably the production and consumption of images in the artistic-scape in Nigeria has remained strong probably because of the power of the image to determine our demands upon reality. These realities shape the metaphors of focus here their enduring vehicular and often pedestrian gridlocks. This is Lagos.
 
Frank Ugiomoh, 2013
Art Historian
University of Port Harcourt
Port Harcourt, Nigeria

vimeo.com/64899161

ROBERT GRENIER
“Language Objects: Letters in Space, 1970 - 2013”
May 18 - June 30, 2013
Reception for (& presentation by) the artist, Sunday, 19 May 4 - 6 PM
 
SOUTHFIRST is proud to present “Language Objects: Letters in Space, 1970 - 2013,” a retrospective exhibition tracking (via notebooks, holographic & published texts, archival materials and works on paper) the evolution from early typewriter-generated forms to more recent four-color drawing poems in the work of American poet Robert Grenier between 1970 - 2013. The show will be on view from May 18 – June 30, 2013.
 
On Sunday, May 19, 4 - 6 PM, Robert Grenier will introduce the ‘idea’ for the show, and speak to/read from & provisionally ‘interpret’ certain of the materials set forth in the room.
 
Over the past 40 years, poet/artist Robert Grenier (b. 1941) has constantly pushed poetry into new frontiers of practice and utterance. His handwritten poems, produced in the last two decades, cross the upper limit of inscription to be both writing and drawing. His works include Series (This Press, 1978), SENTENCES (Whale Cloth Press, 1978), Oakland (Tuumba Press, 1980), A Day at the Beach (Roof Books, 1984), Phantom Anthems (O Books, 1986), and OWL/ON/BOU/GH (Post-Apollo Press, 1997), as well as more recent online color drawing poem sequences like POND 1 and PENN SCANS. A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, Grenier has received two NEA fellowships for poetry writing and a 2013 grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. An archive of his work is housed in the Stanford Libraries’ Department of Special Collections. He lives in northern Vermont.
 
SOUTHFIRST, founded in 2000, is located at 60 N6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn between Wythe and Kent Avenues. Gallery hours are Fri., Sat. and Sun. from 1 - 6 PM and by appointment. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact Maika Pollack at 718 599 4884 or info@southfirst.org.
 
SOUTHFIRST
60 N6th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718 599 4884
www.southfirst.org