Karen Brummund—401 Harrison Street
UVP Everson site
September 6–November 4, 2012
Thursday–Saturday, dusk–11pm
401 Harrison St, Syracuse, NY 13210

Urban Video Project, Light Work, and the Everson Museum of Art are pleased to present the video 401 Harrison Street by Karen Brummund at the UVP Everson site as part of The Other New York: 2012. This exhibition is part of a community-wide, multi-venue biennial exhibition that is the result of a major collaboration among fourteen art organizations in Syracuse. This ambitious project aims to highlight the rich talent of artists across Upstate New York, with a special focus on Central New York and the surrounding counties.

The Everson is I.M. Peiʼs first museum commission. His art museums are commonly seen as art objects for art objects. They are sculptures in the landscape. Shortly after the Everson, Pei built the Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca. In the 1960s, Pei continued to work in “the other New York,” including campus buildings in Syracuse, Fredonia, Rochester, and Buffalo. Whether one is walking across campus or through parking lots, watching the sunset or desolate streetscapes; Peiʼs geometry and concrete offer a visual dialogue with the environment.

In this site-specific video installation, images of the form and materials of both art museums are projected onto the Everson Museum. The images capture the light, surfaces, and depth of the architecture. The video uses images from two different buildings, analyzing how Peiʼs ideas bridge individual communities. These disparate places are abstractly connected through the architect’s development. The plaza is not only infused with the presence of the Pei’s forms, but also the conversation that takes place through his practice.

The projection acts as translucent paint altering the building. As it blends with the concrete facade, one becomes more sensitive to the details of the place. While visitors sit or walk through the plaza, 401 Harrison Street invites pedestrians to slow down, meditate, and be re-familiarized with our shared landscape.

For more information on TONY: 2012 gallery talks, tours, artist lectures, receptions, YouTube interviews, online activities, and venue maps please visit www.everson.org

TONY: 2012 is organized by the Everson Museum of Art in collaboration with ArtRage—The Norton Putter Gallery, Community Folk Art Center, Erie Canal Museum, Light Work, Onondaga Historical Association, PuntodeContacto/Point of Contact, Rosamond Gifford Zoo, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, SUArt Galleries, Urban Video Project, The Warehouse Gallery, City of Syracuse and XL Projects. Major funding is provided by The Central New York Community Foundation through the John F. Marsellus Fund.

GENERAL INFORMATION
Urban Video Project (UVP) is a multimedia public art initiative of Light Work and Syracuse University that operates several electronic exhibition sites along the Connective Corridor in Syracuse, NY. The mission of UVP is to present exhibitions and projects that celebrate the arts and culture of Syracuse and engage artists and the creative community around the world. Light Work and UVP work closely with collaborative partner Everson Museum of Art in determining exhibitions and programming for that site. Light Work is a nonprofit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. Light Work and UVP are members of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.

For more information visit www.urbanvideoproject.com.

Military Visual Journalism
Exhibition Dates: February 13–March 8, 2012
Gallery Reception: Thursday, February 23, 5–7 pm

The exhibition features the work of ten photographers enrolled
in the Newhouse Military Photojournalism Program:
Ryan Courtade/USN, Christopher Lee Griffin/USAF, Venessa Hernandez/USA, Brian A. Lautenslager/USMC, Andrew J. Lee/USAF, Efrén López/USAF, Manuel J. Martinez/USAF, Kyle T. Ramirez/USMC, Justin Stumberg/USN, and Bobby J. Yarbrough/USMC.

Guest curated by Efrén López.

About the Military Visual Journalism Program at Syracuse University:

The Newhouse School is home to two Department of Defense sponsored programs which teach active-duty military personnel photojournalism and broadcast journalism. The Military Photojournalism (MPJ) and Military Motion Media (MMM) programs consist of students from the Navy, Marine Corps, Army and Air Force. These enlisted service members have been serving as mass communication specialists, combat photographers and military journalists. They come to the school for ten months to learn how to become better storytellers.

While at Newhouse, MPJ and MMM students earn 30 credit hours. Military students arrive in August for an intensive English and grammar refresher. Following this two-week course, students attend a one week workshop on photography before they begin classes in the regular semester. While most classes taken by MPJ and MMM students are exclusively for the 16 students in each program, for one class each semester the students are mixed with our regular student population for communication classes.

Light Work invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility. Light Work is a nonprofit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. Light Work is a member of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.

For more information, please contact Jessica Reed at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhreed01@syr.edu.

Photographs from the Light Work Collection—Wounding the Black Male
Exhibition Dates: January 17–May 31, 2012
Gallery Reception: Thursday, February 23, 5–7 pm

Light Work is pleased to bring the exhibition Wounding the Black Male to Syracuse. The exhibition was curated by English Professor Cassandra Jackson and Gallery Director Sarah Cunningham, both from The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). The exhibition was on view in the TCNJ Art Gallery in 2011.

The central ideas of the exhibit are rooted in Jackson’s most recent book, Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body (Routledge, 2010). Her book deals with the ways in which the black male body has been visually exploited, and the ways in which contemporary artists have called into question the paradigmatic construction of the black body in American society. The exhibit displays thirty-one photographs by nineteen contemporary artists of African descent, seventeen are from the United States, two from Britain. Their work comments on the various representations of black bodies in Western visual culture. These artists confront stereotypes about black male appearance, sexuality, violence, and family, and highlight the ways that visual culture has contributed to the marginalization and exclusion of the black community.

Violence, and more specifically the ways in which wounds have been used to control black masculinity, is central to Jackson’s research. The wounding and modification of the black body is a theme which runs throughout many of the photographs in the exhibit, most notably in the striking photographs of New York City based artist Hank Willis Thomas. Featured in the exhibit, Branded Chest (2003) from his Br@nded series, is a photograph of an anonymous African American male torso, with a scar of the Nike symbol etched on its left pectoral. Willis Thomas is commenting on the appropriation of the black body in American advertisement and consumer culture, and the implied values that American society assigns to the male body.

Gallery hours for these exhibitions are Sunday-Friday, 10am-6pm (except school holidays), and by appointment. To schedule an appointment, please call 315-443-1300. Both the exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. Paid parking is available in Booth Parking Garage.

Light Work invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility. Light Work is a nonprofit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. Light Work is a member of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.

For more information, please contact Jessica Reed at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhreed01@syr.edu.

EN FOCO/IN FOCUS:
Selected Works from the Permanent Collection
On view in the Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery
Schine Student Center, Syracuse UniversityExhibition Dates: Sept. 1, 2011–Jan. 31, 2012

Light Work is pleased to announce the exhibition EN FOCO/IN FOCUS: Selected Works from the Permanent Collection, featuring photographs from the permanent collection at En Foco. Since its founding in 1974, En Foco has been dedicated to promoting cultural diversity in the field of photography. It has nurtured and supported photographers of diverse cultures, beginning with Latinos in New York, eventually broadening its mission to embrace photographers of African, Asian and Native American heritage across the United States.

The exhibition features the earliest works in the collection, dating to the 1970s and 1980s, which reflect the documentary impulse that characterized photographic work produced during and in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era. The exhibition also traces En Foco’s mission as it broadened its scope beyond Latino photographers. In doing so, the organization reflected the multicultural discourse of the 1990s, one that pressed for the inclusion of many cultural and ethnic voices in the spheres of culture, politics or the media, and looked at photography as a medium to examine identity, otherness and social and cultural contexts that shape perspectives on the self. Finally, the exhibition looks at En Foco through the youngest photographers represented in the collection, who provide a glimpse into the contemporary art scene’s global landscape. Whether dealing with local or universal themes, photographers of the current generation approach photography with great freedom, drawing from multiple photographic traditions, cultural histories and creative modes. These artists have come of age as digital technologies matured and essentially replaced the old, analog processes, and as virtual realities and communities have assumed an influential role in the way we perceive the world.En Foco has become recognized in the field of photography for its publications, annual New Works fellowship program, workshops and exhibitions. Much less known is a collection it has amassed of works by many of the photographers who have taken part in its programs. It now numbers nearly 700 prints dating from the 1970s to the present day, encompassing not only a plurality of voices but also subject matter, photographic approaches and points of view. The images presented in this exhibition offer an introduction into this significant photographic collection.

In addition to Light Work, the EN FOCO/IN FOCUS exhibition is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Bronx Council on the Arts, Canson Infinity, Archival Methods, and Syracuse University’s Division of Student Affairs Co-curricular Fund.

Gallery hours for the Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery in Schine Student Center are Sunday to Saturday, 10 a.m.–10 p.m., except school holidays. You can also view the exhibition by appointment—to schedule an appointment, please call 315-443-1300.

Light Work invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility. Light Work is a nonprofit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. Light Work is a member of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.

For more information, please contact Jessica Reed at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhreed01@syr.edu.

JEFFREY HENSON SCALES–That Year of Living
March 22 – July 10, 2011 (extended)
Reception: April 7, 5–7pm
Light Work Hallway Gallery

Light Work is pleased to announce the exhibition That Year of Living featuring stunning black-and-white photographs by Jeffrey Henson Scales. Diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Scales was forced to, in his words, weigh the possibilities of his own demise, and whether he had achieved what he felt he was put here to do. It was this diagnosis and contemplation, along with the urging of his wife, Meg Henson Scales, which led him to return to making photographs on a daily basis.

The images in That Year of Living were made in the year following his cancer diagnosis and surgery. Scales photographed mainly in and around Times Square, depicting the part of New York City that he visited every day going to and from work at The New York Times. The images capture the certain hardness mixed with joy, sadness, determination, and bewilderment that is found in the faces of young and old alike in New York City. Created in the months following his own experience with mortality, the photographs explore the journey of life and death found in the faces on the streets of New York.

According to Scales, “I believe the world outside is never a static experience. Life on the street in New York City is always changing and I have and always will love to see what it looks like, photographed. I never bore of the state of contemporary life as it is reflected in the faces of people, the states of nature, the stuff of life itself. As such, I hope to always be making photographs of this thing: life—even when it transmogrifies into its natural endpoint.”

About the Artist
Scales has spent more than forty years as a documentary photographer. His work has been exhibited internationally, and has appeared in numerous photography books, magazines, and anthologies. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Scales has been a photography editor for The New York Times since 1998, editing The Week in Review, The Book Review, and co- editing The Year in Pictures. He is also an adjunct professor at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University. He and his wife own the Harlem-based photo archive, HSP Archive, and the multimedia production company, Henson Scales Productions. His work can be viewed atwww.jeffreyscales.com.

Also on view at this time is Canaries, an exhibition of photographs by Thilde Jensen. The images in this exhibition are a personal account of the life Jensen has lived with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, and the people she has met who suffer the same condition. People with this sensitivity have been dubbed “human canaries,” and they are the casualties of what Jensen calls a “ubiquitous synthetic chemical culture.” Jensen became so sensitive to chemicals in the air that she could not sit in traffic, read a book, or sit next to someone wearing perfume. She was forced to wear a gas mask when entering banks, supermarkets, and doctor’s offices. She left her life in New York City, her husband and her career, and moved to the country where she lived in a tent away from the regular chemicals such as laundry detergents, pesticides, and exhaust fumes.

Gallery hours for these exhibitions are Sunday to Friday, 10am-6pm, and by appointment. To schedule an appointment, please call 315-443-1300. Both the exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. Paid parking is available in Booth Parking Garage.

Light Work invites groups and individuals to schedule tours and gallery talks of the exhibition and facility. Light Work is a non-profit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. Light Work is a member of CMAC, the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers at Syracuse University.

For more information, please contact Jessica H. Reed at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhreed01@syr.edu.