Laura Heyman—Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again
Exhibition Dates: September 13–October 15, 2010
Lecture, Gallery Reception, and Verbal Blend Performance: October 7, 5:00–8:00pm
Laura Heyman’s intriguing photographs, on view this fall at Light Work in the exhibition Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again, capture life in Haiti both before and after the earthquake. She began the photographic project in Port-Au-Prince with a question:”Can someone from the first world see and photograph within the third world without voyeurism or objectification?”
Heyman works with an 8×10 camera to create black-and-white portraits that recall the work of earlier studio photographers like Mike Disfarmer and James VanderZee. According to the artist, while making these photographs, she was aware of the many cultural complexities of this type of representation, stating,”I was highly conscious of everything that stood in the way of a real exchange between myself and each person who sat for a portrait—race, class, opportunity and lack of opportunity, agency, the ability to move freely through the world. These things can make communication difficult, as they are always present, but rarely discussed.”
Heyman’s first visit to Haiti was in November 2009. On subsequent trips and in the aftermath of the earthquake, her project has evolved to include various rapidly expanding populations in Port-Au-Prince tied to reconstruction. United Nations officials, NGO employees, volunteers, grassroots organizations, business investors, and local politicians are among the subjects she plans to shoot; the first group of non-Haitian subjects photographed for the project was the U.S. Infantry, in May 2010.
Heyman is an associate professor of photography in Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as Ampersand International Arts, San Francisco, CA; Deutsches Polen-Institut, Darmstadt, Germany; Senko Studio, Viborg, Denmark; and The National Portrait Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Her most recent curatorial project, Who’s Afraid of America, featuring the work of Justyna Badach, Larry Clark, Cheryl Dunn, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zoe Strauss and Tobin Yelland, was exhibited at Wonderland Art Space, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Light Work will feature a Syracuse Symposium event with the artist on Thursday, October 7 from 5–8pm. The evening will begin with a spoken-word poetry performance by Verbal Blend, followed by a lecture by Heyman and a gallery reception. Verbal Blend is a spoken-word poetry program sponsored by Syracuse University’s Office of Multicultural Affairs, designed to enhance participants’ confidence in writing and performing original poems. The program is comprised of a five-week workshop series on poetry forms and formats, journal entry and peer-reviews. Participants get the opportunity to showcase their work at public venues such as open mic nights. For this event, a group of SU students, high school students and community members have prepared spoken-word performances in response to Heyman’s images. Syracuse Symposium is a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival celebrating interdisciplinary thinking, imagining and creating, presented by SU’s College of Arts and Sciences to the entire Syracuse community. The 2010 Syracuse Symposium theme is Conflict (Peace & War).
Also on view during this exhibition is Bearing Witness: The Light Work Collection, featuring work from Light Work Collection. 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 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 Heckman at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhheckma@syr.edu.
**Digital press images and image information for this exhibition/event are available upon request.
Kitchen Table heats up
/in NewsWeems also made the news yesterday when a triptych of her work from the Kitchen Table series fetched the highest price at a Christie’s auction, selling for higher than images made by Irving Penn and Ansel Adams, as reported on the Vintage Photo Forum.
Birth of the Light Work collection
/in Re:CollectionThe collection was started by accident rather than by design and as a byproduct of listening to and meeting the needs of artists. Shortly after Light Work was founded as the programming arm of Community Darkrooms, a public access photography lab at Syracuse University, we began to engage the larger community of photography through a series of exhibitions, lectures, and workshops. Our workshops were fairly typical for the time where we would invite photographers from across the country to Syracuse to conduct short two or three day workshops where they could share their expertise and knowledge with photographers from our area. After a few years of conducting workshops led by Larry Fink, Les Krims, Charles Harbutt, Melissa Shook, Linda Connors, and others, a simple conversation changed how we were to provide support to artists for years to come. No one seems to agree on which artist the conversation took place with, but it played out something like this. When either Phil Block or Tom Bryan was taking one of the artists, who had just completed a workshop, to the bus station for the trip back home they were doing a general debrief of how the workshop went. The artist remarked that he thought things went well and that it seemed like the students got a lot out of the experience. After a slight pause the artist offered a candid reflection by saying, “But I’m not so sure what I got out of the experience. You have such a great lab facility, and what I could really use is just the time to come and make new work without any distractions or obligations.”
So a light bulb went off and we realized that a core need that most artists have is to be able to have the time, support, and access to facilities to do what they do best, which is make new work.
Synapse, an alternative video organization that shared the same building with us, had been inviting artists to Syracuse to produce new video works, so we asked to share their artist apartment and invited Charles Gatewood as our first Artist-in-Residence in August 1976. The deal was very simple—we gave him a place to stay, a private darkroom, keys to the facility, and $1,000 and told him that his only obligation was to do his own work. It was probably our good fortune and the good fortunes of the 350 artists who followed Gatewood in our residency program that his initial stint as a visiting artist was so successful and productive. During his residency Gatewood printed in the darkroom and also made new photographs at the New York State Fair, which is held annually in Syracuse at the end of the summer. Although we only invited him for a month, he stayed for six weeks and to show is appreciation he gave us a half-dozen prints he made during his time in Syracuse. Shown here is Human Punctuation, New York State Fair.
We were very pleased with Gatewood’s gift and decided to make it a requirement of each future Artist-in-Residence to ask for a donation of a few prints from their residency in order to have a trace of what they worked on in Syracuse. After just a few years the donations from visiting artists began to accumulate into an impressive collection, and it would take us several more years to organize this great asset and make it available to the public. We will talk about that process in upcoming articles and encourage you to explore the collection online.
—Jeffrey Hoone, Executive Director
Best from the Rest: hideseek.org
/in ElsewhereBest from the Rest is a new feature that will highlight really wonderful articles from our favorite blogs and online magazines. For this very first Best from the Rest, we’re doing something a little different — I’m featuring a whole website, and one that’s text-based, for a very special reason. Timing and urgency make this necessary.
The website hideseek.org is a clearing house of information about the controversy that has risen surrounding the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. The site offers links to a growing number of articles chiming in on the issues, including the excellent piece written this past weekend by Holland Cotter for the New York Times. The site also offers a list of screenings going on all over the country in support of the work and freedom of expression, including the screening being hosted by Light Work and ArtRage tomorrow night.
Censorship of this kind must be acknowledged and discussed publically. This is the best way to restart discussion and dialog that conservatives, and in this case the National Portrait Gallery, decided that we shouldn’t have. When institutions begin to retroactively recurate their exhibitions based on political pressure, this is bad news for everyone, especially those who would like to make up their own minds about the work and the issues it addresses.
Take a look at hideseek.org and let me know what you think in the comments.
— Mary Goodwin, Associate Director
From the Files: Charles Gatewood
/in From the FilesA press release from 1976 has this to say about Light Work’s first resident: “During September, Charles Gatewood, photographer, will be spending the month in residency at Community Darkrooms. A self-taught photographer, Gatewood’s interest in people is evident always in his work. ‘I like people. Human behavior has always fascinated me especially when it is tied to strong emotion. As a photographer, I try to capture these emotions on film to remember, to communicate with others and to comment on what I have experienced.'”
Click here to see images by Gatewood in the Light Work Collection and to read more about the artist.
—Mary Goodwin, Associate Director
Kitchen Table, Carrie Mae Weems at Art Institute of Chicago
/in NewsIn Kitchen Table, Weems uses a subtle vocabulary of props, gesture, and gaze to frame complex questions about identity, gender construction, representation, parenthood, and the nature of human relationships. The nonlinear narrative and issues presented in this work remain as topical and thought-provoking today as when the images were first created in the early 1990s.
Fans of the Kitchen Table Series and Carrie Mae Weems should know that the Light Work 2011 Subscription program features the image Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make-up), a hand-printed silver gelatin print in a numbered edition of 100. Click here for more information and to purchase.
New blog features
/in Re:CollectionThe Collection Connection is one of several new columns that we are initiating for the Light Work blog. In addition to the Collection Connection we will be introducing From the Files, Best of the Rest, and featuring monthly giveaways of signed prints and books to readers of our blog. We hope you find these new features of interest and plan to return often.
The Collection Connection will feature articles written about work contained in Light Work’s permanent collection of over 3,500 photographs and photo-based objects and installations. The entire collection is accessible online in a searchable image database. There are many great features of the database including the ability to search for any word or combination of words across all data fields and the ability for viewers to save selections from the collection and view or present them as slide shows.
These features make it easy to create exhibitions from the collection and in the coming months we will create opportunities for readers to put together exhibitions from the collection and present them both on our blog and our main website.
There are many things that make the Light Work collection unique. Unlike most collections at museums, universities, and cultural institutions that were built with specific criteria, areas of interest, and noting of connoisseurship, the Light Work collection contains work primarily made by artists who have participated in our international Artist-in-Residence program. An overwhelming number of works in the collection were produced in Syracuse either in the darkroom, computer lab, studio, or in the field. There are very few collections in the world where the creation of work in a single location both defines and feeds the collection.
Also because our mission is to support emerging and under recognized artists the work in the collection has early works by important contributors to the field including Cindy Sherman (shown here), Laurie Simmons, James Casebere, James Welling, Zeke Berman, Dawoud Bey, Fazal Sheikh, Carrie Mae Weems, Andres Serrano, and many others.
So we hope you find this brief introduction to the collection informative and you take the time to view the collection online and check back here for further articles and insights into this unique collection of contemporary photography.
Pipo Nguyen-duy: East of Eden: Vietnam
/in ExhibitionsLight Work is pleased to invite you to view East of Eden: Vietnam featuring photographs by Pipo Nguyen-duy. These large-format color photographs bear witness to scars on the landscape and its people, caused by the Vietnam/American War.
To create East of Eden: Vietnam, Nguyen-duy traveled across Vietnam on a moped looking for war survivors—both afflicted civilians and amputee ex-combatants—and photographed them against the idyllic Southeast Asian landscape.
According to Sam Lee Gallery, “In East of Eden: Vietnam, Nguyen-duy has not veered far from his signature art practice, focusing on producing images that employ a blend of documentation and performance. Using the landscape as a post-apocalyptic ‘Eden,’ Nguyen-duy points out the horrific evidence of violent conflict and also focuses on the persistence of the human spirit. Each image conjures a narrative that hints at the past but also looks to the future.”
Pipo Nguyen-duy was born in Hue, Vietnam. Growing up within thirty kilometers of the Demilitarized Zone of the 18th Parallel, he describes hearing gunfire every day of his early life. In 1975 he immigrated to the United States as a political refugee. Nguyen-duy has taken on many things in life in pursuit of his diverse interests. As a teenager in Vietnam, he competed as a national athlete in table tennis. He also spent some time during the mid Eighties living as a Buddhist monk in Northern India. In 1983 he earned a BA in economics at Carleton College. He then moved to New York City where he worked as a bartender and later as a nightclub manager. While living in the East Village in the Eighties, or as Nguyen-duy describes, “the crux of creativity in New York,” and meeting people such as musician Don Cherry and artist Keith Haring, his interests turned to art. In 1992 he earned a MA in Photography, followed by a MFA in Photography in 1995, both from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. He participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 2004 and was featured in an exhibition in the Light Work Main Gallery in 2006.
Light Work will feature a lecture by the artist on Wednesday, November 17 at 6:00pm. This exhibition and lecture are co-sponsored by the 2010 Syracuse Symposium and the Co-Curricular Fund from the Division of Student Affairs at Syracuse University.
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 Heckman at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhheckma@syr.edu.
Stay tuned . . .
/in News• A whole new website, better looking and better functioning.
• A totally redesigned blog with all new features and giveaways.
• Several exciting new subscription options.
• Many new can’t-do-without-them prints and books in our store to launch the 2011 Subscription Program.
We’ll be telling you more soon!
Yolanda del Amo: Archipelago
/in ExhibitionsPowerful forces deep below the surface of the earth form archipelagos, which are chains or clusters of individual islands. In her series Archipelago, artist Yolanda del Amo depicts the powerful forces between people—their conflicting needs for intimacy and connection, independence and individuality. In Archipelago, these competing needs seem to have reached a peaceful if temporary stasis. These beautiful images show people who, although in the presence of another, appear surrounded on all sides not by water but by silence.
Del Amo leaves the relationships of her subjects to each other deliberately vague, which makes her images all the more universal and compelling. Each photograph represents a fragile time in any relationship when two people—whether they are mother and son, husband and wife, or simply friends—momentarily live alone, together.
Archipelago will be accompanied by a 48-page exhibition catalogue, Contact Sheet 159, featuring thirty-eight color reproductions of del Amo’s work. Contact Sheet 159 will be published in November 2010. del Amo’s image Edith, Juan will be featured in Light Work’s 2010 Fine Print Program, also available in November 2010.
Del Amo was born in Madrid. She received a BS and MS in mathematics from the Universität zu Köln in Cologne, Germany, and an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous venues, including the National Portrait Gallery both in London and in Washington, DC; the Instituto Cervantes, New York City; Hudson Franklin Gallery, New York City, Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York; the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea in Barcelona, Spain; and the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Del Amo was a resident fellow at the Spanish Academy in Rome in 2010, and previous residences include Light Work; the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, France; and the Lower Manhattan Culture Council in New York City. She is currently an assistant professor of photography at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Also on view at this time is the Light Work Grants in Photography exhibition, featuring photographs by 2010 grant recipients Yasser Aggour, Ron Jude, and Lida Suchy. 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 the Marion Parking Lot and Booth 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 Heckman at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhheckma@syr.edu.
Bill Viola public video in Syracuse
/in NewsThe Quintet of the Astonished, 2000
Video installation
Performers: John Malpede, Weba Garretson, Tom Fitzpatrick, John Fleck, Dan Gerrity
Photo: Kira Perov
Installation photo: Steve Sartori
Laura Heyman—Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again
/in ExhibitionsLaura Heyman’s intriguing photographs, on view this fall at Light Work in the exhibition Pa Bouje Ankò: Don’t Move Again, capture life in Haiti both before and after the earthquake. She began the photographic project in Port-Au-Prince with a question:”Can someone from the first world see and photograph within the third world without voyeurism or objectification?”
Heyman works with an 8×10 camera to create black-and-white portraits that recall the work of earlier studio photographers like Mike Disfarmer and James VanderZee. According to the artist, while making these photographs, she was aware of the many cultural complexities of this type of representation, stating,”I was highly conscious of everything that stood in the way of a real exchange between myself and each person who sat for a portrait—race, class, opportunity and lack of opportunity, agency, the ability to move freely through the world. These things can make communication difficult, as they are always present, but rarely discussed.”
Heyman’s first visit to Haiti was in November 2009. On subsequent trips and in the aftermath of the earthquake, her project has evolved to include various rapidly expanding populations in Port-Au-Prince tied to reconstruction. United Nations officials, NGO employees, volunteers, grassroots organizations, business investors, and local politicians are among the subjects she plans to shoot; the first group of non-Haitian subjects photographed for the project was the U.S. Infantry, in May 2010.
Heyman is an associate professor of photography in Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as Ampersand International Arts, San Francisco, CA; Deutsches Polen-Institut, Darmstadt, Germany; Senko Studio, Viborg, Denmark; and The National Portrait Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Her most recent curatorial project, Who’s Afraid of America, featuring the work of Justyna Badach, Larry Clark, Cheryl Dunn, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zoe Strauss and Tobin Yelland, was exhibited at Wonderland Art Space, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Light Work will feature a Syracuse Symposium event with the artist on Thursday, October 7 from 5–8pm. The evening will begin with a spoken-word poetry performance by Verbal Blend, followed by a lecture by Heyman and a gallery reception. Verbal Blend is a spoken-word poetry program sponsored by Syracuse University’s Office of Multicultural Affairs, designed to enhance participants’ confidence in writing and performing original poems. The program is comprised of a five-week workshop series on poetry forms and formats, journal entry and peer-reviews. Participants get the opportunity to showcase their work at public venues such as open mic nights. For this event, a group of SU students, high school students and community members have prepared spoken-word performances in response to Heyman’s images. Syracuse Symposium is a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival celebrating interdisciplinary thinking, imagining and creating, presented by SU’s College of Arts and Sciences to the entire Syracuse community. The 2010 Syracuse Symposium theme is Conflict (Peace & War).
Also on view during this exhibition is Bearing Witness: The Light Work Collection, featuring work from Light Work Collection. 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 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 Heckman at Light Work, 315-443-1300 or jhheckma@syr.edu.
**Digital press images and image information for this exhibition/event are available upon request.
Demetrius Oliver on the High Line
/in NewsFormer Light Work Artist-in-Residence Demetrius Oliver watched yesterday as his piece Jupiter was installed on a 25-by-75-foot billboard on the High Line at West 18th Street. The following image gives some sense of the scale of the piece as well as the material it was printed on. Click the images to enlarge them.
On watching the piece go up Oliver commented, “It was strange watching them [the installers] working with the vinyl. With prints, we are taught to have a certain amount preciousness. They were literally walking onto top of it, but it’s okay because the vinyl is a very durable surface.”
Click here for more information about Jupiter and events surrounding its installation.
Light Work will host an exhibition of Oliver’s work in January 2011.