Former Light Work Artist-in-Residence Christine Osinski recently opened a solo exhibition called Staten Island Shoppers at Blue Sky in Portland. Like her series Drawn to Water (click here to see examples of this series in the Light Work Collection), the images in Staten Island Shoppers focus on people inhabiting a world apart. In the case of the shoppers, Osinski depicts a world apart that, despite its material opulence, feels more like a deserted island than a bountiful oasis.

Writing about the series, Osinski explains, “From 1993 through 1995 [when the artist was living in Staten Island] I roamed through an overwhelming landscape of excess, often under brutal lighting, to collect images that would match my experience of shopping—peering at the harsh faces of hunters and gatherers—adults and children alike.  As I did this work, the promise of capitalism, gratification through shopping, clearly became an activity of diminishing returns as I too became a hunter-gatherer, but of images.”

Christine Osinski’s exhibition Staten Island Shoppers will be showing at Blue Sky until June 27. Images from her series Drawn to Water are featured in the 2009 Light Work Annual.

June Light Work Artist-in-Residence Gerard Gaskin is video blogging his residency throughout the month on Facebook. Here, Gerard shows you around the apartment where our artists stay during their residencies. (Click here for more information about the residency program and what is included.) He then talks about his plans for his time in Syracuse, which are both ambitious and doable, with Digital Lab Manager John Mannion’s help.

Send Gerard a friend request on Facebook to follow his video blog.

We’ve just added a comments feature to our blog, thanks to our dedicated and tireless web designer. So go ahead and tell us what you’ve wanted to say about any of our previous posts – the new feature is retroactive to all posts.

We hope that adding comments will help this blog better serve artists by being a place where we can share ideas. To get the ball rolling, I’d like to talk a little about portfolio reviews. I just got back from Review Santa Fe, a fantastic event that brought together over 100 photographers with curators, publishers, and art administrators. There was some quality work there, including Jody Ake‘s amazingly rich ambrotype portraits (yes, he really does bring the actual plates to portfolio review events as well as prints made from them). Former Light Work Artist-in-Residence Chad States got a lot of attention for his Cruising series, which many people were talking about. It’s a real testament to the organizers, Center, that the event still felt really intimate even with so many people involved.

The Santa Fe reviews are 20 minutes long per person, which is pretty standard for such events. I’ve heard this format compared to speed dating, and that is really no joke. As a reviewer, within 20 minutes time you have to get a sense of who the photographers is and what they want to accomplish, gauge whether that is actually happening in the photographs, and then communicate that feedback in a way that is constructive and helpful. Meanwhile, the reviewer is trying to show enough of the work and tell enough of the story to provide context while also attempting to get specific questions answered. Whew.

To maximize the opportunities afforded in these types of reviews, a good dynamic has to develop pretty quickly. In the comments, post your stories of portfolio review victories, plus any tips you have on what works and what doesn’t work both as a reviewer and a reviewee. I’ll post my own tips farther down in the comments. —Mary Goodwin, Associate Director

Image: Jody Ake

We had a great preview yesterday at Art Chicago/NEXT. The booth was full all day with hundreds of people interested in our mission and the beautiful prints and books we’re selling in support of our programming.

The Eatonville Portfolio attracted a lot of attention in the booth during the preview. This amazing set of four images explores the history, geography, and people of Eatonville, FL, the oldest incorporated African American town in America. The portfolio features work by Carrie Mae Weems, Lonnie Graham, Deborah Willis, and Chicago artist Dawoud Bey.

Bey’s other print in our Fine Print Program, Five Children, Syracuse, New York, 1985, has also been very popular with Chicago collectors. The gorgeous prints by fellow Chicago artists Judy Natal and Ben Gest are drawing a lot of people into the booth as well.

If you’re in Chicago, definitely stop by the Light Work booth at 7-8034. We have some great neighbors in our corner of the fair, including Jon Feinstein and Amani Olu from Humble Arts Foundation. We’ll be here through Monday.

Our entire selection of fine art prints and books, all of them donated by the artists who made them, is also available online at our website.

Sometimes just looking at books you love yields great ideas when you’re thinking about a book for your own work. April Artist-in-Residence Brian Ulrich knew when he arrived that he wanted to work on a book dummy for his project Copia during his residency. Syracuse University’s Bird Library, right next door to Light Work, has a great collection of photobooks both in the stacks and in their Special Collections.

While doing some roaming in the stacks, Brian came across one of his favorites, What We Bought by Robert Adams. It’s a classic that definitely resonates with Ulrich and his work: “What We Bought was one of the first books I started thinking about when I began Copia. It’s a great example of diverse work developed over time around an idea. What Adams was seeing in Colorado at that time was all new when he made those pictures. I liked the idea of sort of bringing that trajectory of thought into the 21st Century.”

Image: Brian Ulrich, Westland Mall, 2009, from the series Copia