NYAB Event - "Light|Dark" Exhibition

"Light|Dark" Exhibition

SEPIA International | The Alkazi Collection

This event has ended.

Linked by a strong sense of re-discovering the ordinary, these five artists in the exhibition embrace the broad spectrum of the photographic process to create work that is both meditative and fully aware.

Linda Connor, best known for her photographs of sacred sites and landscapes, is represented in “light/dark” by her ethereal series of images picturing constellations, solar eclipses, and the tracks of stars. Leaving her 8-by-10 view camera behind, she has created contact-prints from existing glass-plate negatives belonging to the University of California's Lick Observatory, originally produced between 1893 and 1945. The resulting prints make visible their scientific origins and the vast grandeur of the cosmos.

Sookang Kim’s images of white bowls and plates, the “White Vessels” series, are a unique and fresh study within the time-honored genre of still-life. These everyday objects, temporarily pardoned from their ordinary functions, are given new life in pure monochromatic form. Utilizing the time-intensive gum bichromate photographic process, Kim permeates each vessel with a quietly etched deliberation and august gaze.

The images of Michelle Kloehn invite the viewer into realms where the ephemeral becomes everlasting. Unencumbered by convention, these still-lifes of indeterminate constructions become mysteries, unanticipated and dreamlike. Intimate in scale, the use of the unwieldy 19th century tintype process is deeply intertwined with the fleeting, elusive nature of these images.

The “Path” series, by Yukio Oyama, is one of found traces and suspensions of time. Oyama’s photographs pose a delightful contradiction; the immutable stillness of each image is achieved through the photographer’s journey through the landscape. Just as movement leads to repose, each image of Oyama’s begins as an active thought and ends as a visual revelation.

A remarkable series of gelatin silver prints from 2005/06 by Go Sugimoto, “Paper_work,” explores the borderlines of visual perception. Working with deceptively simple white paper constructions, Sugimoto creates a faintly visible presence that challenges the viewer to distinguish the image. Is it a photograph or a drawing? A purist by nature, Sugimoto captures the beauty of the object that is barely perceptible.

Born in New York in 1944, Linda Connor studied with Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Arthur Siegal. Her work is in over 40 major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. She has had over 70 one-person shows throughout the world since the late 1960s. In the last two decades, she has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant three times and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Sookang Kim attained a BFA in Painting from Seoul National University and a MFA from the Pratt Institute, New York. She has had several solo exhibitions in her home city of Seoul and in group exhibitions internationally. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Musee for Fotokunst, Odense, and the Daelin Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul.

Brooklyn-based artist Michelle Kloehn is the recipient of two MacDowell Colony Fellowships and was prominently featured in a recent issue of the noted photography publication, Blindspot. She received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and MFA from Bard College.

Born in 1963 in Hokkaido, Japan, Yukio Oyama graduated from Nihon Shashin Gakuen (School of Photography) in 1994, where he also presently teaches. His work is in numerous private collections in the Northeast. This is Yukio Oyama's fifth exhibition at SEPIA.

Go Sugimoto studied Photography at the International Center of Photography, New York. His work has been shown internationally, most notably and recently in The Japan Society's “Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York," exhibition and has been featured at Rencontres d'Arles, France and PhotoEspana, Madrid as a portfolio review finalist.

Related Publication: Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, features an essay by William L. Fox and a conversation with the artist and two modern luminaries, Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin. (Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2008)
[Image: Michelle Kloehn "Untitled, from the series "Perimeter" (2008) tintype 5 x 7 inch. Courtesy of the artist and SEPIA International.]