NYAB Event - "More Songs about Buildings and Food" Exhibition

"More Songs about Buildings and Food" Exhibition

Newman Popiashvili Gallery

This event has ended.

Newman Popiashvili Gallery presents More Songs about Buildings and Food, an exhibition of new works by Jude Broughan and Susa Templin punctuated by two photographs by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Jude Broughan's wall-mounted assemblages, in which original and found photographs are juxtaposed with artificial and industrial materials, function as intimate, improvised conversations, each component representing a different point of access for the viewer. While Broughan's works are perhaps better considered in terms of a poetic sensibility than a conceptual agenda, there are themes and sources that run throughout her projects. Uppermost among these is the role of photography as a visual argot of commercial culture; Broughan's shots are openly flawed, ambiguous, even mundane, offering a critical rejoinder to the polished, seamless aesthetic of contemporary commercial imagery.

Key to the effectiveness of Broughan's compositions is her judicious introduction of 'empty' or uninflected spaces. These open areas, whether physical or merely depicted, embody a neither-here-nor-there condition that suggests both the free-floating anxiety of perpetual dislocation and the excitement of limitless potential. Images of the liminalâ€”cloudy skies, unpeopled living spaces, and anonymous urban facades-rub up against cut-outs, deletions, and other unvarnished 'edits,' clearing space for viewers' own imagined additions and alterations. Using both direct collage and digital manipulation techniques, Broughan maintains a flexibility of emphasis that allows her to effectively wield the element of surprise.

Susa Templin is interested in the creation of images and models that function as 'interpretations of spaces.' These combinations of photographs made in different spatial situations appear as purposely rough 'inserts' - images or almost abstract visual interventions. Handprinted large photographs are the results of these photographic journeys into the rooms and models which are then later used for large-scale installations. The results are large-scale installations consisting of floor-to-ceiling photographic image-panels or large formatted sculptures made of photographs.

Templin's recent work explores the balance in the relation of spaces - existing ones and proposed ones - moving between the public and private in our live experience of spaces. Her work combines the intersections between photography, architecture and sculpture. Employing the medium of photography in a very sculptural manner, Templin positions its purportedly transparent portrayal of spaces against photography's own physicality as a potentially sculptural medium. Templin works with exhibiting space, rejecting the notion of a final art product. Trained as a painter and film maker, she chose photography as her main medium, blurring its conventions and refraining from showing physical handwork or ideal craftsmanship.

In More Songs about Buildings and Food, Broughan and Templin are in dialogue with one another as well as clearly juxtaposing recent works with two classic photographs by the influential Hungarian-born artist, designer, and educator Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Consistent with his modernist ethos, Moholy stressed the value of photography as a fluid, improvisational tool: "The enemy of photography is convention," he wrote, "the fixed rules of 'how to do' .. . the salvation of photography comes from experiment." Moholy's photographs, as well as his works in other mediums, also reveal a consistent interest in the interaction of space, time, and light. In this exhibition, both of these concerns are echoed in Broughan's use of the photographic image in concert with other materials and Templin's refusal to conform to artistic standards.

Jude Broughan is a New Zealand-born, New York-based artist. Broughan graduated from the School of Visual Arts and is currently an MFA candidate at Hunter College. She has exhibited internationally; recent New York shows include "Written by Snakes" at Churner & Churner, "Best of 2012" at Soloway, and "Nauscopy" at Chashama 461 Gallery. Later this year, she will exhibit in "New. New York" at the Essl Museum, Vienna, and at I-20 in New York. Susa Templin was born in Hamburg, Germany. After attending the Academy Hochschule der KÃ¼nste in Berlin, Templin studied at the Academy of Art, Stadelschule, Frankfurt. She moved to New York in the mid-nineties where she stayed and exhibited for ten years. Templin currently lives and works in Berlin. She has shown at major public venues including the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; the Biennale des Images, Paris; the Berlinische Galerie, Museum fuer Moderne Kunst, Berlin.

[Image: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy "Lucia & Table" Edition 3 of 30, 8 X 10 inch fiber-based photograph]