NYAB Event - Rick Odell "My Better Half" and Four Member Solo Exhibitions

Rick Odell "My Better Half" and Four Member Solo Exhibitions

Soho Photo Gallery

This event has ended.

Odell explains that each of the 23 images in his show is a double portrait that appears at first to represent a male and female couple. However, the pictures are, in fact, digitally manipulated composites of two photographs of the same subject—one of a man in drag persona masquerading as a woman and one of that same man with masculine attire and grooming. In images with more than two figures, each romantic pair is a single man cast in both gender roles.

His work has appeared in the Daily News and USA Today, on Life.com and elsewhere. Odell has had numerous solo shows; his work has also been a part of group exhibitions in China and Russia. Odell is dedicated to photographing socially taboo subjects as well as current events.

"Step Up," Martin Frank

Lucien Freud, the modern painter and Sigmund’s grandson said, “The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes and ironically the more real.” Frank says, “Think of these images as an exercise. They begin with a staircase in front of a ubiquitous office building that I pass on my way to my mother’s home. Rearranging its interplay of line, shadow, texture, shape and tone, I’ve tried to take a step up from mere representation to a new and different kind of reality.”

"Bon Coiffur: Barbershop and Beauty Parlor Images in Ghana and Mali," David Miller

“These photographs of hand-painted portraits that advertise barbershops and beauty parlors were taken on my trips
to Ghana and Mali during the past five years. My intent is to both preserve and interpret an art form that is colorful and eccentric, but is rapidly disappearing in urban locations.”

"Thank You For Smoking," Norman Borden

“This exhibition is not about the perils of smoking, but about the role it plays in a smoker’s life. Although an ex-smoker, I’d forgotten how smoking can define you. How that cigarette or cigar can become part of a smoker’s persona, how it adds to your coolness and gives you a few moments a day to escape. I observed some of the rituals, the way people hold their cigarettes, the multi-tasking and the pleasures that smoking still provides.”

"Fire and Ice," Susan Keiser

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
—Robert Frost