NYAB Event - Hrvoje Slovenc & Mónika Sziládi "There is More to the Story"

Hrvoje Slovenc & Mónika Sziládi "There is More to the Story"

Helac Fine Art

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Helac Fine Art presents There is More to the Story, an exhibition of recent photographs by Hrvoje Slovenc from his Marble Hill series and Mónika Sziládi from her series, Wide Receivers.

Hrvoje Slovenc documents psychologically charged domestic environments that evoke the illusory relationship between fact and fiction. He possesses a deep interest in the many visual languages photography offers and exploits varied techniques such as documentary photography, sculpture and set design to blur temporal boundaries and evoke a sense of displacement in familiar spaces. In his newest series, Marble Hill, Slovenc investigates the grotesque yet eerily beautiful world that lies beneath his own neighborhood in the Bronx. Through a series of time-intensive interventions that often take place over a period of weeks, Slovenc seamlessly crosses technological and stylistic eras through a series of black-and-white photographs that transcend time and place. In II-II, (2012), he develops the work as a wallpaper installation on a monumental scale; a local man laden with grocery bags --seemingly covering his face in fatigue-- is positioned against a classical background of drapery that evokes the feeling of a stage set or Renaissance interior. The overlapping frames and uneven light effects collapse the three-dimensionality of the space and reveal the ultimate artifice of the image. Slovenc’s painterly approach and attention to surface is present throughout the images that comprise Marble Hill.

Focusing on the inherent tension between reality and fiction in photography, Mónika Sziládi’s digital collage constructions investigate the complexities of human behavior and group dynamics. Her photographs explore the paradoxical relationship between the multitude of possibilities for re-invention and individual expression offered by society along with the pressure for assimilation perpetuated by interactions with new media. Approaching her subjects from an anthropological perspective, Sziládi identifies the ways in which mass media dictates social behavior and how it has supplanted other societal institutions that historically performed this function. In the series Wide Receivers, Sziládi candidly photographed the attendees at offline networking, meet-up and public relations events that originated online as they interacted in their mediated environments. A nod to current conventions of media display, she rearranges focal points and group interactions to mimic the experience of viewing an image, as one would scan a computer screen with multiple windows open. In photographs such as Untitled (Candy), 2009, consumption and desirability manifest themselves in body language, clothing and disjointed social interaction of the young women at this event. The self-consciousness of the participants is amplified by the tenuous relationship between public and private personas that each woman chooses to display within this ephemeral environment.

Hrvoje Slovenc was born in Croatia and studied biochemistry at the University of Zagreb before receiving his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2010. His photographs have been exhibited in institutions worldwide including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of New Art, Detroit; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia; and Young Artists’ Biennial, Bucharest, Romania. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and the Museum of Arts and Crafts, Zagreb, Croatia.
Slovenc lives and works in New York.

Mónika Sziládi was born in Budapest, Hungary and received her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2010. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and most recently the Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program. In 2010, she won Jurors’ Pick (Julie Saul and Alec Soth) at the Daylight/CDS Photo Awards Work-in-Process Prize. She has exhibited worldwide including at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the DUMBO Arts Center, New York. Her work is in the collection of Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Sziládi lives and works in New York.