NYAB Event - Katya Arnold “Lost Souls”

Katya Arnold “Lost Souls”

(Art) Amalgamated

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(Art) Amalgamated presents a solo exhibition of new works by Katya Arnold “Lost Souls”. It is her first work in photography. In her unstaged and unmanipulated photographs, Arnold transform quotidian objects into personal, poetic and unique art.

With the Tableux vivants in Lost Souls I play with the classical Greek idea that beauty resides in the object, not the viewer. I prove otherwise. --Katya Arnold

Rome is the epitome of civilization. When I was living there every step I took, every glance to the right or left, revealed another amazing image: here was history; art; beauty; humanity; architecture; fashion, mixed together in the eternal city. I loved the sculptures of Roman citizens that I saw everywhere, scattered like debris, and all of a sudden I began to notice the contemporary sculptures of contemporary Roman citizens in shop windows. These sculptural portraits were created not for purposes of commemoration, but for consumption. I was fascinated by the expressions of loneliness and longing and displacement I saw on their faces.

I began to photograph them, concentrating mostly on their incredibly (uncannily) human faces, unseen by those who look only at what the model is selling. Everywhere I went, I began to find these lonely, self-contained individuals. Whenever I encountered one, I took her picture. When I returned to New York, I saw hundreds of these idealized beings, in every shop widow and storefront. For me, the ancient Roman tradition of sculptural portraiture lives on in the humble and reviled mannequins.

Katya Arnold was born and raised in Moscow, Russia where she received her Masters Degree in Art. She has lived in many different countries and travelled extensively. In the 1980s, she settled in New York City, where she painted, curated exhibitions, and written and illustrated 16 children's books. She has exhibited in Moscow, Jerusalem, London and New York. Her work has been reviewed by The New York Times, among other publications, and has been shown on CNN and PBC. She teaches art at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, and divides her time between the Hudson Valley, Manhattan, and Rome. She began working on “Lost Souls” in 2006 when she spend a year in Rome and continues to photograph her subjects in places as varied as Beijing China, Miami, Florida, Bayonne, New Jersey and New York City, New York.

[Image: Katya Arnold “Glamour” New York, New York (2012) 22” x 34”, Edition of 10 + 1 AP]