NYAB Event - "Hey, Hot Shot! 2012 Second Edition Showcase" Exhibition

"Hey, Hot Shot! 2012 Second Edition Showcase" Exhibition

Jen Bekman Gallery

This event has ended.

Jen Bekman Gallery presents the Hey, Hot Shot! 2012 Second Edition Showcase, opening on Friday, April 5th. The exhibition features works by photographers David Favrod, Erin O'Keefe, Pacifico Silano, Ilona Szwarc, and Trey Wright, the five Second Edition winners of Hey, Hot Hot!, the annual international photography competition founded by Jen Bekman.

The show represents contemporary photography from diverse perspectives across the globe. Pacifico Silano uses Photoshop, Google images, and reworked vintage photographs to rework and breathe new life into representations of '70s gay porn star Al Parker. The result is a series of unconventional portraits that simultaneously glamorize, memorialize, and interrogate a lost generation of pre-AIDS gay male life and culture. David Favrod works from sources including memory, stories told by parents and grandparents, and popular and traditional culture to create images that blend portrait, landscape and fantasy on a quest to find out the definition of true identity and how is it manifested.

Erin O'Keefe shoots two-dimensional constructions created from photographs, which result in images both straightforward and unnerving; they invite the viewer to examine the relationship between object and image. Trey Wright, meanwhile, cuts and dissects photos, arranging them like specimens or a spare collage on a flat plane of rich color. The new narratives that result reinvent conventional ideas about what pulls the eye into a picture plane; indeed, Wright's work has been called "a trippy Surrealist take on Pop Art."

American Girls, Ilona Szwarc’s series of portraits of girls and their American Girl dolls, takes a close look at the inventions of gender and childhood created by culture and society. Conceived as more wholesome and historically minded alternatives to Barbie (and modeled after a body of a 9-year-old girl), customizable by race and feature, the mass-marketed dolls offer the illusion of choice—and therefore the illusion of individuality. In Szwarc’s images, gender's performative nature is mirrored in the performance of the girl subjects for her camera.

A distinguished panel of arts professionals, along with the Jen Bekman Projects curatorial team, chose these five striking artists from an impressive pool of submissions for their current contributions to contemporary photography and their obvious promise. Each photographer is awarded a stipend; one 2012 winner will be selected for a $10,000 honorarium, a solo exhibition at the gallery, and Jen Bekman Gallery representation for two years. Since its inception in 2005, Hey, Hot Shot! has debuted more than 140 photographers, including 2010 Whitney Biennial artists Nina Berman and Curtis Mann.

[Image: Trey Wright "Spanish Fly" archival pigment print]