NYAB Event - “Neon 15,000 Volts” Exhibition

“Neon 15,000 Volts” Exhibition

Westbeth Gallery

This event has ended.

This exhibition is an examination of life in the city as reflected in the work of three photographers: Natalia Sharymova, Alex AG and Dmitry Kravtsov. The great metropolis has a perpetual, transformative impact on the human psyche; it is the complexity of that impact – the emotional, the spiritual and the psychological impact of life in the city. Each of the contributors experiments with both: the traditional and “new” art of photography.
Each of the three participating artists employs a fundamentally different device: mechanically augmented photography, digital enhancement and digitally altered imagery, yielding a diverse range of style, technique and mood. But their separate artistic concepts merge at the apex of the interaction between the city and its occupants, transforming them either into something more than human beings were meant to be, or into something different altogether.
Natalia Sharymova’s work examines the emotional components of human beings. Her digitally altered photographs convey the imagery of the emotional impact urban life wields. Issuing from reality, but far from realism, Natalia Sharymova’s photography conveys an instinctual quest for happiness, harmony and beauty in the face of an unremitting, resilient jolt: 15,000 volts of emotional and spiritual stress delivered daily by the cacophony and the chaos of the metropolis.
Alex AG’s photography examines the impact of the immense amount of information – virtual and actual – that floods the mind every day. His images convey the constant need to compress this environment into an ingestible size. Alex AG’s vision addresses the issue of the immense gap between objective reality and subjective perception, invoking in the viewer reflection on the gossamer balance between what we see and what we think we see.
Dmitry Kravtsov’s art, based on traditional photography, alters the shooting process itself in ways that transfix. His images divulge the veiled solitude and latent serenity obscured by the apparent anarchy of metropolitan life. While contemplating the distress that dominates urban life, the artist corroborates the hidden grains of inner peace and emotional balance to be found under the avalanche of life in the city.
It is only natural that this exhibition takes place in New York City, the exact locus of metropolitan life. It is equally natural that the particular New York City venue for this exhibition be Westbeth, the artistic housing, the former Bell Laboratories (1868-1966), where the “new technology” was born. The first talking movie, the first condenser microphone, the first TV broadcast and the first binary computer were all conceived.
When brought together in Neon 15K Volts: New Photography in the West Village, the diverse creative methods used by each of these three artists combine to produce rather a startling sensation – a new image.
A resilient jolt.