“Sleep is Useless: Urban Photography” Exhibition

J. Cacciola Gallery

poster for “Sleep is Useless: Urban Photography” Exhibition

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J. Cacciola Gallery’s exhibition, Sleep is useless: Urban Photography by Michael Massaia, Alan Chimacoff and Jenny Montgomery, presents visions of New York as timeful. Though each artist’s oeuvre is distinct in imagery, temperament and tone, each approaches the city as a place which is at that moment-and for always-feeling something (Massaia), being something (Chimacoff), or doing something (Montgomery).

Michael Massaia’s middle-of-the-night and pre-dawn photographs in Central Park evoke the park and the surrounding city as existing in a dream state. Not a sleeping dream but a waking one, where the surrounding skyscrapers of steel and stone are majestic attendants to the enchanted forest at their feet. We are in a world at once modern and primeval, a place where the mysteries of darkness and quiet exist in tandem with the human activity that’s always simmering in New York, for there are lights on in the skyscrapers-a window here, a floor-through there- long after most have been darkened and long before the day begins.

Massaia’s silvery tonalities of blacks, grays and whites are reminiscent of photography’s early days, particularly the un-colorized views by Edward Steichen. Like Steichen, Massaia allows the city to express its moods through its shapes, shadows, textures, and even its air. But Massaia’s work is more emotional than the earlier master’s, finding not just the moods and restless energy of the city, as Steichen did, but exposing the relationship between the mystery and energy that infiltrate that mood.

For Alan Chimacoff, the city’s streets and neighborhoods are their own art galleries. Their buildings, façades, structural elements and ornamental details, alone or in combination, become artworks for public exhibition. Though the city’s overt geometry has been a hallmark of New York photography for over a century, in Chimacoff’s camera that geometry becomes the foundation for further exploration of light and shadow, space, form and texture. Whole buildings, perceived as massive when experienced from the street, are here graceful elements in a dance of sculptural form. A wall of rough brick has the warmth of homespun fabric. The sculptural scrollwork on an entry pilaster has the majesty of a princely castle, it’s aggressive shadow claiming ownership of the wall and window next to it, indeed the whole building. The architecture, materials, reflections and shadows of the city are the palette from which Chimacoff realizes the larger artwork: New York itself.

Chimacoff’s experience as a practicing architect gives his photographs the intimacy of knowledge. He is able to bring forth the city’s physical secrets because he knows where within its structures those secrets are. It’s as if each detail, each shadow or rivet or windowpane, contains an emotion that Chimacoff is able to tease into view.

Jenny Montgomery’s work reminds us that New York is more than just the canyons of Manhattan. There are four other boroughs out there, each with a life, culture and grit of their own. Montgomery’s ‘Sunset Park’ photographs, shot in that neighborhood of Brooklyn, gives us the New York of doing something.

Montgomery’s timefulness sometimes presents the now, sometimes the little while ago, and sometimes the waiting for later. The pictures of now present us with life in the moment: a boy and his dad in a park with a kite; cats sunning themselves on a stoop; Asian women doing their morning exercises. The feeling of the little while ago is beautifully embodied in a gently intimate image of some laundry, chiefly pajamas, hung from the bars of a window. Perhaps the most haunting, the most pensively timeful, are the images that seem to be waiting for later, such as the photograph of a nondescript open doorway in bright light: Who will emerge from that doorway? Who will enter it? When? Montgomery uses New York’s geometry here-the balance of a large white square against the verticality of the door beside it; the tiers of rectangular bricks on the wall balanced against the squared sections of pavement-to frame the stretch of time this open doorway inhabits.

Media

Schedule

from July 31, 2014 to August 30, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-07-31 from 18:00 to 20:00

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