Amy Finkelstein “New Work”
Alan Klotz Gallery
This event has ended.
There are several interesting, perhaps disturbing, shows in various venues just now, assembled by different curators, all exploring the changing nature of photographic expression. The thesis of these shows has to do with the fact that much of recent “photography” seems disconnected to its photographic roots. The works are hyper-hyphenated hybrids that have some (often barely) recognizable photographic activity associated with their creation, but by and large they have hefty doses of “other” sharing the same image…painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, and a host of appropriated images. This is not new, it’s Post-Modernism redux, but there seems to be a lot of gene mixing at this evolutionary moment.
Our artist, Amy Finkelstein, is one such hybrid. She draws with runny India ink on architect’s yellow tracing film. She elevates the drawing so that the ink runs down the paper, leaving its trace…often giving the impression of a landscape…perhaps more specifically a Chinese landscape. When she likes what she sees, she stops the flow, then photographs the results through glass using an 8 x 10 inch view camera and good old-fashioned color sheet film. The subtle shifts of tonality comes from illuminating the drawing with lights of slightly different color temperatures. She then prints them as C prints. They are, as you see, elegant. They are photographs. Amy thinks of herself as a photographer. She and I have never discussed the fate of the original drawings… they are her means to an end. I hope to show some of them with the resulting photographs soon, as I think some “means to an end”, would be interesting to see.
“I photograph stuff once it becomes something other than what it was when I started fumbling with it. I start pretty close to nothing… I want to make something last forever. The original promise of photography to forever freeze a moment in time may be why I keep making work in the way that I do. My work documents some shared unquenchable thirst for finding and photographing a happening in time and place that promises to never go away.
My work is abstract. I am not suggesting that I am making direct metaphors for dealing with these subjects. But in trying to decipher the ideas behind the marks I find and make and photograph, there is something in there that points to the infinite. In the space of looking, which I hope to sustain with my images, photography still pulls from us an impulse to believe something that is or was or could be.”
-Amy Finkelstein
Media
Schedule
from November 11, 2015 to December 11, 2015