“The Exhibition Lab Exhibition” Exhibition

Foley Gallery

This event has ended.

Foley Gallery presents the 2018 edition of the Exhibition Lab Exhibition, a group show featuring work by Jennifer Baumann, Pratya Jankong, Rachel Beamer, Paul B. Goode, Frank Mullaney, Michael Meyer, Miska Draskoczy, Yu-Chen Chiu, Kerry Kolenut, Elizabeth Panzer, Peter Schafer and Miles Kerr.

The exhibition will feature photography in its many forms.

Miska Draskoczy is exhibiting new photographs from the series Super Normal. As we race into a future defined as much by the virtual world as the real one, our relationship to nature becomes more tenuous than ever. Our technology allows us to remain alternately oblivious to our environment while at other times commodifying or dominating our organic surroundings.

Elizabeth Panzer explores her world through the camera lens, and feels it is an entirely different way of seeing. The sensor, or film, sees differently than the human eye, exaggerating texture, locking in focus and depth of field, making the captured image a personal event. In PlantScapes, Panzer is able to build new worlds by combining multiple scans together.

Portents, a series-in-progress by Frank Mullaney, grew from a mood of unease and anxiety that began in this post-Trump world. The daily news covers stories of deceitful behaviors, widespread corruption, conspiracy theories, the imminent possibility of nuclear devastation and the ‘end of days’. Scenes appear as foreboding omens; a single crow alighting on a rock, a dog on a roof. Alarming. Surreal. Cinematic.

Jennifer Baumann’s work has long been directed at finding the narrative of the inanimate, allure in the unappealing and elegant calm in the purely functional. This series depicts a moment in the lives of various places, rather than their occupants. Baumann uses formal composition with a muted palette to reconsider them and find beauty. These images reveal my visual attraction to a sense of quiet abandonment.

The car is a constant source of discovery, whether it is a glimpse into someone else’s life or the revelation of a mirrored landscape sinking into the paved horizon. In the car, we are observers getting lost in the sight of world passing us by, while simultaneously stuck inside our vehicles, unable escape the drift of our own currents. In was in this state that Kerry Kolenut felt the need to document the paradox of traveling while sitting still, so she held up her camera to a rearview mirror and captured the instant of moving forward while looking back.

Michael Meyer’s Single Pixel Cameras are the foundation of an alternate photographic process. They’re meant to function as a warped mirror through which our collective assumptions about the ways photography operates within our technologically complex culture can be considered. The cameras comprise simple hand built electronic circuits that convert light striking a single pixel into sound. The resulting sound recordings are then re-visualized through data analyzation to create the Transigrams exhibited.

Miles Kerr describes his work as a broken narrative with no beginning, middle or end, told by an idiot. The scenes are inhabited by characters we’d assume have an idea about what is going on, but they do not. The imagery is full of signs and signifiers pointing to things as vague and meaningless as the signs themselves.

Mirrors entered Paul B. Goode’s portraits as a design element. Over time the reflection became a search for the hidden soul, that person deep inside ourselves we rarely share with others. During the session the model no longer looks directly into the camera. She can only see it’s reflection, his curved fingers wrapped around the lens and body. Goode sees her reflection, portions of the face bleeding into an unknown world. He looks for a sense of intimacy in his photographs. The model and Goode work together, close, sometimes touching, but at the same time appearing to inhabit parallel universes. The design of the reflection makes no sense – aside from its emotions.

Peter Schafer sees and shares things that obscure our view of others’ humanity, whether in a photo or in real life. His photographs show a woman from Guantanamo who is a grandmother and head of a multi-generational household in Baracoa, Cuba.

Pratya Jankong’s project The Habitat of Us explores an international students’ temporary dwelling in a liminal space between the homeland and the new. Having come to New York in search of what is lacking in their countries of origin, international students find that New York, too, is lacking in something - the comforts of familiar food, climate, and, most importantly, home.

The formation of memory and the identity of place are the focus of Rachel Beamer’s photo collages. Artifacts and surfaces are repositories for the layers of stories and evidence within a home. Outlines of recipes shared across generations are reminders of use and the passage of time. Traces of light, thresholds, windows, and walls frame movement between spaces. Alternations between interior and exterior spaces blur the distinctions between the past and present, as well as what is obscured and what is visible.

The work of Yu-Chen Chiu focuses on the notion of migration and belonging. Chiu grew up in Taipei and emigrated to New York City. Chiu’s experience of internalized cultural conflict strongly influenced her artistic approach. Her series America Seen is a visual poem of America, capturing one of the most vulnerable eras in American history, and depicts what America is leading up to and after the 2016 Presidential election.

The Exhibition Lab is a study of photography outside of a traditional academic setting. The initiative was co-founded by Michael Foley in 2010 as a study center for fine art photography dedicated to learning by critique. Students of the Ex Lab meet over the course of 5 months, holding critique sessions with one another and one-on-one sessions with Michael Foley.