NYAB Event - Michal Ronnen Safdie "Vapor Trails"

Michal Ronnen Safdie "Vapor Trails"

Andrea Meislin Gallery

This event has ended.

Andrea Meislin Gallery announces the opening of Vapor Trails, Michal Ronnen Safdie's first exhibition with the Gallery.

Vapor trails are a physical phenomenon. At certain altitudes, jet exhaust from the plane's engine condenses and makes a line of visible H20 in the sky. The atmospheric conditions play with this condensation to create an infinite variety of patterns. Each vapor trail also represents an episode of human activity and the hundreds of passengers traveling the sky every day. Manufactured goods crisscrossing the globe – packages mailed for next-day deliveries, fruits, vegetables, flowers and high-end electronic components. These vapor trails are a symbol of the globalized world – a shrinking, borderless planet where we are continually traveling the shortest routes and defying geography.

Ronnen Safdie observes the extraordinary and unpredictable beauty of these patterns, where winds, temperature, and atmospheric conditions act upon a vapor emission and create wiggles, arches, fractal patterns or simply merge into the clouds and disappear to nothingness. Vapor trails are visually pure H20 and harmless to the environment, but do remind us that they are accompanied by burned jet fuel. The beauty observed in the sky also has a price. Given the recent air transport crisis in Europe, we are reminded of the vulnerability of this mode of transportation.

Ronnen Safdie has a diverse body of work and has explored anthropomorphic trees, ice formations on the Charles River as well as human rights issues in Rwanda, Darfur and the Western Wall. Her works from Africa, entitled Rwanda: After, Darfur: Now, were exhibited at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, the Salt Lake City Public Library, and Nazareth College Arts Center, Rochester, New York. The photographs of refugees from Darfur are also part of the group exhibition Darfur/Darfur, which has been exhibited at prestigious venues around the world. Additionally Ronnen Safdie's series exploring the natural world have been exhibited at Salander O'Reilly Galleries, New York, Robert Klein Gallery, Boston, Drabinsky Gallery, Toronto and David Gallery, Los Angeles.

[Image: Michal Ronnen Safdie "SKR8" (2008) Color Photograph]