11.24.2009

MUST SEE PHOTO EXHIBITION NEAR NEW YORK CITY


Impermanence

Impermanence is the result of an almost three year exploration of the devastation caused by the fire that ravished Kendall Messick’s home in 2006. In nearly 200 images of the scene he has oscillated between his typical portrait and documentary practice and a more aestheticized pictorization to create photographs that are metonymic and act as a space of meditation and scrutiny. Many of these images are reminiscent of Aaron Siskind’s metaphoric abstract photographs from the 1960s that portray dripping paint, graffiti and peeling walls. However, unlike Siskind, Messick does not wish to impart a transcendent sensibility but instead, he calls attention to details and privileges a particular type of note taking. One sees in the development of such images, rendered over a period of one year, the artist’s attempt to assess the damage. Messick indicates that in the weeks after the fire, he spent much of his time itemizing his loss for insurance purposes. His abstract images convey a similar type of enumeration, not only of specific objects but also of the space that housed these objects. These images are simultaneously emotive and analytic, their visual impact owed to their composition. Messick’s use of a square format causes the image to be pushed out towards the edges of the pictorial field leaving no room for additional narrative. This, coupled with their diminutive size as compared to other works in the series, afford them a specimen-like quality.

As part of this body of work Messick has also produced surreal images that bring the viewer closer to the facts of the fire. In drawing us nearer, the more concentrated looking that is demanded by the abstract pictures gives way to a visual pulling back, suggesting the palpable weight of Messick’s reaction to the disaster. The artist’s method of managing the constant unfolding of ruin is to translate it into a series of vignettes that reveal more of the destroyed space. In contrast to the abstract pictures, these works recall film stills and are sharply photographed with acerbic color that calls Mannerist painting to mind. In them, charred corridors lead to rooms filled with scorched and mangled objects. In one, an open door reveals disembodied heads bathed in a ethereal light while in another, dripping streaks stain eerie blue walls. These elements make them enigmatic as their seemingly constructed nature belies the actuality of the event. One is caused to wonder how these heads came to be in this room, in this way? What is Messick trying to articulate as he invites the viewer to move with him down lonely corridors? The probing, almost forensic nature of some of his images suggests that Messick is also searching for the answers to such queries.

In Corapeake (1995) and The Projectionist (2007), two portrait-based projects that seek to record the passing of communities and the transience of life, Messick embedded himself in the ever-changing lives of his subjects in order to record the tenor of each passing day. These works contain a biographical element as Messick has always been drawn to such narratives. At first glance Impermanence appears to be a departure from such ruminations, however it is arguably the most intimate of his photo essays and is the first time he has turned his camera onto himself so extensively. In a series of pictures of objects entitled Conflagrations he recalls his portraitist and biographical devices to examine the fire’s aftermath. His likeness can be found in these objects, as they are beloved possessions that for the artist resurrect lost craftsmanship. His penchant for reclaiming the past may account for their fetishist treatment in his images. Portraits of head forms once used by haberdashers, fishing gigs traditionally forged by blacksmiths and Steuben glass vases cloaked in the fire’s residue become otherworldly, seeming to materialize as transient things. It is this space of interstitiality that reveals the photo-essay’s redemptive meaning. The images reflect Messick’s sense of wonder in the rediscovery of his objects. His goal in rendering them is to highlight the distinctiveness of change—to move from a universal discourse about the destruction to a more personal celebration of transformation.

A conflagration is an all-consuming fire typically started by human intervention. The heat from such a fire can be so intense that it creates a flow of oxygen, which allows it to feed on itself. Angel, a workman who while using solvent to strip varnish from a room’s wooden detailing, inadvertently struck his steal wool pad against a metal surface starting Messick’s conflagration. In the exhibition, Angel’s image appears in a set of black and white prints, some of which were taken just hours after Messick arrived on the scene. The color reality that describes the conflagration and predominates Messick’s other pictures is transformed in these images to indicate a change in the artist’s mood. Messick often uses this tonal variation to affect an emotional shift. Capitalizing on their warm tones, the photographer seems to be offering up a requiem by locating the images in a room that contains the last evidentiary remnants of the fire. Here, the site as artifact emphasizes the magnitude of the disaster presenting the fire as both historic and contemporary events.
Andrea Douglas
Curator of Exhibitions
University of Virginia Art Museum

11.10.2009

MICHAEL MORAN: MEETING WITH TREES

Michael James Moran, an independent furniture designer in Charleston, announces a fall solo exhibition at downtown gallery Rebekah Jacob. Moran’s first solo show with the galley, titled “Meeting with Trees,” will feature all new, original pieces that speak to the relationship we build with tress through furniture.
“Meeting with Trees,” which will run from November 16 to 24, 2009, marries Moran’s custom woodworked furniture and sculpture with the contemporary aesthetic of Jacob’s Lower King Street gallery space. Moran, whose oeuvre deals with designing around perceived "imperfections" in wood, says “It seems ironic to me that many of the characteristics that make a tree unique are often overlooked or discarded.” Driven by a need to balance the presentation of these “quirks” with a functional modern aesthetic, Michael James Moran Woodworked Furniture is a hand-tooled workshop for the present age.

The opening reception for Moran’s “Meeting with Trees” exhibition will take place on Thursday November 19, from 6-8 pm. An artist’s lecture – going in-depth on the pieces in the exhibition as well as the practice of sourcing wood and joinery methods – will be hosted in the gallery the same night at 7PM.

10.23.2009

SHEPARD FAIREY INTERVIEWED FOR TIM HUSSEY'S DOCUMENTARY

SHEPARD FAIREY IS INTERVIEWED BY ADAM BOOZER, PRODUCER OF TIM HUSSEY'S DOCUMENTARY. CHILDHOOD FRIENDS, SHEPARD SHARES STORIES OF GROWING UP WITH TIM IN CHARLESTON, SC AND RESPONDS TO HIS CURRENT BODY OF PAINTINGS. Shepard Fairey is famed for the HOPE design to bolster Obama's 2008 campaign.

REBEKAH JACOB ON RICHARD SEXTON'S PHOTOS

Sister Cities: Charleston & Savannah are two of the most mythical and charming urban societies in all the South, interchangeable in culinary, tradition, and architecture. I would characterize their natural rural areas to be as dramatic and photogenic: serpentine waterways infinitely changing with the tide and moon, historic fragments, overgrown cemeteries with Confederate and sacred heart markings… Perhaps some of the most incredible and defining things of this region seem to be its trees that appear more like architectural elements and overseers of the land--their greatest wonders often discovered by looking up, as depicted in Sexton’s image of Wormsloe Plantation.

As a gallerist, I am often befuddled at the number of photographers who attempt to capture this region, but whose images translate as casual, sentimental, and sappy. What separates photographers like Richard Sexton from the masses-and certainly the amateurs-is his inherent sense of place, his patience and discernment of light, and his restless search for unique and infinite wonders. However, a Sexton photograh's texture, composition, aesthetic are most fully realized in real life.

VISIT REBEKAH JACOB GALLERY AT 169 KING STREET TO VIEW SEXTON’S NEWSEST BODY OF WORK: CHARLESTON TO SAVANNAH

RICHARD SEXTON: CHARLESTON TO SAVANNAH


WORDS FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHER:

Shortly after I moved back to the South from San Francisco in 1991 I began photographing the natural landscape. I was intrigued by the low, flat, moss-draped landscape and landscapes became an important counterpoint to my photographs of the built environment, which focused on the mutated, scarred state of the historic architecture in places like New Orleans, where I live. For fifteen years my landscape focus was the gulf coast from Louisiana to the Florida panhandle. Very recently I expanded that focus to include the Lowcountry of South Carolina and the Sea Islands of Georgia. I grew up in a small town in southwest Georgia and I remembered the Georgia coast vividly from my youth. As I rediscovered this region in contemporary times, I appreciated the fact it hadn't changed quite as much as the gulf coast of Florida, which has seen rampant real estate development in recent years. The new work from South Carolina and Georgia builds on what I started with the gulf coast, and as with my gulf coast work, I'm focusing both on historic sites and buildings, as well as the marshlands and live oaks of the natural landscape.




10.10.2009

CYNTHIA KNAPP: OCT 18-NOV 14

This October, Cynthia Knapp will exhibit several recent pieces from a series of paintings and works on paper. These are abstract musings on the relationships of organic structures where fields of color blur, overlap, and interact to create an amalgam of natural shapes. Her intent is not to represent any literal outward appearance, but rather to portray the essence of abstraction as seen in her physical environment. Knapp's nebulous forms float and meander through the canvas - enabling the colors, shapes and depths to gracefully leap and drift from the foreground to the background. Her vivid colors are interspersed with neutral colored auras which emanate out of the depths of the painting.

9.14.2009

LOOK SOUTH: ICONIC IMAGES BY JERRY SIEGEL

A NOTE FROM THE CURATOR;
A PERSONAL RESPONSE

As an art dealer and curator specializing in Southern images, it has been a dutiful exploration of my own heritage to exhibit photography that has captured the beautiful, sober accretion of a place geographically below the Mason-Dixon and east of Texas (inclusive, of course). I have worked to focus on photographers whose images chronicle a region that feeds our imagination and that we trust no matter what. For the curator and artist alike, this exhibition is about a land of which we profess a fondness and continue to artistically explore.

From the beginning of Rebekah Jacob Gallery, Jerry Siegel’s photography has been essential to our curatorial program. Though Selma, Alabama is at the center point of Siegel’s oeuvre, his pluralism of Southern themes becomes a poetic documentation that encompasses—and exceeds—Alabama borders. Perhaps his current solo exhibition LOOK SOUTH is a microcosm of a long, unplanned road trip: a clapboard church with wooden pews waiting on someone to arrive; a bar-b-q joint whose interior decoration is sparkling white tiled walls and stuffed deer heads; Tucker’s Grocery whose Christmas lights blink past Easter; and a tin building with a tacky graffiti advertisement that reads, “Celebrity Barber." Siegel’s raw, unstaged material shares imagination between the photographer and viewer, spurring questions like, “Is this ‘for real’ or a movie set?’”

As Jerry and I sifted through hundreds of images over the course of the past year, we worked carefully to select photos that poignantly tell of his South, my South…our South. We selected both black/white and color images that tell of the region’s mythic terrain, African American heritage, and compulsiveness with religion (God Bless; Jesus Saves). Throughout the project, I was reminded of the technical genius of Jerry’s concise eye, inherent skill of knowing when to click the shutter, and undeniable patience for the subject matter. Knowing Jerry personally, I have come to believe that it his dedication to the medium, personal kindness, and genuine spirit that grants a fate of being at the right place at the right time.

To watch a concept doodled on a legal pad evolve into a 3-D exhibition is a patient and often grueling, frustrating process. However, the labor and time of LOOK SOUTH has manifested itself into a stunning selection of photography. And we hope viewers alike will experience the story of a place (below the Mason-Dixon), whose intrinsic complexities are at the root of Heritage and a place for which we are proud, no matter what.

Yours Truly,
A Southerner, by the Grace of God