David Stephenson Vaults September 6- October 6, 2007 Reception for the artist, Thursday, September 6, 6 to 8 p.m.
We are pleased to announce David Stephenson's fourth solo exhibition. This new body of color work, completed over the past three years, records Gothic architecture in Northern European churches and cathedrals. In this series, images of naves, crossings, apses and choirs are combined into diptychs and triptychs to create anthropomorphic designs. Using long exposures, Stephenson continues to explore notions of the sublime in architecture. The sites include Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, Chartres, the cathedrals in Laon, Mechelen, Soissons, and Ghent and chapels in Bath, York, Lincoln and Cambridge.
Various symbolic associations of the dome, from bridge between heaven and earth to the oculus as an eye or opening into endless void, reflect the transcendent nature of architectural design. Stephenson's oeuvre also employs subjects such as sky and clouds of the Artic, stars, trees, and landscapes to capture the relationship between photography, time and human mortality.
Stephenson holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tasmania where he heads the Photography Department at the School of Art. His work is included in over thirty international public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Tanya Marcuse Fruitless September 6- October 6, 2007 Reception for the artist, Thursday, September 6, 6 to 8 p.m.
We are pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of work by Tanya Marcuse which will be held in the second gallery and includes 9 small platinum/palladium prints and one large pigment print. Comprised of photographs of fruit trees in northern Dutchess and southern Columbia Counties in New York State, Fruitless records orchards as they change with the seasons, and with the times. They document the vanishing visual, economic and cultural presence of orchards in the Hudson Valley region. Today, the orchards are disappearing as new housing developments spring up at astonishing rates and many of the trees stand on land that is currently for sale. Sharon Bates notes, �With stark, unsentimental elegance, the trees are composed, portrait-like against sky and meadow, their limbs curling and stretching in lush, linear complexity. It was this gorgeous but unsweetened visual intimacy, as well as Marcuse�s thoughtful compositions and choice of printing mediums that elevate this series, Fruitless, to a level beyond the lament of encroaching �progress�.� Marcuse brings to the viewer�s attention that perhaps in a year, or a decade, these trees will be gone and only the photographs will remain.
A small 16 page publication by Nazraeli Press entitled Fruitless accompanies the show. In 2005 Nazraeli Press published Undergarments and Armor which was supported by a 2002-03 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2004 Anson Kittredge Grant. The project won a 2005 JGS Book Project Award. Marcuse�s photographs are in the collections of the Corcoran Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Yale Art Gallery, and The Library of Congress. She teaches photography at Bard College at Simon's Rock.
