Opening night for Keliy Anderson-Staley: Imagined Family Heirlooms

 

This past Saturday we here at the John Cleary Gallery celebrated the Houston premier of Keliy Anderson-Staley’s Imagined Family Heirlooms with an opening nigh reception with the artist in attendance.

Installation shots of Keliy’s Baking Pan Series and Americans: Contemporary Tintype Portraits

 

Response was enthusiastic to Keliy’s work, which includes a wide range of photographic techniques as well as the incorporation of found objects into the exhibit.

Keliy (left) discussing her work with an interested attendee

 

Imagined Family Heirlooms, 2011

 

Patrons were also treated to milk (white Russians) and cookies, inspired by the artists Baking Pan Series and served by the gallery’s in-house bartender/baker, Arnaud Couturier.

 

Keliy, Catherine and I would like to offer a warm thanks to all who attended and made this exhibit opening a great success!

(L to R): Keliy Anderson-Staley, artist; Joseph Roberts, Assistant Director; Catherine Couturier, Director

 

Installation as seen through reflection of Found Child's Dress # 1, 2011 (Dress mounted on blue cloth. Framed size: 19 x 21 inches. Edition 1 of 1)

Cookie Disaster

 

In preparation for Keliy Anderson-Staley’s Imagined Family Heirlooms, Catherine and I decided to have a “theme” to go along with the drinks and snacks for the opening.  Inspired by Keliy’s Baking Pan Series we instantly thought of milk and cookies!

Installation shot of the Baking Pan Series

 

So instead of spending a Friday night out on the town, I attempted to make three different batches of cookies: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, and snickerdoodle.  Let’s see how that turned out, shall we?

So much for homemade… besides, I’ve realized I’m more of an Ansel Adams wannabe than a Martha Stewart anyway!

Looking forward to seeing you all at the opening tomorrow, Saturday March 26 between 6 and 8pm! Come for the chocolate chips and stay for the fabulous photography.  (Well, and the white Russians certainly can’t hurt either)

Preparations for Keliy Anderson-Staley’s Imagined Family Heirlooms

 

Installation processes are in full swing here at the John Cleary Gallery for Keliy Anderson-Staley’s Imagined Family Heirlooms, opening this Saturday, March 26 with a reception from 6-8pm.

Keliy and husband, Matt, hanging pieces from her Baking Pan Series.  I want cookies NOW!!!

 

Selections waiting for placement. PICK ME, PICK ME!!

Imagined Family Heirlooms harkens back to the rootless nature of the American identity, with many individuals unable to place family histories back more than one or two generations. This series of installations, comprised of both found and newly-made objects alike, suggests those photographs and sentimental objects one might have collected over the years. Domesticity in a wide range of connotations plays a central part in her works, as is evident in the use of rusted baking pans as a unifying visual motif.

As is the nature of the beast, we are sad to see Renate Aller’s One View, Ten Years exhibit coming to a close but simultaneously thrilled to welcome Keliy to her first solo show here at the gallery!

Please join us for the opening this weekend or stop by anytime during the next month to see the exhibit or peruse our other selections.

Catherine hard at work on the website!

Keliy Anderson-Staley: Imagined Family Heirlooms

 

Please join us Saturday, March 26, from 6 – 8 p.m. for the opening of Keliy Anderson-Staley: Imagined Family Heirlooms. The exhibition will run through Saturday, April 23. The artist will be in attendance for the opening reception.

“Young Boy” circa 1870; found and treated wet-plate collodion tintype

Born in 1977 in the woods of northern Maine, Keliy Anderson-Staley received her Bachelor of Arts from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College in New York, NY.

Imagined Family Heirlooms harkens back to the rootless nature of the American identity, with many individuals unable to place family histories back more than one or two generations. This series of installations, comprised of both found and newly-made objects alike, suggests those photographs and sentimental objects one might have collected over the years. Domesticity in a wide range of connotations plays a central part in her works, as is evident in the use of rusted baking pans as a unifying visual motif.

Installation shot of The Baking Pan Series: An Incomplete Family History

 

She has spent the last decade championing historical and alternative photographic practices, passing along her knowledge of extended technique through classes at The Center for Alternative Photography in New York and the Bakery Photography Collective in Westbrook, ME, among others.

“Relatives” 2011; 5x7” Antique Albumen Print

 

Keliy Anderson-Staley’s work has been featured in such publications as New York Magazine, Esquire Russia and F-Stop Magazine, with numerous solo and group exhibitions held in collections from around the world.

“Collage 1” 2011; 9x12 Made of found quilt fragments and found antique tintype

Renate Aller: One View, Ten Years

Renate Aller, Oceanscape (January, 2007), 28 x 40 inches, edition of 10

Please join us Saturday, January 15, from 6 – 8 p.m. for the opening of Renate Aller: One View, Ten Years. The exhibition will run through February 12, 2011. The artist will be in attendance for the opening reception, and the book, Oceanscapes:  One View Ten Years, will be available for purchase.

Renate Aller, Oceanscape (May, 2006), 28 x 40 inches, edition of 10

Born in Germany, artist Renate Aller lives and works in Long Island and New York. For over a decade Aller has been photographing the Atlantic Ocean from the same point under different conditions during the day as well as at night. The result of her extensive project is exquisite oceanscapes that are reminiscent of greats such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and Mark Rothko.  Renate has received a myriad of praise for her work and excellent reviews in articles and other press.  Here is a link to some of the articles discussing her work and process.

Renate Aller, Oceanscape (September, 2009), 28 x 40 inches, edition of 10

Renate Aller’s work has been exhibited around the world in numerous countries and is held in a vast array of public and private collections.  This will be Renate Aller's first solo exhibition at John Cleary Gallery.

Renate Aller, Oceanscape (December, 2006), 28 x 40 inches, edition of 10

We hope to see you soon!

Sincerely,
Leah Hebert Fourmy

Deck the Walls

Deck the Walls is an annual group exhibition of vintage and contemporary pieces that allows John Cleary Gallery to showcase a variety of artists, prices ranges, styles, and photographic mediums.  Deck the Walls will feature gallery favorites such as Elliott Erwitt, Maggie Taylor, Jeffrey Becom, Mitch Dobrowner, Takeshi Shikama, along with several others.  There will be something here for everyone’s budget and taste.

Takeshi Shikama: Silent Respiration of Forests



Takeshi Shikama, Toyosawa Lake 1, 2009, platinum and palladium print on gampi

 Please join us Saturday, October 23, from 6 – 8 p.m. for the opening of Takeshi Shikama: Silent Respiration of Forests. The exhibition will run through November 27, 2010. The artist will be in attendance for the opening reception, and the book, Silent Respiration of the Forests, by Takeshi Shikama will be available for purchase.  A booksigning and preview of the exhibition will take place on Friday, October 22, from 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.



Takeshi Shikama, Landscape 30, 2010, platinum and palladium print on gampi

 Takeshi Shikama was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1948. After attending Aoyama Gakuin University, he pursued a career in the field of design. Shikama began photographing, and in 2002 he began to explore the forests of Japan as the subject of his photography. The product of his exploration resulted in beautifully hand-crafted platinum prints on gampi, which capture the darkly printed tones and highlights on the delicate Japanese paper.



Takeshi Shikama, Mt. Chyokai 23, 2004, platinum and palladium print on gampi

 Shikama’s attraction to the forest began when he was building a cabin in the woods with his own hands. As he was clearing the land and chopping down the trees, sap accumulated on his ax and Shikama saw the sap as the blood of the tree. As a result Shikama began to see the forest as a living organism. He began traveling to different forests in Japan to capture the images the forest allowed him to take. He is drawn to these wooded locations because of the power Shikama feels the forests exude.



Takeshi Shikama, Mt. Takamaru 5, 2010, platinum and palladium print on gampi

Takeshi Shikama’s work has been shown in various countries in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is held in public and private collections around the world.  This will be Takeshi Shikama's first solo exhibition at John Cleary Gallery.  Come by the gallery to experience these works for yourself!

Mirage: Images from India, New Work by Jeffrey Becom

Please join us Saturday, September 11, from 6 – 8 p.m. for the opening of Mirage: Images from India, New Work by Jeffrey Becom. The exhibition will run through October 16, 2010. The artist will be in attendance for the opening reception.

Jeffrey Becom
Red Pillars, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India, 2008
archival pigment ink print

Jeffrey Becom comes to his art as a photographer and painter with formal training as an architect. For him these three pursuits ignite one passion: painted walls. The traditional painted façades of vernacular architecture around the globe offer this inveterate traveler subject and palette from which to derive his own artwork while he, in turn, documents their history, mystery and power. Paint then—and specifically color—is Becom’s life’s calling, whether he photographs, paints, or write books about painted color customs, myths and meanings.

Jeffrey Becom
Pink Pillar, Pushkar, Rajasthan, India, 2008
archival pigment ink print

A dozen years pursuing painted color in the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea were followed by a decade’s search in the lesser-known corners of Mexico and Central America to unravel the Maya’s enduring color cosmology. Then in 2002 Becom unfolded his map of South America. His search began in Peru, and so far he has wandered no further through South America. In between trips to the Andean Highlands, he has returned to Mexico and Guatemala again and again.

Jeffrey Becom
Red Bundle, Bundi, Rajasthan, India, 2008
archival pigment ink print

In the winter of 2009, Becom released a new series of film-based images from Northern India and Kashmir as pigment ink prints on German etching paper. Our upcoming exhibition will highlight his newest series of work done in India. Becom’s latest work is more figurative than previous work, but the focus on color and architecture remains.

Jeffrey Becom
Taj, Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India, 2008
archival pigment ink print

Becom is also a writer, designer and visual anthropologist. With his partner, Sally Aberg, he has authored two award-winning books, Mediterranean Color and Maya Color: The Painted Villages of Mesoamerica (both from Abbeville Press, New York, 1990 and 1997), for which they won the annual Lowell Thomas Gold Award from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation for “Best Travel Book.” Becom is the subject of an hour-long PBS / BBC documentary entitled For the Colors, A Journey Through Italy (soon available for purchase on DVD). His work is held in public and private collections worldwide and represented by ten fine art photography galleries across the country. He was featured in the inaugural issue of COLOR Magazine in April 2009.

Jeffrey Becom
Ganesh Wall, Balotra, Rajasthan, India, 2008
archival pigment ink print

Stop by the gallery to experience these works and more for yourself!

Found

Tom Hawkins

Obelisk and Meeting House:  Bonaire

platinum and palladium print 2000/2010

Found is an exhibition that brings recently discovered and emerging artists to the public eye and gives them a chance to display their work in a professional setting. This is the second Found exhibition the John Cleary Gallery has hosted. The artists selected to be in this show were hand picked by Catherine Couturier, the owner of the John Cleary Gallery, for their uniqueness, quality, and craftsmanship. The artists in Found were discovered in Houston’s FotoFest and New Orlean’s PhotoNOLA.

Michael Donnor
Elizabeth
waxed gelatin silver print

FotoFest’s portfolio reviews at the Meeting Place occur biennially and PhotoNOLA’s portfolio reviews take place annually. Both events offer the opportunity for artists to get their work exposure and for the reviewers to see the latest and most contemporary work not yet on the market. These mutually beneficial experiences were the catalyst behind Found.

John Chervinsky

All Watched Over

archival pigment ink, 2005

Found features artists who hail from as far away as Switzerland to as close by as Houston. Artists selected to be in the exhibition are Darryl Baird, Edward Eakins, EJ Major, Elaine Ling, Ferit Kuyas, Gerald Pisarzowski, Isa Leshko, Jessica Somers, John Chervinsky, John D’Agostino, Michael Donnor, Niniane Kelley, Robert Covington, Renate Aller, Tom Hawkins, and Trudy Cohen. Found will be each artist’s first exhibition at the John Cleary Gallery.

John D'Agostino

The Arms of Undertow

archival pigment ink on canvas, 2008

Come by the gallery and see what we Found!

Maria Levitsky: Interior

Above:  Maria Levitsky, Dijon Art School Corridor, 2004/2010, platinum and palladium print

Please join us Saturday, June 5, from 6 – 8 p.m. for the opening of Maria Levitsky: Interior. The show will run through July 2, 2010. The artist will be in attendance for her first John Cleary Gallery exhibition.

Above:  Maria Levitsky, Roosevelt Stairs, Double Platinum, 2003/2009, platinum and palladium print

New York based photographer Maria Levitsky has been working for over a decade in analogue printing techniques including alternative processes which employ copper, silver, platinum, and gold. Interior will feature her platinum-palladium prints which examine the relationship between architectural space and perception of light and how these facets influence each other in the making of a photograph. The rich palette of platinum-palladium allows the small shifts of light and shadow to be revealed. The subtlety of light coming through in the photograph is especially important in Levitsky’s photographs because she employs only available light conditions.

Above:  Maria Levitsky, Dijon Warehouse 1, 2004, platinum and palladium print

Levitsky’s work has been shown in galleries in New York, Boston and San Francisco and in several publications including the Crime issue of the Paris Review. Levitsky has been supported by residencies at the Macdowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and by a fellowship from The Camargo Foundation. Maria is a former dancer and performance artist whose resume includes a stint as the Coney Island Freakshow snake dancer/electric lady, as well as a music DJ with an occasional radio show. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Come experience the work of Maria Levitsky first hand at John Cleary Gallery.

Maggie Taylor & Jerry Uelsmann: Intersections

Please join us this Saturday, May 1, from 6 - 8 p.m. for the opening of Maggie Taylor and Jerry Uelsmann: Intersection. Both artists will be in attendance for the opening, and Maggie will be signing copies of her three most recent books.

Inspired by one another, Jerry Uelsmann and Maggie Taylor's work often intersects in various ways from subject matter to theme to the physical appropriation of negatives. Despite any similarities they may share, their work is completely distinct from each other in the different processes used to achieve their final products.

Over the past forty years Jerry Uelsmann's work has been exhibited in over 100 solo shows throughout the US and abroad. Uelsmann's work combines several negatives to produce one seamless, black and white print, which have often been described as surreal. Uelsmann has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He began teaching photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville and became a graduate research professor of art at the University in 1974. Uelsmann is now retired from teaching but is still producing art.

After dedicating over ten years to still life photography, Maggie Taylor began using the computer to create images in 1996. Taylor is a pioneer in digitally created art images and her work is featured in Adobe Photoghop Master Class: Maggie Taylor's Landscape of Dreams, published by Adobe Press in 2005. Her whimsical photographic creations made her the perfect candidate to illustrate Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published by Modernbook Editions, Palo Alto, 2008. Taylor's work has been exhibited in one-person exhibitions across the US and abroad and is present in numerous public and private collections.

We hope to see you Saturday to experience these works for yourself!

One Night Only! Mauro Fiorese's "mockumentary"

Please join us this Saturday, March 13, from 7-9 p.m. for a one night only exhibition of Italian artist, Mauro Fiorese's, U.Ph.O. photographs and film. It will represent the first film exhibition at John Cleary Gallery and the first time this work has been seen in the U.S.

About the series:

Knowing how to transcend the visual information we meet up with every day, using photography as a pretext to delve deeper in order to know new worlds: this was the spirit that has led Mauro Fiorese to document places and situations on the borderline between reality and fiction for almost twelve years around our Planet.

After a long period of iconographic research both in amateurs on-line archives as well as in official State archives recently opened up to the public, the photographer took countless trips to remote sites on Earth with the intent of producing the first official Archive of Unidentified Photographic Subjects.

This Project was carried out in twelve years along the lines of the great territorial documentary campaigns, like those of F.S.A. or Alinari photographers, whose far-flung activity produced an immense catalogue of images throughout the years.

View the work here

These pictures tell us about presence as well as absence: the photographic subject is always real, for it was “found” and existing in front of the photographer when he clicked the shutter, but it always and mysteriously remains difficult to identify.

The final work takes on the significance of a photographic evidence, in a almost scientific and forensic sense of the term, of a specific moment, only chronologically and geographically denied.

Every print is supplied with an X-File number that makes consultation possible, with the curiosity of observing something indefinable and with the desire to possess something that is much more than a simple fantasy.

Parallel to his photographic work, the author decided to document this long-term project with a video diary, edited in a unique, surreal mockumentary.

This is a 12’ long fiction film, produced in the same spirit and supporting the photographic project, where paradoxical situation are mixed with live breaking news and street interviews to both local friends and colleagues as well as internationally recognized artists, such as Duane Michals, Michael Kenna, Keith Carter, Jerry Uelsmann and Maggie Taylor among others.

The U.Pho.S. Project has been awarded with the following grants:

International Art Prize ARTE LAGUNA 2009 – Venice, Italy
Kaunas Photo 2008 – Kaunas, Lituania
Backlight 2008 “Tickle Attack” – WOLKERSDORF, Austria
International Photography Awards 2008 Competition (finalist) – New York, U.S.A.

John Cleary Gallery is proud to present this innovative Project for the first time in the U.S. on Saturday, March 13 2010 for a unique one-night Show.
The artist will be in attendance.

Mark Jaremko: Nightscapes Opening and Exhibition

John Cleary Gallery will open our newest exhibition, Mark Jaremko: Nightscapes, this Saturday, October 24, with a reception for the artist from 6 - 8 p.m. The show will continue through November 28 and will represent the first show of Mr. Jaremko, an artist we found at Fotofest 2008, in Houston.

Jaremko says of his work: "I photograph at night. For the past four years my focus has been on capturing landscapes over water, photographed during a full moon, all taken with very long exposures. I am fascinated with the horizon, with the lights and the structures that we build there. These photographs document the discoveries I have made along the way."


We hope to see you Saturday to welcome Mark Jaremko to Houston and view his beautiful images. For a preview of the exhibition, please click here.

Deck the Walls

Last Saturday's Deck the Walls opening was a hit!



This annual show allowed us to display a variety of gallery artists and price ranges for the holidays. The annual show featured gallery favorites such as: Elliott Erwitt, Maggie Taylor, Dan Burkholder, Stanko Abadzic, Jeffrey Becom, Mitch Deobrowner, among several others.