A Separate Reality An eclectic exhibition of realistic visual artworks Curated by Samantha Mae Dorfman artists: Thomas Andersen - Aileen Bassis - Allen Maertz - Jennifer Mazza Douglas Newton - Leah Oates - Roger Sayre - Charlotte Schulz Rebecca Sittler - Brian St. Cyr - Randall J. Stoltzfus CLICK HERE FOR IMAGES OF ARTIST'S WORKS CLICK HERE FOR PROPOSAL ARTIST'S BIOS OR STATEMENTS- (on going) Thomas Andersen Aileen Bassis - Artist's Statement website: www.aileenbassis.com My work has centered around areas that I personally find frightening and/or disturbing—disease, violence, hatred, anti-Semitism, child abuse, psychiatric drugs for children, racial and social inequality, the holocaust, 9/11 and immigration. I look at all these issues as particular concerns that spiral into the political and general social realm. The Immigrant series uses prints on paper of fragments of faces combined with maps. The images are pierced and knotted with threads or wires. This work is about the tenuous hold immigrants often have on life here--caught between cultures, languages and seen as threats, victims, or burdens to society. I studied art (primarily painting, drawing and printmaking) in college and graduate school. I'm a self taught photographer. These pieces all use photocopy transfer prints. The prints are made by photocopying my black and white photographs. I then run the photocopy, covered in solvent through an etching press with paper, thereby transferring the image onto other papers. Allen Maertz - A Review website: www.allenmaertz.com ON ENCYCLOPEDIA AND ALLEN MAERTZ James Michael Pustorino September 16, 2003 On Encyclopedia and Cultural Artifact We have a great need to understand and explain the parameters of our existence. Modern civilization is in a steady process of discovery, investigation, collection and explanation of the world in which we live. Landscape is significant because of its human history, purpose, usefulness or geological drama. Studies of animal or plant life can lead to an understanding of greater systems that may govern natural law or affect how we maintain the resources we need to survive. Elements and artifacts in nature and in ancient or modern culture are being cultivated, packaged, and re-presented to us even as our civilized urban society advances upon the domains of nature and our human past. The concept Encyclopedia is expressive of this, suggesting the accumulation, ordering and presentation of knowledge, recalling the efforts of scientists and scholars to attain this knowledge from ancient times through the enlightenment and into our current age. How this information is being presented to us now; how our world and our culture chooses to define itself, examine and comment upon itself is the sprawling subject of this body of work that Allen Takichi Maertz has developed over the past few years. Photographing landscape sites and museums in New York, Hawaii, and Japan among other locations, there is a surprising consistency in his view despite the range of venues. The work ostensibly presents things people would go to see as sights and sometimes also the people seeing these things. They are scenes that to a certain extent any tourist with a camera could take a picture of. This, of course, is part of the point, the other side of which is the specificity of view: that no one else could take this picture in this exact way. One quality of the works is that they most often present the whole of their subject with a completeness that is close to a spectator’s idealized memory of such a scene. Another is that they capture subtle moments, interactions of light and objects, of frames within frames or scenes within scenes, of individuals as individuals responding to and moving through all this information and all these real and fabricated worlds. And in doing this, ennobled by the camera, they achieve a degree of eloquence; the individuals rise to the level of their history or find their place in the grandeur of nature, annotated though it may be. Without sentimentality and also without being a bland document or mere record, these images are about the process of thought, consideration and the act of seeing. On seeing and opinion "She saw the objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any opinion about them, and did not know what to talk about. And how awful it is not to have any opinions! One sees a bottle, for instance, or the rain, or a peasant driving in his cart, but what the bottle is for, or the rain, or the peasant, and what is the meaning of it, one can’t say…" Anton Chekhov Allen Maertz likes to say that photography is simply an opinion. There is a bit of facetiousness in this statement in that it alludes to an equality of perception and of the ability to convey that perception to the viewer of a photograph. Photography may be an opinion, but we know, as does he, that some opinions are worth more of our attention than others. Maertz’s evenhandedness towards his role as a photographer explains some of his interest in the viewers and tourists that he photographs. He gives them credit for having opinions, or for at least wanting to. Like the woman in Chekov’s story who changed her opinions as the father and husband who influenced her life passed through it; and finally on her own, did not know what to think - we as witnesses of life often try to understand what it is we are seeing, try to form opinions, but this is achieved with varying degrees of success and stability. At times we may think we know or understand something, yet that same understanding may eventually change, just as science theory changes when new facts emerge. Also there is the reality that no one really understands fully. We look, we read the information and we sometimes just ponder and do not know what to think. Yet it is awful to have no opinion; we must look, see, learn and discuss in order to be a part of the life around us. If we do not have a point of view, then how can our lives have any effect? This willingness to ask questions and observe the considerations of others permeates the work. We see deep in the black back room of one photograph, a sea illuminated on a screen. In front of it dark figures of people move, and above them, half obscured by the innermost doorframe hangs the globe of the earth. More people, brightly lit now, spill out of the room’s nearer doorframe. They are closer to us, yet none look toward us. Suspended in the space between them and the far entrance frame of the room we are viewing from is an older woman, silver and satellite–like, moving around a large model of the moon that rises on a shiny pole just inside our room. Metal tubing from some kind of rack close to the camera restrains us from entering, and a well-designed circle of light built into the floor separates us from the woman. We see the woman in the act of seeing. Elements of design on the part of both the photographer and the museum planners combine with elements of chance and human determination to create a play of sorts. A theater in which human witnesses observe and wonder and sometimes become actors in a drama greater than themselves. Jennifer Mazza - Artist's Statement I have found that emotion and physical sensation are multifold: that in sadness there can be joy, in happiness pain, in violence humor. My work portrays this varied experience by combining rich color and luscious handling of paint with imagery that appear both sensuous and painful. These conflicting emotions are also implied in the title of a recent series: Schadenfreude comes from the German word. It is a conjunction of two opposing sentiments: Schaden, meaning damage, and Freude joy. Each painting zeros in on a point of contact: hands poke and prod, rip open, or lovingly caress a disemboweled, red, jelly-filled doughnut. The paintings embrace the tension and tenderness that comprise the complicated relationships between persons and between one’s self and ones own body. Douglas Newton website:www.douglasnewtonpaintings.com Leah Oates - Artist's Statement website: www.leahoates.com PARADURA is series of photographs, installations and sculptures that explores the passage of time and the fragmentation of memory. In each moment numerous gestures are expressed, motions taken, sounds heard, and images recorded. I condense, double expose and blur moments and thus have constructed a more fluid and psychologically charged interpretation of time as it disappears and fractures. PARADURA also explores portals through space and the contrast between interior and exterior space by layering a circular shape over landscape imagery. The circle implies an eye peeking from inside or a opening a viewer can move through to be situated in an imaginary landscape that is suspended in time. The sculptural portion of my work aims to represent time as it is flowing without the interruption of measured increments. This reveals that the fragmentation of time is a fabrication of human perception as time moves continually on. The sculpture creates a conceptual contrast to the photographs, which are captured increments of specific moments in space and time. The process of making my work begins in a specific location gathering fragments of sound, image and corporeal response to environment and space via a camera, journal and found objects. I begin a focused collection process until I have accumulated many images and objects and then gradually narrow down to the most condensed grouping of elements. After I narrow the focus of the collection process I begin a series of photographs, books, digital prints, sculpture and installation until the work becomes defined. Roger Sayre This piece combines primitive photography with meditation, collaboration and endurance. Sitting consists of a very large custom-made pinhole camera that sits in the middle of a gallery, a chair and a set of lights on a timer. The camera is approximately the size of a phone booth and produces 20"x24" or 16"x20" photographic portraits using a paper negative. Subjects make an appointment to sit for a portrait during the exhibition. A sitting take one hour. As a collaborator, the subject sits as still as they can, meditating on their own image in a mirror mounted on the front of the camera. Sitting is as much about the participants’ collaboration and perseverance as it is about the actual portraits that result. To sit for a portrait is a individual and personal act, and is essential to truly experience the piece. The sitter is, in essence, on exhibit during the time they are sitting for their one-hour exposure, in the middle of the gallery. Once the portrait is processed it is hung on the gallery walls surrounding the camera. As the exhibition continues, more and more images are generated and the walls fill with portraits. The resulting portraits, in addition to harkening back to an earlier era of photography, resonate with a likeness of the sitter that is possibly truer than a traditional fraction-of-a-second photograph or snapshot. One cannot hold any single expression for the span of an hour; instead, all expressions are merged into one image. The sitter’s essence, distilled and averaged over time, is revealed. Charlotte Schulz - Artist's Statement My impulse to make images stems from a deep desire to grapple with both the outer events of my life as well as the corresponding interior experiences. In my paintings and drawings I attempt to set down or document both the emotional and the rational workings of my consciousness and, in doing so, present before me a visual equivalent of my subjective state. I wish to catch, hold, and make a place for fleeting emotions, origins of pain, moments of insight, echoes, and transformations-to sort out the stuff of life and render a story where the small, quotidian events are married with the large, archetypal patterns. The images are presented as fictions, psychological fictions. And the sources that I draw upon to formulate these narratives are visualizations of ideas discovered in books, images culled from poetry, art history, as well as found photographic references. My selection of the pictures and their parts is based upon a correspondence between my visual instincts and both the ideas and feelings that are unfolding in the image. These images, whether imagined or taken from existing sources, are then woven together into the fabric of the picture plane. They evolve into a complex web of vignettes stitched together through abstract passages and rendered space. Along with my intention to convey a descriptive state of being, my other interest is to return to the past, searching for stories which either resonate with or add to an understanding of my own experience. I draw upon classical and religious mythology that corresponds to the episodes and incidents of my life. Again I wish to weave: I look for the larger myths of human history told through words and pictures and bring them together with the stories of my intimate life. In knitting together these diverse stories and pictures, I strive to bring these moments, these memories of the world into the image and then to house them in a present form. With this, I seek both to collaborate with the larger flow of history and to create a conjunction between my subjective state and the collective. And, in the meditation of making images, I hope to initiate for myself and the viewer the possibility for revisioning and enhancing who we are and what is our place in the world. Rebecca Sittler - Artist's Statement website: www.rebeccasittler.com I’m looking for tipsy metaphoric relationships between the naïve and the sublime, the goofy and the sensual—a conversation between the throes of the romantic and the chores of the week.  This pseudo-symbolic language of vanitas fumbles between humor, lightness, empathy, mortality and acceptance. In this work my love for conceptual art, performance art and critical theory is married to an aesthetic sensibility borrowed from the history of painting.  I often alter the objects physically, change their spatial relationships, or give them personalities within a suggested drama -- creating a sense of play which engages art historical references, contemporary culture, and my own frailties and pathos.  The domestic interior provides the stage for these performances where self-conscious kitsch, artistic quandaries and diurnal rituals are transfigured by the aesthetics of painting and the camera’s visual gestalt.  In an instant, the light of timelessness fondles a sometimes indigestible fabric of being. Brian St. Cyr - Artist's Statement website: www.brianstcyr.com Through my invented landscapes and small-scale dioramas I hope to question the relationship between city-life and the rural, nature vs. the urban, the meadow against the grid. Some questions I am raising are as follows. Is nature more desirable than the city? Are we predisposed to flourish in one over the other? Are the distinctions between the two real or imagined? And, as an artist, what is the more fertile ground in which to plant oneself? Is it preferable to collect ones thoughts on a nighttime hike while staring into the darkness? Or is the unrelenting noise of the grid the richer lode from which to mine? After initially posing these questions it is only by now removing the self-imposed duality of nature vs. city that I have been able to successfully create the more "natural" synthesis of the two. As this internal struggle, for me a daily obsession, plays out in my mind it only comes to fruition through my dioramas. They are the physical manifestation of this internal struggle. I take comfort in my sense of dislocation and use the dioramas to create a physical space I find non-existent in my everyday experience. I am an artist with an overly acute sensitivity to my immediate surroundings. Life on the grid can be brutal. Extended time in nature often produces feelings of separation from ones fellow man. It is only through the co-mingling of two seemingly disparate environments that I create my oasis of palimpsest tranquility. Randall J. Stoltzfus website: www.sloweye.net