Project Room: Lauren Kelley
Put Your Finger On The Button - Women Photographers
January 9th - February 13th, 2010
Press Release
“Put Your Finger On The Button” is new exhibition involving 15 photographic artists from various fields of concentration, ranging from commercial to documentary, auto- biographical, and photo-based art. In a caringly curated show New Image Art has selected each artist from a familial circle of friends and associates. Photographs containing friends of the gallery reflect the culture of the scene and a sense of accessibility.This collection of photographs testifies to the ingenuity and cunning that a photographer has to combine, along with an eye for a picture, in order to get a brilliant image. A compilation of portraiture, landscape, action, and journalistic styling demonstrates each woman’s capacity to display the truths that lie beyond the literal.
In The Project Room: Wild Seed, video installation by Lauren Kelley
Wild Seed is a single channel video that was completed in 2008. This piece was crafted as a response to the aggressive tilling of my hometown during Hurricane Ike on September 4th and shifts in logic after functioning without electricity for 14 days. During that time I was learning about man made upheaval occurring simultaneously across the country solely through the radio. Nodding to the work of French vocal legend Serge Gainsbourg, the narration is a found audio of a banal poem about the four seasons to aid a French online tutorial. The poem has been reedited and scrambled. The narration is supposed to function as the most dominant component of a tale about control shifts. The incompatible translation and audio was an attempt to seduce/ agitate viewers in the dark.
Lauren Kelley was born in 1975 in Baltimore, Maryland. She has a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kelley attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007 and was a Core Fellow at the Glassell School of Art in Houston from 2007-2009. She is the recipient of a 2008 Altoid Award. Her work has most recently been included in Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image since 1970 and No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston, both at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Kelley is currently Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where her work will be exhibited in July 2010.
Curated by Marsea Goldberg & Amber Abramson
Bios
ALEX PRAGER
Alex Prager was born in Los Angeles in 1979. She was raised by her grandmother in a small apartment in the suburb of Los Feliz and her curious and restless nature was evident early on. Her nomadic upbringing saw her splitting her time between Florida, California, and Switzerland without truly settling down long enough for a formal education. Prager's interest in art began in her adolescence, but it was in her early twenties that she began to focus on photography after being inspired by the work of William Eggleston.
In keeping with her independent spirit, she eschewed art school and began taking photographs on her own, teaching herself equipment and lighting through trial and error. Prager has since contributed to a number of publications including Details, i-D, Elle Japan, MOJO, and Complex. All the while, she continued to exhibit her work in various galleries worldwide.
After the release of her first book The Book Of Disquiet (2005) Prager was given her first solo show at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, CA entitled "Polyester", which was covered by the Los Angeles Times. Along with her 2008 exhibition at The Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, Prager is slated to exhibit in New York in 2009.
"Her photographs reveal a keen eye for the shining and the bizarre, a bit Annie Leibovitz, a bit Diane Arbus."- The Los Angeles Times
Alex Prager continues to live and work in the Los Angeles area.
ALMA CARMINA MARQUEZ
Alma Carmina Márquez is a sophomore at John Marshall High. She enjoys volleyball, free verse poetry, and drawing on her hands. She is self-taught in photography thus far, and intends to capture subtle happenings that the hustle and bustle of everyday life would overlook.
AMANDA MARSALIS
Amanda Marsalis was born in San Francisco. She began taking photos when her mother let her have bands play in their basement in high school. Amanda attended the California College of Art and Crafts. Her mother was a flight attendant and her father was pilot; therefore she has been traveling the world all her life and most of it with a camera. She now lives in Los Angeles.
ASHIRA SIEGEL
Ashira Siegel grew up Hasidic in Los Angeles, CA. She learned how to swim before she learned how to walk and started shooting photos when she was 8 yrs. old. Ashira lived in Worcester, MA and then Jerusalem before moving to Brooklyn, NY where she became enmeshed in urban bicycle culture while studying at Hunter College. Now back in Los Angeles, Ashira works in various methods of printing, sewing, photography, glass and ceramics. She remains loyal to documenting as a way of life and regrets ever leaving the house without a camera. Ashira is a member of Swimming Cities, Smockshop, and a secret screen printing studio in downtown LA, loosely called The Scum Dungeon.
BRANDY EVE ALLEN
Whether creating stop-motion videos or experimenting with expired films- Brandy’s work is not about what things look like, but rather what things feel like. Photographing herself and those close to her, the images are an empathetic daydream existing in a timeless world.
CHERYL DUNN
Cheryl Dunn lives and works in NYC. She is a documentary photographer and filmmaker whose works have appeared in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. Her film work often mixes drama, ironic comedy and documentary elements. Her 2nd book entitled "Some Kind of Vocation", was published by PictureBox and distributed by DAP in 2007. Her film "Bicycle Gangs of NY", premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and the same year another film " Come mute", played at Los Angeles film festival, after premiering in the touring museum show, "Beautiful Losers". A book of the same title was released featuring more than 30 of her photos as well as a documentary film that featured excerpts of her film, "Creative life store".
She is currently in production on a feature doc that centers around the Creative Growth Art Center, a school in Oakland California for artists with disabilities.
DEANNA TEMPLETON
Deanna Templeton lives in Huntington Beach, CA. Deanna Templeton has led the perfect suburban life. Coming from a dysfunctional family and emerging from tumultuous teenage years relatively unscathed, she now lives in a big suburban house with her skateboarder husband. She came to photography, (twice) through her travels, and soon
started documenting the people and places that make the Orange County suburbs so strange. Her work is a close-up glimpse into the youth culture and bland architecture that slips through the cracks in this mega-suburb.
JEANEEN LUND
Jeaneen Lund grew up in Hollywood, CA and discovered her love of photography while attending Fairfax High School and documenting her friends out at dance clubs. Spontaneity within the photographic process is essential to her work, whether creating a scenario or capturing a fleeting moment of the friends and life around her. Though mainly self-taught, she has turned photography into a career and some of her clients include Nintendo, Nike, Dazed and Confused, Nylon, Vice, Teen Vogue, ANP, Glamour UK, LÕOfficiel, SPIN, Capitol Records, Kemado Records.
Her photos have been exhibited internationally, including the Collette gallery in Paris. She’s had the pleasure of photographing Snoop Dogg, Bat For Lashes, Daft Punk, MIA and several others. She has directed, shot and edited two music videos, and many of her shoots have turned into dance parties!
KASSIA MEADOR
Kassia is a beach kid. Born and raised in California, Kassia started traveling the world as a professional surfer at 17 and has been on the road ever since. Through all the traveling and new places and faces she was seeing she wanted to start documenting her travels by shooting photos while on the road… Hanging and shooting with Thomas Campbell got her started playing around with cameras. It wasn’t until last year Thomas saw some of her most recent images and thought she should start showing them. A show in Japan in 2009 was her first at the greenroom festival. It was a success and she has shown in 2009 in California at the Surf Indian and New York at the Tribeca grand. Most recently she shot a fashion piece for Foam Magazine’s Oct-Nov 2009 issue, and is currently working on a book with David Mushegan to be released in 2011.
LAURA FLIPPEN
Laura Flippen grew up on a farm in Northern California, and currently makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received a BFA in Fine Art from the California College of the Arts. Laura's work seeks to capture scenes that are part of a continuum: a place where time is suspended to a point where scrutiny becomes possible once more. Her often stark & graphic images frequently show a lone figure, the leavings of human impact, or the absence of which punctuates the subtle sense of scale felt in the images. The sum and substance of her work shows a nostalgic sense of remoteness with a surprising awareness of the humanity of daily life.
LAUREN DUKOFF
Born and raised in Los Angeles, photographer Lauren Dukoff got her start documenting her surroundings, including long time friend and musician, Devendra Banhart. Banhart says Lauren struck him with her crystal-clear certainty that photography was exactly what she wanted to be doing, and additionally he says that someone so sure at such a young age impacted him
to pursue his own career. I knew I was a painter and a songwriter thanks to her. Lauren briefly studied at the Brooks Institute of Photography but left after
one year to cut her chops assisting photographer Autumn de Wilde, a friend and mentor who taught her to stick to her guns when it came to shooting film. Lauren says, shooting film is a blessing and a curse. When I was
photographing Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit all the other digital photographers were practically laughing at me in the photo pit because I had to reload my camera with film and would then miss shots. But in the end I
feel I have one great shot of Neil during the finale that just wouldn't have been the same if it were digital. There is such character and depth to film
its hard for me to see myself converting to digital photography. Lauren
initially learned photography from her father, Barry Dukoff, a director and photographer.
In her own right, Lauren has photographed artists such as Kim Gordon, Beck, Mary J. Blige, Lady Gaga, Morrissey, Neil Young, Adele and Sting. Chronicle
Books is released her first book in 2009, about the art and music movement of which Banhart is a part of. In 2008, she exhibited her work at the UCLA
Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in collaboration with a performance by Devendra Banhart and Gregory Rogove, as well as solo exhibitions in San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Paris and a group show in Sydney. Lauren¹s work has appeared in the pages of Elle, L¹uomo Vogue, Rolling Stone, Spin, Nylon, Tokion, The Guardian, Vice, Dazed and Confused, Another Magazine, and on the covers of Rolling Stone Germany, Rolling Stone Japan, and Soma, to name a few.
REBECCA WRIGHT
Rebecca Wright bought a Minox B spy camera from a junkie passing through a recording studio in the East Village in 1970's. With it, she captured the essence of this wild time. Rebecca was a rock n'roll wife, a dancer, model, and actress, that surrounded herself with such infamous characters as John Lurie, Jim Jarmusch, Nan Goldin, and the New York dolls. Her multi-faceted career brought her all around the world. Pregnant, and acting in a Sara Driver film, "sleepwalk", Rebecca befriended Ms. Goldin, who asked her to appear in what would become the first color centerfold in the history of the Village Voice. A friendship was formed, and Ms. Goldin became God-mother to Rebecca's child.
Living on East 3rd street in the 1970's and 1980's, you had to fight to survive. Io, Rebecca's daughter, was born in these tough times, and changed her focus in life. The little girl refused to wear dresses at age 3, because she hated the local cat-calls of 'Que Linda', and later, a grander transformation took place. At age six, while on tour with a theater company in Europe, Io wrote in her diary that she "had now become a boy". She lived her life as a boy from that moment until she was 15 years old.
These photographs have been selected from a collection that spans Io's years from 6-12 as she explores her masculine side, on and off camera. She played male rolls in film and theater, frolicked on the beach in swim trunks, and played sports on the streets of the Village with brut and swagger.
SUSANNE MELANIE BERRY
While physically aware of my visible stature at six feet and two inches tall, I often feel invisible, unnoticed and outside of social proceedings. The result is a sense of invincibility, a virtual removing of self-consciousness because I feel as if no one sees me in the moment. This perception of invisibility has also lead to an overpowering need to demarcate my actual presence in the world.
The use of readily identifiable materials or subjects allows one quick entrée into my work. The recontextualizations of these materials and subjects are meant to use language in the same way those committing clandestine activities attached another intervening meaning , i.e. 5-0 = huda = one time = the man = cops = copper = police, so that a message meant for specific ears can be spoken in public without revealing the secret intent of those words.
It is important in the creation these works that I am paradoxically accessible to as many people as possible aesthetically while still being able to communicate a specific underlying message to the persons who can identify with the concepts of un-joe-public-like experiences, sensations, or beliefs that we share beneath the wire and under the table while still being above board and in the public’s eye.
TAYLOR BRITTENHAM
Taylor Brittenham, self-taught photographer and Los Angeles native, has toured the country shooting bands for numerous companies and publications. GenArt proclaims, “Taylor Brittenham turns hard rock into fine art with her intimate, emotive shots of stars on stage." When not capturing musicians in action, she loves turning the lens on other vibrant personalities - her talented and extremely photogenic friends. Her goals for the future include mastering her craft, traveling the world, and riding off into the sunset in a ’71 SS El Camino.