Here Now: Contemporary Photographers of the Hudson Valley
August 12 through September 26, 2023
Cur ated by Jane Hart
Tex t by Dan Cameron
Car olyn Marks Blackwood
Sha ron Core
Tim Davis
Phy llis Galembo
Lyl e Ashton Harris
Mar vin Heiferman
Dan a Hoey
Car men Lizardo
Tan ya Marcuse
Pet e Mauney
Qia na Mestrich
Jef frey Milstein
And rew Moore
Car la Rhodes
Set h David Rubin
Rya n Rusiecki
Oli ver Wasow
Special thanks to Doug Milford for the conception and origination of the Here Now exhibition.
The curator also wishes to thank Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Tobey Crockett, Jen Dragon, Lisa McDonald, Ursula Morgan, and Oliver Wasow for their assistance in the production of this exhibition and its catalogue
Cover image Tim Davis Former Country Club, 2019 (Detail) Digital photograph
Here Now presents the work of a selection of established contemporary photographers living in the Hudson Valley. Historically, the sweeping vistas, gently sloping mountains, shimmering river, waterfalls, creeks, pastoral farmlands, and charming hamlets have drawn creatives of all stripes to this region. The latest influx of critically acclaimed artists has similarly made a marked impression on the cultural landscape. The opportunity to capture the essence of this time and place is what drives my desire to organize this show and its accompanying catalogue. The chosen individuals and their work reflect the impact that such a convergence of talent creates, further contributing to the environs’ legacy of artistic excellence a dynamic scene, one worthy of those Hudson Valley predecessors, who had so notably established their own renowned creative movement some two centuries ago.
Together, these artists provide a compelling and insightful reflection of and on the present moment. They employ a broad variety of techniques and approaches to relay narratives primarily reflecting differing cultural backgrounds, identity issues, and relationships to nature. Their photography varies in terms of aesthetics — ranging from highly refined formalism to capturing candid moments of current societal mores.
Some of these approaches harken back to representation rooted in the Hudson River School of painters, with works that in various ways highlight the unique splendor of the valley’s landscape. Tim Davis, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Tanya Marcuse, Pete Mauney, Andrew Moore, and Ryan Rusiecki each focuses a lens on diverse scenes that reflect the often profound majesty of the area’s flora and fauna. Some of them may also capture the unmistakable creep of urban life into the otherwise lush world of the valley’s surrounding vegetation and the river’s shifting currents. A selection of images reveal the decrepitude of once elegant structures and interiors, showing grand homes, vacation destinations, and other buildings in varying states of decay.
While not showing a representation of actual places, Oliver Wasow uses the revolutionary process of AI (artificial intelligence) to conjure dystopian, imaginary places that meld past and future worlds of abandoned buildings, industrial mining fields, and outdated infrastructure imagery that is both haunting and eerily familiar. Jeffrey Milstein’s photographs get up close to the behemoths of modern aircraft and render their imposing forms with distinctive clarity. Marvin Heiferman’s personal grief is rendered in quiet and profound images, marking time in a diaristic fashion since the untimely passing of his soulmate, Maurice Berger. Also suggesting the passage of time are the still lifes by Sharon Core, sourced through vintage paintings that she painstakingly recreates via a reverse trompe l’oeil effect— photography imitating painting.
Identity and the self as seen through multifaceted cultural norms are the terrain of Phyllis Galembo, Lyle Ashton Harris, Dana Hoey, Carmen Lizardo, Qiana Mestrich, and Seth David Rubin. Whether focusing the camera on themselves or others, their images share narratives that speak to the ways in which experience and self-expression are shaped by ethnic histories, often passed down and filtered through generations.
Through these assembled photographic works, a rich and often poetic tapestry is presented, not merely as an instant, but as a distinctive period within the informed historical context of this storied place among rich artistic legacies.
Jane Hart, Saugerties, NY, 2023Goin’ Up to the Country
Although it may only register as a minor blip alongside more sweeping demographic trends of our era, for me the ongoing migration of East Coast artists away from New York City and into the surrounding suburbs/smaller cities/exurbs/countrysides, which started with no small urgency during the economic recession of 2009-11 and may have reached peak exodus in the 2020-21 pandemic, nonetheless represents the most profound geographical transformation of the art community during my lifetime. To the degree that there still exists an entity which we collectively refer to as the “New York art world,” it has increasingly come to resemble a scattering of the tribes across hundreds of square miles and a half-dozen states, as the once-irreplaceable Saturday stroll to catch up on what are now referred to as brick-and-mortar galleries has permanently morphed into the displaced, timeless corporate feel of international art fairs and Instagram feeds.
Does this mean that artists in the Northeast US no longer share a genuine sense of community? This is the unspoken question hovering over Jane Hart’s selection of seventeen photo-based artists for her exhibition Here Now. As entire chunks of our lives continue to be pulled inexorably into the voracious attention economy, Hart seems to suggest that we have reached the end of the long era when the public square constituted the art world’s begrudging yet purposefully shared home. Granted the city has always provided an ideal public forum within which some form of artistic consensus could always be debated in person, as points were debated and conventions shed through endless meetings, social events, and chance encounters. But if everything today can be found online, why can’t artists simply choose to build their lives in other places, reaping the benefits of life in a non-urban environment? Of course, artists have been doing that all along, as Hart’s thoughtful selection reflects, but in the greater Hudson Valley this transformation has gradually taken on the characteristics of a slow-moving cultural phenomenon that directly challenges the urban hegemony.
This doesn’t mean that each artist included in Here Now has turned to nature as their refuge and muse. The change is more subtle than that, but its presence can still be glimpsed in the visual substratum of open spaces, vegetation, natural lighting, and relaxed demeanors. These are not day-trippers or weekend warriors; they are pioneers in the same way that the artists who first explored the downtown lofts of Manhattan in the 1960s and 1970s had to develop a new mode of urban life that was soon copied widely as a glamorous lifestyle, but nonetheless emerged from conditions of sheer necessity, and from the persistent need to adapt to ever-changing circumstances.
Not surprisingly, a lightly worn idealism regarding nature abounds in the photographs of some of the invited artists, like those by Carla Rhodes, whose Beneath the Bird Feeder series of photographs, consisting of images triggered automatically when her winged or furry neighbors came to avail themselves of her feeder’s cold-weather offerings, was organized according to strict rules the artist developed about the scale, placement, contents, and maintenance of the feeders. These rules, which were informed by her extended research into the ethical treatment of animals, establish an intimate scale with their subjects, are similar to the process that takes place in making the photographs of Tanya Marcuse, which plunge into the theme of mortality by reconstructing the flora and fauna seen in the backgrounds of medieval tapestries as a form of a memento mori, where every burst of life serves as a harbinger of inevitable death. In her large-format photograph Woven #26, Marcuse gives us a closeup of both the ripening vegetation the make up the surface, and the decaying plant matter from which it has emerged in the background. If tapestries serve as a key art historical reference in Marcuse’s works, Dutch still life paintings provide a jumping-off for the photographs of Sharon Core, each of which requires elaborate, time-consuming staging in order to perfectly capture the aesthetic of a particular era. Core’s interest in visual exactitude is matched by her holistic approach to the materials in her compositions, which in large degree are products of her acquired skills at gardening, baking, and antiquing.
If Rhodes’, Marcuse’s, and Core’s subject matter is informed by intimate scale, the photographs of Carolyn Marks Blackwood often appear outside the bounds of what can be objectively measured. An ardent observer of the Hudson River throughout all its seasonal transformation, Blackwood’s technique depends in part on patiently waiting to capture the perfect combination of pictorial elements within her photos, in a conscious nod to 19th century notions of the sublime. Similarly, the whispers of narrative that appear in the two photos of Blackwood’s Story Series seen here, which capture the traces of human presence without the actual humans, are rooted in her parallel career of screenwriting and film production. By comparison, the documentarian aesthetic that Ryan Rusiecki brings to his photographs of houses at night lends his subjects a formal, almost clinical, air, as if their explicit purpose is to demonstrate the law of entropy, in which everything in the universe is moving apart. For Rusiecki, the implicit presence of the Hudson River, whether or not it is visible in the encroaching darkness, or indirectly, through its weathering of the structures, informs his ongoing investigation into the vocabulary of manmade shelters.
While some of the Hudson Valley’s current crop of photo-based artists prefer to commune directly with their natural surroundings, the interaction of humans in this non-urban environment sets up a telling contrast with earlier generations of American photographers, who sometimes seemed to be pointing their camera at small-town or suburban life as a way to rationalize their decision to distance themselves as much as possible from that world. In Tim Davis’ photographs, by contrast, the moments and passages of small-town life convey a solemnity and timelessness that is a visual wonder to behold, reflecting his decision two decades ago to make a rupture with New York City in both the geographical and cultural, and to be open to exploring whatever it is that he found upstate. In the works shown here, Carmen Lizardo also explores tucked away nooks and crannies in this country, with the added wrinkle that she is the primary subject of her photos, in which she conspicuously deploys the U.S. flag as a kind of talisman or aspirational symbol. Lizardo’s deeper subject is how immigration informs her subjective experience of these remote corners, to which she is drawn by her imagined histories of the labor that was performed there.
The back-story to the unguarded photographs of Qiana Mestrich is that of her own family, who were among the many who made the permanent transition from city life to country life during the early months of the pandemic. As a first-time landowner with young children, Mestrich’s ongoing discovery of the freedoms that come with being surrounded by nature inspired these images of herself and her children engaging in dance while wearing handmade costumes, encouraging them through play to become attuned to grounding themselves within the natural world. People and their actions, whether shown or inferred, are also the subject of Dana Hoey’s photographs, which typically envelop themselves in an appearance of the offhanded everyday, while simultaneously drawing from a deep well of empathy. If a narrative thread can be sensed in these images from her 2008 series Experiments in Primitive Living, it’s because in this body of work Hoey envisioned a world after having been turn asunder by a series of ecological collapses, rendering humans as an endangered, migrating species, scraping out a living from their post-apocalyptic environment.
As Mestrich’s and Hoey’s images illustrate in quite different ways, humans share comfort and a sense of groundedness through participating in rituals, a quality that has inspired Phyllis Galembo to devote decades to documenting ritual dress and masquerade in Africa and Mexico. The images presented here, and those in her 2019 book Mexico Masks and Rituals were taken at Mexican festivals, and demonstrate Galembo’s commitment as a photographer to bringing out the inherent artistry of the costumes and masks that she’s documenting, even in those cases where the wearer is entirely concealed by what they’re wearing. Lyle Ashton Harris has also employed the language of ritual and performance with his recent photographs that explore the dynamic of Black bodies in the landscape, but from a position in which the subjectivity of the moment is emphatically underscored. Mask-wearing figures at varying distances, brandishing translucent sheets of colored plastic that catch the sunlight in unexpected waves, create enigmatic configurations while surrounded by Edenic groves of trees, which in turn reinforce a quiet atmosphere of personal, intimate immersion.
The domestic environment is generally of great interest to anyone who wishes to decode a social environment, and the photographs of Andrew Moore serve as a kind of x-ray into the layerings of personal histories that tend to accumulate when a particular place has been inhabited for generations by the same family. His special interest in the interior of homes stems from their unrivaled capacity to speak of the passing of time, both as a recorded history and an indirect, nature-inflicted tale. Although they are not exactly interiors, Seth David Rubin’s cubist-inspired series of photographs titled Placements, which are shot and printed exclusively under analog conditions, rely on the intricate placement of mirrors at the moment the shutter clicks to produce a splintered visual field that evokes emotional complexity, while also suggesting a heightened level of intimacy with the subject.
As if to remind us that eventually the most cutting-edge technologies become antiquated, Jeffrey Millstein’s photographs emerge directly from his lifelong fascination with, and devotion to, airplanes. After getting his pilot’s license at age 17 and having a career in the air, he has since spent countless hours watching planes land and take off wherever he’s lived, as a way to recuperate the sense of wonder he felt as a boy, watching takeoffs and landings for hours on end, and many of his photographs capture images of planes that belong to an era of flying which has already receded into the past. The speed at which the world zooms by is also the literal subject of Pete Mauney’s short videos, which are essentially compilations of spectral phenomena in the form of blinking, reflected lights. While striving for the maximum aesthetic impact in his images, he is also committed to sharing what he considers to be examples of communication between the living and the dead, for which the final result serves as an encrypted version of the underlying message.
But recent technologies don’t tend to be limited to their given parameters once they are in the hands of artists. For the well-known and respected photography curator and writer, Marvin Heiferman, the sudden passing of his husband, the cultural historian and curator Maurice Berger, at the beginning of the pandemic unexpectedly led him to undergo his grief and mourning through Instagram, applying his finely-honed skills to bend social media to become a useful tool for others undergoing the experience of great, boundless loss. At the further end of the technology spectrum are the recent photographs of Oliver Wasow, whose work since the 1980s has astutely explored the philosophical implications of technology applied to photography. Beginning decades ago with appropriation, and currently engaged with AI, Wasow eagerly explores the tool’s boundless potential for re-assembling imaginary tropes from different eras and genres, generating a thick pictorial atmosphere of romance and adventure, even in the complete absence of a tangible narrative. And like the other sixteen photographers in Here Now, Wasow’s images exemplify the ironic truism that perhaps the greatest luxury that comes from living in the country is that you never have to go to the country to see what it’s really like.
Dan Cameron is a curator and writer who lives in lower Manhattan
Carolyn Marks Blackwood
Sharon Core
Tim Davis
Phyllis Galembo
Lyle Ashton Harris
Marvin Heiferman
Dana Hoey
Carmen Lizardo
Tanya Marcuse
Pete Mauney
Qiana Mestrich
Jeffrey Milstein
Andrew Moore
Carla Rhodes
Seth David Rubin
Ryan Rusiecki
Oliver Wasow
Carolyn Marks Blackwood
She slipped out of the house. She was just fourteen and ready for her big adventure. 2013 Archival pigment print 62 x 62 inches
Every night, he longed for her. 2016 Archival pigment print 62 x 62 inches
My photographs often specifically and exclusively depict nature, predominantly featuring shifting pictorial elements of the Hudson River’s watery surface and skies above. While the Story Series narrative photographs have also been made in the region, and are similarly void of people, these different scenes belie a human presence more distinctly by including a narrative caption at the bottom of each photograph. The resulting compositions are psychologically charged and mysterious, leaving the viewer to contemplate a myriad of dramatic possibilities, unfolding within these captured moments. In this manner, I expand upon my process, reflecting my experience as a film producer and screenwriter.
Carolyn Marks Blackwood (born 1951, Anchorage, AK) is an American photographer, film producer, screenwriter and musician who resides in Rhinebeck, NY. She has exhibited internationally with a traveling exhibition (with accompanying monograph) of her Story Series photographs in Spain, 2019-21. She will have a show of the Story Series at the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut in 2024. Blackwood was named one of the 5 Artists to Watch in the 2015 photography edition of Artnet News. Art historians Barbara Rose, Carol Diehl, and Carter Ratcliff are among those who have written about her work. She is represented by Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles and Adamson Editions, Virginia.
Sharon Core
Early American, Apples in Porcelain Basket, 2007 Chromogenic print 15 x 18 1/4 inches
© Sharon Core Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC
Early American, Lemons, 2007 Chromogenic print 14 3/4 x 18 1/4 inches
© Sharon Core Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC
1634, from the series 1606-1907, 2011 Archival pigment print 26 x 20 3/4 inches
© Sharon Core Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC
My work explores the boundaries of painting and the veracity of photography through the restaging of masterworks of the still life genre from the Dutch Golden Age to the Pop Art era of the 1960s. I research and recreate painted representations of the past from photographic reproductions with diligent attention to style and period details. I grow heirloom fruits and flowers, bake cakes, and collect period porcelain, glass, and other props to recreate a composition, one that is authentic to the antecedent picture, by which the image is mirrored back onto itself and engages with still life’s long history of illusionism.
Sharon Core (born 1965, New Orleans, LA) began exhibiting her photographs in New York City in 1998 and has since shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in major public collections including the Guggenheim, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, and the Phillips Collection, Washington DC. She was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant in 2000. Core’s monograph Early American was published by Radius Books in 2012. She received a BFA in painting from the University of Georgia in 1987 and an MFA in photography from the Yale University School of Art in 1998. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York City and currently lives and works in Esopus, New York.
Tim Davis
Selections from the series Upstate Event Horizon
Graves and Bales, 2018
Migliorelli Compost, 2017
Axes and Peach Petals, 2018 Night Fishing Hassids, 2020 Huckleberry Point, 2017
Digital photographs Dimensions variable
Upstate Event Horizon is an expansive, ongoing series of photographs about the feeling of living here in the Hudson Valley. An “event horizon” is the exact place where the gravity of a black hole relinquishes its hold on light. I moved back in 2004, and felt that the gravity of NYC didn’t hold here. Everything didn’t feel “seen.” I have walked through 300 villages, cities, hamlets, spending thousands of hours traversing this beautiful, strange, neglected place for all its complicated beauty, promise and sadness. I plan to build a mobile exhibition space to bring the work back to the communities where it was made.
Tim Davis (born 1969, Blantyre, Malawi) is an artist, writer, and musician. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are included in the permanent collections of many prominent museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Guggenheim, and the Walker Art Center. He has published ten books of photographs, the latest being I’m Looking Through You (Aperture: 2021) and Hallucinations (Punctum Press: 2023). Aperture will publish Upstate Event Horizon, including the work shown here, in 2024. He was awarded the Rome Prize in 2007, and has taught photography at Bard College since 2004.
Phyllis Galembo
Bounty of Life, Mexico, 2019 Fujiflex print 30 x 30 inches
Photographer, Car nival Mexico, 2017 Fujiflex print 30 x 30 inches
I have been photographing ritual dress and masquerade primarily in Africa and the Americas since 1985. The images express a phenomenal range of political, artistic, theatrical, social, and religious meanings. The images included in this exhibition are from my long term project based on Mexican costumes. My Mexico project, and its series of portraits, is ongoing and now extends beyond my 2019 monograph Mexico Masks Rituals; the project continues to grow.
Phyllis Galembo (born 1952, New York, NY) was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2014 and has received several awards from the NY Council for the Arts. She has had one person exhibitions at the International Center for Photography, the George Eastman House, and others. Her photographs were included in the 2013 Venice Biennale exhibition, The Encyclopedic Palace. Phyllis Galembo’s books include: Sodo (Datz: 2021); Mexico Masks Rituals (Radius/DAP: 2019); Maske (Aperture: 2012, 2016); Divine Inspiration: From Benin to Bahia (1993: University of New Mexico Press); Vodou: Visions and Voices of Haiti (1998: Ten Speed Press); and Dressed for Thrills: 100 Years of Halloween Costumes and Masquerade (2002: Abrams). Phyllis Galembo is a Professor Emeritus at the University at Albany, State University of New York, department of Art and Art History.
Lyle Ashton Harris
Flash of the Spirit, 2018 Dye sublimation print on aluminum 18 x 24 inches
Shadow Play, 2018 Dye sublimation print on aluminum 36 x 27 inches
All of my work privileges subjectivity, as opposed to thinking that one’s personal experience, one’s subjectivity, can be left in the margins. In actuality, personal subjectivity is central, and it’s informed by, and in turn informs, intellectual discourse in the public sphere— each represents interdependent tracks that sometimes collide, sometimes coincide.
Excerpt from Lyle Ashton Harris in conversation with Thomas Allen Harris, Today I Shall Judge Nothing (page 277-278).
Lyle Ashton Harris (born 1965, Bronx, NY) has cultivated a diverse artistic practice, ranging from photography and collage to video installation and performance art, examining the impact of race, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic and globally through intersections of the personal and the political. Harris has been widely exhibited internationally, and a solo exhibition spanning three decades is currently being presented by the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (Waltham, Massachusetts), then traveling to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), and the Queens Museum (New York) in 2023-24. His work is now on display in group exhibitions at the Tate Modern (London, UK) titled Performing Genders, Performing Selves and at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Zürich, CH) titled Acts of Friendship - Act 2 His work is included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); MoMA (New York); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); and the Tate Modern (London, UK), among many others. Harris’s most recent photography monograph was published by Aperture and an exhibition catalog on his Ektachrome Archive series was published by ICA Miami in 2023. He is represented by LGDR (New York) and David Castillo (Miami).
Marvin Heiferman
Selections from the series Why We Look: Maurice and Me, Love and Loss, Photography and Memory, 2020-ongoing Digital images and text Dimensions variable
Three days after my husband – cultural historian, curator and writer, Maurice Berger – died of COVID-related illness in March 2020, I began posting photos to Instagram (@whywelook) daily, documenting what was happening and tracking grief, itself, in images representing what I was seeing, thinking, and feeling. On a social media platform known for its relentless branding of happiness, seeing pictures of my 24/7 sadness, confusion, and the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other mode I was operating in, allowed for a global community to form, express consolation and support and, as importantly, created a space for people to share stories of their own interactions with love and loss.
Curator and writer Marvin Heiferman (born 1948, Brooklyn, NY) organizes exhibition and online projects about photography and visual culture for venues including: The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, International Center of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New Museum. Author of fifteen books including Photography Changes Everything (2012) and editor of many others, Heiferman’s essays are regularly featured in museum catalogs, artist monographs, magazines, newspapers, and on blogs and websites.
Dana Hoey
THAW - Julia, 2008 Archival inkjet print 20 x 24 inches
DROUGHT - Dakota Firepit, 2008 Archival inkjet print 24 x 20 inches
THAW - Oil Cave, 2008 Archival inkjet print 14 x 10 inches
These pieces are from a project called Experiments in Primitive Living from 2008. In it I imagined a world following a disaster; there was a downfall of ash, a subsequent freeze because of the blocked sun, a thaw, a flood, and then a drought. It featured several kinds of color images including portraits of surviving persons, a world gone toxic, and tools and details of life following apocalypse. It all looks too real, now, but art goes on.
Dana Hoey (born 1966, San Francisco, CA) is a photographer and social practice artist living in upstate New York. She is currently attending the Harvard Divinity School to become an interfaith hospital chaplain, as well as to deepen and reconsider her aesthetic practice. She has shown at institutions such as the Hirschorn Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, State University of New York in Albany, and the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in Baltimore, Maryland. Three books are available on her work: Experiments in Primitive Living, The Phantom Sex, and Profane Waste. She has taught at Columbia University, Bard College and the School of Visual Arts., and been a visiting critic at Yale, Cornell, and Tulane, among others. She is represented by Petzel Gallery, NYC and Analixe Gallery, Geneva.
Carmen Lizardo
Club Gallistico, 2022 Pigment print 30 x 44 inches
Kitchen Floor, 2022 Pigment print 30 x 44 inches
Americana: Portraits with Flags is an evolving project that began during my travels across the American South and Midwest, and the Dominican Republic. During my travels, I found myself inexplicably drawn to forgotten and abandoned places that survived. As an immigrant, these locations, discarded by others, seemed to possess a sense of irony and connection that spoke to me. Through these self-portraits, I aim to give voice to the immigrant experience in the U.S. and to honor immigrants’ presence in a world that often overlooks them.
Carmen Lizardo (born 1970, La Romana, Dominican Republic) is a Caribbean artist for whom using multiple media is essential. Her work utilizes alternative photo processes, printmaking, drawing, and video. Lizardo’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She has received several awards, including a Women Studio Workshop Book Production Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship (nominated in both Painting and Photography), The Academy of Arts and Letters, and an Enfoco fellowship. Lizardo was one of five American Artists of Latino descent awarded an international travel and production grant from the U.S. Department of Cultural Affairs. Her works and process are included in two academic books: Gum Printing: A Step-by-Step Manual Highlighting Artists and Their Creative Practice (Focal Press) and The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes (Cengage Learning). She holds a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Digital Art from Pratt Institute.
Tanya Marcuse
Woven Nº 26, 2017 Archival pigment print 34 x 98 inches
Through the medium of photography, in my series Woven, I imagine myself introducing time (and so mortality), into the flora and fauna which make up the millefleurs backgrounds of medieval hunting and falconry tapestries. These photographs sometimes take weeks to compose, and during this process of composition, of collecting, arranging, burning, painting, and transplanting, there is change. Flowers wither, spiders build webs, new shoots emerge, and corpses decay. In these elaborate tableaux, the inexorable movements of nature are shown forth and growth and decay, beauty and terror, life and death are woven together.
Tanya Marcuse (born 1964, New York, NY) makes large-scale photographs which investigate the imperiled natural world in elaborately constructed tableaux. In 2005, she embarked on a three part, 14-year project –Fruitless | Fallen | Woven – moving from iconic, serial photographs of trees in Fruitless to immersive, allegorical works in Fallen and Woven. Fueled by the Biblical narrative of the fall from Eden, these related projects use increasingly fantastical imagery and elaborate methods of construction to explore cycles of growth and decay, as well as the dynamic tension between the passage of time and the photographic medium. Marcuse’s photographs are in many collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the George Eastman Museum. Her books include Undergarments and Armor (Nazraeli Press: 2005); Wax Bodies (Nazraeli Press: 2012); Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Press: 2019); and Ink (Fall Line Press: 2021). Tanya Marcuse is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter S. Reed Grant, and MacDowell Fellowships. She teaches at Bard College.
Pete Mauney
Stills from Spectral Transmissions, 2020-ongoing Duration variable
While photographically active during both daylight and nightlight, it is in the dark that I feel my deepest groove. As subject matter, I lean towards blinking lights. Whether they be airplanes in the New Jersey sky, truck reflections off home and business windows, or fireflies in the Hudson Valley landscape, I am listening as hard as I can to what they are saying while also trying to bring them home for all of us to see.
This body of work, which I call Spectral Transmissions, started out (and has continued) as an imaginary conversation through the ether with a dead friend and teacher. While our communications will remain private, being as they are imaginary, I present them here in their encrypted form for you to attempt your own translation. This work is composed of both long exposure still images and layered real-time videos.
Pete Mauney (born 1967, Miami, FL) has been educated extensively in both filmmaking and photography, and his mediums of photo and video frequently inform each other, and sometimes overlap and intertwine. He lives and works in and around Tivoli, NY.
Qiana Mestrich
Bestowal, 2019 Archival pigment print 27 x 16 inches
Queen Imogen, 2019 Archival pigment print 27 x 16 inches
Integrating the outdoor studio, staged portraiture, still life, and family photography, THRALL (2017-2020) is my response as a mother to national conversations around whiteness and the value of Black life. The title for this series is borrowed from a book of poems published in 2012 by Natasha Trethewey that explores racial attitudes and stereotypes using both a personal and historical lens. Many of the images in THRALL were made during the pandemic, when my family moved from Brooklyn to upstate NY, our first experience as landowners. This privilege gave us the opportunity to (re)discover an unenclosed, Black relationship to the outdoors. Collaborating with my children, I allow them to dance, be unruly, wondrous, and curious in Nature, moving towards an understanding and acceptance of all things natural.
Qiana Mestrich (born 1977, New York, NY) is a photography-focused, interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator based in Brooklyn and Saugerties, New York. She has been exhibited worldwide including the international Triennial RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt/RheinMain and London Art Fair’s Photo50. Mestrich has written essays on photography for exhibition catalogs and published critical writing in art journals such as Light Work’s Contact Sheet and En Foco’s Nueva Luz. She was a 2022 recipient of the Magnum Foundation’s Counter Histories grant for her project on the history of women of color in the corporate workplace.
Jeffrey Milstein
16 Side Views, 2006 Archival inkjet print 40 x 80 inches
Growing up in Los Angeles in the fifties, I was fascinated with airplanes and flying. One of my favorite pastimes was hanging out at the airport under the flight path of landing aircraft. Once, while still in high school, a few of us secretly climbed the high intensity approach lights at night to get even closer to the landing aircraft. I loved airplanes and earned my pilot’s license at seventeen. When I began photography (my third career) in 2000, I went back to the airport to see if I could capture those thrilling moments, being so close to the airliners as they come back to earth. Flight relies on the most advanced engineering and technologies that we have. Watching a complex jumbo Boeing-747 takeoff, or gently touch down at the end of its journey, like it was nothing at all, never ceases to amaze me. Over the years, the work has become a typology documenting the front, side, and underneath of airliners, and airlines, many of which are no longer flying. The work was published by Abrams in 2007 as AirCraft: The Jet as Art. It is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
Jeffrey Milstein (born 1944, Bronx, NY) is a photographer, architect, and pilot. His photographs have been exhibited and collected throughout the United States and Europe, and have been featured in publications including The New York Times, Time, Esquire, Fortune, Harpers, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, GEO, GQ, Paris Match, Liberation, Graphis, and Die Zeit. He has won numerous awards, including Graphis Gold Awards, and has been featured on CNN and the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley. His work is in the collections of museums including The Scottish National Galleries, LACMA, George Eastman House, Musée de l'Elysée, Portland Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where he had a yearlong solo show, with nine of his photographs on permanent display. His books include Paris From the Air (Rizzoli, LA NY, Thames and Hudson); AirCraft: The Jet as Art (Abrams, Cuba, Monacelli); and Small Dreams (Schiffer). He is represented by Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, Benrubi Gallery in New York, Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, Bau-Xi Gallery in Canada, Messums Gallery in London, and ARTITLEDcontemporary in The Netherlands. His studio is in Kingston, New York, and he lives in Woodstock, New York.
Andrew Moore
Hath a way, Onteora Park, NY, 2020 Archival inkjet print 30 x 40 inches Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC
Susanna 70, Troy, NY, 2020 Archival inkjet print 30 x 40 inches Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC
My photographic interests have always laid at the busy intersections of history, particularly at those locations where numerous tangents of time overlap and tangle.
Andrew Moore (born 1957, Old Greenwich, CT) is widely acclaimed for his photographic series, usually taken over many years, which record the effect of time on the natural and built landscape. Moore’s photographs are held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Library of Congress, among many other institutions. He received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2014, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the J M Kaplan Fund. His publications include Blue Alabama (2019), Dirt Meridian (2015), Cuba (2012), Detroit Disassembled (2010), Governors Island (2004), Russia (2005), and Inside Havana (2002).
Carla Rhodes
Technicolor Snowstorm, Northern Cardinal, from the series Beneath the Bird Feeder, 2021 Inkjet print on Canon Pro Luster photo paper 13 x 19 inches
Raider Of The Lost Birdseed, Eastern Gray Squirrel, from the series Beneath the Bird Feeder, 2021 Inkjet print on Canon Pro Luster photo paper 13 x 19 inches
Munchies, Norther n Cardinal, from the series Beneath the Bird Feeder, 2021 Inkjet print on Canon Pro Luster photo paper 13 x 19 inches
Dive, Black-Capped Chickadee, from the series Beneath the Bird Feeder, 2021 Inkjet print on Canon Pro Luster photo paper 13 x 19 inches
Beneath the Bird Feeder offers a fresh bird's eye view of the wildlife inhabiting my garden in the Catskill Mountains, New York during the solitary winter season of 2020-2021. Amid the seclusion imposed by the pandemic, I embarked on this intimate project, using my DSLR camera trap to document the intricate behaviors of our feathered and furry neighbors. From the early morning arrival of Dark-Eyed Juncos to the twilight visits of Northern Cardinals, I managed to capture novel perspectives on the cherished pastime of bird feeding. The resulting images have been featured in publications such as The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Science Friday, The New York Times and more.
Carla Rhodes (born 1982, Louisville, KY) is a conservation photographer who tells visual tales of the natural world, focusing on the overlooked and misunderstood. From endangered storks to everyday moths, her work is a testament to the beauty found in the unexpected. Her journey, once rooted in the realms of comedic ventriloquism, now flourishes in the wild, capturing images that inspire and educate. Skillfully morphing her narrative craft from the stage’s spotlight to the boundless theater of the wilderness, she is truly a wild storyteller, unveiling the hidden narratives of the unsung heroes of the wild.
Seth David Rubin
Burgess, from the series Placements, 2023 Pigment print, 28 x 42 inches
Once, from the series Placements, 2023 Pigment print, 42 x 28 inches
By making photographs of mirror pieces that I have positioned on location, I deconstruct my subject matter. My series, Placements, is about how we can choose to see and experience things differently. These are not Photoshop creations. By moving the individual mirrors in my scene, I make photographs that are closer to an emotional or fictitious reading than a realistic one.
Seth David Rubin (born 1968, Lisbon, Portugal) is an American photographer and educator who has shown his photographs at international venues such as Museu Arte Contemporanea in Lisbon, Portugal and the Photographer’s Gallery in London, England. In the United States his work has been exhibited at Gallery Kayafas, Boston; Yancey Richardson, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; and Kingston ArtPort in Kingston, NY. He currently teaches at SUNY Ulster College in Stone Ridge, NY. Rubin’s work is in the public collections of the Addison and the Worcester Art Museums in Massachusetts.
Ryan Rusiecki
Ferry Road Intersection, Nutten Hook, Stuyvesant Falls, New York, 2023 Archival pigment print 27 x 40 inches
Lodging House, Jefferson Heights, Catskill, New York, 2023 Archival pigment print 27 x 40 inches
The Hudson River has had a profound influence upon the landscape, culture, economy, and politics of New York State. It is the spine of a titanic realm in perpetual flux, and accordingly, is the anchor of this body of work. The river is less a muse than a model for the future. While the river has been obscured from daily life and plays a much smaller role than it once did (and still could), it sustains a sense of hopefulness and vitality in the face of political uncertainty, fraying legacy media structures, extreme weather, and severe inequality (among others), all of which suggest we’re past a tipping point that healing is attainable after all. In appropriating the river as the central character of these photographs, the past, present, and future of the Hudson Valley is at once made visible.
Ryan Rusiecki (born 1998, New Rochelle, NY) is a photographer exploring the relationship between landscape and the meaning of place in the Hudson Valley. Raised in Westchester County, NY and subsequently graduating from Bard College, he began working and living in Kingston, NY. His work was the subject of a profile piece in Hudson Valley Magazine and has been published In the In-Between magazine. He has completed commissions for Scenic Hudson and collaborated with other artists including Lyle Ashton Harris, who most recently photographed birds in Ghana for The New York Times Magazine.
Oliver Wasow
From the series Information and Resources
Collapsed Dish, 2023
Mall Interior, 2023
Fire and Ice, 2023
Idaho Cobalt Mine, 2023
All archival inkjet prints, Dimensions variable
These pictures, made utilizing recent developments in AI-assisted imaging software, envision a world scarred by the over-use of natural resources and information technologies. While not ignoring the potential ethical questions posed by AI, I’m drawn to the ways in which the medium builds on the already democratic nature of photography. More importantly, my use of the tool is a continuation of my on-going interest in post-production processes that extend the aesthetic boundaries of lens-based photography. AI lends itself well to creating the kinds of pictures I’ve long had an interest in, images that synthesize a variety of seemingly contradictory forces: nature and culture, the past and the future, painting and photography, and the opposition that I suppose defines art and art making itself, fiction and reality.
Oliver Wasow (born 1960, Madison, WI ) is a fine art photographer. His work has been included in numerous national and international group shows, including such benchmark exhibitions as Manipulated Photography
Before Photoshop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Image World at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work is included in the permanent collections of many prominent museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA. Wasow has produced two books, Artist Unknown (2007) and Friends, Enemies and Strangers (2018). He has been the recipient of various grants and awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant in 1999 and, in 2000, his second New York State Council on the Arts grant.