Monday, October 18, 2010

Chelsea Galleries: Danziger Projects, 303 Gallery, Sundaram Tagore

1) Danziger Projects:
Mission Statement: It wasn't explicitly noted but I found this under the "About Gallery" section;
"As a project space, the gallery maintains a collaborative relationship with its own artists as well as with other galleries and artists. Outside collaborations include a publishing project and exhibition with Jack Pierson (in association with Cheim and Read) and the exhibition of Harry Callahan's "Women Lost in Thought" series (in association with Pace MacGill).

The gallery follows the highest standard of connoisseurship and brings its experience and expertise to a range of visual projects including film and publishing."

Artist: Viviane Sassen:
Viviane Sassen is a freelance photographer, who has done work for various fashion publications and advertisements, such as Vogue (FR), Purple and Re-Magazine. Yet her photographs for fashion publications seem to go beyond the immediate subject matter of eye-catching garments and style.
Nearly all her images–both commissioned, and personal work–evoke a sense of nostalgia; perhaps it is a search to recapture the senses she experienced during her childhood in Kenya. For her series Ultraviolet and Flamboya, she travels to Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia and Ghana to capture portraits that not just describe the people, but also the complexities of African societies in which they live.
Her images of people from her travels all throughout the African continent are vivid, mysterious and multifaceted.






2) 303 Gallery: No Mission Statement provided
Artist: Laylah Ali
I love this artist. Definitely one of my top 3 artists that I've found so far:
Sarah Veldez on Laylah Ali (in Art in America):
At once endearing, twisted and sophisticated, Laylah Ali's work has long played on the ways we type people -whether by skin color, costume or behavior.   Her compelling gouache paintings feature figures in a generally cheerless and nicely designed universe whose background tends to milky sky blue.   By giving her characters a variety of skin colors-brown, black, green, sometimes all three-she lets us know, cryptically but with more than a little humor, that race is an issue in her work.   And by equipping her bug-eyed characters with neat-looking apparel -pointy Klan hats, Adidas sneakers, medieval headgear, nun habits, striped tube socks, bathing trunks, even Band-aids -she not only enlivens her compositions, but also tweaks our impulse to use such visual cues to figure out who these people are and what is going on.
Earlier Paintings often focused on groups of people either enduring violence or inflicting it on one another, but this latest exhibition was made up of single-figure works.   Seven fancy-seeming personages, each with a different skin tone, appear in portraits, mostly bundles in exotic, boldly patterned garments. For instance, a pink-skinned geek is shown daringly mixing his stripes and plaids.   His head is wrapped as if he has the mumps, but in an attractive fabric that goes well with his outfit; bad teeth and thick glasses only add to his alien appeal.   Another individual peers out green-faced from some sort of groovy gray helmet with a white web pattern on it.   His face contrasts with his brown torso, which sports two pink dots, nipples perhaps, visible through his clothing.   The overall effect is reminiscent off both fetish gear and a Roman Gladiator's outfit.




3) Sundaram Tagore
Mission Statement: "Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that engage in spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With alliances across the globe, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music."

Artist: Hiroshi Senju


Click on the link to see the images.

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