For the inaugural exhibition in its new location, Rick Wester
Fine Art will feature photographs by Sandi Haber Fifield,
from her recently released monograph, After the Threshold
(Kehrer Verlag, 2013).
After the Threshold is the gallery’s third exhibition featuring work by Haber Fifield and her second solo exhibition here. Since the 1980s, her work has explored the visual, psychological and formal possibilities in creating composite pictures, whether it is the layering of images in the analog process of multiple exposure in camera; the graphic impact of creating grids and grid-like installation work or, as in the 2010 RWFA exhibition Big Girls: Large Format Photographs by Women Photographers, challenging logic by blowing apart the traditional expectation of ordered images on a gallery wall.
After the Threshold conveys a new approach. Here, a preset pictorial structure of three or four images demands a reading of photography as a unique, quixotic visual code. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy wrote that “the illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the camera and the pen alike” and Haber Fifield is not shy to press this point. In After the Threshold, the noted photography writer Vicki Goldberg observes, “So what we are looking at in these photographs is often looking itself.”
The images Haber Fifield draws from are culled from her own archive of past and recent imagery. Recently however, she has extended her range of image making to include video. RWFA is very pleased to premiere As If Nothing Had Happened, 2013, a single channel two minute loop that threads through her four panels. Images that bask in the sun and disappear at night; that show weather both bucolic and fierce and that move in step with the artist’s walking and as she sits still while a young woman pulls on the oars of a rowboat while gliding over still water, populate the screen.
After the Threshold portrays a world of fractured ties between images made whole through the lyrical free-associative visual reasoning of a seasoned artist well schooled in the effects of collage. The themes of the work in the exhibition have been present in Haber Fifield’s work for years. The title of her first monograph, Walking Through the World established her posture in picture making. After the Threshold brings a carefree maturity to the process. Analytical and feminine, sensual and composed, contained yet freely borderless, Haber Fifield has taken her walk and has reported back that the world is filled with more wonder than any one picture can capture.
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Everyone has a camera today. Pencils and paper, once the tools used to jot down reminders and memories have been supplanted by the cellphone camera. Language is evolving from the written word to the impromptu snapshot. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook reach hundreds, thousands, millions, in a flash.
The work of Paola Ferrario trades our conceit for the formal expectations of art photographs for a uniquely personal impression of the world. Her pictures are an intensely quixotic and obsessive catalogue of discarded, distended details painstakingly gathered like orphans amidst a crowd of clearer appeal. It is the quietude in her pictures that make them so compelling. If we expect things to happen in photographs then her pictures will disappoint. Her surgical distillation of any occurrence makes them reverberate with the suggested rhythms of an unseen world, the ghostly shadows of what passed by. To imply action she strings sister images together based on their own oddities, their own uniqueness. Ferrario’s photographs celebrate the cry of the anonymous, the stance of one against a mob. They are as selfless as pictures can be without fading away.
Paola Ferrario’s subjects belong to no one and everyone, and are found everywhere. Beyond her sly humor, there is the melancholic pang of abandonment, the trash and detritus of post-modern, pre-apocalyptic culture, the signs and remains of which appear to anyone willing to look.
Click here for reviews of the exhibition in The New Yorker,
Art In America andPhotograph
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Gallery hours:
Tuesday - Friday 10:00 - 6:00
Saturday 11:00 - 6:00