06.22.11 06.18.11 06.07.11 06.01.11 04.20.11 04.08.11 02.16.11 09.16.10 05.08.10 03.23.10 02.02.10 01.12.10 09.09.09 04.29.09 02.20.09 02.07.09 Subscribe to our e-Newsletter! A NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC SERIES EXPLORES THE SPECIFIC — AND INFINITE New York, NY — Since the earliest days of the medium, photographers have turned their lens towards the heavens at night. Now, beginning March 4, 2010, Rick Wester Fine Art (RWFA) presents a contemporary investigation comprised of a complex and resonant series of photographs of the night sky by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based photographer and video artist Sharon Harper. Orchestrated with time exposures that create arresting, minimalist compositions, twelve 40 x 30 in. black and white and color photographs will be on view through April 24, 2010 as part of the exhibition, One Month, Weather Permitting. The images on view capture long-exposure star trails over Banff, Alberta, Canada. To create what she refers to as "star scratches," Harper exposed sheets of film for several nights in a row, re-exposing the film using different camera orientations. As in previous bodies of work, the artist embraces environmental and technical interruptions as the gifts and vagaries of the photographic process. In Harper's words, the photographs contain "chance compositions, acknowledging that the sublime resists imposed structure." The series exists as a controlled experiment resulting in star trails that can only be captured through the camera with random results. Comprised of fluid and serene translations of the sublime through technological endeavors, Harper's photographs continue to mine the relevancy of nature's grandeur today. Currently an assistant professor of photography at Harvard University, Harper's work was shown in New York in 2001 in a one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first in the museum's "First Exposure" series. Sylvia Wolf, then the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, said Harper's images were "beautiful, spiritual, metaphoric." The artist's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Galeria Arnés + Röpke, Madrid, Spain, and at Galerie Stefan Röpke, Cologne where her work is also represented, at Sebastian Fath Contemporary in Mannheim, Germany and has been in group exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Wallraff-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, Germany, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York among others. Her work resides in several collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; Bayerische Vereinsbank, Munich, Germany; and the Sprint Collection, Kansas City, Kansas. The exhibition opens on March 4 and runs through April 24, 2010. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 10-6pm, and Saturday, 11-6pm. For further information and images, please contact Sarah Stout at +1 (212) 255-5560 or rwfa@rickwesterfineart.com. LEFT One Month, Weather Permitting, 2009 Night Sky over Banff, Alberta September 12 - October 10, 2007 8 October 9 October Archival inkjet print on fiber-based Harman paper, printed 2010 Signed, titled, dated, and numbered on the reverse of the mount 40 x 30 inches RIGHT One Month, Weather Permitting, 2009 Night Sky over Banff, Alberta September 12 - October 10, 2007 7 October Archival inkjet print on fiber-based Harman paper, printed 2010 Signed, titled, dated, and numbered on the reverse of the mount 40 x 30 inches The New York Photo Review Volume 1, Number 3 February 3 - 10, 2010 Norman Borden This is a photo show about the costs of war — seen and unseen — but there isn't a casualty in sight. Two photographers, working independently, offer their separate perspectives. Photographer Bonnell Robinson visited some of the battlefields of World War I on the Western and Italian fronts where hundreds of thousands of soldiers lost their lives from 1914-1918, but all that remains are mostly bucolic landscapes; in one a couple of old artillery shells standing on end in the corner of a French farm is one of the few remaining hints of the horrors that had occurred here. Another image shows tall mounds of grass-covered earth; they were actually mass graves for some of those aforementioned soldiers. Seeing shell-marked stone buildings, one field hospital just a remnant of its stone walls remaining, is not a surprise. But these are not images you want to hang in the living room. Fast forward to World War II and photographer Dana Mueller takes us on an entirely different tour- to former POW camps in the southern United States where 500,000 Nazis were held from 1943 to 1945. That German soldiers were even in the United States may come as a surprise and thinking that they may have enjoyed a relatively relaxed existence is a bit disconcerting. Even more so when you see their living quarters were on hallowed ground such as a famous Civil War battlefield in Virginia. Here, too, the landscapes are mostly pastoral scenes, dense forests, a deserted shack, no hint of their past history as prison camps for POWs. These are all images with a story but if an anti-war message is the basis for the work of these two photographers, it's lost in the translation or the passage of time. View the original article here. The exhibition runs through February 20, 2010. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 10-6pm, and Saturday, 11-6pm. For further information and images, please contact Sarah Stout at +1 (212) 255-5560 or rwfa@rickwesterfineart.com. LEFT Dana Mueller Site of Pickett's Charge, Gettysburg, Adams County, Pennsylvania, 2009 RIGHT Bonnell Robinson View across the Adriatic towards Golametto from the terrace of Duino Castle, Italy, 2008 RICK WESTER FINE ART 511 West 25th Street Suite 205 New York NY 10001 +1 (212) 255-5560 rwfa@rickwesterfineart.com rickwesterfineart.com