Friday, December 9th, 2022

Poetry, photography, and video art reading: 4 pm- 5 pm | Opening Reception: 6 pm to 9 pm

Saturday, December 10th, 2022

Book Reading: 1 pm – 2 pm | Artist Talk 2 pm to 3 pm | Closing reception: 6-9 pm

Keep The Channel Open

The Black and White Gallery, directed and curated by Carla Pivonski, is proud to present Keep The Channel Open, a group exhibition of photography and performance at One Art Space, Tribeca, NYC.

“Keep the channel open,” Martha Graham exhorted the choreographer Agnes DeMille in 1943, urging her that for a true artist there is no near finishing point but “…only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” This compulsion towards constant movement, experimentation and even transgression links every photographer in this exhibition, and each image and performance expresses the painful, transcendent aliveness that is the price of vision.

Here we see the experimental techniques of Ursula Ferarra, who works with wet plates and ‘primordial chemistry’ to create images that seem caught between exquisite living and decay. Naum Dorkhman draws on his engineering background to use photography to ‘paint with light’ with unlimited possibilities. Andrew Wohl is also a scientist, deeply inspired by the beauty of the materials, machines and mathematical dynamics that surround him in the aerospace industry.

We see also Gaspar Marquez, Fernando Espinosa and Gen Nishino who use the age-old tropes of the male and female nude (whether in classical painting or Playboy centrefolds) and turn them into something unsettling and unexpectedly profound. Carla Pivonski, inspired by Stephen Crane’s poem ‘In The Desert’, shoots beautiful landscapes and portraits of a male in stony, sacred wildernesses. Evelyn Oritz and Paola Peli capture equally hallowed and light-filled images of living nature. Shae Jones and Krystal Bitz explore externally marginalized bodies and inward therapeutic journeys, as with Jason Michael Blair for whom photography is a quiet connection to the world. Daniel Chen shoots women curled in their own thoughts while Emiliano Santapaola juxtaposes his poetry with his fashion photography, the words spilling into and out of the eyes of his models. Monty Dames photographs single human hands as though they were portraits, each palm inked with a map or web of words and symbols on the skin. Joseph Dinki and Gary Lippman will be combining poetry and text with images, creating startling fusions both in live performance and, for Lippman, in the form of photo collage. Miles Thorn and Sasha Kay have collaborated to explore the ‘deceptive madness’ of the experience of depression, dramatizing the concept of the mask which reveals as it obscures. Finally, from the delicacy of shadows criss-crossed in corners to the light falling on great pools of water Cosmo Campbell and Joseph O’Neill each in their own way find beauty in loneliness, liminality and the vulnerability of all existence, Campbell through his delicate landscapes and O’Neill in his sharp abstractions. Video projections of photographs by Serhiy Shcheglevatykh feature a delicate dance of water ballet with the Ukrainian dance troupe, Edelweiss.

Keep The Channel Open will run from December 9th to December 10th, 2022. There will be a poetry, photography and video art reading created by Joseph Dinki and featuring performances by Willard Morgan, Geoff Burt, Joe James, and Marissa Dinki on December 9th at 4pm. The Opening Reception follows from 6 – 9pm.

On Saturday December 10th at 1pm there will be a reading from Gary Lippman’s latest novel “We Loved the World But Could Not Stay.” This will be followed by an Artists Talk with Gary Lippman, Carla Pivonski, Gaspar Marquez, Gen Nishino, Evelyn Oritz, and Krystal Britz in conversation at 2pm. We hope that you will join all our artists later in the evening for a closing reception from 6 – 9pm on December 10th, with cocktails, music and mingling.

 

Artists

Performers: