JOSHUA LUTZ – HESITATING BEAUTY

In “Hesitating Beauty,” Lutz breaks down the structure of the photograph as truth and challenges the traditional function of the medium in building narrative. The project is an intimate portrait of the artist’s mother unlike any other photographic model.

Blending family archives, interviews, and letters with his own photographic images, Lutz spins a seamless and strangely factual (yet unflinchingly fabricated) experience of a life and family consumed by mental illness. Rather than showing us what it looks like, “Hesitating Beauty” plays with our conceptions of reality to show us what it feels like to grapple with a family member’s retreat from lucidity.

Joshua Lutz writes: “Holding on so tightly to what I believed was sanity and being consumed by fear of depression and schizophrenia prevented me from being fully present to my mother’s reality. The past few years, as she slipped away from the aggressive paranoia and depression of my youth to an almost calming sense of delusion, made it much easier for me to rid the anger that veiled my life and to attempt to find a place of empathy and compassion as I managed her care. In making this work and simultaneously falling deeper into her psychosis, I tried to imagine a time when the past, present and future collided; a place where the weight of memory is heavier than reality.”

Exhibition runs through till May 18th, 2013

ClampArt
521-531 West 25th St
Ground Floor
New York
NY
10011

clampart.com

FRANCIE BISHOP GOOD

Far From Apple Hill reveals far as a relative term. To experience Bishop Good’s large-scale, digital photographs is to fall between antipodes, cut through the center of the Earth on the straightest path between diametrical opposites, slip from memory to lived experience. The artist compresses place and time like folding a map, making visible an expired wind in the shape of trees or the passion in muscle memory.

You can’t go home again, cautions Thomas Wolf. Bishop Good reaches impossibly toward her distant past in Apple Hill, Pennsylvania from her present South Florida, itself a transient region shaped by pirates, political refugees, and seasonal tourists. The resulting images draw from these varied locations; familiar bodies and strangers; specific cultures and diasporas; reconstruction and autopoiesis. Bishop Good’s photographs are monuments to Walter Benjamin’s notion of memory not as “an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium.”

Bishop Good depicts the place and time of the other, who, as in folklore, is also a familiar. Bishop Good sets upon the world with a keen vision, filtering the darkness of time and place, moment and memory, sign and signifier so that the vulnerability of early childhood, the bosom of a landscape, or the trauma of a torn umbrella is yours, and you can recognize it, suddenly, as clear as a photograph. Bishop Good’s work resonates exponentially at the roots of collective memory. Far From Apple Hill is inspired and troubled by memory in hyperreality, both painfully removed and staggeringly intimate.

Exhibition runs through till May 4th, 2013

David Castillo Gallery
2234 NW 2 Avenue
Miami
FL
33127

www.davidcastillogallery.com

MEGAN CUMP – BLACK MOON

For Cump, the dark is itself a wilderness of sorts, full of the promise of the unknown. It is fitting that the locations she has photographed: underground caves, deep woods, night skies and oceans, conjure up mythic tales of transformation and the underworld. Some of these landscapes are inhabited by wild creatures, including a fox, ghostly white deer, and a shadowy woman who, in one photograph, floats in water black as the night, bringing to mind the ancient Hermetic axiom “as above, so below.” This woman is, in fact, the artist, but one could argue that all of Cump’s figures, even the animals, are enigmatic self-portraits.

Replete with auspicious meteor showers and subterranean passages, these photographs transport us, suggesting the other side of things. Stars appear to burn through the atmosphere and the evening sky fills with otherworldly light and color. The vivid flames are produced by deliberately introducing light leaks that simultaneously destroy and create anew the imagery on the negatives. In the past, Cump notes, the night imparted fundamental knowledge, serving as navigational field, timekeeper, and source of cosmologies. Distinctions were not drawn between scientific observation, spirituality, and art. Recent research suggests that some Paleolithic cave paintings are also prehistoric star maps–the stray dots and dashes overlaid on depictions of animals mark the earliest constellations.

Exhibition runs through till May 12th, 2013

Station Independent Projects
164 Suffolk Street
New York
NY
10002

www.stationindependent.com