Vanishing Lands

Vanishing Lands

Curators: Doron Polak & Esti Drori

Exhibition dates: May 10, 2017

Artura/The International Artists’ Museum

Design Hotel Ca' Pisani
Venice, Italy

#122: Kitakyushu, Japan 

The complexities of how to cultivate attachment are divulged, yet the language is either scrambled, or in a dialect that I can't understand.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial: Debtfair

The 2017 Whitney Biennial: Debtfair

Curators: Occupy Museums (Arthur Polendo, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono, Noah Fischer, and Tal Beery)

Exhibition dates: March 17–June 11, 2017

The Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street

New York, NY 10014
whitney.org

"Formed during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, Occupy Museums connects the struggle for economic and social equity to art institutions, highlighting instances when they propagate and normalize injustice. In 2012, the collective launched Debtfair, an exhibition platform that categorizes artists according to their debts and other financial realities. The system reveals the relationships binding individuals to the banks holding their loans—a hidden but highly consequential factor underlying American art."

David Freund: Gas Stop

David Freund: Gas Stop
Curator: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

The Lipani Gallery
March 1–March 31, 2017
Reception: Wednesday, March 22, 2017, 6–7 pm, Artist Talk: 7–8pm
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
The gallery is open from 9am to 9pm every day except on university holidays

Fordham University is proud to present David Freund: Gas Stop, a sampling of twenty-seven black and white photographs pulled from a much larger investigation made between 1978 to 1981. In the twentieth century, any American driver or passenger would likely stop at a gas station weekly, not just for gas. Then, gas stations were also oases offering food and drink, car repairs, directions, telephones, maps and, importantly, bathrooms. Yet, beyond appreciation as architectural novelties, they and their offerings have been little photographed.

From 1978 to 1981, David Freund looked at the culture, architecture and landscape of gas stations in more than forty states. The photographs show customers and workers interacting, gassing up, or just hanging out. Architecture and signage, both corporate and vernacular, reach out to passing drivers.

Gas Stop presents the designed or natural landscaping seen at stations, and the regional landscapes that hold and surround them. Sparking recognition and recollection, the photographs, accrue as elements in a nonlinear narrative of automotive America. Of more than 200,000 gas stations in the United States at the time of his project, today about half are gone, especially full service ones. Such stations and their offerings exist now mostly in memory and in this work.

David writes:
On the first morning of an intended photographic project, outside of my motel was a gas station from which I photographed a dark and rolling tanker truck as its four black tires passed a line of four half-buried white tires. In the misty distance was a grazing horse, framed by the back of the truck. In front of the station was a large, hand-lettered sign advertising milk, and across the road a small, local motel. As someone later commented, “These are about everything."

The painter Miles Forst once described gas stations as a place to go to fill up your tank and shut off your brain. That morning, however, I became aware of gas stations as a locus for many elements that characterize America. And whether stopping in or hanging out, people in motion are often around to enliven and propel the narrative.

From that moment, looking out from and looking in at gas stations became my new project, which in the end entailed travel to forty-seven states and stops at thousands of stations. All provided discoveries. —David Freund

Press: Verel, Patrick. "Photo Exhibit Highlights Bygone Era of Independent Gas Stations." Fordham Newsroom. Fordham University, 08 Mar. 2017. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.


For further information please contact: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock: apicellahit@fordham.edu
For additional information about David's photography please visit his website
View his book at Steidl Books

Fundació Joan Miró: Autogestó

Autogestó

Curator: Antonio Ortega, Adam Nankervis

Exhibition Dates: Februaury 16, 2017—May 21, 2017

Fundació Joan Miró

Parc de Montjuïc

08038 Barcelona

website

Autogestó includes work from Adam Nankervis' another vacant space project, of which I am a long time fan and contributor. Antonio Ortega writes, "Self-organization provides a genealogy of artists from the 1960s on who have been developing strategies to recover the authorship of their own narrative. The exhibition is also an attempt to understand recent art and confirm the current validity of these dynamics." Desire Line, 2005, is the piece selected by Adam Nankervis for Antonio Ortega's exhibition.

Desire Line, 2005, C-print mounted to Sintra and Plexiglas, h 70.5” x w 3” (right image: detailed enlargement)

Desire Line presents the entire cast and crew of a single movie on one vertical support the precise height of the artist. As with the companion video Desire Lines, the title of this piece refers to the landscape architecture term of the same name where the placement of concrete sidewalks is established by the organic paths worn into the landscape by foot traffic.

The 2014–2015 Ildiko Butler Travel Grant Recipients

Featuring: Qinrui Hua, Giovani Santoro, Aubrey Vollrath
Curators: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and Joseph Lawton
Dates: July 2015–May 2016 

Hayden Hartnett Project Space
Fordham University at Lincoln Center MAP
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
(Inside the office of Undergraduate Admission room 203)
New York, NY 10023
haydenhartnettprojectspace.com

The Ildiko Butler Travel Grant is awarded to four photographers in the Department of Theatre and Visual Art each year that demonstrate exceptional promise. The grant amount is $3,500 and enables students to generate a substantial body of work while traveling abroad in their proposed countries. The Department of Theatre and Visual Art is pleased to present the photographs of Qinrui Hua, Giovani Santoro, and Aubrey Vollrath made in Japan, Italy, and Germany respectively. Their work represents a range of locations and interests; however, despite the differences in their individual focus, each photographer is engaged in the process of carefully studying the world and representing it in a straightforward, descriptive manner.

Applications are accepted each year in March. Please direct questions regarding the application guidelines to the Department of Theatre and Visual Arts in room 423. 

Image captions left to right: Giovani Santoro, Italy; Qinrui Hua, Japan; Aubrey Vollrath, Germany. For more images of the recipient's work, please visit the exhibition website. 

The Hayden Hartnett Project Space presents yearlong exhibitions of work produced by students from the Fordham University Department of Theatre and Visual Art. It is located on the second floor in the Office of Undergraduate Admission, room 203. The hours for the Hayden Hartnett Project Space are 9–5, Monday through Friday, except on university holidays.

veterans/photographers

Featuring works by: Philip D'Afflisio, Douglas Dacy, Dawn Jolly, James McCracken, Cody Adam Pearce, Oswaldo Pereira, Giovani Santoro, David Wiggins

Curator: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

Exhibition dates: May 27–September 30, 2015
Reception: Wednesday, September 16, 6–8 pm
Summer Vet Together: Thursday, July 16, 4–7 pm. For all students, veterans, faculty, friends, staff, and allies

The Lipani Gallery
Fordham University at Lincoln Center

113 West 60th Street, New York, NY 10023
fordhamuniversitygalleries.com

veteransphotographers photographersveterans brings together forty images made by eight artists who have studied photography at Fordham University. Philip D'Afflisio, Dawn Jolly, Cody Adam Pearce, Oswaldo Pereira, and David Wiggins are Fordham University alumni and Douglas Dacy, James McCracken, and Giovani Santoro are currently matriculated students.

Working in black and white, color, and with both traditional and digital photographic technologies, their work represents a range of years, styles, and interests; however, despite their differences, each photographer is engaged in the process of carefully studying the world and representing it in a descriptive manner. Significantly, each of the exhibition participants is a veteran of the United States Armed Forces.

Philip D'Afflisio’s color images focus on details in the landscape, particularly objects that foreground a sense of history. There is a classical beauty to the photographs, as well as recognition of inherent mystery. His picturesque image of an alert hunting dog leads us into this exhibition and sets the tone of inquiry found throughout the show.

Douglas Dacy’s images pay special attention to form and the simple qualities of light. Illumination imparts significance to both landscapes and still lifes, regardless of the nature of the subject matter. The resultant photographs are poetic meditations on the ordinary.

Dawn Jolly’s photographs were made during the Visual Arts Department course Documentary Photography: Italy. They display Rome and its inhabitants bathed in the beautiful summertime Mediterranean light, yet hint at social issues of gender and race just below the surface.

James McCracken’s quiet images made in Virginia along the West Virginia border provide a glimpse into territory that he is intimately familiar with, as he was raised in nearby Richmond. His spartan landscapes are precise descriptions of the topography, of the season, and have a timeless quality.

Cody Adam Pearce’s black and white images made in Morocco and Iraq are carefully composed studies of the relationship between humans and the landscape. In some cases the figure is directly featured, in other cases the human presence is dwarfed by its surroundings, or even absent entirely.

 






Oswaldo Pereira makes very traditional, black and white documentary images of subject matter that is anything but traditional—an S&M convention in New York City. His understated approach to the topic yields a pragmatic record of an atypical event.

Giovani Santoro spent the summer of 2014 traveling throughout Italy as the recipient of the Visual Arts Department’s Ildiko Butler Travel Grant. His images in this exhibition contrast the architecture and opulent spaces of Rome with their inhabitants.

David Wiggins subtly adjusts the tonalities in his images highlighting latent faces that he detects in the tarmac of roads and streets. The resulting portraits accentuate the surreal hiding within the everyday.

Regardless of the photographers’ chosen subjects, all participants in this exhibition are deeply engaged in the process of looking at what is in front of them. Their images embrace a long tradition in the medium of photography that celebrates the revelatory power of direct representation.

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, 2015 (for more information please email: apicellahit@fordham.edu

My Ranching Life

My Ranching Life
Featuring works by: Jean Laughton

Curator: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock

Exhibition dates: May 22–September 30, 2015
Reception: Wednesday, September 23, 6–8 p.m.

The Ildiko Butler Gallery
Fordham University at Lincoln Center MAP
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
The gallery is open from 9am to 9pm everyday except on university holidays
fordhamuniversitygalleries.com

Image caption: Riding Drag on the Brunsch Ranch, 2012

This day we were ‘neighboring’ on the Brunsch family ranch and working with a crew of about twenty other neighboring ranchers. We do this in the fall and spring to help each other out. Just at sunrise, we gathered over four hundred pairs and trailed them a few miles into the corrals at the headquarters of the ranch for shipping day. This was when I first started cowboying, so I was appropriately riding drag, in the back. – Jean Laughton

My Ranching Life by Jean Laughton brings together eighteen black and white prints made from negatives shot between 2002 and 2011. A native Iowan, photographer Jean Laughton moved from New York City after sixteen years of residence to the Badlands of South Dakota in 2002 to pursue her projects. What was initially intended to be a brief photographic opportunity turned into thirteen years, with Jean working her way up from ranch hand novice to ranch manager at Lyle O’Bryan’s Quarter Circle XL Ranch.

The photographs in My Ranching Life are a small sample selected from hundreds of images made by Laughton over an extended time period; nevertheless, they represent a thoughtful depiction of a ranching community from the perspective of a participant, as opposed to that of an outside observer. Her photographs document the realities of the vocation—all panoramas are shot from horseback while working—and give shape to a depiction of American ranching life shorn of gloss and stereotype. The following statement by Laughton captures the essence of her endeavor succinctly:

I feel lucky to work in an area of ranches where things are done the old way—in the day of herding cattle on 4 wheelers I am happy to say we do it all on horseback. And we also brand with a wood fire and drag the calves in on horseback. There are many here who take pride in their cowboying—keeping the traditions and the spirit of individualism alive.

I would like to offer a very special thanks to Jean Laughton for her decision to leave New York City back in 2002. We would not have her timeless landscapes and lovely testimonial on display in Fordham University’s Ildiko Butler Gallery had she not decided to radically change her life by leaving behind the big city and beginning her new ranching life. For more information about My Ranching Life, Jean’s story, as well as her other related projects, Go West, and Americana, please visit her website.

Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, 2015

For more information contact: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
For the Visual Arts Department Blog: click here
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here

Faculty Spotlight 2015

Faculty Spotlight 2015

The Ildiko Butler Gallery
Fordham University at Lincoln Center MAP
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
ildikobutlergallery.com

Featuring works by:
Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
Richard Kalina
Anibal Pella-Woo

The current display of works in Fordham University's Ildiko Butler Gallery is the 2015 installment of the annual Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. Each year in the fall three members from the Department of Theater and Visual Art are asked to share a sampling of their production with the Fordham community. Richard Kalina represents painting this year and photography is represented by both Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and Anibal Pella-Woo. Despite the differences in their mediums and approaches, their works generate a lively dialogue regarding content and representational methods.

Dates: February 3, 2015 – March 10, 2015
Reception: Tuesday, February 3, 2015, 6 – 8 p.m.
WEB:

For more information please contact: apicellahit@fordham.edu