Participating Artist: Kelly Shimoda

Artist Biography

Kelly Shimoda was born in California and raised in Connecticut. Her ancestors hail from the British and Japanese isles, though her family now lives in North America. She first started taking photographs while a high school student in northwestern Connecticut, where her primary subjects were friends, children, strangers, and their respective behaviors and movements.

She has lived in Maine and Rhode Island, where she graduated from Brown University with a degree in Latin American Studies and American Civilization. Her interest in photography can be traced further back to her paternal grandfather who was arrested during World War II for possessing a 5×7 Curtis Color Camera, which the United States government believed to be a sign of subversion to the national war effort.

She has lived in Nantes, France, Golfito, Costa Rica, and Barcelona, Spain.  After successive years working in the fields of international education and communications, Kelly completed the International Center of Photography’s Program in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism in 2005.  Kelly has spent the intervening years utilizing both her grandfather’s, and her own, cameras, as she continues documenting human behavior and communication.

She has lived in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and now lives in Beacon, New York with her husband Neil and their cat, Pearl.  Her recent appearances and publications include The New York Times, the Jen Bekman Gallery, CITY Magazine, Le Monde 2, Visão,  and La Repubblica delle Donne, among others.

Artist Statement

I capture images to feed my obsession with the intricacies of human behavior and communication in the modern world.  I am fascinated by the way that humans interact with each other and their environments.  Through both still and moving images, I examine encounters, moments, and arrangements of objects that reveal patterns in our collective actions, and insight into our collective psychology.

Rather than telling stories in a traditional documentary fashion, I am more concerned with finding and sharing images that are quiet and subtly iconic, and that resonate with viewers emotionally, such that they might feel more connected to the world, or gain a level of awareness about themselves and their surroundings that they did not previously have.

I photograph because the content of a flat image can be composed to show people something they have not seen before, yet something that seems strangely familiar.  I want to challenge people to slow down, reflect, and hopefully gain some degree of introspection.  The ultimate satisfaction in my work is channeling my obsession into a force for greater human understanding.

Artist Contact Info

Website: www.kellyshimoda.com
Email: kellyshimoda@yahoo.com

Participating Artist: Magda Biemat

Artist Bio

Magda Biernat (b.1978) was born and raised in Poznan, Poland. In 2002, after obtaining her Masters in Marketing and Management from Adam Mickiewicz University and BFA in Photography from Wielkopolska School of Photography, she moved to United States settling down in Seattle, WA. After two years in the North West, she decided to move to New York and started working at Magnum Photos Inc. Surrounded by great photojournalistic works at Magnum she turned her interests towards a different specialty, and begun photographing architecture and interiors. Besides freelancing for different architecture offices and design studios, she worked as a Picture Editor at Metropolis Magazine. In 2007 she decided to leave her steady life in New York and took off for a year long trip around the world. While traveling to more than 17 countries she worked on her personal projects concerning urban landscape and habitat. She is currently enrolled in an MFA program at the Transart Institute.

Biernat has been exhibited internationally since 2001 with solo exhibitions in Poland, Belgium and United States. She is a recipient of many awards such as Lucie Award, Photographic Center Northwest Photo-Op and The Friends of Melina Mercouri Foundation Award. She currently lives and works in New York City

Artist Statement

“Units of Separation”

The rise of social equity movements in the 19th century happened to correspond with the invention of steel beam building technology, giving the leaders behind social revolution a timely solution to the unsafe, unhealthy and inequitable housing issues of the time. They were laying the foundations for the superblock.

The rise of design theories from Bauhaus era architects and designers propelled the theory of highly functional, practical methods for urban density. Post war Europe found itself wanting for housing solutions as they rebuilt their cities. Soviet dictators co-opted the highly functional concept of mass housing with exuberance. The notion of precisely equal units in well ordered blocks appealed at first to their sense of equality for the masses and secondly as an ideal way to exercise authoritarian policies on a large scale.

Apartment blocks became a worldwide phenomenon in the 1960’s as city planners cast off design based on human scale and began construction on a future of managed density. Filled with optimism about a new society that would live in collective units, the designers swept away old learning about organic urban growth in order to bring the traffic pattern of human lives under strict control.

In “Units of Separation”, my project is an exploration of the way people maintain their individuality while being part of a collective and how units of space meant to foster communal harmony can actually threaten our sense of community. While a resident may come to know their immediate neighbor, it is possible they may never meet the person living directly above them.

In this collection of images, I explored blocks of flats in different countries and photographed them from different vantage points. I am fascinated by how the notion of communities in high-rise apartment complexes changes in different parts of the world. In some countries it is a sign of luxury, in others they are equated to a slum.
Most of the project was shot in Singapore where I photographed several apartment complexes. Visiting each floor, I documented the small personal items left outside of otherwise identical homes: bikes, shoes, shrines and drying laundry of all different colors. It was fascinating for me to see the ways the occupants had personalized their exterior spaces to separate themselves from other units.

Artist Contact Info

Website: www.magdabiernatphotography.com

Email: mail@magdabiernat.com

Participating Artist: Heungman

Artist Biography

Heungman was born in China and brought up in Hong Kong. He earned a BA degree in Cinema and Television Arts from California State University. He went on to study photography and received a BFA with honor from the Art Center College of Design in California. He has been working as a photographer in New York for 15 years. His work has been published in Rolling Stone, Spin, Paper and Time Magazine, amongst others.

Heungman is currently dividing his time between New York and Shanghai and focusing on personal projects and exhibitions. He is also busy with two book projects: 100women 100motors 100yrs of Harley-Davidson and Old Shanghai Now. They’re going to be published in the United States.

Artist Statement

All eyes are on China.

Two years of living in the motherland, Heungman was interested in mixing China’s new with her recent past, obscuring the urban days with darkness, even erecting the black n’ white among all colors to draw new meanings about the ambivalent big giant.

With the Little Red Book series Heungman employs the naked body as “eternal truth” and the Cultural Revolution icons as the “recent past,” he attempts to discover answers to the present moment in Chinese history.

Artist Contact Info

Website: http://heungman.net/splash.html
Email: heungman@gmail.com

Participating Artist: Nathaniel Moses Ward

Artist Biography

Nathaniel Moses Ward was born in Philadelphia in 1983.  In 2006, he received his BFA  from the Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where he minored in cultural anthropology. He also studied painting and drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is a graduate of George School, Newtown, Pennsylvania, where he began his formal study of photography. Nathaniel is a recipient of the Constantiner fellowship and Seth Tobias Award. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Artist Statement

Have you ever woken from a dream, neither afraid nor excited, but simply yearning for the next fragment of narrative to inform the dream-state mysteries that preceded? For me, the American condition, in its many and varied iterations, is as compellingly fragmented and obtuse as any dream that provides more fresh questions than absolute truths. I am constantly waking up in America with new questions; working to find another piece that will add dimension to a curious condition I call Graceland. Graceland takes in the darker side of nostalgia, the distinctly American penchant for a disturbingly augmented innocence, the hollowed-out hope, the brilliant, the distinctly noble, the short-sighted dreams and the desolation this mixed blessing of a country provides us.

Nathaniel Moses Ward’s contribution to this show has been selected from his project, “Graceland.”

Artist Contact Info

Website: http://www.natwardphoto.com

Email: n.m.ward@gmail.com

Participating Artist: Gabriela Herman

Artist Biography

Gabriela is a freelance photographer currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Though born in Newton, MA, she enriched her photographic palette through her many experiences living abroad. She learned to eat crepes in the cafes of France, get lost in the zocalos of Mexico, and dance samba in the streets of Brazil, all with camera in hand. Post college, Wesleyan University, with her dual US-Brazilian citizenship, she relocated to Sao Paulo for four years, where she pursued her long-standing passion for photography full-time, working for several acclaimed photographers in the process.

She was recently honored with first place in Adorama’s ‘One’s to Watch’ competition in NYC and was nominated for a New York Photo Festival Award. Her work has been featured in Humble Arts Foundation Group Show #20, Fraction Magazine, Projekt 30’s I(pronoun), and Trucemag. She has worked for Time Out NY, METRO NY and METRO International newspapers and New Voices magazine, among others.

Aside from taking pictures of herself, she enjoys riding her bike in Prospect Park, hanging out on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, and making caipirinhas.

Artist Statement

“Since I began photographing, I have always insisted on being in front of the lens, becoming part of the construction of my images. Photography has become my therapy, an exclusive dialogue between myself and the camera where we push each other to a point of exhaustion, both emotionally and physically. By inviting the viewer to partake in this intimate process, I am able to free myself from preliminary inhibitions. As I approach other subjects, I take this comfort with me and try to recreate the same intimate setting. Rather than expose the subjects, I provide them with a space where they will feel safe enough to reveal themselves. This process from subject to intimate confidant is what drives me to keep creating.”

Artist Contact Info

Website: http://www.gabrielaherman.com

Email: gab@gabrielaherman.com

Participating Artist: Marten Elder

Artist Biography

Marten Elder grew up in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and currently lives and works in New York City. He received his B.A. in Photography from Bard College, where he studied under Stephen Shore. Marten was a recipient of the 2008 Tierney Fellowship.

Artist Statement

“Delmarva Beaches” explores and documents the apparently deserted nature of the off season in popular summer destinations on the shore of the Delmarva Peninsula.

I grew up in the resort town Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.  In the summertime over 90 percent of the population is made up by vacationers and the town is packed to maximum occupancy. This is how most people experience and remember beach towns like Rehoboth, but it is not representative of what the town is like most of the year.  In the off season, the boardwalk, hotels, beach houses, mini golf courses and beaches are completely empty. There is a growing year round population, but these people are not occupying the tourist spaces that the town is known for by summer visitors. With a 4×5 view camera and color film I return to Rehoboth Beach and the surrounding area to document this unseen state of the towns.

Artist Contact Info

Website: http://www.martenelder.com

Email: info@martenelder.com

Participating Artist: Ahndraya Parlato

Artist Biography

Ahndraya Parlato was born in Kailua, Hawaii in 1979. In 2002 she received a B.A. from Bard College, where she majored in photography; and in 2005 she graduated from California College of the Arts with an M.F.A. Her work consists of large-format, color photographs that explore the distinctions between banality and normalcy, often revealing the uncanny or magigical in everyday life. Amongst others, Ahndraya’s work has been shown at the 9W Gallery in New York City, and The Helsinki Biennale, at the Helsinki Design Museum, in Finland. Her work was recently showcased at the International Fashion and Photography Festival in Hyéres, France. Ahndraya has lectured at California College of the Arts, in San Francisco, and is currently teaching at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.

Artist Statement

I’m interested in how we structure our personal worlds, in how we imbue them with a sense of direction, purpose, and security when, in fact, we can actually control very few things. The idea that we’re not working towards anything, that completion and wholeness are unattainable fictions, and that chaos rules, is a scary possibility to consider. The world can unravel at any moment – no matter how perfect your yard is.

Our feelings are elusive. It may take us years to know why we do certain things, or feel certain ways. Because of this, we’re often operating without reason. We believe we know why we’re doing what we do, but, in fact, we’re blind. We’re magicians. My reality is an illusion that I’ve created. I may recognize it as an illusion, or I may not; I may continue to accept it, and to call it reality, thus rendering it real. Or it may vanish before me like the fleeting chimera it was.

I want to show the world in a way that recognizes the fragility of our constructions, that accepts, and perhaps welcomes the discovery of a torn veneer. My subjects accept the failure of order; they sense their own inability to control the world, and yet, they continue to try. Their world is marked by both a loss of comfort and the search for new and unusual methods of consolation, despite the impossibility of complete consolation.

Artist Contact Info

Website: http://www.ahndrayaparlato.com

Email: ahndraya@ahndrayaparlato.com

Introduction to Recessive Traits–in the absence of the dominant element

This upcoming group show, Recessive Traits–in the absence of the dominant element, will be held at Broadway Gallery, New York, from 11/2-11/30/2009.

The show includes two parts: Part I from 11/2-11/15/2009 and Part II from 11/16-11/30/2009. Each part will exhibit the work of 10 to 12 artists. The opening dates will be announced soon.

The curator, Natalie Chan is currently a photo student at School of Visual Arts, New York.