Northern California artist, Brigitte Carnochan, will be exhibiting work from her new series entitled, Floating World, Allusions to Poems by Japanese Women of the 7th—20th Centuries. The series, printed on Japanese handmade mulberry paper, is a departure in technique from Carnochan’s earlier handpainted gelatin silver prints, but the relationship between the beauty of the human form and nature still guides her imagery and these new figure and botanical studies demonstrate a deepening of Carnochan’s signature style of sophisticated sensuality.

Carnochan found the inspiration for her new series while rummaging through a used bookstore in Princeton, New Jersey, where she discovered a volume of poems, mostly tanka and haiku—written by Japanese women from the 7th through 20th centuries translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ikuko Atsumi in 1977.

“I was immediately drawn to the poems, and as I read them—so allusive and rich in imagery—I knew that I wanted to make their photographic equivalents. I quickly realized that I wanted to create my own versions of the poems as well, which I did with the help of translators. The title, Floating World, refers to the conception of a world as evanescent, impermanent, of fleeting beauty and divorced from the responsibilities of the mundane, everyday world. For the poets in this volume (whose names are calligraphed in each image) that world centered on love—longing for love and the beloved, mourning lost love, pondering its mystery. The beauty of the natural world—its flowers, landscape, the moon, and the changing seasons—serves as the primary metaphor.” —Brigitte Carnochan

New York artist, Joy Goldkind will be exhibiting work from three bodies of work, including the processes of bromoil and ambrotype. Goldkind is inspired by the idea of the fantasy world and utilizes the camera tools of older photographic processes, double exposures and slow shutter speeds to assist in changing what is true and expected from a photograph into a more surrealistic scene. The old world beauty and quality the imagery possesses is influenced by a deep interest in art history.

The bromoil work in the exhibition contains images from her Adagio series in which she photographs the abstraction of dancing figures. The work centralizes its focus on the movement of the body through space and light. The other bromoils in the exhibition are from her new work focusing on body distortions.

“Having raised three daughters, I know that many women today do not really see themselves in the mirror. The mind plays games so that some think they are too fat or too thin and not pretty enough. The mirror is a powerful force in their perception of reality. These images show that the mirror does not always show exactly what we look like. As this body of work continues I hope to prove that what the mirror reflects, in reality is what the mind wants to see.” – Joy Goldkind

Santa Fe artist Nancy Sutor will be exhibiting work from her new series entitled, COMPOSE DECOMPOSE. While this new work continues Sutor’s study of the systems and cycles of nature that she explored previously through cyanotype photograms, the new work has a more literal approach and a further exploration of the way light sensitive materials depict vision and perception.

In this series, she explores the representation of time passing, light changing, germination, growth and decay. These images are not only a literal documentation of the artist’s garden – her refuge – but they become a metaphor for the need to generate sustainability on a larger scale.

“The surge in backyard, city and neighborhood gardens, the growing need to reduce the use of fossil fuels in producing and transporting food and the movement to convert distressed urban real estate into green spaces, all point to positive changes that can increase the health of the earth, communities and people. These images represent a direct experience of making dirt, germinating seeds, growing food, adding oxygen to the world.” – Nancy Sutor

The resulting images are dense with pattern and texture, silhouetted and flattened, or translucent and refracted, viewed from above or seen up close. Sutor shows the idea of transformation and dissolve as delicate flowers and food decay into composted dirt and shadows and natural projections become form.

BRIGITTE CARNOCHAN, JOY GOLDKIND, NANCY SUTOR
Exhibition Dates: Friday, September 3 through Saturday, October 16, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, September 3, 2010, 5-7pm

Bromoil Demonstration and Gallery Talk with Joy Goldkind
Saturday, September 4, 10:00am

Gallery Talk with Brigitte Carnochan and Nancy Sutor
Saturday, September 4, 2-4pm

VERVE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
219 E. Marcy Street
Santa Fe, NM 87501

Press release and images provided by the gallery.

Ron Nagel, A Rose Grows in Coma, 2010, ceramic, 4-1/4 x 3-1/2 x 7 inches

Nagle, whose career spans the past forty years, was a student of the renowned ceramic sculptor Peter Voulkos and currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Early in his career, having seen exhibitions of paintings by Giorgio Morandi, and teacups from Japan’s Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568-1600), Nagle decided to focus on making cups. Until recently, he worked almost exclusively on variations of the cup shape, often pushing the form toward pure abstraction.

However, in recent years, Nagle has shifted his focus away from the cup/vessel form focusing on small-scale abstract sculptures. These new works are highly detailed, although intimate in scale. The unique textures and garish color combinations are trademarks of Nagle’s work. He combines rough highly textured surfaces, which have been sprayed with mat color glazes, with exquisitely smooth surfaces on the same piece.

A rigid formalist, Nagle often fires his sculptures up to forty times during the glazing process, and carefully constructs the drip-like features that at first glance appear to be accidental. All of the sculptures originate directly from the artist’s drawings, which are complete sketches of realized and unrealized abstract forms done on legal pads. Several of these drawings will be included in the exhibition as well.

In addition to being a renowned sculpture, Nagle is also an accomplished musician and songwriter.

Nagle’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Renwick Gallery, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA among others.

Spit Shine
Exhibition Dates: July 30 – September 25, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, July 30th, 2010, 5:00-7:00 pm

James Kelly Contemporary
1601 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87501

Press release and image provided by the gallery.

California based artist Jeffrey Becom will be exhibiting work from his most recent series of film-based images from Northern India and Kashmir. These new photographs reflect his signature subject and style: the sensuous use of color to transform architectural imagery into lush, painterly, colorist compositions. Coming to fine art photography as a painter and architect, Becom has spent the last thirty years revealing the stories and symbolism behind the brightly painted walls of traditional villages from the Mediterranean and Mexico to the Highlands of Guatemala and Peru.

“It was only a matter of time before I turned my camera to the subcontinent of Asia,” says Becom. “After all, India is synonymous with brilliant colors, myriad faiths and some of the earliest societies on earth. Color and faith profoundly envelop Indian life on all levels. I worked mainly in small towns and villages located well off the tourist routes where color and religious ritual are most deeply entwined and intact. I call this first series of images “Painted Shadows,” because while the painted colors and belief systems of India are potent and pervasive, my understanding of Eastern cultural traditions is necessarily obscured by my Western mindset. These images reveal glimpses—enduring mirages—in the mountains, dust and sand.”

Becom has come to find his inspiration in ever-more remote places populated by indigenous, ritual-bound people whose architectural color springs organically from their history, geography and faith. He considers his photographs to be documentary: the colors, subjects and details are captured as found. He has long relied on traditional equipment and materials and printed using traditional wet darkroom techniques and the Ilfochrome process. Only with this new India series has he entered the digital realm and begun producing film-based images as pigment ink prints on German etching paper.

Simultaneously pursuing an interest in antique darkroom processes, Becom will also be exhibiting six contemporary platinum/palladium prints of images from India. This exclusive collection is printed on Japanese handmade, hand-coated Gampi paper in collaboration with Hidden Light of Flagstaff, Arizona, as commissioned by Verve Gallery of Photography.

For this exhibition, Florida based photographer Maggie Taylor will be debuting, Small Possible Worlds, twenty new color prints which are an extension of her previous work, in which she explores the use of a computer and a flatbed scanner in place of a camera. By placing objects directly on the scanner she is able to create a unique type of digital image which keep its photographic qualities.

After completing her own illustrations to a new publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 2008 (with debut exhibition at Verve Gallery), Maggie is now freely working with her own imagination again, continuing the use of animals, people and landscapes in the surreal, bizarre settings she creates. She also continues the use of old photographs such as daguerreotypes and tintypes as well as using animal figurines, illustrations and negatives in which she then composites on the computer, resulting in a digital print. The animals continue to mingle with the people in her new work either as pets, or being discreetly placed within an image and becoming a subtle integration or showing up as a threatening force. The use of landscapes have been inspired by Maggie’s images from her travels and include Venice and Lacock Abbey in England. She has made an homage to the history of photography including appropriated images from Henry Fox Talbot in her image, “The Collector.”

Santa Fe based photographer, Nevada Wier will be debuting her new, ongoing project entitled, Outer India, where she is focusing on the tribal cultures that live in the peripheral edges of India. Culturally, these tribes are diverse and unique; physically they mostly inhabit the border regions. Most of these locations require special permits, rough, long days of driving, dealing with difficult weather, and uncertain political situations.

In Nevada’s first exhibition at Verve, A Nomadic Vision, she exhibited a retrospective of work from her extensive travels throughout the Eastern world. This series, Outer India, began years ago when she traveled extensively in the northwestern region of Ladakh and became enamored with the Ladakhi culture. She then traveled to the color-fantastic states of Gujarat, Rajasthan and South India. Those travels led her to explore the rugged far northeastern states, euphemistically called the “Seven Sisters”, near the Bhutan and Myanmar borders: an extremely rough area that is often closed due to tribal and political disputes. After her recent third visit to this region she was able to penetrate further into Nagaland and, with the help of the royal family, visit the tribes of Tripura. She has additionally, been exploring the tribal east-central hill states of Orissa and Chhattisgarh.

“I find the lesser-known regions of India singularly fascinating. These are people living on the margin of Indian society. They are tucked away in harsh terrain close to the borders of Myanmar, Bhutan, Pakistan, and China, as well as in the hill country of obscure states such as Orissa and Chhattisgarh. Each tribe has distinctive language, traditions, and tribal ceremonies, even within a larger tribal group (such as the Nagas). Most live in areas that have basic infrastructure and are only recently being connected by roads and electricity.”

All of Nevada’s images are printed in her studio where she oversees every technical and aesthetic detail in the printmaking process. In the exhibition, there are three different processes including color, digital infrared, and de-saturated color. She says of the medium, “I love the art of digital printmaking; there is an art in sculpting a print. Although I do not crop or change any content of an image, I do enjoy experimenting with de-saturating and accentuating certain colors. Digital infrared gives me a look that I can not achieve with color and it is best during lighting conditions that would not work for color.”

Saturated With Color: Jeffrey Becom, Maggie Taylor, and Nevada Wier
Exhibition Dates: Friday July 9 through Saturday, August 28, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, July 9, 2010, 5-7pm

Gallery Talk with Jeffrey Becom and Nevada Wier
Saturday, July 10, 2-4pm

VERVE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
219 E. Marcy Street
Santa Fe, NM 87501

Press release and images provided by the gallery.