March 25 - May 9, 2013







Martin Kruck, Habitorium

My photographic projects often involve multi-layered interpretations of place. This recent series entitled ‘Habitorium’, makes a study of constructed habitats -- those spaces designed to satisfy both the emotional and bodily needs of its occupant. Views of hotels, zoos, museums, parks, and other human and animal environments, are combined to create new scenes that explore the idea of post-naturalistic photography. More enclosures than landscapes, the images tend to reveal how extremely studied life is. Nature and artifice form inversions throughout the series, adding to the uneasy feeling the spaces we inhabit are for test subjects.









Tatana Kellner,  (Un)natural Occurrences

My work is rooted in social issues. Growing up in communist Czechoslovakia as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, I was told to toe the line in school while at home ‘do not trust them’ was the dictum. This conflicting advice provided a schizophrenic lens with which I see the world. 

I create installations, drawings, photographs and artist’s books that explore politics, economy, environment and social justice issues.

I’m interested in finding the proper visual language to address these weighty topics. Using satire, whimsy and at times an element of surprise, I try to bring the viewer into the conversation.

My work is rooted in printmaking, I like the graphic nature of the medium as well as its historical role as the medium for the masses. Covered in dust, rubble and layers upon layers of sediments, history and politics are only revealed after digging up a lot of dirt, both physically and figuratively. I work with images in a similar way, digging through layers of information to arrive at the final images.







Insoon Ha, Face

Multiple large-scale digital self-portraits installed on the gallery floor. I conduct a performance as part of this installation in which I wash the photographs after they have been walked on by visitors and then use the water to wash my face.





Adriane Little, Housekeeping/ A Very Easy Death

The conceptual frame of my work originates from the investigation of ritual and trauma through the presence and absence of the maternal body. This is then visualized through a series of mediated rituals. This occurs either within my artistic process itself or within the final work through symbols of recuperation and continuance. Ritual can allow contribution and participation in the world around us. Here ritual is functioning as a singular and private act; under the burden of grief and trauma embedded within instinct or what I call the matrilineal ghost.

The matrilineal ghost concept provides a container for collective and personal history that becomes visible as instinct. It is a space that continues to evolve through the interrogation of traumatic moments. It is the space where residue, marks and traces can be found or the way in which memory and trauma imprint on the present. The matrilineal ghost encourages a position that the psychical and corporeal bodies are perpetual and that one supports the other partly through the uncanny and repetition toward our own origin. By this I mean that they exist as the same yet divided realm of space and time. The energy between helps the other exist; each desires the other through a language of trauma. One becomes more aware of the matrilineal ghost through the absence of the maternal body. Yet it is much more.

As a continuation of these ideas, this new body of work turns to literature as a source of visualization. Literature is riddled with dead or otherwise missing mothers. I have chosen two such texts for the beginning for this new work: A Very Easy Death (Simone de Beauvoir) and Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson).

A Very Easy Death consists of 12 pairs of transparent images. Each pair, hung one behind the other, is illuminated with a single light source. By its nature, the transparency is weightless and is affected by those who encounter it. In essence, the work is moving image projected on the wall. The image is perpetually moving, most often fragile and alters the physicality of space and time. The projected images consist of shadow, texture, decay and absence with the first image. For these images, the camera was placed on the ground. This was done for the sake of a marked horizon line between life and death. I retyped the book and used the text to create the second image.

Housekeeping consists of a series of shadow boxes, image and text. For this project, I cut seventeen copies (and counting) of the novel Housekeeping into individual words. The text from the book is then placed in the empty space of the shadow box and in front of the image. The act and ritual of cutting the books speaks to the persistence of loss and trauma, which is fractured yet contained or fragments of trauma. With lineage tracing to Dada and Surrealism and advanced by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, the cutting of the text also visualizes the cut- up literary technique. It is used here for its inherent nature of rewriting or reorganizing and in turn allowing for internal housekeeping in response to maternal loss. The images for this project dissolve the boundary between loss, inside and outside. For instance, images mimicking wallpaper or wall paint.