Seena Sussman - Crossroads

Twenty-five years ago, I volunteered to do portraits of residents at a facility providing food, shelter, clothing and crisis counseling to adolescents at risk. Over a period of about a year, I visited the facility once a week and collaborated with the subjects on their portraits. I had hoped that creating these portraits would help these young people gain a better sense of self-esteem and imagine a different life. Looking at these images now, I wonder how their lives turned out.
This show is dedicated to Harry Sussman.

Tony Kirman - Landscape Within

With these images I continue to explore the photo-gesture, inspired by the Abstract Expressionist concept. Shutter speeds between half a second and 6 seconds enable the gesture. I then further abstract the image by removing color, manipulating the remaining tonal range and printing on metallic paper.
The images are my love poems for New York City, where I have lived and changed for 27 years. I arrived as a migrant and will perhaps leave as a ghost. In the meantime I document the process of living by creating evidence of a life.
The Chilean director Raúl Ruiz wrote that Truth is unspeakable because it takes time for us to tell it and Time has a habit of making us change our minds. This is why I make photographs.

Roman Makhmutov - Project «Arkaim» (Russia, 2005-2015)

Arkaim was a fortified settlement in the Bronze Age that has gained wide popularity in Russia as a mystical "place of power." At every summer solstice, it attracts up to 15,000 pilgrims, tourists, and vendors, while others come to rest, dance, have fun, or look at the others.
However, everything excavated by archeologists has now been reburied, nothing of the original structure is now to be seen, and visitors can tour only a reconstructed house and part of a defensive wall some distance from the original site.
It’s as if a crowd gathered to view a picture frame and imagined a famous painting. Everyone sees a different picture, depending of their beliefs and value systems.

F. Emmanuel Bastien - Fragmented Reflections

I am drawn to the dimensional contradictions within reflections.
The reflections flatten onto one plane multiple dimensional layers that would not otherwise interact, revealing a new dimension.
I watch this moving canvas: the glass, what is behind the glass, the fragments reflected in the glass and what evolves in between, waiting to create a new narrative, shrouded in mystery, dreaminess and uncertainty.

Jay Matusow - Starting with Sky

This body of work has its genesis in the colors and shapes the sun paints in the sky at the beginning of each day. The beauty of the seemingly endless variety of sunrises I saw from my back porch last winter, compelled me to interrupt my morning routine to make a series of photographs. The opportunity to record these images, was both ephemeral and mercurial, as the eastern sky morphed from darkness to splendor, and then back to the mundane, over the course of a just a few minutes.
While the results were beautiful, the pictures were no where near as dynamic and imaginative as my memory of the original. So I was inspired to recreate (or perhaps relive) these mornings, by painting my own shapes in the sky. My instinct led me to create what feels like a collaboration of sorts, between myself and the sun, working together to recreate impression of a fluid sky morphing from one startling set of tones and shapes to another -- always fresh, never static and never feeling like a copy of any other morning.
I developed a consistent method for the work:
1. Each one begins with a single photograph, shot around dawn, looking east from my home.
2. Everything but the sky is cropped from the photo, and the resulting image is mirrored and then joined to the original, usually along the horizon, so it forms a kind of surround or enclosure, which serves as a background .
3. Imaginary shapes and objects are digitally sketched and small portions of the same dawn sky that serves as the background, are mapped on to their surfaces. These figments, born from the sky, become the actual subject of the image. Some echo familiar objects, others are simply doodle-like products of my brain -- ribbons, hollow pyramids, strands, and spheres.

Yaqui Yamdrok - A Retrospective

Yaqui Yamdrock became a member of Soho Photo Gallery in 1999. She was one of the Gallery’s most prolific photographers, a master (darkroom) printer, an excellent photographer and an eccentric with a great sense of humor.
Born Sally Guthrie, Yaqui changed her name when she became a Buddhist. Her interest in photography began when, as a young actress, she appeared as a turtle-owning character. She bought herself a baby turtle that she named Mullan and was so struck by how cute Mullan was that she went out and bought a camera, adding photography as another of her passions. Yaqui and Mullan lived together for 50 years. Throughout her adulthood Yaqui could be seen on any given day walking Mullan through her Upper West Side neighborhood.
She was a world traveler with a special spot in her heart for Venice, Italy, where she befriended a mask maker who would make masks according to her specifications. When she returned home, she found costumes in local thrift shops and delighted in dressing up her friends and neighbors posing them in ironic and funny vignettes.
Yaqui was a lover of animal, turtles and horses in particular. In 2013, she published a delightfully illustrated book called "By Two!" The book is about a turtle named Mullan who could run very fast and travels to Kentucky to follow her dream of racing against horses.
As a lover of turtles, Yaqui did volunteer work at the Wild Bird Fund, caring for orphaned turtles. We ask that winners of the Silent Auction make a donation to the Wild Bird Fund in Yaqui’s name, at www.wildbirdfund.org.
With all of Yaqui's interests and talents, she was truly a "one of a kind" whose presence is missed by all who knew her.