Left:Curtis Mann, Loudspeaker (Beirut), 2007 acrylic varnish on bleached c-print, 23 x 28"                              Right: Jowhara AlSaud, Halos, C41 print mounted on aluminum, 30 x 40"

 

Jowhara AlSaud & Curtis Mann:

Altered States
March 13 - April 14, 2009

 

For Immediate Release

 

Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to announce Jowhara AlSaud and Curtis Mann in their first exhibition at the gallery. Altered States will be on view from March 13th - April 14th. Both AlSaud and Mann use photographs as a starting point in their work. They each use a new visual language as they scratch, bleach, and alter the images to create scenes of isolated beauty. Whether it’s a social scene that you might experience with friends or a vague hint of a place you might have seen featured in the nightly news both artists show how suggestive photography can be. AlSaud and Mann push the limits of traditional photography as they alter the physical elements of the photographs, the paper and the film. Each shows just how malleable a medium photography can be even before the readily available aide of today's digital manipulations.

Growing up in a society where figurative work is still considered by many to be sinful; AlSaud, who was born in Saudi Arabia, began this series of photographs as a comment on the censorship in Saudi Arabia and it's effects on visual communication. Copying the language of the censors Alsaud makes line drawings from her personal photographs, omitting faces and providing only the essentials in the details, so that the figures become anonymous. These drawings are then etched back into film and printed in an analog darkroom. These minimal narratives become powerful in their simplified statements.

Starting with appropriated images from online websites like Flicker , Mann refashions images that are taken in areas going through deep conflict like Israel/ Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq. He bleaches away information, not giving too many details of specific locations and events in any one scene. The details that are left behind create an entirely new landscape. Eroded buildings, piles of rubble, speakers tethered to people, all become an otherworldly landscape, where the accentuated details that are left behind hint at their potential significance and open them up to new interpretations.

 

For further information please contact  Howard Yezerski Gallery 617.262.0550  Tuesday - Saturday 10-5:30pm