Critic's Pick

Who are you?
WXW:

I’m just a guy from Milwaukee who somehow ended up living in India. My father was in India and China during World War II, as part of the group flying supplies over the “hump” of the Himalayas. He had a photo scrapbook that always intrigued me when I was young. It had large gold letters on top a leather cover that read “CHINA – BURMA – INDIA”. There were small black and white photos inside that my dad took, and those always intrigued me. Later, in school, I fell in love with English Literature an opposed to American Literature. And of course English literature takes you straight to the Raj. I suppose all of this sounds very colonialist, but it’s not. I grew up in the 60s, so I’m a bit of an old hippie. The Beatles’ fascination with India influenced me also, and people like Allen Ginsburg and Peter Orlovsky. Later, Francesco Clemente. Anyway, in 1993 I made my first visit to India, and India has been in my heart ever since. For the past sixteen years I’ve lived here, first in Goa, and later here in Udaipur in Rajasthan, where I keep my home and studio.

When did you first discover your interest in photography and where did it go from there?
WXW:

I started shooting with an old Nikon years back, while attending the now defunct Milwaukee Center for Photography. By the time I was studying at Studio Marangoni in Florence I had switched to a vintage Rolleiflex. My training was as an old fashioned chemical process guy, with heavy emphasis on quality in darkroom technique. My photos were heavily influenced by the movement of Pictorialism. Documentary photography never appealed to me. I would sepia tone my Rolleiflex images and reveled in their chocolaty tones. For me sepia wasn’t nostalgia, but just a beautiful way to present an image. In India this got me in trouble though. When I started to exhibit these images in India I was widely criticized by Indian and European critics for trying to hold India back in some past that lacked modernity. All the weight of Edward Said and post-colonial theory was thrown at me. I was surprised to find that the very images that were thought innocuous in the US caused such a commotion in India.

How do you use photography to interpret your experience as an American living in India?
WXW:

In 2006 I rented a home in Udaipur in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. There I built my first Indian photo studio. It was modeled on traditional Indian portrait studios, though the images I hoped to make would be much more funky. Working with a crew of local painters we produced our first linen backdrops. I switched back to a Nikon, and started to shoot digital. The resulting photographs were first printed digitally in black and white, and later were hand-coloured by Rajesh Soni. Finding Rajesh was just super lucky for me. He was very young when we started working together, which has been for ten years now. But he is the grandson of Prabhu Lal Verma, who was once the court photographer to the Maharana Bhupal Singh of Mewar. The skills of hand-colouring photographs had been passed down to Rajesh from his grandfather through the intermediary of his father Lalit. Rajesh is super talented, and we make a good team. There was something about this change in my artistic trajectory that caused a shift among the critical community toward a more positive view. Another thing that happened is that I began a series of semi-autobiographical paintings with an Indian miniaturist painter known as R. Vijay. The miniatures are self-reflective and often humorous. Indians started to love this work. The two bodies of work reflect on one another. It’s been rather a success story ever since.

Who or What inspires you?
WXW:

I’m inspired by beauty. I love landscape, but feel too overwhelmed by landscape to try and capture it. The beauty of people on the other hand I can relate to on a very personal level. For the past five years we’ve had our new studio out in the village of Varda, about a thirty minute drive outside of Udaipur. The villagers are completely wonderful. They help us and have fun with us. It’s fabulous…truly, the things that have happened during our photographic journey over the past ten years in Udaipur have become the stuff of local legend. I may not be world famous, but I’m loved and respected here. India feels like home.

What next?
WXW:

We keep working. Rajesh and I are both a bit of workaholics, and we love to just make things. There is a new series developing. But it’s always a bit hard to predict where the energy will eventually take us. We just work, and see where we go.

Waswo X. Waswo was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the U.S.A. He studied at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, The Milwaukee Center for Photography, and Studio Marangoni, The Centre for Contemporary Photography in Florence, Italy. His books, India Poems: The Photographs, published by Gallerie Publishers in 2006, and Men of Rajasthan, published by Serindia Contemporary in 2011 (hardcover 2014), have been available worldwide. The artist has lived and travelled in India for over sixteen years and he has made his home in Udaipur, Rajasthan, for the past ten. There he collaborates with a variety of local artists including the photo hand-colourist Rajesh Soni. He has also produced a series of loosely autobiographical miniature paintings in collaboration with the artist R. Vijay. These paintings are represented by Gallerie Espace, New Delhi, while the artist’s hand-coloured photographs are represented by Tasveer India. In Thailand Waswo is represented by Serindia Gallery. In Europe the artist is represented by Gallerie Minsky, Paris.

Rajesh Soni was born on the 6th of August, 1981. He is an artist living in Udaipur, Rajasthan, who has become known primarily for his abilities to hand paint digital photographs. He is the son of artist Lalit Soni, and the grandson of Prabhu Lal Soni (Verma), who was once court photographer to the Maharana Bhopal Singh of Mewar. Prabhu Lal was not only a court photographer, but also a hand-colourist who painted the black and white photographs that he produced. His skills of hand-colouring photographs were passed down to Rajesh through the intermediary of his father Lalit.

R. Vijay, son of Mohan Lal Vijayvargiya, was born on the 22nd of March, 1970, and is a grandnephew of the historic Rajasthani painter Ramgopal Vijayvargiya. The artist received little formal training and his miniature painting style has been described as naïve, though his works have drawn attention and praise from various critics throughout India. Early in life R. Vijay was tutored by traditional miniaturists such as Sukhdev Singh Sisodiya and Laxmi Narayan Sikaligar. Later he developed his own style, which has been called an eclectic mix of Persian and Mogul styles, along with a bit of the Company School of Indo-British art. His collaboration with Waswo has lately become the subject of a book, The Artful Life of R. Vijay by Dr. Annapurna Garimella, Serindia Contemporary, Chicago.

In the start of 2014, I decided to take a year off from work and travel to India. Though born in India, I had never travelled much within the country. This sabbatical was going to be the perfect opportunity to see and experience this country like never before. Through my travel I was hoping to experience and understand the rich culture, tradition and heritage of India. This project “Festivals of India” is a result of those travels. Through my documentary style, I wanted to tell stories of the people, place and the culture of India. Festivals tell a lot about a culture and India has an abundance of that.

My travels took me from the remote parts of India to the big metropolitan cities. Some traditions were native to a place while others were celebrated throughout the country. During my travels I came across many surprises like witnessing one of the biggest Hindu festival of “Ganesh Chaturthi” being celebrated by a Muslim majority village in central India. Being invited to be part of the breaking of the fast at “Karva Chauth” in northern India, a festival celebrated by married Hindu women fasting from sunrise to moonrise for the safety and longevity for their husbands. During “Durga Puja” festival in Kolkata there was a similar tradition of wishing longevity by Bengali women for their husbands but with a different ritual. Here married Bengali women beautifully dressed in traditional attire smeared Vermilion on the feet of the Goddess Durga and then applied it on each other’s forehead. In Surat, Gujarat I came across thousands of kites flying, celebrating the festival of Uttarayan. This festival marks the most important harvest day in Gujarat when winter ends and summer begin.

This project has helped me experience and understand Indian culture and tradition better. There are still places I have not explored and this project is far from over. I do plan to continue to document and expand my understanding and through my photographs help others experience the festivals and ultimately the soul of India.

Artist Bio:
Uday Khambadkone, born and raised in Mumbai, moved to the US to pursue a degree in Engineering. Though always interested in art, photography came to him accidentally through a darkroom college course in Texas. Travel has always lured Uday to various places to explore the people, culture and their customs: From exploring the Romas in Zenica, Bosnia to Catarina doll making people of Capula, Mexico, from a shelter home for cancer kids in Mumbai, India to an NGO school for mentally disabled kids in Quito, Ecuador. The lens has allowed him to break stereotypes and understand the world better.

Hand Painted
My experiences in the darkroom have me hands on with the chemicals. I saw the results of this on the paper, but I couldn’t see how they physically reacted with my hand. That lead to this body of work, Hand Painted. I wanted to literally see how the chemicals ran and spread on my hands; how the two responded to each other to create what I was seeing on the paper.

BIO
Nicole Harrington, who was born and raised in Nebraska, has enjoyed photography since childhood. Running around her grandmother’s home with a 110 film camera taking pictures of the cats. She, however, didn’t fall in love with photography until her high school darkroom class. There, her wonderfully supportive teacher allowed Nicole to follow her own path. After a few years away from photography, she felt something was missing and returned to shooting again while teaching English in South Korea; and the spark was reborn. She found it was a way for her to explore the new culture she found herself becoming a part of. Upon returning to the states she began the study of photography at the New England School of Photography. She graduated in June of 2015. She specializes in black and white fine art and architectural photography.

Critic
The Griffin Museum Of Photography

Statement:
In much of my work I’m dealing with subjects that are in a transitory state. The Evanescence series features images from composted organic materials. In this body of work I’m exploring the mechanics of transition through time, neglect and natural decomposition. I hope to establish images that can be beautiful and chaotic. Subjects that in their own specific way function as a part of a transient process. This ongoing series has been developed over the past two years and included are some of the newest selections.

Bio:
Having studied painting and photography at the Kansas City Art Institute, then, for a time owning and operating a small music shop and gallery, I’ve devoted much of life to making art and working in creative environments. For years I worked in painting and mixed media before transitioning from those disciplines to working exclusively in photography. I’ve been living and working in the Boston area since 2001.

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“Ask your brother if he knows my brother. He will know him. He’s terrible….”

Lost Boys depicts young men living in the American suburbs. Their age’s range from 18
to 25, they are from Generation Y. In reverie between youth and adulthood, this
generation has been called the peter pan generation because they’ve had delays into
adulthood and frequently return to their hometowns because of financial hardships. These
are my brothers. Some I knew from my past and others I’ve met recently. Not only do
they embody a generation, but they also epitomize the actions of generations past.

I want to feel what home means to these boys and what it means to feel happiness and
freedom; ideas that we have constructed in relation to the American Dream. These boys
are all in a state of repose in their parent’s homes; not the common trajectory for males in
accordance to the American Dream.

I aim to have the boys dually express a level of vulnerability and tenderness that is often
looked down upon for men. Being a female photographer, I am also questioning the male
gaze to further challenge gender stereotypes.

“If your brother is so terrible then what are you?” I asked this boy casually smoking in
front of me. He took a deep inhale before responding.

“Beloved.” He replied with an exhale. “Or at least that’s what I’d like to be.”

The probability of returned memory

Igor Lebedev, Critic

Memory rolls in like waves causing a sudden and acute experience which doesn’t refer to a life of a specific person. This memory is connected to a cultural stratum. Everything is mixed here, the present and the past, some old photo portraits telling the stories of life which were erased by flow of time, dried flowers that represent markers of what was important but was forgotten, the memories of what happened, but couldn’t be remembered. So we can see it all in the pictures of the new series Escape to the edge by Julia Borisova.

The imperfection of memory provokes an artist to restore it, so in her work she turns to archives again and again, systematically reinterpreting them at the new levels of personal awareness of not ancestral memory but the memory of the nation. Through its reconstruction it’s easier to recover what has been lost and what has continued as consequences of birth traumas which took place in Russian history so often.

An archive is an anonymous evidence of elapsed time. The anonymity is inherent in a multi-level cultural de-identification of the past. However, despite the apparent constancy of its anonymity, it is surprisingly ready to manipulation according to the needs of everybody who faces it.

The material included in the archive has great variability of its stories, as a rule, on a superficial level, which can be read from the perspective of nostalgic feelings of the past time in the context of personal experience.

But the work with an archive is not only a subconscious desire for nostalgic revival of the past or an affect of overcoming losses in a chain of generations, although it means also some sensual experiences. It is rather an intuitive feeling of the boundaries rigidly dissecting an established world order, an attempt to understand the reasons for the “explosion” that changes the lives of many generations. And, in the end, created statement based on fetishes (old photographs in this case), the objects of so-called personal museum according to Sigmund Freud is an expression of protest arising at the point where the traumatic overcoming of a loss merges with the desire to counteract the possibility of its recurrence in the future.

It seems that such attempt of expression protest is characteristic for Julia Borisova who in her works refers to events from Russian history connected with the revolution and after that the first wave of emigration. In the old pictures the author adds the multi-layer effect through the using collage technique. The pictures themselves already have the images of a distant, “frozen” by photography past while the fragments of flowers imposed on them marked the present undefined in the flow of time. The occurring in the gap of the past and the present becomes for the author the field of exploring her relationship with the historical predestination.

The people in the photographs can’t realize their future, but for the author it’s ajar from the other side, as the future-in-the past. This is the future as the opposite shore of rapid flow of history, which destroyed the whole world, erased the relations of collective memory, forced to experience the pain of the absence of something that wasn’t experienced. And the most important, provoked a conversation about the “deformed, broken world” made in our minds by the old Soviet and the new post-Soviet society in turns, whose features have collage nature.

Critic – Igor Lebedev
Photographer, curator, teacher. Born in the family of Valery Lebedev in Leningrad (1966). Studied photography at technical college (1983–85). Took up professional photography (1985). Taught at a children’s photographic studio (from 1992). Opened the FK photographic studio at the Petrograd District House of Children’s Creativity. Member of the board of the Photoimage Gallery (1995) and the Traditional Autumn Photomarathon Festival (2000). Member of the Union of Photographic Artists of Russia (1996). Curator of exhibitions of photography. Contributed to exhibitions (from 1995).

Photographer – Julia Borissova
info@juliaborissova.ru
View her personal  website.

Julia Borissova was born in Tallinn, Estonia. She lives in St.Petersburg, Russia where she studied at the Academy of Photographic skills in 2009-2010. She graduated from the Foundation of Informational and Cultural projects “FotoDepartament, the program “Photography as a research”, 2011-2013. Julia took part in the Masterclass by Jan Grarup (Denmark, agency NOOR) 2011; Morten Andersen (Norway) 2011, 2012; Luuk Wilmering (Dutch) 2012; Anouk Kruithof (Dutch) 2013; ; Jaap Scheeren (Dutch) class, 2014; participated in a Workshop of the international photography magazine FOAM.

Her works were included in several Russian and international group shows. Besides she had five solo exhibitions, the last one was in 2014 at FotoDepartamet Gallery in St.Petersburg, Russia.
Julia Borissova is the winner in the 2013 International Fine Art Photography Competition in the Experimental category; the competition “The Baltic Photo Biennale. Photomania” in the Fine Art category; participant at the Noorderlicht International Photofestival 2013 TWENTY. Her first book “The Farther Shore” was selected for the shortlist of the 50 books in the International Photobook Festival 2013 in Kassel, Germany. The project “Running to the Edge” was selected for the top 10 professional shortlist in the Conceptual category, in the 2013 Sony Word Photography Awards.
Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg) and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris).

Julia Borissova considers photography as a way of research and recognition the intangible meaning in the world. She thinks that act of photographing attemps to make sensation visible. She explores ideas of the image and the materiality of the medium of photography. She also uses photographs as a material for making collages and transfers them on different surfaces to create the other forms. She also creates and publishes art-books.

Publications:
The project “DOM. Part 3″ on Prizm
The project “DOM” on Posi+tive Magazine
The project “DOM. Part 3″ in the art-magazine “Iskusstvo” (Moscow)
“Running to the Edge” on Elephant Magazine
“The Farther Shore” on Phases
The project “DOM” on v-e-l-l-u-m
“In the mountains is my heart” on SMBHmag
The project “DOM” on Le Journal de la Photographie
The interview for the Japanese magazine “Chemodan”
Landscape Stories Magazine 12 | River
F-Stop Magazine
“Tideland” on Naturae
‘The Farther Shore’ on Urbanautica
The interview for the Sony World Photography Awards
Archivo Portfolio’13 editor’s choice
“FOTO & VIDEO” Magazine, № 6 June 2012 (Moscow)
“FOTO & VIDEO” Magazine, № 3 March 2012 (Moscow)
“Home & Space” Magazine №20 (Tumen, Russia), Aug 2011
“RUSSIAN REPORTER” Magazine, № 25 Jun 2011 (Moscow)
“FOTO & VIDEO” Magazine, № 2 Feb 2011 (Moscow)
“FOTO & VIDEO” Magazine, № 8 Aug 2011 (Moscow)

Artist Statement

Commonly adapting systems-based strategies, my work embraces chance outcomes and sits at the intersection of new media, photography, and a performance act. Stalking Michael Stipe: Another Prop to Occupy My Time is an interactive multimedia installation detailing the accounts of a 36-hour photographic road trip through the Georgia landscape in pursuit of my one-time Rock n’ Roll idol. The project parameters were simple. When Michael emerged from his house the project began. When I lost his trail the project ended. All spaces I was led to in between became my photographic territory.

Stalking Michael Stipe is experienced in 3 parts: 30” x 35” color photographs, an interactive 35mm slide box experience referencing the research and events that brought me to Michael’s door in Athens, GA, and a performed lecture detailing the many moments of coincidence that happened along the way. This online gallery is an abbreviated reinterpretation of the original installation, integrating both research slides and the final photographic outcome into a new self-contained and nonlinear sequence. An expanded version of this project can be seen on my personal website.

Many have inquired about why I chose Michael Stipe as my subject. In short, for me, he was worth it.

Artists Bio

Jon Horvath is an artist and educator residing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2008. Horvath’s work has been exhibited nationally in galleries including: The Print Center (Philadelphia), Macy Gallery at Columbia University (New York), Newspace Center for Photography (Portland), and The Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography. His work is currently held in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Haggerty Museum of Art, and is included in the Midwest Photographers Project at MoCP . Horvath was a finalist for the The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s 2009 and 2010 Mary L. Nohl Emerging Artist Fellowship. In 2011, he was named a US Flash Forward winner by The Magenta Foundation. Horvath currently teaches at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

www.jonhorvath.net

Critic’s Bio

Greer Muldowney is an artist, photography professor and independent curator based in Boston, Massachusetts. She received an undergraduate degree in Political Science and Studio Art from Clark University, and an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She has acted as the Curator for the Desotorow Gallery in Savannah, GA and is the Regional Coordinator for the Flash Forward Festival on behalf of the Magenta Foundation. Muldowney also serves as an active member of the Board for the Griffin Museum of Photography, and currently teaches at Boston College and the New England Institute of Art.

Her work has been exhibited and published in North America, Hong Kong, Malaysia and France, and is a 2013 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship.

Artist Statement
Massive constructions on the suburbs of big cities are a global phenomenon. The contemporary cities are changing their shape so much faster than in the past, that it is very hard for their inhabitants to integrate the new in their life and imaginary.

In my most recent work I focused my attention on the new, unbridled, and largely unnoticed development around Rome in Italy. Attracted by the concept and aesthetics of contemporary typologies of residential housing, I decided to turn some of these architectures into pieces of art, depicting them as something between sculptures and movie sets. In these way I tried to recreate a state where the buildings are still looking for an identity being something between pure “form and volume” and set for possible narrations.

Artist Bio
Ilaria Ortensi completed her B.A. in Cinema Studies at La Sapienza University of Rome in Italy. She then moved to Boston where in 2010 she completed the Post-Baccalaureate Program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She is currentely living in New York City and pursuing her MFA in photography at Columbia University.

Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions such as Pass this on at the Stone Crop Gallery in Maine, Collective 9 at the Dog Eared Gallery in London and Out of Context at West Germany in Berlin. In 2010 her work was part of the PRC Student Exhibition at the Photographic Resource Center and of the Student Annual Exhibition at the Grossman Gallery and Anderson Auditorium of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. In the same year she had her solo show, Rooms, at the Stone Crop Gallery in Maine.

Stone Crop Gallery

In the early 1920s, Grace Merrill bought a small strip of land along a rocky ledge on Shore Road near Perkins Cove. Before a structure was built—even before she had a design for her new studio—she named the future home “Stonecrop” after the hardy flower that “clothes the rocks with starlike yellow bloom.”

Miss Merrill built Stonecrop with salvaged materials from an old barn and other local structures. She reclaimed the barn’s hand-hewn pine timbers to construct a 24-foot high great room, while a damaged 18th century dwelling supplied a stone fireplace and a unique staircase. As construction proceeded, she scoured the surrounding towns for wood, doors, windows—whatever she could find that fit her vision for the home. “From all sides, old materials seemed to pour in,” Merrill wrote. “All summer, my long-suffering car was adorned with bags of cement, old brick, and iron in varied shapes.”

The result of her vision is this unique house with a special history. Stonecrop has been a home to artists for much of the past century. Two previous owners, painter Ruth Seeger and printmaker Beverly Hallam, are still active in the Perkins Cove area. Current owner and photographer Dana Berenson welcomes you to Stonecrop and the Stonecrop Gallery. She’s proud to inherit the creative legacy of Miss Merrill, and invites you to enjoy the artwork.

Statement:
Inspired by periods of art history, my work reinterprets these traditional works from a more contemporary point of view. Our world and cultures are changing so quickly, we are witnessing the collision of past and present as populations shift, our world has become so diverse that cultures are visually harder to define.

Although my photographs are “manufactured realities”, they address real issues. Populations shift. Gender and race are redefined. Past definitions are challenged and the faces of cultures and customs change. My work depicts those changes.

Bio:
Maxine Helfman is self-taught, late bloomer. After spending years as a stylist and art director, Helfman realized her vision by getting behind the camera. She has since been shooting commercially for advertising and editorial clients, while pursuing personal projects. Her work has been recognized in PX3, IPA, Foto DC, Flash Forward Boston, Critical Mass, British Journal of Photography, Photo News, as well as the permanent collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Art Houston.

Visit www.maxinehelfman.com

About wallspace Founder and Director, Crista Dix

Starting in this creative field as a photographer, collector and lover of the visual image, Crista decided to put down her camera and utilize her years of business management to help promote photographers and photography. With a background in science, business and creative arts, she has created a gallery space that celebrates artists’ vision. She has been a member of numerous panels and discussions, juried creative competitions and has participated in major portfolio reviews across the country.

About wallspace
wall space is a gallery focused on the craft of photography, featuring emerging and mid career artists. The gallery expands the definition of what a photograph is, our artists use alternative processes, mixed media and digital technology in crafting their stories

The gallery opened in 2005 in Seattle, showcasing local and national talents. We opened our Santa Barbara location in 2010 again taking the lead in showcasing artists who transcend the medium, looking to expand the photographic arts.
Gallery Artists are national and internationally known creative talents, whose artistic vision is well known for its imagination and originality. A selection of prints is available in the gallery in our flat files.

Our Online gallery is our virtual showcase exposing new artists with a creative contemporary vision. Prints are available for viewing by arrangement.

Collectible is our quarterly showcase of singular images at introductory pricing. Four focused collections per year showcase new artists, and images exclusive to the gallery’s program. Limited editions, affordable pricing, and unique images make this an important part of the gallery’s mission to promote our artists and advance the larger availability of photography as an art form. A selection of prints is available in the gallery, and all of the work is available for purchase online. To view specific images, please contact the gallery to make arrangements.

Visit www.wall-spacegallery.com