"Show Two," the second in a series of BFA shows of work in photography, digital imaging, and multimedia from Tisch's Department of Photography & Imaging, will be on view at the Gulf + Western Gallery.
SHOW TWO, an exhibition featuring works in photography, digital imaging, and multimedia by 17 graduating seniors in the Department of Photography & Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, will open Thursday, March 23, 2017. There will be an opening reception from 6 pm to 8 pm.
The show explores such varied themes as the construct of masculinity, the search for meaning in an arbitrary world, the pervasiveness of class divides in a suburban American town, and the examination of patterns and shapes in everyday life.
SHOW TWO is the second in a series of three BFA exhibitions of the work of the entire graduating Photography & Imaging class. It is installed in the Gulf + Western Gallery (1st floor rear lobby) and the 8th Floor Gallery at 721 Broadway (at Waverly Place) and will remain on view at through April 22, 2017. Artists whose work will be on view include the following:
Maya Baroody: In LIBNAN, Baroody explores the country of her origins through a Western-raised lens and begins to reconcile the differences between an upbringing in America and life in Lebanon. In intimate photographs of her family as well as landscape and street portraits, Baroody captures aspects of this beautiful yet complex country not often depicted in Western media.
Lucy Beni: Her Story puts a focus on women who have embraced their non-heteronormative sexual or gender identities as women, even when such decisions pulled them from their families and caused them to be subject to bigotry. Through personal storytelling, these women provide a range of instrumental perspectives on the progress of LGBTQ rights (with some actively disagreeing with this labeling) that has occurred over the past half century.
Phoebe Boatwright: Derivations and Inference explores the desire to find trends and meaning in an otherwise arbitrary world. Images explore the accumulation of the appropriate data, and follow where the data leads us, refines our rough hypotheses, builds our necessary tests, and orders our statistics.
Lauren Brahn: Patterns and structures are everywhere, and often go unnoticed. Brahn depicts structures and patterns in black and white while processing them digitally to converge old and new styles of photography. She further explores this concept by printing them in large scale to change the context in which we see these patterns.
Aaron Breetwor: “What Makes A Man?” is an investigation of the myriad dreams, desires, and expectations women have of men—their fathers, brothers, friends, coworkers, partners, and sons. Having been raised primarily by women, Breetwor’s interest in this topic stems from questioning the ways in which women participate in the construction of masculinity. His goal is to deepen our willingness to question the effectiveness of the gender binary, and ask that we consider how we are all complicit in its perpetuation.
Eugenia Efstathiou: Nephelai depicts the collective nostalgia and confusion of the Greek youth who have emigrated to other countries as a result of the financial crisis. In pursuit of stability and economic security, the young population finds itself trapped in the reminiscence of the physical grandeur of Greek nature, communicated by Efstathiou's juxtaposition of the Greek natural landscape with the cityscape of New York City.
Alex Fiszbein: Una Pasión is an immersive look at soccer fanaticism in Argentina through the perspective of a Racing Club Fan. Racing Club has one of the biggest followings in Argentina despite its poor record (no championship won between 1966-2001). This undying love even in the face of suffering is a revealing feature in Argentine popular culture (tango) and politics.
Kearra Amaya Gopee: Artifact #1: Tiger Balm deals with the many facets of identity, nationality and immigration that are implicit in the relationships of Trinidad and Tobago, the U.S. and European colonial history. In the installation’s mirror, a video depicts the artist and her mother. In certain areas, both of these people have been erased by replacing their faces and bodies with noise, reflecting the metaphorical state of visibility and invisibility often inhabited by immigrant people.
Aaron Kho: Kho arranges documents referencing personal history, pop culture, politics, and social media in a three channel video installation to question the conundrum between passive and active viewership. The documents in his installation are arranged in a chaotic way, begging the spectator to make sense of their contents.
Michelle Kim: Kim creates sculptures that are free of any identifiers in order to examine gestures in isolation. Her multimedia process is concerned with the performance of breakage and construction and the fragility of yearning.
Justin Lanier: In Uniting Palatine, Lanier documents inequality in his hometown––a suburb of Chicago––through personal narratives and historical data in an attempt to understand what is responsible for the social divide between its predominantly white upper-middle class residents and its more diverse, working class. The videos are presented online accompanied by historical data about Palatine’s schools, housing, and demographic makeup, and information regarding programming grants aimed at community empowerment.
Claire Sunho Lee: Lee suggests that the poetics of everyday epiphany comes at a certain moment of the day, at a certain angle. She shows that it is then that the light and shadows cast by our man-made objects make an effort to fulfill an inner craving for ethereal beauty in vain.
Claudia Mann: In Qui la Camorra ha perso Mann travelled to three cities near Naples, Italy, where criminal activity and violence by the Camorra, a Mafia-type crime syndicate in the Italian region of Campania, is still very prominent. During her month and a half-long trip, she documented the life of the communities who work on the properties confiscated from the Camorra and fight the oppression of organized crime.
Andrew Nelson: The People is an observance of the public sphere. Each piece is a portrait of a stranger that is engraved into marble. Each piece is a monumental declaration that anyone can be put in stone and remembered. Since the people are unaware of Nelson’s presence, their postures, expressions, and costumes are in the context of their own culture. The purpose of this series is to inspire curiosity and empathy towards those living in the present, seeing all people as valuable and real.
David Tu Sun Song: Haenyeo: The mothers of the sea is a compilation of photographs produced to capture the community of women divers in Jeju Island, the southernmost part of South Korea. Though Haenyeo was recently inscribed on the UNESCO cultural heritage list, the women divers' population is diminishing in size. Song’s documentation quietly shines a light on the Haenyeo, ensuring its preservation for generations to come.
Rachel Tarling: Tarling’s photographs examine the people and places of her childhood town: Scarsdale, New York. Inspired by the curiosity she felt as a child, the images focus on places and people that shaped her identity.
Jeffry Valadez: Entre los dos, is a series of collages that explores issues of memory, migration, hybrid identity, and transgenerational trauma in the Chicanx community. Working with images from Mexican-American mestizo iconography and personal archives, the series makes visible the physiological landscapes embodied by the community—in a demand for greater recognition and protection from the state, by the state.
Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays. Admission is free. Photo identification is required for access to the building. For more information, visit http://tisch.nyu.edu/photo or call 212.998.1930.
The Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the
Arts is a four-year B.F.A. program centered on the making and
understanding of images. Students explore photo-based imagery as
personal and cultural expression. Situated within New York University,
the program offers students both the intensive focus of an arts
curriculum and a serious and broad grounding in the liberal arts.T