Judith Gale

Judith Gale’s artistic drive is inspired by nature, particularly marine life. Her fascination with the complex intricacies and the plethora of shapes and colors found in living things generate her paintings. By enlarging these unique elements of nature on canvas, she aspires to capture peoples’ awareness and appreciation of these spectacular wonders. She hopes her artwork helps to draw the tranquility of the ocean to the world above.

Judith has been actively working with the Molluscan Science Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Maryland focused on the study of mollusks and the preservation of coral reefs. She has been involved in distributing educational material to school aged children all over the world. She hopes that by introducing seashells to children, they will grow to love and value our oceans and help protect them.

This work with seashells shaped her art and influenced the themes of her paintings and photography. A portion of her proceeds are donated to this foundation. Judith Gale grew up in Maryland and is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in NYC.

Patrick Christiano

New York based artist Patrick Christiano sold his work on the streets of the city.

According to Robert Lederman, President of ARTIST [email protected], "Pat was one of the City's most beloved street artists. He was an artist, writer and poet who sold in many parts of the City, including Union Sq Park, the Met, and Strawberry Fields.

 

Pat was very active throughout the years of our legal struggle. He provided a lot of help and research for the lawsuit that overturned the Parks' Department's artist-permit. A 1999 criminal court ruling issued by Judge Lucy Billings dismissing some of his park summonses was an important step in winning that case. Pat will be remembered as one of the friendliest and most helpful street artists."

 

You can view some of Pat's art and poetry here:

https://www.patchristiano.com/

https://twitter.com/christianopat

http://www.subwaymusicblog.com/union-square-subway-station/%E2%80%98danny-boy%E2%80%99-banned-by-police/

http://www.artistkunst.de/pat/pat_pictures.html

 

Carol Dronsfield

Carol Dronsfield is a Brooklyn based photographer who uses advertising detritis as inspiration.

Her photography is used almost as a mosaic where she focuses in on a portion of a much parger image, often including areas of distress or detritis, and using that abstracted portion in part of a much larger work of art. The effect of of a fully formed abstract piece of work that stands apart from its original form and look.

 

Julie Mardin

 Julie Mardin is a New York based photographer who gives the viewer a fuller look at object whether snow globes, dolls, artists or a range of other subjects. 

She says, "I have used toys in my work for many years. I find that it helps to approach difficult issues and what feel like daunting problems. This image grew out of a series that photo collages souvenir dolls in and around New York, the city I was born and grew up in, celebrating our diversity and our heritage, though oftentimes questioning what it is we consider progress. The location, a well known superfund site, illustrates the toxic legacy that many residential communities live with throughout the borough of Brooklyn. The doll and the various props celebrate the regenerative spirit I have seen in Bushwick, one that I imagine can only continue to strengthen, through its combination of art, science, sensual pleasures, and practical environmentalism. The souvenir doll also makes reference to the refugee crisis, making one wonder at the interconnections between resource wars and the spent state of our own backyard, and how studying both together could lead to synergistic solutions. I think this brings up another natural role for the Bushwick creative and ecological collectives, one that encourages more events and voices from these regions of conflict, as we are in the midst of the largest human displacement ever recorded, and there is such a big hole in our understanding from the main stream media."

Rocio de Alba

Rocio de Alba poses in a series of humorous and processed self-portraits, which shows us different contemporary mothers in current modern families. Current statistics confirm that the diversity of family structures are affected by many situations including the rise in divorce rate, interracial unions and legalization of same sex marriages. These statistics support the change in the mother prototype.

By taking humorous and dynamic self-portraits, Rocio explores what mothers should look like in the progression of the “modern family”. Statistically, the diversity of modern family structures is caused by divorce. She uses these facts and her own experiences as a base to her concerns and questions.

De Alba’s ongoing series, “Honor Thy Mother,” is featured in the Atelier Gallery at the Griffin Museum of Photography from June 6^st through September 3^rd, 2017. An opening reception will take place on July 13^th, 2017 from 7-8:30PM. Event is free and open to the public.

Rocio de Alba shares, “In my early twenties my pious old fashion Hispanic parents divorced. Years later they confessed their most devoted accomplishments were sparing us the un-pleasantries associated with step-parents. Yet almost immediately my mother began a relationship with a man… and my father courted many women. Baffled, I witnessed my strict marital ethics unravel through the adults that enforced them and seamlessly integrated into what is referred to as the “modern family”.” In these self-portraits, de Alba uses props and minor Photoshop edits to transform herself into these numerous characters which “[focus] on the gamut of the contemporary mother archetype. Rocio herself has undergone broken relationships and separated children. She says, “As the evolution of a progressive family dynamic ensued, it revolutionized societal doctrines that enforced what mothers should look like and instead made mothers reinvent themselves unconventionally and with disregard to social biases.”

Rocio de Alba is a fine art, multimedia and conceptual photographer based in Queens, New York. She received her BFA from The School of Visual Arts and is an award winning book designer and handmade book instructor. Her work has been featured on many platforms including CNN Photos, New York Magazine, and the New York Times Lens. Her work has been part of different group exhibitions including at The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, Blue Sky Gallery in Oregon, and at the Vermont Center of Photography. Her handmade book has earned a finalist position and was displayed at the Festival Documental in Barcelona. On April 2017, the book was also selected for the INFOCUS Exhibition of Self-Published Photo Books at the Phoenix Art Museum.

Marcel Sternberger

 Marcel Sternberger photographed the likes of Sigmund Freud, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Albert Einstein, and George Bernard Shaw. His portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the basis for the president’s likeness on the dime. And yet, his name was forgotten, until a young photography and antiquarian book dealer named Jacob Loewentheil discovered his photographs, abandoned in storage.

Sternberger was born in 1899. He fled his native Hungary due to antisemitism, only to wind up in Nazi Germany. He and his wife, Ilse, were detained by the Gestapo, but made it out of the country in 1933. They moved to Antwerp, where he became the Belgian Royal Family’s official photographer. As war engulfed Europe, Sternberger moved to London, before emigrating to the US, where he was enlisted to take FDR’s official portrait.

“In his heyday, world leaders and preeminent persons recognized him as the leading portrait photographer of his generation,” Loewentheil told American Photo.The artist traveled the US and Mexico, photographing numerous luminaries, his work appearing in international newspapers, on book covers, and postage stamps. In his travels, he became close friends with Rivera and Kahlo, returning time and time again to the couple’s Mexico City home, la Casa Azul.

Sternberger’s method for producing emotive portraits that captured his sitter’s personality involved what he called “The Psychology of Portrait Photography.” Described by the New York Times as “a unique blend of psychological and photographic techniques,” the methodology involved conversing with his subjects before immortalizing them with a handheld Leica 35mm camera.

 

Article from artnet.

Laura Lappi

Laura Lappi works in a wide range of media including installation, sculpture, photography and video. Her work crosses the boundaries between our perception of space and time and between reality and fiction. She is interested in creating bewilderment, uncertainty, unexpected situations and mystery by shifting the form of space and the viewer’s point of view. Emotions such as loneliness and yearning are important concepts within her work.

Lappi's work has been exhibited widely in solo and group shows in Europe, US and Asia including AC Institute in New York, Galleri Vest in Reykjavik, Galleri Uusi Kipinä in Lahti, Gallery Titanik in Turku, Kunstpodium T in Tilburg, Gramercy Gallery in New York, Fotogalerie in Rotterdam, Re:Rotterdam International Art Fair in Rotterdam, Twente Biennale 2013 in Enschede, Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm, Access Art in New York and Green Papaya Art Projects in Manila. She has received grants from the Finnish Cultural Foundation, FRAME (Finnish Fund for Art Exchange) and the Arts Council of Finland.

Laura Lappi lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Asikkala, Finland.

Matt Lipps

Matt Lipps’ work combines elements of collage, constructed still life, and appropriated imagery, into a wholly new and original form.

His recent work “Library” is based on images from Time-Life’s 1970s seventeen volume set of books called “Library of Photography”, Lipps cuts out and assembles selected images into groups that echo the themes of the different volumes – Photographing Children, The Camera, Travel Photography, Special Problems, etc.. Mounted and arranged on shelves in front of vivid color backgrounds, the figures become players in a story that is both a tribute to the heyday of analog photography and an accomplished vision of the possibilities that the digital age has opened up to artists.

The colorful backgrounds of the series come from 35mm photographs taken by Lipps when he was a student and their warm emotional color and abstract feeling contrasts dramatically with the coolly objective black and white figures and forms selected by Lipps from the “Library” books.

Combining authored and appropriated photographs Lipps sets up a tension between the subjective and objective uses of the medium offering both an intriguing and fresh perspective on the history of the medium and history itself.

Matt Lipps received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Most recently his work has been shown at the Saatchi Gallery, FOAM (Foto Museum of Amsterdam), and is currently on view at Pier 24 in San Francisco. His work is in the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Pilara Foundation/Pier 24. He is Assistant Professor of Art at San Francisco State University. Lipp's work can currently also be seen at Art in General and in the group show "Under Construction - New Positions in American Photography" at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

Mark Seidenfeld

Mark Seidenfeld is an artistic polymath, working in paint, collage, sculpture and photography. But it is his photography that mesmerizes.Work from around the world capture a dramatic essence and beauty from even the most disturbing and exotic subjects.

He says, "I am a storyteller by nature. My work is the way I move forward, with each new artwork being the culmination of every artistic gesture, experiment, and statement that I had made previously. For me, creative expression is the path into the future. Not only does a deeply rooted place of clarity enable me to create these works, but they, in turn, open new doors of perception for me. The process of creating each one is a transformation accelerator, taking my understanding to both new heights and new depths. So I am hooked on the act of creation, which is a rocketship, taking me on a journey into the universe that lies beyond the waking mind. These artworks are my philosophy in action."

Donald Lokuta

Donald Lokuta is a photographer who captures the essence of human behavior.

 

In his latest series he explores the costumed sea creatures of Coney Island's Mermaid Parade. He says, "Coney Island is in the southern part of Brooklyn, New York. It is on the Atlantic Ocean and is known for its amusement park, wide sandy beach and its boardwalk. At an annual summer event, marchers dress as mermaids, fish, lobsters, pirates, sailors, jellyfish, and various other sea creatures- and in a variety of other costumes- sometimes unrelated to the theme of the sea. This series of photographs were made before the start of the procession that winds through the streets and down the boardwalk of Coney Island.

 

The event gives the participants an opportunity to design their own costumes, dress-up and show off their creations. The diversity of bright and colorful costumes adds to the Mardi Gras atmosphere and in many cases offers an opportunity to display a side of one’s self that is seldom seen. Some marchers are masked as they assume another identity.

 

One of the women that I photographed for this series wrote in an email, “I was a mermaid! Her name is Katrina, Queen of the Waves. It’s my inner mermaid persona.” What we portray in our everyday life is also not likely real and the masks and costumes we put on during parades and other rituals, are an attempt to escape from one unreality to another- if only for a short time.

 

Anthropologist Barbara Babcock calls these dressing up opportunities, “symbolic inversion.” During these rituals, we are more likely to dress up in costumes that are the polar opposite of the person everyone knows. Events like parades make it socially acceptable for a person to escape into another reality.

 

These inversion rituals give us an opportunity to make our hidden fantasies real, even if they go against long held social norms. We can overturn social conventions in a socially acceptably way, and we don't have to do it alone. Our fantasies are supported by other participants and cheering spectators. Participants can wear normally “unacceptable,” sensational or even sexy costumes. And participation in many events is very democratic; you don’t have to be a movie star, great athlete, a political figure, or anything like that. You can often be a participant simply if you want to be.

 

For me, this is another window into how we see ourselves as a society and as individuals."