Images NYC
August 19th – August 30th
Opening August 21st, 7-10pm
On August 14, 2010, OPEN SOURCE GALLERY is pleased to present Images NYC. Curated by 17 year old Malissa Williams, (who also participates in the exhibition), this depiction of New York City is based on the views of four unique young female artists. Hailing from various parts of the world, and in different states of young adulthood, these young women offer their varying drawing styles to create a prism projecting nascent hopes and desires and a picture of the New York of tomorrow.
Curator’s Statement:
Participating artists Jen Kaplan, Anna Mytko, Kseniya Kopitko, and I, depict New York City based on our particular and personal views. We are of different ages, come from various cultures, and live in disparate parts of the country. These distinctions and our divergent experiences determine our views of NYC. Anna, originally from Belarus, is currently a Sophmore at Kent State University in Ohio. Jen Kaplan is moving to NYC from Cleveland to attend college, (she plans to live in New York for the rest of her life). Kseniya and I are Juniors at LaGuardia High School in New York City. Because the two of us are native New Yorkers, we offer an inside perspective about neighborhoods and places that are off the beaten path. We hope that by giving you views from different angles and unique personalities, we present a colorful portrait of the city we love.
– Malissa Williams
Peter Feigenbaum “Trainset Ghetto: Streetsmart”
In September 2010, Peter will be showing a new series of large-scale photographs at Open Source Gallery based on a site-specific installation of his “Trainset Ghetto” sets on the street in front of the gallery storefront space. The images will feature increasingly bizarre and phantasmagorical juxtapositions of time, scale, and neighborhood architectural vernaculars, in which his invented, rubble-strewn New York City 70s minature slum landscape collides with the almost-gentrified brownstone environment of south Park Slope.
Trainset Ghetto is voyeurism more than it is hobbyism. It is the physical byproduct of teenage suburban daydreams and attempts to live vicariously through an alien post-urban 1980s landscape that was in no way part of my quotidian existence–a landscape that I caught glimpses of through car rides down the Bruckner Expressway, Henry Chalfant’s graffiti photographs, and movies such as “The French Connection” and “Style Wars”. But this odd juxtaposition of lifestyles is a well-hidden text. I make few overt attempts to exploit this perverse juxtaposition of place and social circumstance in my photographs. Rather, the primary emphasis is always “setting the scene” in a hyper-real, trompe l’oeil manner. Unlike other “scene-setting” photographers like James Cassebere, who works with hazy spatial ambiance, or Gregory Crewdson, who creates uncanny cinematic narratives, Trainset Ghetto is concerned primarily with hyper-realism via an attention to small mundane details of the urban architectural vernacular.
Pirmin Hagen: First
November 2010
There are places I remember – some have gone and some remain. There are places we know from pictures, books, magazines and TV and those we know from tales and stories. There are places we visited and places we lived in. There are the places of our childhood and those we always wanted to go to. There are places with a better economy, more freedom, better food, less suppression, war, injustice; you name it, you got it. In our mind they come together, we mix them up, idealize them and create places that don’t exist. Nevertheless these images of places feed our longing for them, and if the longing wins over the fear, those images make us go there.
First in space. First steps on an unknown land, first contacts, all those wonders and difficulties awaiting us in the strange places we were longing for.
Exhibiting in this local based gallery, the artist becomes an invader, an artistic immigrant. Even though only for a limited time, he occupies space in an existing social context, brings his belonging, settles down, and becomes visible for the people living there.
The title of the exhibition also refers to a mountain, the “Dornbirner First” which looms over the hometown of the artist. The image of the mountain appears over and over, in drawings, collages and installations, and becomes a symbol for that place called home, or the idealized memory of it.
The longing for far away places and their idealization, false expectations and the pain of leaving home behind, are central topics in the work of Pirmin Hagen.
In a mixture of drawings, prints and sculptural works, the show at the open source gallery will try to capture the ongoing story of coming and going, leaving and arriving, solitude and overcrowding.