Light Work Podcast – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Nabil Harb’s project Mater si, magistra no (a macaronic phrase that translates as “Mother yes, teacher no”) presents photographs that describe and depict moments and scenes within his hometown of Lakeland in Polk County, Florida. This Central Florida location is both the backdrop and main character of Harb’s visual narrative: a story that emits surreal qualities which twist ideas of the region through photography’s formal language into a conceptual idea—an idea of how to describe the atmosphere of a place without words. Harb writes, “The landscape is the perfect reflection of our society, our ultimate index—it holds our histories, our secrets, our failures, and our hopes for the future.” 

Harb uses his camera to look rather than gaze at the wily scenes and moving bodies; his images disturb the before and after of a photograph by showing a moment extended or an instant flashed with a strobe. The project title informs Harb’s reasons and choices around his subject matter with his opinions and beliefs about this landscape, the people who inhabit it and move through it, and his subjecthood. The history of land usage in Central Florida greatly influences where he goes to photograph and how he looks at his surroundings. The narratives in his work are conflicting and intermingle with one another. The overriding story is one of man versus nature, of beauty and destruction coexisting in an atmosphere that is surreal, seductive, and breathtaking. Where the conflicting notions of destruction and rebirth intersect is also the point at which Nabil Harb’s formalism and conceptual photographic practice meet, showing us the potential for beauty in destruction and foreboding rebirth. 

Image credit: Nabil Harb, Lake Hancock, 2024

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Nabil Harb is a Palestinian American photographer born and raised in Polk County, Florida, where he still lives. Harb received his BA in anthropology from the University of South Florida and his MFA in photography from Yale University. His work has been featured in Aperture, The Atlantic, ArtReview, The Guardian, and A24. 

nabiljharb.com/

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In this exhibition, Nicholas Muellner offers up photographs depicting people pantomiming in a verdant landscape made complex with surreal lighting; these images are paired with an issue of Contact Sheet that serves as a guidebook to the exhibition. The text in Contact Sheet is wryly poetic and succinct, and loosely leads us from picture to picture. Asea takes us somewhere without making its destination specific, setting a tone and mood that guides our desire for meaning but refuses to precisely locate it.

The exhibition conveys a type of suspended drama via an installation that divides the gallery into two rooms, creating an atmosphere in which viewers float, both in space and time. The majority of the portraits are of people connected to the maritime economy and all of the photographs were made in a landscape or setting that the subjects live in: Marseille, Odesa, Milan, Long Beach. The subjects gesture toward the camera, holding the invisible tools of their respective trades, and suggesting an estrangement from their concrete identities.

With Asea, Muellner projects a state of limbo and a search for personal meaning within photography’s inevitable narrative limits. We are asked to ponder alone, in a subjective state that is not fixed but which hovers within the parameters established by the photographs and text. Ultimately, we engage with Asea because it is at once thoughtful, beautiful, and curious.

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Nicholas Muellner is an artist and writer whose books include Lacuna Park: Essays and Other Adventures in Photography, The Amnesia Pavilions, and In Most Tides an Island, which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award and named a Best Book of the Year in Artforum. In addition to solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe, his writing has been published by MACK/SPBH, Aperture, Radius, Triple Canopy, Foam, and Routledge, among others. Muellner has performed slide lectures internationally, including at MoMA PS1, Carnegie Museum, The Photographers’ Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work has been supported by a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a John Gutmann Fellowship, and residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies. Muellner received a BA in comparative literature from Yale University and an MFA from Temple University. He is the founding co-director of the Image Text MFA and ITI Press at Cornell University.

nicholasmuellner.com

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Futari (Two Persons) is an exhibition of photographs depicting the ongoing relationship between the artist Pixy Liao and her Japanese partner and muse Moro. Liao met Moro at the University of Memphis in 2005 while attending graduate school, where she invited Moro, who is five years younger, to model for her. In some ways, this served to reverse expectations that women seek older and wiser men. From the beginning of their collaboration, Liao took the role of the director, arranging and posing Moro, so that together they challenge traditional heterosexual roles. For fourteen years now, Liao and Moro have continued to explore ideas of control, dominance, gender, and sexuality through photography.

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Born and raised in Shanghai, China, Pixy Liao now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Liao has participated in exhibitions and performances internationally, including Asia Society (Houston), Fotografiska (New York City), Museum of Sex (New York City), National Gallery of Australia (Sydney), and Rencontres d’Arles (Arles, France). She has received honors that include En Foco’s New Works Fellowship, Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival Madame Figaro Women Photographers Award, LensCulture’s Exposure Award, NYFA Fellowship in photography, and Santo Foundation’s Individual Artist Award. Liao was a Light Work Artist-in-Residence in 2015. Her other residencies include Camera Club of New York, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Pioneer Work, School of Visual Arts, and University of Arts London. She holds an MFA in photography from the University of Memphis. Chambers Fine Art in New York City represents her.

pixyliao.com

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In his new exhibition, Object Lessons, artist James Henkel looks back over thirty years of image-making, following a conceptual and formal thread that ties his work together and seems to stubbornly insist on resurfacing.

Whatever is discarded, broken, and damaged draws Henkel to it. The objects he collects, assembles, or deconstructs are humble, common, and often no more than the scale of the human hand. Both the patina of wear and the handling that was often the source of the object’s destruction are clearly present. He presents pieces of ceramic pots, bowls, bricks, toys, combs, and well-worn books in their broken fragments. Completely useless now, they remain a testimony to someone’s life. This is what Henkel elevates by photographing these found objects so directly. Tension abounds in his work between the humble and the monumental, between play and decay, between high and low. The artist cross-references grander ideas from art history, painting, and sculpture, while also pointing back to the simpler but profound experience of photographing an ordinary life.

Jameshenkelstudio.com

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Clifford Prince King is a self-taught queer Black photographer from Arizona. The images in this exhibition focus on King’s life in Los Angeles. In his work, King’s lifestyle and experiences are starting points to explore desire, intimacy, and day-to-day life with HIV. King’s images chronicle himself and others located in lamp-lit domestic settings. We see a brotherhood of men enacting moments of domestic bliss, nude bodies in the moments before or after a sexual encounter, and the side effects and routine of living with HIV. After King’s diagnosis, he focused anew on understanding the legacy of the AIDS crisis and the artists who responded to it. He took refuge in the words and images of those who once shared an experience like his own, and his work evokes that history while developing a language all his own. In talking about his practice, King returns time and again to the life-affirming aspects of his relationships. In We Used to Lay Together, King has compiled a body of work that explores affection in all its varieties―the simple parts of intimacy, often overlooked but universal.

cliffordprinceking.com

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Meryl Meisler: The Best of Times, Worst of Times

March 22 - July 23, 2021

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

In Light Work’s early days, during the 1970s and 80s, many artists arrived for their month-long residency with no specific plans for using their time. With only a camera and a vague idea of exploring, they walked the streets of Syracuse, open to the synchronicity of what might happen. Incredible photographs ensued and the artists often called them gifts. Grateful to land in the right place at the right time, they discovered images on their contact sheets that startled and delighted them. But they also saw photography as more than random luck. It was both a collaboration and a conversation. They saw themselves as witnesses.

Over the same decades, Meryl Meisler was photographing her life in and around New York City with the same sense of exploration and possibility as those pioneering Light Work AIRs. Retiring from decades as a public-school art teacher, Meisler began to unearth and rethink her own archive. Part time capsule of the 70s and 80s and part memoir, Best of Time, Worst of Times is an invitation to join her for a wild ride—disco nights, punk bars, strip clubs, Fire Island, family, friends and neighbors, and suburban Long Island. Her exuberant celebration of human connection is particularly poignant now, when we can take none of these gatherings for granted. Meisler clearly celebrates with her subjects. These are her people: she is not an outsider but a participant. She depicts our own shared humanity, humor, and joy.

“I want to show you who I am,” she says now. “My identity as a woman, Jew, lesbian, middle- class teacher, Baby Boomer, New Yorker, liberal, American—and so much more—influences how I perceive and create art about the world around me. I’ve only just begun revealing my huge photography archive. Stay tuned, the best is yet to come!

merylmeisler.com

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Aaron Turner: Black Alchemy, Backwards/Forwards

January 25 – March 4, 2021

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Light Work will exhibit more than 20 works by Arkansas–based photographer Aaron Turner in its first main gallery show of 2021. Aaron Turner: Black Alchemy, Backwards/Forwards will be on view in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery. In the solitude of the studio, the artist is never alone. Quite the contrary for Aaron Turner. Sidney Poitier, Martin Luther King, Marvin Gay, Frederick Douglas and others all move up and through the layers of cut paper and projections. The artist handles, arranges, touches both objects and beloved figures, seeking, listening, directing, and responding. Some of these juxtapositions seem random, fluid, almost falling through space, but this is precisely the process Turner invites us to witness.

Aaron Turner’s Arkansas delta community and family taught him to know and understand African American history, honor its heroes, and respect his elders. The simple and profound gift of this upbringing has allowed him to pursue the role of Black artist and activist in our culture with unapologetic, single-minded intensity. Turner is in many ways acknowledging, standing on, and building from this foundation in his work. With deep affinity for the formal qualities of black-and-white photography, Aaron Turner uses his large format camera and the alchemical darkroom process to move back and forth between abstraction, still life, collage, and appropriated archival images to literally take apart and then reconstruct his photographic images. The color black itself has a presence in this work—infinite, elegant, unknowable. Turner is also a painter; his use of large swaths of black is both a metaphor for race and related to abstraction and its emphasis on process, materials, and color itself as subject.

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Besides his studio practice, Aaron Turner is a teacher, curator, writer, founder of the Center for Photographers of Color (CPoC) at the University of Arkansas, and host of the CPoC podcast. Active in the photo and contemporary art community, he often uses these platforms to discuss his primary muses: other Black artists and activists. Bring a pen and notebook, because Turner is a name dropper in the best sense and you will want to look up these painters, sculptors, photographers, athletes, and activists whom he reveres, some hallowed and some obscure (for now). His generosity reminds us of artists like Deborah Willis, Carrie Mae Weems, and Zanele Muholi, who all—understanding art and power—have made it their business to bring a community of artists along with them through the doorway and into the spotlight. He too arrives en masse: perhaps his greatest tribute to his elders in the Arkansas delta.

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With great pleasure, Light Work presents Heroine, a solo exhibition of work by Mexican-British multimedia artist and visual anthropologist Alinka Echeverría. Heroine is the culmination of the artist’s extensive research into the representation of women and femininity since the origins of the medium of photography. “With few exceptions, the place of women was before the lens, not behind it,” she acknowledges. As Echeverría immersed herself in the colonial archives of the Nicéphore Nièpce Museum in France, work she embarked on in 2015, the aesthetics of the fetishized and exoticized depiction of women both intrigued and appalled her. Directly referencing the “inventor of photography,” Nicéphore Niépce, Echeverría titles this work more broadly as Fieldnotes for Nicéphora (incorporating the “a” at the end to feminize the name that he had adopted for its meaning: victorious)—thereby explicitly reframing the legacy of this white, male pioneer of photography to a feminist and postcolonial perspective.

We are mindful of installing the exhibition amidst an ongoing global pandemic, as we all work to reimagine how physical gallery spaces exist (or don’t) and perhaps expand how works on walls may take on new forms. With that in mind, Echeverría has opened up the ways in which she would normally exhibit photographic work in a gallery. She revisits past collage work innovatively, re-adapting stills from a video piece as large-scale photographic prints and pages from a photobook project, brought to life here as a continuous stream of images wrapping around three of the gallery walls.

Echeverría reframes the photographs to examine how she can alter their purpose both through their context and materiality. “As a link between the past and the present, the photographic archive makes time resurface by way of stored visual forms,” Echeverría explains. “In my view, an active reframing allows them to acquire a certain contemporaneity with the new interpretations brought by our contemporary gazes as practitioners and viewers.” Echeverría’s works in Heroine are both visually arresting and profoundly thoughtful—urging viewers to investigate the complexities of the photographic object itself as well as the ways in which its creation, reproduction, and distribution has been problematic since the early 1800s.

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Light Work presents Queens-based artist Matthew Connors’ General Assembly. This exhibition comprises 650 portraits that span the first year of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in New York City. An expansive project that pairs individual black and white portraits within a tightly formatted grid, General Assembly borrows its title from the movement’s term for its horizontal decision-making process. Connors made these black-and-white portraits in the charged atmosphere of Zuccotti Park, elsewhere in New York City at direct actions and during more contemplative moments before and after working group meetings.

We encourage you to visit Light Work exhibitions online and to check out our catalog of artist videos, including an interview with exhibiting artist Matthew Connors.

When Connors first arrived at Zuccotti Park in September of 2011, he had no intention of making photographs. He first gravitated to the congregation of protesters who occupied Manhattan’s Financial District out of simple curiosity. But as he observed Occupy Wall Street’s “wellspring of generative social organization,” he wondered how photography could contribute to the historical moment before him. Disturbed by the way that passersby were photographing protesters at a distance, he immersed himself in the activity of the movement and sought to use his camera as a tool of engagement.

The process of creating the portraits involved lengthy conversations with the participants about their motivations and involvement in the movement. Building on these newly formed relationships, he regularly returned to demonstrations to photograph and offer each person he photographed a print of their portrait. For Connors, this ongoing exchange of images and ideas contributed to the “relational fabric” that Occupy was cultivating. In many of these portraits, the person gazes directly into the camera at the artist—and us—a rare and brave moment of trust and connection. A native New Yorker, Connors had begun to feel that his home was becoming a “city of strangers” pulled apart by gentrification’s economic power and frequent disruption. By distributing political power and reaching decisions more equitably, Occupy Wall Street sought to reestablish that community.

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Matthew Connors received a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Photography from Yale University. He has exhibited his work in galleries and museums worldwide, including DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. His awards include the Alice Kimball English Travelling Fellowship from the Yale School of Art (2004), the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2010), the Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship (2011), and the William Hicks Faculty Fellowship from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design (2012 and 2008). Since 2004 he has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in Boston, where he chairs the Photography Department. He lives and works in Boston, MA, and Brooklyn, NY.

matthewconnors.com

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Pacifico Silano’s The Eyelid Has Its Storms… borrows its title from a Frank O’Hara poem. O’Hara’s musings and observations about everyday queer life inspired Silano’s artistic practice. “The eyelid has its storms,” the poem begins. “There is the opaque fish-scale green of it after swimming in the sea and then suddenly wrenching violence, strangled lashed, and a barbed wire of sand falls onto the shore.” O’Hara’s deeply visual poem, like Silano’s work, evokes duality—in memory, in the present, and future, shimmering beauty and umbral violence often occur at once.

Through the appropriation of photographs from vintage gay pornography magazines, Silano creates colorful collages that explore print culture and the histories of the LGBTQ+ community. His large-scale works evoke strength and sexuality while acknowledging the underlying repression and trauma that marginalized individuals experience. Born at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Silano lost his uncle due to complications from HIV. “After he died,” says Silano, “his memory was erased by my family due to the shame of his sexuality and the stigma of HIV/AIDS around that time period.” Silano set out to create art that reconciled that loss and erasure. Silano’s exhibition somberly contemplates such pain and photography’s role in the struggle for queer visibility, while celebrating enduring love, compassion, and community.

In collaging, Silano decisively fragments, obscures, and layers images that he has rephotographed from these magazines. He reassembles and ultimately recontextualizes these images, removing the overtly explicit original content. “These new pictures-within-pictures are silent witnesses that allude to absence and presence,” says Silano. He sees them as stand-in memorials, both for the now-missing models as well as those who originally consumed their images. Silano meditates on the meaning of the images and tearsheets that he collects over time. What continually excites him is precisely the “slipperiness” of representation and meaning in photography as our culture shifts. “The lens that we read [images] through today gives them new context and meaning,” he observes. “In another 30 or 40 years, they might very well mean something completely different.”

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Pacifico Silano is a lens-based artist born in Brooklyn. He has an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts. His group shows include the Bronx Museum, Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, and Tacoma Art Museum. His solo shows include Baxter ST@CCNY, The Bronx Museum, Fragment Gallery in Moscow, Rubber-Factory, and Stellar Projects. Aperture, Artforum, and The New Yorker have reviewed his work. Silano’s awards include the Aaron Siskind Foundation’s Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, Finalist for the Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize, and First Prize at Amsterdam’s Pride Photo Awards. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Silano participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 2016.

pacificosilano.com

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