Gitterman Gallery is proud to present an exhibition with Von Lintel Gallery of Christiane Feser’s recent work from her series Partitionen. The exhibition will open with a reception for the artist on Thursday, April 4th from 6 to 8 p.m. and run through Saturday, May 25th. Tarrah von Lintel will be at the gallery through Saturday, April 13th.

Christiane Feser’s Partitionen is an ongoing series of unique three-dimensional photo objects that are dense assemblages of repeated forms represented through photography and paper construction. The repeated forms are assembled in a dense pattern and collectively evoke an abstract work that seems filled with an organic energy. Simultaneously representational constructions and optical experiments, they lead us to question our perception of what has form and what is a representation of that form.

The constructions in this exhibition begin as assemblages of paper shapes in gradations of black and white that are lit and photographed. The image is printed and then cut-open, folded, punctured or otherwise added to; transforming the flat print back into a three-dimensional object with its own sense of time and space.

ALLEN FRAME: INNAMORATO
curated by LIA GANGITANO
PRATT INSTITUTE Oct—Dec 2018

“Innamorato,” an exhibition by the writer, filmmaker, and photographer Allen Frame, was dominated by Ennio, 2018, a room-size installation made up of more than fifty found Italian Mussolini-era photographs of an air force pilot, his sister, and a handsome young man. The pictures, hung salon style, were set into a variety of secondhand frames. The subjects of the photos appeared well off, beautiful, and youthful. They could be seen with skis in the mountains and cavorting on beaches, bringing to mind the bourgeois family in Vittorio De Sica’s 1970 film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Seven photographs of Ennio were printed by Frame from negatives he purchased along with the photos. Every portrait is full body, and in each one the man is ready for pleasure, be it in sun or snow. Is he an object of desire for whomever took the pictures? Is it the handsome friend and his sister who yearn for him? Or is it the artist, who rescued these people from the obscurity of a flea market? Or could it be us? Perhaps it’s all of the above. Included in the installation were hand-written passages in Italian taken from Absalom, Absalom! (1936), William Faulkner’s tale of a sibling love triangle—thus revealing the narrative that Frame projected onto the images.

Look and Feel: The Best Photography Books of 2018

Generation by Klea McKenna

What matters to Klea McKenna registers immediately when you take her book, Generation, into your hands. For her, touch is on a par with vision. Surface and image are inextricable. McKenna works in the dark, embossing light-sensitized paper through pressured contact with objects, then exposing the textured sheets to the raking beam of a flashlight. In the past, she has made such “photographic rubbings” using the cross-sections of trees; in Generation, she uses different types of handmade fabrics, from a fringed Spanish shawl to an embroidered Pakistani dress. Some of these photograms are included in the book, along with a text in which McKenna reflects on the material history and intimate use of the textiles. Also included are montages of reference photographs, old and new, ethnographic, cinematic, and vernacular. Like the fabrics, like skin, the book’s cover has a distinct life—the cover of my copy will not look or feel like the cover of yours, since a unique one has been created from the residue of the making of the work for each edition in the limited print run. In case we needed the prompt, the inside back cover is stamped with the directive: FEEL ME.

KLEA McKENNA reviewed in PHOTOGRAPH

By Michael Wilson

If the photogram is ordinarily associated with a shadowy ephemerality, San Francisco artist Klea McKenna’s approach to the form invests it with a physical heft more often linked to printmaking, or even sculpture...In her Generation series, McKenna redirects her lens toward the human realm, depicting textiles transformed by wear and tear into haunting records of women’s experiences – narratives removed from McKenna’s own by the specificities of time and place but united with it in other ways. La China Poblana (1), 2018, for example, embodies a fascinating intersection of cultural identities in its depiction of an old skirt encrusted with sequins. This traditional garment tells the story of a Rajasthani woman who, in the late 1600s, was kidnapped, sold into slavery, and taken to the Mexican city of Puebla, where she eventually married a wealthy merchant.

KLEA McKENNA reviewed in MUSÉE MAGAZINE

by Adam Ethan Berner

The photograms render their subjects in incredibly intimate detail; each stitching shines through the silvery imprint, lines and creases transforming from marks to be fixed into something ethereal and beautiful. Even a seemingly tangled scattering of 48 nylon stockings becomes a beautiful composition of fabric, a twisting and flowing set of silvery smoke that beckons the viewer to imagine what is and what could be...It reveals the life and labor that took place to create these works in the first place, highlighting the identities of those who had been rendered invisible by the unconscious assumption that objects like these just appear without the labor of actual people...Each crease, each line, each stitching, and each decoration becomes a testament to the lives of those who made these works, like the creation of a soul now passed onto the viewer.

KLEA McKENNA in COLLECTOR DAILY 

By Richard B. Woodward

Over the last 5 years, Klea McKenna has repeatedly proven herself to be a contemporary master of the photogram. A technical innovator who has nonetheless remained true to this primal act of the medium—writing on pieces of paper with light—she has created ravishing prints that incorporate nature into the process of their emanation, an artistic philosophy that reflects an unconventional upbringing in northern California.

link to full article

ALLEN FRAME: INNAMORATO
curated by LIA GANGITANO

October 3 – December 14

Opening reception Wednesday, October 3, 6–8 pm

PRATT INSTITUTE PHOTOGRAPHY GALLERY
ARC Building, Lower Level, Brooklyn, NY 11205

DIRECTIONS: If coming by subway, take the G train to the Clinton-Washington station and use the Washington Avenue exit. Walk up Washington Avenue one block to Dekalb Avenue and take a right one block to Hall Street. Enter the campus at the corner of Dekalb Avenue and Hall Street. Walk through campus to the ARC building at the end. It is a two story building with many triangular roofs.
link to more directions      link to campus map

Pratt Gallery hours: Monday–Friday, 11 AM–5 PM
link to more information

California based artists KLEA McKENNA and Aspen Mays in conversation with Joshua Chuang (Senior Curator of Photography, New York Public Library)

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES
Friday, September 14th, 7:00 pm

KLEA McKENNA in QUIET LUNCH

By Kurt McVey

Her work, as she sees it, though aesthetically gorgeous, sensual and mysterious, is dependent on the idea that these things, the sinewy, ghostly photograms-a physical and yet metaphysical expression of these textiles-have something to say for themselves. “They’re not just dead matter.”

KLEA McKENNA: Generation

Gitterman Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of contemporary work by Klea McKenna. The exhibition opens on Wednesday, September 12th from 6–8 p.m. and continues through Saturday, November 10th.  

This exhibition marks her first solo show in New York and the beginning of her representation by Gitterman Gallery. It is presented in association with Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles where McKenna will have a concurrent exhibition from September 7th through October 20th.
 
The exhibition presents McKenna's most recent work Generation alongside work from two of her previous series Automatic Earth and Web Studies. With each series, McKenna uses the photogram process innovatively to create unique gelatin silver prints that contain both vivid detail and ethereal abstraction. She pays homage to her subject's histories while re-animating them through her engagement, revealing nuance, depth and energy.