© Dan Burkholder. Above: Tree in April Snow, Catskills.

Dan Burkholder was one of the first photographic artists to embrace digital technology, having originated the digital-negative process in the early 1990’s.  Melding his unique vision with mastery of both the wet and digital darkrooms, Burkholder went on to pioneer the use of platinum/palladium prints on vellum over 24k gold leaf.  Combined together, the membrane-like translucency of the vellum and iridescence of the gold leaf imbue Burkholder’s  images with a uniqueness all to their own. – courtesy  John Cleary Gallery.

All photos © Ed Panar.

While exploring the streets and back roads of North America, Pittsburgh based photographer Ed Panar has sometimes found himself unexpectedly confronted by other beings. For a moment, eye contact is made and a kind of mutual recognition is felt. Animals That Saw Me, published by The Ice Plant, is a quiet and often hilarious series of photographs pulled from his archive spanning 17 years recording some of his most unexpected encounters with the nonhuman world. A meditation on the uncanny moment of acknowledgement between species, the photographs in Animals That Saw Me reminds us that we must appear at least as strange to them as they do to us. – courtesy The Ice Plant.

(more…)

Mouse, 2012 from the Morbidity & Mortality series © Jeanette May

Brooklyn-based photographer Jeanette May will be exhibiting works from her Morbidity & Mortality series in Creature Features, a two-person show with Jocelyn Chase‘s Defunct series. There will be a reception for Creature Feature during the New York Photo Festival, Wednesday, May 16th, 5–7pm, the exhibit will be on view through May 20th at A.I.R. Gallery in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Responding to the recent popular fascination with depictions of crime scenes, forensics, and surgically altered bodies, Jeanette May and Jocelyn Chase create seductively creepy representations of the macabre. Their photographs of staged murders and dissected flesh call attention to our society’s obsession with mortality. Both artists masterfully instill subtle humor into each image, producing photographs that are simultaneously disturbing and whimsical.

—Text courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery

Hunter Pressing on Fallen Game with Rifle 2, 2010 © Stan Gaz/Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

With his second solo show at the gallery, Stan Gaz presents “Ensnared.” The opening reception for “Ensnared” will be Thursday, May 17, 6–8pm at ClampArt in New York City, the exhibit will be on view until June 23rd.

“Ensnared” considers themes of loss, transformation, and memory. Throughout these images, ensnarement is allegorized by the actions and effects of the archetypes of the hunter and the hunted. Gaz finds these roles to be oddly inter-changeable, caught in a cycle in which each is incarcerated by the other—trapped by longing, manipulation, and other forms of daily violence.

Divided into three suites or chapters, “Ensnared” includes painted photographs of vintage butterfly specimens, images taken during winter hunting expeditions in the Western United States, and haunting prints of an astronaut armed with a butterfly net out to catch fleeting samples of a vanishing world. The exhibition also includes video footage of the astronaut in Central Park, along with a massive, twenty-foot, stainless steel sculpture representing his net.

—Text courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

All photos © Stacy Kranitz.

Over the last six years, Los Angeles-based photographer Stacy Kranitz has been working on a personal project about the Native American community living on the disappearing Isle de Jean Charles in the Louisiana bayous. Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians first bought land here in 1876. Because of its close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and the disruption of the Mississippi River levees (built in the Sixties) the island has been slowly eaten away by the Gulf’s saltwater. The land is a fourth the size it was when its oldest residents were children. Oil pipelines began unearthing the land in the early-Nineties and erosion of the island has since accelerated due to the gulf oil spill coating nearby vegetation with crude and chemical dispersants. Less than 60 water-damaged houses remain on the island and more than half of them are empty. The road that leads to the island disappears underwater during storms.

Kranitz explains, “Some of the residents I have photographed have left. There have been four major hurricanes that have devastated the gulf coast during the last six years (Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike). The population has dwindled substantially during this period. I have seen houses blown away, abandoned and deteriorated into uninhabitable dwellings.”

Kranitz is currently working on an installation that includes a model she built of the island along with sound, video and drawings. She hopes to show the work first in Louisiana. The project is a work in progress as long as the Island is inhabited, for a projected  15 to 50 years.

(more…)