All photos © Sharon Harper/Courtesy of Galerie Roepke, Cologne and Rick Wester Fine Art, New York City. Above: Moon Studies and Star Scratches, No. 2. November 8, 2003. Greensboro, North Carolina.

NASA says that its twin probes are scheduled to arrive on the moon New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The data they collect may solve some of the mystery that remains about the lunar surface. The mission’s chief scientist, Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the AP: ”We actually know more about Mars … than we do about our own moon.”

For her series Moon Studies and Star Scratches,  Sharon Harper photographed the moon over a period of days, weeks and months on a single sheet of film.  Harper says the camera is “a metaphor for the pervasive presence of technology within the landscape, a presence that often interrupts our experience of the natural world. The camera here, however, creates possibilities for re-interpreting contemporary experience as it mediates and records, generating images that cannot be seen without it. In the images from the series…the moon links our understanding of time in terms of a monthly calendar with a celestial realm where time is measured in light years.” Moon Studies and Star Scratches is featured in Daylight Magazine’s current issue, Cosmos. Harper’s newer series, Sun/Moon (Trying to See through a Telescope), is currently on view at Galerie Roepke in Cologne through January 21st.

Wishing you all new perspectives for 2012.

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All photos © Ken Schles.

Ken Schles’s fourth monograph Oculus (published in the Netherlands by Noorderlicht), considers the nature of images in various guises: Images in memory and the use of the image as a construct to define our personhood or to define our world, as well as the image on the printed page. Oculus looks at the image as it functions as a metaphor in all its forms. But the investigations we see here are not idle or abstract. The root of this exploration, what gave birth to and sustained these inquiries, was a deeply personal (and somewhat troubling) set of circumstances. Inspired by the opening lines of Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory (“The cradle rocks above an abyss, but common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”), Schles made these images of sleeping children and compared them to a kind of somnambulism he was experiencing. He explains, “…the world, as I once knew it, had unraveled. I still acted as if things were as they had been. I was the sleepwalker moving through the bedrooms of these still and silent children, all tucked in their beds. Eventually, I came to realize that seeing is, in many ways, only ‘believing.’”

Perhaps it is because of this inescapable truth that we hold on as best we can to our effervescent memories—memories filled with spaces of light and dark—and full of mutating images. But wherever our fortunes reside we must ultimately negotiate our lives between ignorance and knowledge, between incoherence and significance, between, as Nabokov wrote, our “two eternities of darkness.” Schles will be signing books at the International Center of Photography in New York City on Thursday, December 15th from 6:30 to 7:30.

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PO5, 2011 © Max de Esteban/Courtesy of Klompching Gallery, NYC

Barcelona-based artist Max de Esteban, takes us back-to-the-future with his latest project Proposition One, where he meticulously deconstructs the cutting edge technology of yesterday. The cameras, tape decks, typewriters and projectors—all tools of used in the creation and dissemination of visual and sound art—are shot layer-by-layer and photographically reassembled. The result is retro-chic, x-ray-like artworks displaying an evocative look into the inner workings and complex designs of these devices. The Artist Reception for Max de Esteban’s Proposition One is Thursday, November 3rd, from 6–9, the exhibit will be on view through December 9th at Klompching Gallery, New York City.

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Girl in the Bottle, 2011 © Marc Yankus/Courtesy of ClampArt, NYC

In his third solo show with the gallery, native New Yorker Marc Yankus presents new work from Call It Sleep, as well as a series of recent photomontage still lifes. The project derives it’s name from Henry Roth’s 1934 critically acclaimed novel, about a young Jewish boy’s coming of age in the slum of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Through Yankus’s photographs, he nostalgically portrays the city’s architecture, moody streets and pulse with his unique personal vision. The opening reception for Marc Yankus’s Call It Sleep will be Thursday, November 3, 6–8pm at ClampArt in New York City, the exhibit will be on view until December 17th.

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During the 1950s, Martin Karplus captured the lush hues of the Southwest’s culture and landscapes during his travels there as a post-doctorate fellow. Kodachrome may be gone, but its vivid color qualities lives on through his works which will be exhibited in Stoneham Gallery of the Griffin Museum from Jan.–Feb. 2012, as well as in three additional venues during the next two years featuring different bodies of work. Karplus is currently a Professor of Theoretical Chemistry and Biophysics at Harvard and showed his work as a participant at this year’s Photolucida in Portland, Oregon.

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