New Landscapes

These are some new landscapes from the past few months. I am really drawn to the the soft, fogged feel of these images. More to come...

Lowell, MA- Part 1

This is the first group of pictures from a new series that I am working on about my hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. I am the fourth generation of my mother's family to have lived in this blue collar mill town on the Merrimack River. My mother was born on Prince Street in a small tenement house in a mixed immigrant neighborhood. This street was the DNA of our family. A three dimensional family tree on one city block. Her mother's Portuguese family had lived for years on Prince street, recreating a small village the way that immigrants to a new land often do. Her father's family from Canada lived on this same street. Across from the French newspaper, above a small general store. Prince street no longer exists. The lines in the sidewalk now lay underneath the City Hall and the Library. Though the street was demolished in the 1950's, the stories of this street have taken on the tone of folklore in our family. This is the story of the places in Lowell that still exist. It is the story of my older relatives that are still alive and the stories of those that have passed away. It is my love letter to Lowell.

New Work

Here are some new pictures from the last month. A bit from Massachusetts, a bit from North Carolina and back to New York.

New Aerial Photos

Seasons Project- Part 1 in Progress- Winter

My favorite place at MOMA is located up the first set of stairs and straight through to the back of the floor in front of Cy Twombly's Four Seasons paintings. For those of you not familiar with the paintings, here they are below.

I love the way that the colors of each season are separated into such clear and separate sections. This project is a work in progress for me and I imagine that I will work on it for the next few years. For now, the groupings are based on color and the season in which the photographs were taken. I am starting to move out of these confines slightly and would like to start the groupings based more on the subject matter. I am doing a lot of color work in Photoshop after scanning the negatives to create the feel of different seasons. For the winter series, I am making the colors really desaturated and pale. Looking out the window of my studio in Brooklyn this morning, the skyline is pale and foggy. It makes for perfect reference. I'm really enjoying playing with color so much.

When I show this work as a whole, they will be printed small (8x10") and arranged in a grid for each season. I like the idea that from far back the colors will form similar palettes to the Twombly paintings. I have been so inspired by these paintings. Of course the other set of the Four Seasons at the Tate Modern are also a huge inspiration. Here are some of the photographs from the winter group.

after the snow, new london, new hampshire

hotel bed on christmas morning, cambridge, massachusetts

temporary grave marker, auckland, new zealand

fog on the island, the coromandel, new zealand

Gallery Update

I didn't get a chance to post anything about the shows that I saw last week. Before the snow came, I went for a quick walk in Chelsea and was able to pop into a few galleries. As always, there was so much more that I would have liked to have seen. Gallery hopping with a 5 month old baby tends to make for shorter viewing days. Here are a few of my favorite shows from last week.

The first gallery that I went to was Paul Kasmin. I was lucky enough to drop in right before the Santi Moix show came down.  I was at first drawn into the gallery because I am really interested in smaller framed pieces lately. The exhibition is called May the Earth Rest Lightly on You and is a selection of new watercolor paintings that feel like a visual diary. They are quite stunning as a group. The subjects of the paintings range from intimate domestic scenes, to food, to street scenes and portraits and landscapes. I love the color palette that you see as you walk into the gallery.  Here are a few quick snapshots of the show. 

 Next we stopped in at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery to see sculptures by Jane McAdam Freud. The artist is the great granddaughter of the late Sigmund Freud. The relation is evident in some of the larger figurative pieces. I really liked necktie piece and the large faces. Here are a few images from the show.

I would definitely recommend going to the new show at Aperture. reGeneration is a group show of eighty young photographers from photo schools around the world. I was really impressed by some of the work. There were some pieces that I felt were overly reliant on the digital aspect of the medium. As a retoucher, I am very involved with digital photography, but think that in some parts of this show it was a bit flashy and over used. Beyond showing off knowledge of the tools, some of the work lacked depth and left me feeling uninterested. That being said, there were some photographs from the show that I really loved.


Here are the pieces from the Aperture show that I loved.

Florian Joye

Robin Friend

Di Liu

Ya'ara Oren

That's all for now. In my next posting, I will put up some new scans that I made yesterday. I'm really excited about some of them.

Have a great night!