Last ALL show currently up; Artist reception next week

ALL Arts & Literature Laboratory
Erector Square, 319 Peck St. Building 2, New Haven, (203) 671-5175
Black + White
Ends Feb. 9, 2008.
Artist reception: Sat. Feb. 9, 5—7 p.m.

Press release

(NOTE: This show, unfortunately the last at ALL Gallery's Erector Square space,, is currently on display. The reception is a closing reception. HH)

Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL) is proud to present a juried exhibition of recent works by fifteen national and international contemporary photographers. Black + White aims to reveal the truth that exists between two extremes through the medium's unique ability to capture subtleties and nuances. The artists selected explore a range of themes, such as personal experiences, human relationships and conditions, political or social issues, the environment, abstraction or other interpretations of life.

The featured artists include: Roberta Alberding (Silver Spring, MD); George Bedell (Brandywine, MD); Lauren Chester (Athens, GA); Joan Fitzsimmons (Hamden, CT); Joshua Klein (Los Angeles, CA); Gabi Kotlarevsky (Ramat Gan, Israel); Isa Leshko (Salem, MA); Harry Longstreet (Bainbridge Island, WA); Sarah Lusto (Cheshire, CT); Inger Schoelkopf (Madison, CT); Jessica Somers (Bristol, CT); Patrick Toohey (Stratford, CT); Samantha Wolov (Berkeley, CA); Ryan Wong (Sammamish, WA); and Marjorie Wolfe (Cheshire, CT).

Highlights of the exhibition include:

• "Ephemera 1," 2007 by George Bedell, explores the relationship between the ephemeral nature of seemingly important historical events, and the vast timetable of the landscape in which these events occured. This image is part of a series of black-and-white photographs of the Civil War battlefields of northern Virginia and Maryland. In many ways, the series is meant to be a kind of meditation on impermanence—they contain a hope that the horror of
mistakes we make now can be tempered with time.

• "The Woods," 2007 by Joan Fitzsimmons, is a personal reflection on the meaning of landscape. Rather than a grand sense of romanticism, she relates to landscape with a sense of potential danger and fantasy. "The Woods" addresses issues of both fear & fantasy, while appropriating from both Polish and American cultures.

• "Verres, Paris," 2005 by Joshua Klein, frames what the artist has described as the extraordinary, or eternal essence, that which we so often miss in an increasingly hurried world. His methodology includes a medium format camera with a normal focal length lens, and the larger negative to effectively capture textures and luminous highlights.

• "Point Pleasant, NJ #1," 2006 by Isa Leshko, was photographed with a $20 plastic film camera called a Holga. Holga images defy conventional rules of photography, they are dark, blurry, and they fade around the edges. Rather than record exactly how the subject looked, Holga images depict how the artist felt when the shutter was clicked, and they are beautiful because of their very imperfections.

• "Bell Jar," 2006 by Inger Schoelkopf, was photographed the weekend before the artist was to have surgery. This image was taken inside a unique second-hand store where the dolls (to which the artist has always had an aversion) were arranged in curious and unsettling tableaus. With an impending surgery and a disturbed mindset focused on her mother and sister's breast cancer, the dolls struck a profoundly fearful cord, reflecting the fragility of life.

• "Bond," 2007 by Jessica Somers, is part of an ongoing series of Ziatype prints that explores the struggle and balance between the choices one makes and the uncontrollable circumstances that intervene with these choices. This portrait uses personal symbols to illustrate and question the way life can lead us, and the ability to allow oneself to be led.

• "Stony Man Mountain," Shenandoah National Park, VA, 2006 by Patrick Toohey, is part of a series focusing on the process of darkroom techniques to inform the abstract end result. It is the push and pull of black and white—of light and dark, life and death in the natural world, which ultimately finds a beautiful equilibrium that is at the core of Toohey's work.