Walter Wickiser Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Currents in Photography, exhibiting works by Sandra Gottlieb, Sol Hill, Kaethe Kauffman, Nolan Preece, and Bert GF Shankman from May 26 – June 21, 2016.

“Gottlieb’s camera confronts the cascading waves with results as profound as they are beautiful and evocative. Creating meditations-in-time, the artist’s lens dissects a temporal curve, catching the waves within each frame as they move like dancers on a stage. One dynamic wave crests mid-frame while another dissipates in the foreground and yet another gears up to perform in the background, the moment captured brilliantly, before being lost forever.”

“Sol Hill is a digital wizard. For this photographer, the camera’s sensor is a wand gathering in energy forces and other ambient emanations, waved through the lens by the Master for capture. His is a magician’s sophisticated use of technology sifted through a humanist’s highly romantic vision. Hill paints his images with digital noise that he uses to make his exposures, manipulating the fallibility of human perception to wring out its mysteries. He works in a poetic realm, filtering light, color, and a diverse collection of cosmic interferences. Then, Hill mounts his Japanese art paper pigment prints onto stretched canvass to anoint them with glazes and washes, transporting them further onto a painterly plane.”

“Kauffman’s images live at the nexus of the physical and the spiritual. They often meet in a mirrored reflection of each other. Point and counterpoint, these highly embellished photographic pigment prints reside in a nether world of conjoined pluses and minuses while figuratively using human shapes as a trope. Depicting people in meditative states is a codifying theme this artist employs to captivate the viewer so they can enter the work and vibrate in sympathy with the intellectual and emotional energies of the photograph.”

“Nolan Preece uses an archaic process called a chemigram, a liquescent technique pioneered by French photographer, Pierre Cordier that Preece rescued from mid-last century obscurity. Without using a camera, Preece paints onto photographic paper in daylight before developing the prints in a darkroom. He takes his oeuvre into the digital age by scanning the originals to create lush, sensuous, archival simulacrums. Employing an anachronistic, alternative photographic process to make cliché-verre prints, the artist embellishes his work with references to early 19th century French impressionist landscape painters, like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. With viscous resists and gullies of washes, Preece’s images lure the viewer back into the 19th century while simultaneously confounding the senses with the delights of contemporary photography.”

“Shankman’s florid-torrid mix of passion, color, and gigantism makes a larger than life, hedonic statement. Size, color and vastness compel the viewer to sense these flowers essential flowerness. Sometimes Shankman’s posies look like Impressionist paintings. Giant plants and fantastic flowers appear in legends and fairytales the world over. Here, big blossoms are hyper-blooms; larger and more outlandish than any flower ought to be. Shankman captures their deep, exuberant joy as they flourish into elegant expressions.”

An opening reception for Currents in Photography will be held on Thursday, June 2, from 6 – 8 p.m. For further information, please contact the gallery at (212) 941-1817, Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m.- 6 p.m. ©Phil Tarley