Room for the Whole Wide World offers five artists’ findings from the field of abstraction, using ideas rooted in photography as a starting point. Within these artworks abstraction is a viable method for discovering larger truths and mapping our desires.
Static in common logic
Inside itself
I assure you
Abstract as not to negate
But to redirect and redefine
Reading beyond category
Currently in body
Not a direct link
to the cultural conscience
Mapping notions of fantasy
And desire
Not avoiding meaning
In a language of its own logic
In its result
Something
is the present
-JM
A review of this exhibition can be found online on artblog here.
Elisa Gabor is an artist and current member of Fjord Gallery. She received her BFA in Photography from Ohio University and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been exhibited in Delaware, Los Angeles, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the Netherlands. While Gabor identifies as a photographer, her work approaches ideas of process, narrative, and labor through the use of photography, writing, video, sculpture, and performance.
Sanaz Mazinani is an artist, curator, and educator based in San Francisco and Toronto. She holds her undergraduate degree from Ontario College of Art & Design University, and her Masters in Fine Arts from Stanford University. She co-edited the book ALMANAC: An Index of Current work and Thought (Stanford University, 2010). She was the 2011 Visual Arts Curator for the Iranian Canadian Centre for Art & Culture’s interdisciplinary arts biennial, Tirgan. In 2012, she was Guest Curator at Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University where she curated Edward Weston: On Light, Line and Form. Most recently she co-curated New Constellations: Contemporary Iranian Video Art. Her projects have been exhibited in venues such as University of Toronto Art Center, Museum Bärengasse, Zurich, Art & Architecture Library at Stanford University, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Gallery 44 Center for Contemporary Photography, Toronto, and Emirates Financial Towers, Dubai. Her artwork has been written about in Border Crossings, Nuva Luz, NOW Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, and Dide.
Anna Neighbor lives and works in Philadelphia. She thinks about how much work it takes to hold on to things. She also thinks about how much it takes to hold up things. Time, wetness, gravity, oppression, hardness, Anarchism, nurturance, labor, monuments. And she thinks a lot about art.
Sarah Palmer was born in San Francisco and lives in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown at Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Foam photography museum in Amsterdam, as well as in Dublin, Berlin, and Madrid in recent years. Her work was most recently included in the exhibition Reflected – Works from the Foam Collection at Foam in Amsterdam, which holds her work in its permanent collection. She was awarded the 2011 Aperture Portfolio Prize and has had solo exhibitions at Wild Project, in 2010, and at Aperture Bookstore in fall 2012. Her writing has been published variously, including Foam’s What’s Next project in 2011 and Aperture’s recent volume, The Photographer’s Playbook. She is a faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design and The Pratt Institute.
Elisabeth Tonnard is a Dutch artist and poet working in artists’ books, photography and literature. Since 2003 she has published over thirty books in which texts and images extracted from the cultural archive are processed and laid out to exhibit their latent messages. The works range in scale and method from a book that is completely invisible, to a book containing a short story that swallowed a novel, to a book that is a swimming pool. The books are held in numerous public and private collections including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Brooklyn Museum, Centre Pompidou, International Center for Photography, MoMA Library, New York Public Library, Tate Library and the Walker Art Center. The work has won several awards, most recently the Kleine Hans (Little Hans) Award 2013. In November 2014 the Van Abbe museum in The Netherlands will present a retrospective of Tonnard’s bookworks. For more information visit elisabethtonnard.com.
Jay Muhlin (curator) recently completed his MFA in Transmedia/Art Photography at Syracuse University. After graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Photography his work appeared in various editorial publications worldwide. In 2008 Muhlin published his first long-term book project entitled Half Life: A Portrait of Lauren. The book documents the life and suicide of a close friend and the artist’s relationship to her. He has recently completed residencies at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester NY, The Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, NY and at the Contemporary Artists Center at Woodside in Troy NY. Muhlin has taught at Syracuse University, Salem Community College, Moore College of Art, University of Delaware, The College of New Jersey, Rowan University and was a visiting faculty member at Bennington College. Muhlin is an artist member of Vox Populi, and his studio is in Philadelphia, PA.