In her latest exhibition, Midst, Megumi Shauna Arai uses soft, subtle metaphors to address the many, often ambiguous layers of her Jewish and Japanese heritage.
While trained as a photographer, Megumi Shauna Arai often combines sculpture, fibers, and exercises with culturally significant materials to emphasize this splintering complexity. Her latest exhibition, Midst at Seattle's Jacob Lawrence Gallery is a series of photographs of bodies suspended in water exhibited amidst three installations referencing Japanese folk practices for honoring sacred space. In a piece in one room titled "did you not know, I was waiting for you?" a hobo bag with elements of Japanese stitching stands propped up in cinder blocks like flowers in a makeshift vase. In another piece titled "Interior Frontiers," sets of rice straw rope resembling a crown of thorns hang from the ceiling and entryway and wrap around the entire space. In another piece, " simultaneously (the border of a great belonging)," a similar rope connects two small boulders like a tin can telephone, but hangs loosely without the tension one might expect.
While each piece in the show has a very specific origin, there is an open-ended-ness that allows viewers to float through the gallery and gather their own meaning. I spoke with the artist to learn more about her process of making the work, and how her own sense of identity fits into it all.
Daniel W. Coburn's photographs confront the tension between the artist's inner narrative what's projected to the outside world.
Daniel W. Coburn’s Becoming a Specter, on view at Philadelphia’s Print Center through August 4th, is purposefully restrictive and subtle. The artist demonstrates how the elimination of color in a photograph can make the deepest blacks and brightest whites – and everything in between – so vivid and tactile that you don’t miss color at all. And that's exactly what Becoming a Specter does.
The exhibition consists of twelve untitled photographs, four to a wall, in an alcove gallery space on the second floor. Predominantly images of people, they all seem to deliberately capture the split-second moment where nothing looks particularly real as if the subject and photographer have come together on an inhalation.
Exhibition review by Deborah Krieger
We're no fans of McDonald's, but we can't escape the impact of their golden arches on our landscape, culture and emotional psyche. And unsurprisingly, they're incredibly photographic. Their shimmering presence can be strange, funny, and ominous - at times a topographical eyesore, at others, an unfortunate landmark or "Where's Waldo" beacon of Americanism wherever we go.
Seeing these pop up repeatedly in our Instagram feed, and in larger bodies of work from some of our favorite photographers like Tim Davis and Susana Raab, we put out a call for various interpretations of the logo in context. Without further ado, here are 30+ photographs of the McDonalds logo in its unsettling glory. Make sure to check out more work from each photographer by clicking the link in their image-credit.
Seattle exhibition traces the visual descendants of the Black Panther party
All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party, organized by Michelle Dunn Marsh at Seattle's Photographic Center Northwest – as well as an abridged (expanded) version at AIPAD earlier this spring – is an exhibition drawn from a book of the same name and showcases a select group of contemporary black artists, whose work has been informed or influenced by The Black Panther Party. Timed to the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Seattle chapter – the first outside of California – the exhibition looks to how the Panthers' visual codes and social platforms play out in contemporary African American photography. I spoke with curator Michelle Dunn Marsh to learn more about the book, exhibition and plans to take the Panther's legacy into the future. The exhibition is up at PCNW through June 10th, 2018.
Jon Feinstein in conversation with Michelle Dunn Marsh
The contemporary American cultural and political landscape has become divided and pessimistic. Curator Ruben Natal-San Miguel's latest exhibition looks to its complexities and optimistic flipsides.
From fractured Facebook feeds to dreaded family gatherings, as Americans, we've seen a consistent decline of hope. Earlier this year, this prompted curator Ruben Natal-San Miguel and Harlem gallerist Loni Efron to announce a call for work with an upward angled view, juried by TEDx curator and former Slate photo editor David Rosenberg, Executive Director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) Hannah Frieser, and Humble Arts Foundation co-founder Jon Feinstein.
Titled American Splendour, the exhibition, which opens Friday, June 1 at Harlem, NY's Iloni Gallery and includes work from more than fifty photographers, presents a refreshing take on everything grim. From honest portraits to abstracted plateaus, American Splendour reveals a glimmer of hope within the rough.
American Splendour will be on view June 1, 2018 - July 12, 2018.
Opening reception: Friday, June 1.
ilon Art Gallery
204 West 123rd Street. Harlem, NYC.
Below are some highlights: