From the Studio

Gallery MC

March 7—11, 2018

545 West 52nd St, ground floor

Gallery MC is pleased to announce the exhibition: “From the Studio” a selection of works by 6 artists and an artist-team.

Featuring Works by Steven Crawford, Simone Douglas (Parsons MFA Fine Arts Program Director), H. Lan Thao Lam/ Lana Lin (Parsons Fine Arts and Media Studies Faculty), Don Porcaro (Parsons Fine Arts Professor Emeritus), Gorazd Poposki and Leslie Wayne (Parsons Fine Arts ’84).

From the Studio brings together the work of four artists (Steven Crawford, Don Porcaro, Gorazd Poposki and Leslie Wayne) whose studios are in one of the oldest cultural buildings in Hell’s Kitchen, NY, with invited artist Simone Douglas and the artist-team Lin + Lan (Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam). This exhibition coincides with Art Fair week and is located on West 52^nd Street near 11^th Avenue, 1½ blocks from The Armory Show.

Steven Crawford is an award-winning New York City based artist. Crawford moved to NYC in 2001 from Oregon. His artwork reflects the belief that photography should be conceived before the image is captured and executed in the camera. He primarily works in the studio using large format film and digital backs.  Crawford uses lighting to create color and creates two-dimensional graphic images inspired by turn of the century Botanical drawings. The work draws from the artist’s deep knowledge of lighting technique and an eye to the history of photography. His work has gained international acclaim and has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in major art centers from Zurich to New York. His exhibitions have been covered by art publications across the globe including in the US and Germany and have received numerous awards. Most recently he was recognized as a Spotlight photographer by the prestigious Black & White Magazine.

Simone Douglas’ work incorporates installation, photography, video and more recently site-specific works. Out of a practice that engages with contemporary issues of the sublime, cultural and environmental legacy have become rising issues in her work. She is currently working on a large-scale installation entitled, Promise. The research that supports Promise encompasses indigenous and post colonial histories, environmental engineering, ecological impact and climate change. Her site-specific work is an extension of a long term, ongoing project Douglas initiated called Exquisite Corpse, A Visual Research Collaboration. The collaborative project asks artists and designers internationally to respond to crucial issues of the environment while working with cultural differences and historical legacies. The project has taken place to date in China, USA, Europe and Australia. This ongoing commitment to issues of environment, intercultural facilitation and art as a medium that activates key issues of our time is the backbone of Douglas’ larger agenda within her practice. Her works have been exhibited internationally including at the V&A Museum/London, Photographers Gallery/London, the Art Gallery of NSW/Sydney, National Gallery Of Victoria/ Melbourne, the MCA/Sydney, the Australian Centre for Photography/ Sydney, and The Ian Potter Center for Contemporary Art/ Melbourne. Her work is widely published and she has curated for institutions such as The Getty Conservation Institute.

Since 2000, Lin + Lam (Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam) have combined their individual strengths toward realizing multidisciplinary, research-based projects about immigration, sites of residual trauma, national identity and historical memory. Their work has been exhibited and screened at international venues, including The New Museum, The Kitchen, the Queens Museum, NY; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; 3rd Guangzhou Triennial; Arko Art Center, Korean Arts Council, Seoul; Taiwan International Documentary Festival; rum46, Aarhus, Denmark; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Auckland International Festival of Photography, New Zealand. Lin teaches in The School of Media Studies at The New School and Lam teaches in Fine Arts at Parsons. Lin earned her PhD from New York University and MFA from Bard College. Lam holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Each has been a Whitney Museum Independent Study and MacDowell Colony fellow. Together they were Vera List Center for Art and Politics Fellows in 2009-10. The photographs they are contributing to this show are derived from a mixed media installation that takes Sigmund Freud’s residence and antiquity collection, which saw different kinds of violences in the aftermath of Freud’s exile, as its point of departure.

Don Porcaro is a New York-based artist whose work explores the nature of human interaction with the physical world through archeology and man-made objects like tools and toys. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been reviewed in The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, Artnews, BOMB and Newsday, among others. In 2007 he was the subject of a featured profile in Sculpture Magazine. This past year, he was commissioned by New Jersey Transit to create a sculpture for the Jersey Ave. Light Rail platform in Jersey City and in 2011 was the U.S. representative at the 50th Forma Viva International Sculpture Symposium in Portoroz, Slovenia. He been nominated for the International Sculpture Center’s prestigious Educator of the Year Award, and is the recipient of a Teaching Excellence Award from Parsons School of Design, where he has been teaching since 1975 and is currently Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts. Porcaro received his MFA in Sculpture from Columbia University.

Gorazd Poposki was born in Macedonia and lives and works in New York City. After graduating from the Fine Arts Academy in Skopje, he received MFA at the Fulbright School of Arts and Science at the UA. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US and Europe and are part of permanent institutional and private collections in the USA, Australia, Europe, Japan, China and his native Macedonia.

Most recently his work was installed at the Commercial Bank in Skopje and, at the Forma Viva Sculpture Symposium.  Poposki maintains the influence of the spontaneous in his creative process as another way of investing the works with a natural authenticity. Sketching directly on the marble in preparation, the artist has described his sculpting process as “action drawing-carving” where the instantaneous touch gives way to multiplicitous and fresh invention. The melding of disciplines refutes an easy reading of style, method or even origin. Flattened impressions create depth and detail through the application of hundreds of compressed small marks, contrasting textures, various states of polish and painterly shadowing.

Leslie Wayne is known for her highly dimensional surfaces of oil paint that create intersections where painting, sculpture, abstraction and representation collide. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, a New York State Council on the Arts Projects Residency Grant, a Yaddo Artists Fellowship, a Buhl Foundation Award for abstract photography and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Wayne has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad and her work is in the public collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; la Coleccion Jumex, Mexico City; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum Smithsonian Library, NYC; The Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, FL; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY among others. In 2016 she was inducted into the National Academy. Her commissioned window design for the MTA Arts and Design program in New York City will be installed at the Bay Parkway Station on the Culver line in Brooklyn, NY. Wayne is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery and lives and works in New York City.

Gallery Hours: Wed-Fri, 12 – 6 PM; Sat 1 – 6 PM; Mon and Tues by appointment

Phone: 212 581-1966 / Email: info@gallerymc.org