In remembrance of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, LaGuardia Community College is hosting a multi-media exhibition by 15 artists, many from Lower Manhattan who were eye witnesses to the tragic events. Brooklyn Editions prepared and printed large scale images of some very haunting and powerful sculptures by Michael Richards. They are prophetic for their chilling vision. In 1999 Michael Richards cast his own body in plastic resin to create “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian.” St. Sebastian was an early Christian martyr who was executed by being shot full of arrows. However, in this sculpture it was a Tuskegee Airman who was was being pierced by multiple airplanes. He made the life size self-portrait in 1999 and was killed on Sept. 11, 2001 during the World Trade Center attack while in his art studio on the 92nd Floor of the Twin Towers. While his work dealt with a much different theme; the metaphor of the all-black Tuskegee Airmen’s Squadron of the Second World War, men whose images Richards (using himself as his model) often returned to in his work. The Tuskegee airmen were awarded more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses but at the same time their Alma Mater was  used for illegal experiments on black men to test the transference of syphilis. The contrast between the freedom of aviation and the metaphor of airmen crashing and being attacked speak to greater social issues.

The exhibition opens at Saturday September 10th and will be on display through November 23rd.

Remembering 9/11 Exhibition at LaGuardia Community College curated by Kristin Jefferson

The original sculpture is on display at The North Carolina Museum of Art

Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian 1999

John D’Agostino’s Empire of Glass Project was recently featured in the New York times Lens Blog. John is an artist, photographer and educator based in New York City. This project involves taking highly detailed large scale photographs of a trove of Tiffany glass he discovered in his parents basement. He prints these stunning abstract images at large sizes on a matte canvas. His work has been featured in exhibitions at The Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston, and at The Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, with group exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C, and St. Louis. John’s images have appeared in The New York Times, Photographer’s Forum, Time Out, Studio Visit, as an award winner in The PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris, and featured in Silvershotz: The International Journal of Fine Art Photography, and on the cover of GLASS Quarterly.

Lens Blog
Empire of Glass

I recently had the opportunity to collaborate with multimedia artist Ester Partegàs for her new show More World. Working with Ester is always fun and she presents a different challenge every time. From giant garbage bags to French fries she continuously explores new ways to examine evidence of our disposable consumer culture in graphic and colorful ways. She is always interested in trying new and different surfaces. Ester is always focused on the consumption and marketing, so the surfaces we choose play an important role as an object and often must either compliment or contradict the subject matter. For this show she printed a series of French fries on beautiful Hahnemühle Photorag 308 paper and a created a light box of a landscape found on construction site mural in China which we printed on Back Light film.

Opening Night

Press Release: More World, ESTER PARTEGÀS’ latest solo exhibition at Foxy Production, plays with perceptions of excess, anxiety, pleasure, and deprivation. More World combines wallpaper, drawings, prints, sculpture, and video in a charged environment of color and contrast. Nature within the city, packaging, and fast-food provide inspiration for the artist’s ironic takes on the psychic underpinnings of landscapes, surfaces, and objects.
Partegàs unpacks Pop, contaminating it with trash, removing its logos and references, and infusing it with a corrupted photo-realism. Private and public spheres sit uneasily together, as the artist traces the process of consumption: from the birth of desires in marketing to the final transformation of products into trash, the symbol of depletion and, perhaps, death.

foxyproduction.com

esterpartegas.com/

My brother the painter Alex Gross and I have finished work on some new limited edition prints that are now featured in his online store following his successful show Discrepancies at Jonathan LeVine Gallery. Alex paints in oils with amazing detail and subtlety. Preserving this quality and satisfying his very particular eye is always a creative process. No matter how perfect a capture we start with, recreating the sensibilities of the oils is always a challenge. Adjusting contrast for a painting is very different than correcting for a photograph. Most paintings rarely have a perfect black or pure white so the corrections must preserve all of the shadow and highlight detail. Alex lives in LA, so our creative exchange is via FTP and Fedex. Generally one set of proofs and a file with a few adjustment layers gives him the options to get things looking exactly the way he wants.

Premonition

Stephen and Alex in front of Envy at the Discrepancies Opening

Heroes and Villains Cards / Limited Edition Boxed Sets

Visit Alex’s website to check out the editions: Alexgross.com

More about Discrepancies Show At Jonathan LeVine Gallery

Redemption

Videotape