Category Archives: Photography Philadelphia

Philadelphia photographers and photographs.

Tu B’Shevat

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Amie Potsic, Old City Jewish Art CenterAmie Potsic, “Enchanted Forest Installation view #1”, Archival Pigment Print on Silk, Dimensions variable, 2015, © Amie Potsic 2015

Artists present environmental art celebrating trees and drawing attention to Climate Change

Celebration of Trees, An exhibition in celebration of the Jewish New Year for Trees, Tu B’Shevat

 

AMIE POTSIC  |  LINDA DUBIN GARFIELD

HOWARD BRUNNER  |  LESLIE K. BRILL  |  BARBARA ROSIN

 January 31 – February 25, 2018

–  EVENTS  –

OPENING RECEPTION:
Tu B’Shevat, Wednesday, January 31, 6:00 – 8:00 PM

FIRST FRIDAY: Friday, February 2, 5:00 – 9:00 PM, First Friday event followed by Shabbat Dinner

ARTIST TALK AND RECEPTION: Sunday, February 11, 2:00 – 4:00 PM

CLOSING RECEPTION: Sunday, February 25, 2:00 – 4:00 PM

LOCATION: Old City Jewish Art Center, 119 N. 3rd Street, Philadelphia, PA  19106

http://www.ocjac.org  |  rabbizash@ocjac.org  |  215.627.2792

Admission is free and by appointment

Philadelphia, PA – Old City Jewish Art Center (OCJAC), located at 119 N. 3rd Street, Philadelphia, PA presents Celebration of Trees, a group exhibition featuring Amie Potsic, Linda Dubin Garfield, Howard Brunner, Leslie K. Brill, and Barbara Rosin.  The exhibition will include a site-specific photographic installation and series of complementary photographs by Potsic as well as prints, paintings, and mixed media works by all the featured artists. The show begins on January 31st and runs through February 5th.  The opening reception will be on Wednesday, January 31st from 6:00 – 8:00 PM in celebration of Tu B’Shevat, the Jewish holiday that commemorates the New Year for Trees. There will be a reception on First Friday from 5:00 – 9:00 PM followed by a Shabbat Dinner.  Artist Talks will take place on Sunday, February 11th from 2:00 – 4:00 PM. The closing reception will be on Sunday, February 25th from 2:00 – 4:00 PM.  Gallery hours are by appointment.

Amie Potsic’s work references the sensory experience of being within the forest while encouraging us to appreciate and preserve its future. Her incarnate environmental explorations entice the viewer to connect with their own perception of nature in a manner that is simultaneously intimate and enchanting.  “Facing massive deforestation due to industry and global warming itself, the ill-fated future of our forests is undeniable unless we intervene.  To focus attention on climate change, support improved environmental policies, and encourage an appreciation for forests and their fragility, my work emphasizes the cyclical beauty of the seasons and the delicacy of nature,” says Potsic.

Celebration of Trees is presented in honor of Tu B’Shevat, the Jewish New Year for Trees, at a time when forests are increasingly important in the fight against Climate Change.  We observe this holiday “by eating fruit, particularly from the kinds that are singled out by the Torah in its praise of the bounty of the Holy Land:  grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates.  On this day, we remember that ‘Man is a tree of the field’ and reflect on the lessons we can derive from our botanical analogue,” explains Rabbi Zalman of Old City Jewish Art Center.  In organizing this exhibition to commemorate Tu B’Shevat, OCJAC and SmART Business Consulting chose these artists because their work encourages the appreciation of trees.

Amie Potsic, Old City Jewish Art Center

Amie Potsic, “Enchanted Forest #1”, Archival Pigment Print, 12” x 24”, 2015, © Amie Potsic 2015

Amie Potsic is a photographer and environmental artist based in the Philadelphia area whose work addresses cultural, personal, and natural phenomena through the lens of social responsibility.  With 18 solo exhibitions and over 100 group exhibitions, Potsic has exhibited her work internationally at the Art Park in Rhodes, Greece; The Royal College of London, England; Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia; Medfoundart di Cagliari, Italy; the Museum of New Art in Detroit; The Woodmere Art Museum, The National Constitution Center Museum, The Painted Bride, The Gershman Y, James Oliver Gallery in Philadelphia; Mission 17 in San Francisco; and 626 Gallery in Los Angeles.  Her work has been published in or awarded by publications including The San Francisco Chronicle, Art Matters, The PhotoReview, andThe Philadelphia Inquirer.  Potsic received her MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and BA’s in Photojournalism and English Literature from Indiana University.  She has held faculty appointments at the University of California at Berkeley, Ohlone College, and the San Francisco Art Institute and has been a guest lecturer at The University of the Arts, The Delaware Contemporary, and The International Center of Photography.  Potsic is the CEO and Principal Curator of Amie Potsic Art Advisory, LLC as well as Chair of the Artistic Advisory Board of the Art In City Hall program of the Office of Arts and Culture of the City of Philadelphia.

Founded in 2006, the Old City Jewish Art Center was envisioned as a platform to build Jewish community through the arts.  Building steadily since then, the OCJAC gallery has become an exhibition space for serious artists, holds monthly First Friday art receptions with a Jewish twist and provides social and Jewish holiday programs throughout the year. OCJAC is now a landmark gallery in the Philadelphia art scene and is the only gallery dedicated to Jewish artistic expression and cultural exchange in Philadelphia.  Using the arts as a springboard, the Old City Jewish Art Center advances and promotes the universal messages of Judaism and spiritually to the broadest possible audience.

Amie Potsic, Old City Jewish Art CenterAmie Potsic, “Enchanted Forest #5”, Archival Pigment Print, 24” x 48”, 2015, © Amie Potsic 2015

Celebration of Trees will be on view January 31st through February 5th.  The opening reception will be on Wednesday, January 31st from 6:00 – 8:00 PM in celebration of Tu B’Shevat, the Jewish holiday that commemorates the New Year for Trees. There will be a reception on First Friday from 5:00  – 9:00 PM followed by a Shabbat Dinner.  Artist Talks will take place on Sunday, February 11th from 2:00 – 4:00 PM. The closing reception will be on Sunday, February, 25th from 2:00 – 4:00 PM.  Gallery hours are by appointment.

For more information, please contact Amie Potsic at apotsic@yahoo.com or 610-731-6312 or Old City Jewish Art Center at rabbizash@ocjac.org or 215-627-2792.

Thank you to Amie Potsic for the content of this post.

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MUSE @40

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MUSE @40. Muse GalleryMUSE @40

Muse Gallery in Old City invites you to MUSE @40, our 40th Anniversary Group Exhibition. The exhibition opens on November 29 and runs through December 31, 2017. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday 12 to 5 pm.

Muse Gallery will present small works in oil, acrylic, watercolor, print, photography, mixed media and sculpture.  Our talented members, past and present, are donating these select works to create a unique opportunity to purchase 8” x 8” artwork for $40 each.  Art lovers can support the gallery and fund new initiatives by adding to their collections.

Please join us for:

  • First Friday            December 1 from 5 – 8 pm
  • Artist Reception    December 10 from 1 – 5 pm.

At the December 10th reception, current and past members welcome the public to celebrate the gallery’s longevity and it’s value to Philadelphia’s vibrant artistic community.

In 1977, 60% of students in American art schools were women.  Only 2% of these trained artists showed their work in galleries.  That year Muse Gallery opened its doors as Philadelphia’s only professional women’s art gallery, and it was also the first women’s co-operative gallery.  It was organized by Judith Stein, Patricia Meilman and a core group of nine professional artists.  There are now 21 artist members. 

Muse Gallery has always provided support to its members.  Women artists would have freedom to create without the pressure to sell.  Although Muse Gallery continues to have a strong feminist point of view, it now accepts men as equal members.

The Muse Gallery continues to value the same ideals as it did at its inception.  Its members have an opportunity to exhibit in an open and supportive environment.  We encourage dialogue through monthly meetings, critiques, as well as group and individual shows.  It is also a place where people form lasting friendships and make important connections with other artists. Muse offered women the opportunity to shine and still does after 40 years.

Muse Gallery, 52 North Second Street, Old City, Philadelphia 19106, 215-627-5310

Thank you to Charlene Lutz for the content of this post.

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Digging

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As By Digging

As By Digging, Jaime Alvarez, Olivia Jia, Michelle Marcuse

InLiquid @ The Painted Bride

As By Digging features three artists—Jaime Alvarez, Olivia Jia, Michelle Marcuse—working in distinct media, whose works suggest an archaeological position to their subjects. Materials are used to draw out contradictions in our relationships to things and spaces with unclear origins: Photographs pronounce their subject with a different accent; paintings reflect on tangible objects without pointing us in the direction of where exactly we are; cardboard is put together to seem like lumbering parts reclaimed from a shipwreck. Split personalities can be sensed in the work, and each of the artists use their medium to collapse the distance between what we expect something to be and our fantasies of how it actually performs. The Indiana Jones franchise is a useful comparison in popular culture, in which the medium of film is a bridge between an intellectual’s quiet scholarly pursuit and their alter ego’s perilous adventure.

In contrast to an action movie, the excavations here unfold more quietly and without black and white good and bad guys. Jaime Alvarez’s photographs of small, synthetic figurines appear giant and alive; Michelle Marcuse’s bits of cardboard and glue take on machinic obscurity; Olivia Jia manipulates paint illusionistically in an idiosyncratic approach to cataloging personal documents and art history fragments. Amidst these approaches, we become conscious of our connection to a vast lineage of human remains, and the strange moment when our distance to these emergent totems is both closed and accentuated.

Jaime Alvarez’s work introduces us to some of the fundamental poles of the photographic medium. His large prints of uniformly painted figurines, trinkets, and other left-behinds, in either jet black or white, offer a sumptuous version of familiar things while they remain at the distance imposed by their singularity and iconized stature. Amidst these delectable yet cold memento mori, there appear straightly documented rooms of an empty, crumbling home. In their quiet, irreversible decay, we find we can pay attention.

Olivia Jia calls on the sleight of hand in painting to place us into an object’s space. Curious specificity meets ambivalent setting. Busts of classical, familiar statues are captured in a moment of focus, and provide little context for their inner fracturing. Fragments of personal ephemera, art historical reproductions, and more abstracted yet referential piles of historic matter are similarly reverent yet concise in what they appear to describe.

In the cardboard and glue sculptures of Michelle Marcuse, we encounter flexible understandings of reverence and delicateness. That which is flimsy is not necessarily weak; lightness in weight is not bound to a lightness in being. Her objects, while small in stature, imply something grand, aged and important, and indeed heavy. Each one is a space that is found out, by a process of physical conflicts and resolutions with the material. We come to detect them, not by a definitive allegation from their author about their personalities, but by the clear relationship between the object and the hands constructing it.

The Painted Bride Cafe Gallery, 230 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106

Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, noon – 6:00pm

As By Digging: November 1, 2017 – December 16, 2017

Reception Dates: Friday, December 1, 2017 · 5:00 pm–7:00 pm

Thank you to Michelle Marcuse for the content of this post.

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FUTUREPROOF

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Futureproof, HAVERFORD'S CANTOR FITZGERALD GALLERY

FUTUREPROOF at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery Explores Our Present by Interrogating How We Imagine THE FUTURE

Artists, writers, inventors, moviemakers, militaries, and think tanks have long tried to predict coming technologies or foresee catastrophic events — not merely for entertainment’s sake, but to prepare for possible outcomes, quell anxieties, or gird against tragedy. Shell Oil even has a “Scenarios” team, founded in 1965 and still working today, whose job is to explore “possible versions of the future by identifying drivers, uncertainties, enablers and constraints, and unearthing potential issues and their implications.” A new exhibit at Haverford College‘s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Futureproof, gathers work from contemporary artists on this theme with real-world images and archives from governmental and corporate scenario planners to explore how we have imagined and continue to imagine different futures.

In engineering, industrial design, and architecture, “futureproofing” typically refers to creating something in a way that minimizes or slows down technological obsolescence. Futureproofing methods are often reflective of people’s anxieties, aspirations, and assumptions about the present, sometimes acting as self-fulfilling prophecies. In this sense, they recall another form of proof—proof as mathematical argument, defined by a series of accepted axioms and truths. The artists in Futureproof engage with the many malleable interpretations of futureproofing, drawing from both the legacy of military and corporate scenario planning and the use of semi-fictionalized artifacts or archives as “proof,” or evidence, of alternate timelines or futures yet to come.

So, a 1991 in-house film on climate change produced by the Shell Corporation will be shown alongside a multi-faceted installation by Ilona Gaynor (“Everything Ends in Chaos”), featuring 2D and 3D objects with video in a piece that deconstructs corporate risk assessment. The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History, which foresees that the detention facilities in Cuba have been closed and replaced with a museum that reflects on Guantanamo Bay’s social and political significance, will be represented, as will images and archival documents from Cybersyn Project, the real-life cybernetics economy-management operation of Salvador Allende’s Chilean government.

In a time when each day seems to bring a new cascade of political uncertainties, when every “now” is assumed to be “more than ever” and every crisis feels more unmanageable than the last, Futureproof encourages viewers to interrogate the fraught systems of the present moment and imagine how they might be otherwise.

Futureproof is curated by Ingrid Burrington and features the work of Morehshin Allahyari, Salome Asega, Gui Bonsiepe and the Cybersyn Project, the United States Department of Energy, Ilona Gaynor, Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde, Shell Corporation, and The Guantánamo Bay Museum of Art and History. Futureproof is supported by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities.

Futureproof will be on view Oct. 27 through Dec. 17, at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. On Friday, Oct. 27, to celebrate the show’s opening, there will be a talk by curator Ingrid Burrington at 4:30 p.m. followed by a reception at 5:30 p.m. An associated screening of Peter Galison and Robb Moss’s film Containment will take place Nov. 29, at 7 p.m., in the Visual Culture, Arts, and Media building’s screening room. For details and additional related events: exhibits.haverford.edu/futureproof.

Overseen by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and located in Whitehead Campus Center, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is open Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., and Wednesdays until 8 p.m. For more information, contact Matthew Seamus Callinan, associate director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and campus exhibitions, at (610) 896-1287 or mcallina@haverford.edu, or visit the exhibitions program website: www.haverford.edu/exhibits.

Haverford College is located at 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, Pa., 19041

Thank you to Rebecca Raber for the content of this post.

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Photographic

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PSoP Salon

Photography by Members, 2017 Photographic Salon

The Photographic Society of Philadelphia is holding it’s annual salon at The Plastic Club, 247 South Camac Street, The Avenue of the Artists, Philadelphia, PA, 19107 through October 26th, 2017. The galleries of the historic artist club are filled with the work of 33 Philadelphia photographers. Tuesday evening, October 17th, is the monthly members meeting which features lectures and presentations by visiting photographers and members work. The Plastic Club has a cool AV system which allows us to really enjoy our fellow photographers presentations.

Sunday October 22 is a final artist reception from 2:00 – 4:00pm.

PSoP Salonlight being (Bowie), digital photograph, DoN Brewer

Three of my photographs are on display, I created a new piece for this show that is special to me. Returning to a theme I explored over ten years ago, I printed a shot from 2006, titled light being (Bowie). The abstract landscape photograph is 30″ x 20″, printed by Photo Lounge on lustre photo paper, is a continuation of my search for ethereal light effects in the urban environment. Incorporating photography into my art life is important to me because of the plastic nature of the practice; line, shape, color are the illustrative elements of developing a good picture.

Please visit The Photographic Society of Philadelphia salon at The Plastic Club, the collection of work is unique, directional, provocative and inspiring.

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