Beautiful Night at Benrubi

Benrubi Gallery is pleased to present Beautiful Night, curated by Jude Broughan, featuring artists Karen Azoulay, Adler Guerrier, John Lehr, Reiner Leist, Daminico Lynch, Jasmine Murrell, Beuford Smith, Jenna Westra, and Jess Willa Wheaton. [The show runs September 8 through October 28, 2023.]
Photography is about light (originally sunlight), and sometimes nighttime photography feels unexpected. Neon lights, camera flash, street lights, spot lights, tungsten lamps, high contrast, misty silhouettes. Nighttime is a restful time, when we unwind, hug each other, and look after ourselves, loved ones. Maybe go out and meet up, have some fun. Night is when we sleep and when we grow, our bodies relax and a time for healing. That inky blue twilight, then the star-filled dark night sky, souls gone before, and an as yet unmanifested void of exciting potential.

Beautiful Night is a synthesis of finely intertwined visual narratives. Jasmine Murrell’s low-light long exposures with halos and glowing light traces, speak about miracles that happen in the worst of times and in the most invisible places, and transformative experience around historical erasures. The car headlights and streetlights glow in Daminico Lynch’s “Lonely City”, a still from his 2022 short film “A Woman in the City”, illuminating modern people in their everyday lives in the streets of New York, focusing on the connection between people and exploring human and universal connections.

In John Lehr’s “Burger King, CT”, street light illuminates the bubbled vinyl graphic sign – a photograph from his Low Relief series depicting the skin of the city, surfaces and facades that have been transformed by human interaction and reimagined through subjective perception. In Adler Guerrier’s photograph “Untitled (Wander and Errancies–memories within; citrus in Saint Augustine”, the camera flash spotlight on a citrus tree is an unexpected focusing, an engagement in poetics of place and landscape.

Karen Azoulay foregrounds botanicals in “Dreaming of the Chamomiles”, where the white and yellow chamomile flowers play across the child’s face, and inky blues of the figure and ground, with floral symbolism and secret messages imbedded within. The inky blues flow through Jess Willa Wheaton’s piece “Drawing in the Dark”, where she combines disparate found images in radically unified ways, through a slow complex processes of observation and adjustment – in deep contrast to our widely shared experience of viewing images in rapid succession on screens.

In Reiner Leist’s “Window, 4 DEC 2022” the night exposure is several hours long, perhaps analogous to the time it might take to make a sketch. This photograph is part of a serial ongoing long-term photographic project begun in March 1995 – “Window” involves a ritual of photographing the view from Leist’s New York City apartment with two antique large format cameras making exposures on contemporary film.

Jenna Westra’s “Aperture Self Portrait (Jump)” takes aesthetic cues from performance documentation and postmodern dance, and invites the viewer to re-examine their role in the dynamics of image production and consumption. And of Beuford Smith’s iconic black and white silver gelatin photograph “Two Bass Hit”, the photographer states “Photography is a call and respond medium. The call is the subject and respond is the creative process in capturing the image.”

Jude Broughan

Lampoon on Sparkling Islands 

Debora Vitulano covers Sparkling Islands: Another Postcard of the Caribbean, for Lampoon Magazine (051923).

Sparkling Islands: Another Postcard of the Caribbean is a collective exhibition born from the initiative of Caryl Ivrisse Crochemar, founder of the Espace d’art contemporain 14N61W, an art gallery located in Fort-de-France, on the island of Martinique.

«Last year at 1-54 New York edition we discussed about doing a focus on artists of African descent, whether they were based in the United States, in the Caribbean or elsewhere, in order to strengthen their tides with the African diaspora in the art scene, because they still seemed to be worlds apart, even though they are actually linked. This is not something that comes naturally for both communities, but the integration of our gallery in 1-54 for so many years aroused the interest of many Caribbean artists towards the fair».  

When thinking about the Caribbean, most people – whether they have ever visited the archipelago or not – picture sunny beaches and crystal-clear waters. Sparkling Islands: Another Postcard of the Caribbean does not wish to contradict such image, but to expand it: «There is also the historical part, the broken history of the Caribbean in general, the pre-Columbian history, the proto-colonial history, the post-colonial history and the present development».

In such a variety of themes there was «a multitude of possible messages», but the curators preferred to conceive the exhibition in the «simplest way possible, as a series of snapshots, just like the postcards you send to your friends from a holiday vacation». Still, these postcards tell a different story from the mainstream narration of the Caribbean archipelago: «We attract the visitors’ attention towards something that they would probably pass by if they went to the Caribbean. It is 2023 and we are at a crossroads of many things in culture, identity, gender, and we need to experience this diversity as creatively as we can».

The artworks featured in the exhibition neither follow any particular red thread nor aim to offer an overall insight of Caribbean art and culture: «This would have been impossible; the exhibition is just an open door to a much vaster environment. The Caribbean is neither compact nor homogeneous. Due to its history, which we may call “a discontinuous continuity”, the archipelago is a melting pot. It is not to be forgotten that the Caribbean were the first point of entry into America for the West, both Europe and Africa. So, when you pull one thread, you just end up pulling many, such as identity, diversity, cultural mixing, colonialism, post-colonialism, future. In the end, the only possible red thread is the public, who will be able to take all the information received from the exhibition in the direction they choose».

Adler Guerrier was born in Haiti, but now works in Miami. He uses the form of collage – which he regards as a democratizing technique – to subvert space and time in constructions of race, ethnicity, class and culture.

The complete article.

Present

Sparkling Islands, Another Postcard of the Caribbean at High Line Nine. Photo : Eva Sakellarides

1-54 is pleased to present Sparkling Islands, Another Postcard of the Caribbean, a group exhibition of contemporary Caribbean artists coinciding with the fair’s 9th New York edition. This is the first exhibition by 1-54 Presents, a new programme of pop-up exhibitions by 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair; curated by Caryl Ivrisse Crochemar; 11 – 20 May 2023.