Red Devil (soul 2), 1972, Cibachrome print. Photo: Doug Harris © Senga Nengudi, 2023, courtesy of Amistad Research Center, Sprüth Magers and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York

Monika Sprüth Gallery | May 17–July 28, 2023

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are honored to present an exhibition at the New York gallery that illuminates in-depth Senga Nengudi’s Spirit Flags, an important body of work created by the artist while working in New York in the early 1970s. These evocative works comprise boldly colored fabrics cut into the form of human-sized silhouettes, which Nengudi then affixed with ropes to the walls and edges of rooms, and even staged outdoors in alleyways and across fire escapes. Beautifully staged photographs of Nengudi's Spirit Flags strung in outdoor and indoor locations, shot in 1972, will be on view alongside a selection of sculptural Spirit Flags recreated by the artist for the first time in four decades.

To learn more, visit Monika Sprüth’s website.

@Ketuna Alexi-Meskhishvilli. Toma Vova Gogi, Analog C-print, 2023. Courtesy of the Artist and Helena Anrather, New York © Inna Svyatsky

Helena Anrather Gallery | April 14th — May 20th, 2023

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes claims that “The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape.”* The work of Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili both complies with and resists this photographic imperative of the laminated object and, in the process, creates fecund sites of imagistic possibility.

Her work is half-done in darkness. Glowing fingertips darn haphazard exposures. Streaks, penumbra, and corona of speculative light conjure the form. By her hand, it is subject to the unquantifiable layer of the supernatural that surrounds everything and through which she develops meaning in the interweaving of photographic techniques that both reveal and destabilize the image. Here, the indeterminacy of bodies, heavenly and human, in the ether-thin hours of the late, late night, make for the strange landscapes she crosses and records in her camera-less works. When she does turn to the object world, there is a haptic intimacy between the eye and the touch: look closely for the lace and the scar. These images exist within another system of signification, perhaps fixed in the liminal moment when the displaced sign finds its precarious beauty. It is the language of the flowers in a fugue state—meaning made vulnerable to losing itself—flying from its stability and leaving only a trace of the half-forgotten logic of chance.

To learn more, visit Helena Anrather’s website.

@Trent Bozeman. Waiting For An Echo, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Silver eye Center of Photography

Silver Eye Center of Photography | May 11–July 28, 2023

For over twenty years, Silver Eye has supported vital new voices in contemporary photography through Fellowship, our annual international juried photography competition. Taking the Fellowship 23 competition as a point of departure, this original exhibition reflects the myriad ways photography shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

This exhibition reflects Silver Eye’s mission to showcase contemporary photography that addresses artistic and social concerns, often in dialogue with the past. Silver Eye is delighted to support these Fellowship 23 artists at a pivotal point in their creative practice and present their innovative work in dialogue together for the first time.

To learn more, visit Siler Eye Center of Photography’s wbesite.