Irina Rozovsky, Honoring Martin Luther King, Femme ’n isms
Tureen | Irina Rozovsky: Turn the Sun, January 6, 2024 – February 17, 2024
“Irina Rozovsky’s exhibition at Tureen begins with the Sisyphean command of its title, Turn the Sun; what more impossible feat than to bend this star to a single will? The works in the show do in many ways resist dominant conventions, not least of which may be photography’s mechanical illusion of total control. But the heavy handed phrasing of the title should serve as a knowing linguistic cue—this command, in the French and Spanish translation, is in fact an acceptance of the sun’s power in its Russian translation, “under the sun.” For this exhibition the artist finds herself both bending and surrendering to the pull of an extant force, be it art historical or closely personal. Unlike her past series, this group is tied not to a singular geography but rather to an aesthetic urgency Rozovsky felt in her making. These works arrive with the artist in tow.
Cliches of art history recur throughout the photographs on view, a challenge Rozovsky poses to herself and to her medium. The images of a gliding swan or a Van Gogh sunflower approach indulgence in their saccharine beauty. Two hands meet under moonlight in the most sentimental of gestures. Close relatives of the artist, including her daughter, appear in multiple works, the family album cum exhibition. Perhaps the most autobiographical of any in her oeuvre, Rozovsky chose these works, in part, for their power to simultaneously accept and transcend such tropes. Here the personal is universal. From a chance encounter with a sunflower field on a trip to France to an accidental doubling of film capturing three generations of her family, the narrative and aesthetic underpinnings of each image are as intimately revealed as they’d be in a scroll through one’s iPhone photos. Autobiography, motherhood, the beauty of nature—Rozovsky turns these cliches inward and embraces their lingering pictorial effects, their mirroring of the lives of the artist and viewer as beguiling as ever.
There is a sense of the celestial moving through these works, an influence or stimuli beyond art history. Each one culled from a different era of Rozovsky’s life. Like marking the height of a child on a doorframe, their selection denotes the artist’s place in time and space. Some force draws this constellation further and further away from the realism of earlier series, and its imagery thrives on the varied glows of possible culprits. In one work, Untitled, glass bottles of irradiated color orbit a female figure like so many planets in the mind’s eye. In another, also Untitled, a grocery store orchid sits alone on a bed of snow engulfed in the flame of winter sun. Even the sunflowers, having wilted overnight in the moon’s withholding glow, turn toward the suggestion of sunrise. The more the work gives over to the origins of its making, to the light that makes it so, the further we see into the artist’s surrender to a different order.
The cyanotype has just such an origin. An indigo trace unchanged since its notable use by 19th Century botanist Anna Atkins is here a novel but deliberate technique employed by Rozovsky for the first time. For many it is itself a cliche among photographic methods, another trope with which the artist wrestles to prove that sentimentality can belie a more universal, cosmic appeal. In this exhibition junk mail envelopes are the conduit for images of transparent material. Water, plastic, lace are all elements that both obscure and reveal, a characteristic reflected in the windows of the envelopes. As artwork they conceal but as frame they portent, their cyclical return always near.
Rozovsky’s exaltation of these ephemera—discarded envelopes, pictorial cliches, thrift store frames—is freeing. With these works she grants herself an almost painterly permission to flit between singular inspirations, like a collector’s eye across the object scape of an antique market. The works on pedestal from her Miracle Center series are a quite literal manifestation of this impulse. Acquired over a period of many years from eBay or estate sales, they are found objects once containing the most precious of a stranger’s memories. Into these vessels the artist places her own precious cargo, photographs that might once have been relinquished to storage in her phone. Neither the frames nor the images originally occupying them were the subject of any grand design, but Rozovsky’s intervention does not pretend to derail that inevitability. It’s in the act of saving rather than the fate from which something is saved where such small miracles transpire.”
For more information, visit Tureen
Art Intersection | Dan Budnik and Susan Berger: Honoring Martin Luther King, January 6, 2024 – February 10, 2024
“Photographs by photojournalist Dan Budnik take us to the time of the Selma to Montgomery March, March on Washington DC, and the Voting Rights Act. Dan Budnik documented social, political, and cultural change in the world for 55 years. He was at the heart of the civil rights movement. A small number of signed books, 'Marching to the Freedom Dream' are available.
From the essay, 'Inside the Dream', James Enyeart wrote: 'It was Budnik’s desire to help reveal the power of non-violence through the courage and commitment of the marchers, and their desire to assign King’s manifesto to that realm of history where humanity succeeds rather than fails.'
Photographs by Susan Berger in this exhibition resulted from her travels across the United States to neighborhoods with streets named in honor of Martin Luther King. These photographs have been selected from her book 'Life and Soul – American Streets Honoring Martin Luther King'. Copies of Susan’s book are available.
From Susan’s forward to her book 'I can’t help thinking about where a street named for Dr. King should be placed. Should it be in the neighborhood where the people most directly affected by him reside? Or should it be in a place where all residents, regardless of race can be reminded of him?' The pictures selected for this exhibit are sure to evoke these same questions in the thoughts of the viewers.
The Honoring Martin Luther King exhibition is on display from January 6, 2024, through February 10, 2024, in the Art Intersection curated Gallery 4 at HD South. The opening reception on January 6, 2024, is from 6pm to 8pm.”
For more information, visit Art Intersection
Allen Memorial Art Museum | Femme ’n isms, Part II: Flashpoints in Photography, January 2, 2024 – January 18, 2025
“Drawn from the Allen’s collection, this exhibition spans more than 150 years. Although far from comprehensive, the loosely chronological presentation encompasses key practitioners and decisive moments in the history of photography.
From the mid-19th century to the first decades of the 20th, there was widespread debate as to whether photography should be considered a fine art rather than a mechanical trade. The exhibition opens with practitioners who took advantage of this ambiguity to enter the field and make crucial discoveries, largely through portraiture. Works on view from the 1920s to the 1950s show how photographers used the unique characteristics of the medium to document the quintessentially modernist processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and scientific discovery.
The second half of the exhibition focuses on strategies of appropriation and collage from the post-World War II period to the present, foregrounding the effects of mass media. Alongside these concerns, photographers developed conceptual modes of portraiture to address identity-based issues.
This is the second installment of the multi-year series Femme ’n isms, which highlights women-identified artists in the Allen’s collection and expands art-historical notions of the feminine through the intersections of gender, race, and class. The exhibition includes works by Berenice Abbott, Laura Aguilar, Margaret Bourke-White, Claude Cahun, Julia Margaret Cameron, Nan Goldin, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Norfleet, Cindy Sherman, Iiu Susiraja, Carrie Mae Weems, and others.”
For more information, visit Allen Memorial Art Museum
