American Girls
June 5 - July 3, 2013
Ilona Szwarc is an award winning photographer, who lives and works in New York City.
Her work examines gender, identity and beauty in the context of American culture.
Szwarc has had a solo exhibition at Claude Samuel gallery in Paris and has been shown in group shows internationally – in London, Bilbao and New York. Her work has been featured in numerous publications worldwide including TIME, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Telegraph Magazine, Surface China, PDN.
She has won World Press Photo 2013 in the Observed Portraits category, 3rd Prize; PDN 2012 Annual in the Personal Category and has been awarded Grand Prize in the Fine Art category of the PDNedu 2013 contest. She has been selected for American Photography 28 and 29.
Her project “American Girls” has received worldwide recognition, having been highlighted in The New York Times Lens Blog, MSNBC Today.com and The Huffington Post, among others.
Cosmology- Val Britton
June 5 - July 3, 2013
Val Britton was born in Livingston,New Jersey. She currently lives and works in San Francisco. She has recieved a BFA from the Rhode Island School of design and an M.F.A from The California College of the Arts, San Francisco.
Artist Statement:
My mixed media abstractions map not only physical locations but also psychological and emotional spaces. Since my pieces are not planned, I am compelled to put myself in an explorative mode, employing the abstract space of the map to create a pliable structure for intuition, improvisation and chance. Connecting paper fragments together through collage, drawing, painting, staining with salty washes of ink, printing, stitching and cutting paper have become my methods for navigating the blurry terrain of memory and imagination. An ongoing concern in my studio practice is how to push the language of abstraction in order to create a visceral sense of movement through space and an emotional impact. I am interested in how my work can explore the tension between chaos and imposed order, the concrete and the imaginary, the known and unknown. Traveling, navigating routes, mapping our experiences, making choices at a crossroads, viewing purpose as a destination: these common metaphors link experiencing life with the notion of a journey. In my work I often think about how the retelling of our stories, the reconstruction of our journeys, helps us make sense of the now, and how the retelling is its own journey. Mapping serves as a metaphor for searching, an implication of the unknown in wide, open spaces, and a trace of how we see where we've been.