When you see This...

The Project Gallery presents a new video, and video stills by Elaine Reichek, both from a larger body of work entitled, When This You see…This is the first use of video for Reichek, who has become known for the past fifteen years for installations, adaptations of found photographs, and art in the media of knitting, sewing, and embroidery. Defiantly working with a traditionally ‘leisurely’ activity not readily acceptable to the domain of ‘high art’, she has confronted issues of subjugation in feminism and racism, as well as the complexities of identity politics with wit and self-reflections. When This You See…investigates a specific history of knitting, sewing and weaving and how these actives have been perceived over time. The video piece shown here is a series of clips compiled from a wide range of films, saying from the 1920s to the 1990s. In each clip, a woman playing a pivotal role in the film, appears sewing; her motives are revealed by one-word text interventions superimposed by Reichek. As with her samplers, where art historical and literary sources are appropriated into the work, an alternate history for the practices of both embroidery and art is unveiled.

Reichek’s exhibition history has seen her work included in a preponderance of shows based mainly on the context or concept of the work, rather than its craft. She recently participated in the exhibition, Loose Threads, at the Serpentine Gallery in London. A Postcolonial Kinderhood her one-person show at the Jewish Museum in 1994, also appeared in part in the seminal exhibition, Too Jewish at the same institution in 1997.

Part II of Making Pictures: Women and Photography, 1975 - Now,

Nicole Klagsbrun is pleased to features Part II of Making Pictures: Women and Photography, 1975 - Now, an exhibition of over fifty women artists from the late seventies, eighties, and nineties who incorporate photography as or in their work. Artists included in Part II are Eleanor Antin, Tina Barney, Jennifer Bolande, Jennifer Bornstein, Sophie Calle, Sarah Charlesworth, Elaine Lustig Cohen, Nancy Daveport, Moyra Davey, Jenny Gage, Nan Goldin, Bonnie Gordon, Dana Hoey, Candida Höfer, Valérie Jouve, Mary Kelly, Karen Knorr, Sylvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Annette Lemieux, Sherrie Levine, Annette Messenger, Elaine Reichek, Lorna Simpson, Amy Steiner, and Carrie Mae Weems. Working with but also expanding on themes introduced in Part I—problematisation of conventional genres, the function of artifice, focus on perceptual processes, technical manipulation, representation’s role in identity—this part of the exhibition has its own distinctive character.

Again the work diverges from straight photography although perhaps not so obviously at first. For practitioners of what has come to be known as the snapshot aesthetic the parameters of traditional photographic practice are there to be simultaneously employed and mutated. The strengths of candid composition are subtly twisted out of shape by content to reveal alternative couplings and family groupings as well as the strangeness of architectural spaces and everyday objects. In both the snapshot and photo-text based works narratives are alluded to but never fully disclosed. Texts are on, near, or a design element of the work. They may be descriptive, confrontational, provocative, poetic, or accusations but always make us look at the photograph differently. In other works images derived from other media to produce a discrete visual entity which discloses and reworks the original photograph’s meaning, Color and light are wielded with a painterly flourish in many of the pieces while scale is altered to make the intimate monumental, the ordinary worthy of note, and the ubiquitous subject to closer inspection. What all of these images have in common, however, is the ability to make us as viewers look and look again.

The exhibition is being held in conjunction with the New York Public Library’s exhibition, A History of Women Photographers October 19 - January 4, 1997. Artists included in Part I were Sally Apfelbaum, Uta Barth, Ellen Brooks, Jeanne Dunning, Mary Beth Edelson, Barbara Ess, Maria Hahnenkamp, Ann Hamilton, Ariane Lopze-Huici, Ana Medieta, Marilyn, Minter, Mariko Mori, Catherine Opie, Michal Rovner, Carolee Schneemann, Beverly Semmes, Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, Sterck and Rozo, Gillian Wearing, Hannah Wilke, and Francesca Woodman.