Jackie Furtado | Alex Yudzon | Sara Maria. Salamone. Quiescent

About

Works will highlight a ‘decisive moment’ that upends the contemporary burst of social shutters. Public image-makers’ current obsession with documenting and curating their memories fall prey to a motionless shoot, a determined instant yet seemingly edited instant. All artists create work that has a stain of nostalgia in the present moment. Photographing now, for what will be gone later is a moment of really seeing. Opposed to photographing in lieu of experiencing, they each are in the state of looking at, present in the moment.

The stillness lingers on a chromogenic print of Furtado’s, (taken with a 4x5 camera) “Shotgun Sun I & II” at rest within a frame, proof of soft whispers with desert hues bouncing off the negative. An image of the artist’s brother, stationary, stuck in the weeds or “The Overlook” capturing a windless and instantly by an omniscient viewer. Furtado powerfully freezes her figures in a landscape. “Rose after Edith” proves that a monochromatic setting perfectly halts a horizontal figure, embedded in a site where a tranquil light stands. Furtado escapes the rapid fire shoots of her generation of cell-phone photographer, and instead promotes a latent luminosity within her compositions.

Amongst the tiered stage, back center of the gallery, lay objects replicated from an historical Russian Cookbook that Yudzon sculpturally recreates and then photographs, without manipulation, from “The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.” Enjoy “Sausages with Beer” above the display, then, peer into "The Book…” both the original and recreated. From 1939, until its collapse, it was the only cookbook available inside the USSR. He states that the photographs “…act as memory images, combining fragments of the real and the false to create a simulacrum that looks convincing on the surface only to fall apart into a jumble of inconsistencies upon closer examination.” Like the programmed teen exploration of “Finsta” and “Rinsta,” Instagram accounts, the ‘real’ or the ‘fake’ photo is anything but a sincere and accurate documentation of an instant. Yudzon’s images combine a fictional painting quality to a non-fictional, straight image caught on an SLR.

Slowly and deliberately, Salamone’s series honors the daily inventory of objects and relationships most of us are indifferent to, such as errant weeds, and window tchotchkes. Amidst change, she documents a grammar of stillness and double-takes. Form and composition merge with a domestic photographic tradition. Wrapped in immobility as snapshot “Palm Tree Cars, Maspeth” becomes a remembrance to a hidden street, the image encapsulates its stasis with cleverness.