Yoko Ikeda @ Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

Yoko Ikeda

Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

December 5, 2024 – January 31, 2025

Yoko Ikeda was born in Kanazawa City, and studied at the Research Department of the Tokyo College of Photography. She now lives and works in Tokyo. Her work has been exhibited in many one-person and group shows throughout Japan, as well as in Belgium and various venues in the United States. In 2013, she was the recipient of the prestigious Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchase Award, and her work is included in their collection. In 2016 she was awarded the Higashikawa New Photographer Award and in 2018 Yoko Ikeda was awarded the first ALPA purchase award for Best Artist at Photo Basel.

LAURENCE MILLER GALLERY

9 East 8th Street, New York, NY 10003

By appointment only

www.laurencemillergallery.com

Eadweard Muybridge: Animal Locomotion @ Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

Eadweard Muybridge

Animal Locomotion

Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

February 20 – May 31, 2023

Eadweard Muybridge

Selections from:

ANIMAL LOCOMOTION

An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements

Commenced 1872 - Completed 1885 - Published 1887

It all began with a horse. In 1872, the former governor of California, Leland Stanford, hired Eadweard Muybridge to make a photograph that would be the first of its kind: a picture capturing the gate of ​​his racehorse Occident galloping at full speed. Thus began Eadweard Muybridge’s quest to develop high-speed photography that could capture “animal locomotion”.

On June 15th, 1878, the press was invited to witness Eadweard Muybridge's early achievements in this area: using a bank of 12 cameras on a Palo Alto race track which (with shutters triggered by a tripwire) he could capture the movements of a galloping horse. The news of this innovation was reported across the world—publishers could not yet reproduce high quality photographs, so magazines like Scientific American printed the images using wood engravings. 

Eadweard Muybridge was invited to continue this work at the University of Pennsylvania and between 1883 and 1886 he worked prolifically, creating sequential images with his multi-camera setup in his new outdoor studio. He recruited athletes and local residents as models, and even borrowed animals from the Philadelphia Zoo. The photos were published in 1887 as a 11 volume collotype portfolio with 781 plates: Animal Locomotion: an Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements.

After the portfolio was published, Eadweard Muybridge travelled widely, lecturing on the "Science of Animal Locomotion". He used a device he had invented, the “zoopraxiscope”, to project his photographs in an early motion picture technique and, thus, operated the first commercial movie theaters.

LAURENCE MILLER GALLERY

9 East 8th Street, New York, NY 10003

www.laurencemillergallery.com

Yoko Ikeda & Mary Laube @ Laurence Miller Gallery, NYC - The World is Our Idea

Yoko Ikeda & Mary Laube

The World is Our Idea

Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

January 7 – February 28, 2021

Moving through the world, we all infuse the things we encounter with personal meaning. Photographer YOKO OKEDA (b. 1965 Kanazawa City, Japan) and painter MARY LAUBE (b. 1985 Seoul, Korea) use their respective mediums to explore this routine form of creativity. 

Speaking about her photographic practice, Yoko Ikeda explains that it’s not her intent to record her surroundings, instead she seeks to “create a new world through the lens”. She intentionally seeks out “humble” situations and objects, seeing in them an opportunity for imaginative transformation. Because these small moments go overlooked they are also more free, lacking larger meanings they can become vessels for Yoko Ikeda’s personal visions.

Mary Laube cites the creative aspect of memory as being central to her approach to painting. When things are remembered imperfectly our minds fill in the gaps, Mary Laube expresses this in her paintings by allowing objects to slide towards abstraction. As these things move away from their original forms and functions they become more personal, markers of half-remembered places and times. Similarly, her work deals with the mutable nature of identity when she “paraphrases” cultural objects from Korea, a country that she grew up with virtually no direct memory of, having transplanted to the US at a young age where she was raised by her adopted family.

Mary Laube observes that something her and Yoko Ikeda’s work have in common is that, while human form is absent from their pictures, a human presence is always strongly implied. Yoko Ikeda’s photographs allow things within the frame to go out of focus, lending a subjective and improvised feeling to her images. Rather than a neutral depiction, Yoko Ikeda offers a the sense of the kind of close and personalized looking that life’s quieter moments allow for. Mary Laube’s objects have a similar mood, they feel as if they’re partly remembered and partly created by the associated acts of thinking and looking.

Both of these artists create pictures that suggest that the world isn’t a place but an idea that’s unique to each of us, made anew when we take the time to look.

YOKO IKEDA was born in Kanazawa City, and studied at the Research Department of the Tokyo College of Photography. She now lives and works in Tokyo. Her work has been exhibited in many one-person and group shows throughout Japan, as well as in Belgium and various venues in the United States. In 2013, she was the recipient of the prestigious Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchase Award, and her work is included in their collection. In 2016 she was awarded the Higashikawa New Photographer Award and in 2018 Ikeda was awarded the first ALPA purchase award for Best Artist at Photo Basel.

MARY LAUBE was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up in the Chicago area. She received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Iowa. Recent exhibitions include VCU Qatar, Trestle Gallery (NYC), Monaco (St Louis), Troppus Projects (Kent), the Spring Break Art Show (NYC), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NYC), California State University (Stanislaus), and Coop Gallery (Nashville). She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville in Painting and Drawing.

LAURENCE MILLER GALLERY

9 East 8th Street, New York, NY 10003

www.laurencemillergallery.com

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Anastasia Samoylova @ Laurence Miller Gallery, NYC - Landscape Sublime

Anastasia Samoylova: Landscape Sublime

Laurence Miller Gallery, New York

Through December 31, 2020

Landscape Sublime focuses on the way that landscape imagery in our contemporary culture is used to create constructed realities, wholly apart from our lived experience. Anastasia Samoylova collects online stock photography, creating a group of landscape images that reflect the stream of consciousness nature of internet surfing and the idealized imagery of consumer culture. The digital images are printed, cut, folded, and assembled into three-dimensional studio tableaus that are then re-photographed. The resulting works collage together unreal and romanticized spaces, evoking the way that commercial images reflect popular taste like an infinite hall of mirrors.

ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA (b. 1984) grew up in Moscow where she earned a Master’s degree in Environmental Design from Russian State University for the Humanities in 2007. She received MFA from Bradley University in 2011. She lives and works in Miami, Florida.

In 2020 Anastasia Samoylova had her first solo museum exhibition of the ongoing project FloodZone at USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa. Her work is in the collections at the Perez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago. Art Slant Collection, Paris; Miami International Airport; Mount Sinai Medical Center Miami Beach; Boston Consulting Group; and Vontobel, Switzerland; among others. 

LAURENCE MILLER GALLERY

9 East 8th Street, New York, NY 10003

www.laurencemillergallery.com

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John Dowell @ Laurence Miller Gallery, NYC - Cotton: Symbol Of The Forgotten

John Dowell, Cotton: Symbol Of The Forgotten
Laurence Miller Gallery, New York
December 5, 2019 – January 25, 2020

Laurence Miller Gallery presents the New York City debut of John Dowell’s COTTON: Symbol of the Forgotten. John Dowell blends a unique mixture of spiritualism, historical awareness, racial angst and deft technique to create photographic works that inspire the viewer to recognize the injustices imposed upon the black community, especially in New York, over the past 400 years.

Throughout the exhibition, featuring more than two dozen photographic works made between 2016 and 2018, John Dowell weaves together – both literally and figuratively –complex historical threads addressing issues of slavery, community, and memory, all intertwined with cotton.  Several of the works are large panoramas, reinforcing the idea of the vastness of cotton across the southern American landscape, as well as the long-term cultural and financial impact that cotton had on the African-Americans who harvested it for their white masters.

In All Angels Church of Seneca, John Dowell utilizes diverse digital techniques to situate one of the early churches in New York City’s Seneca Village, a once thriving African-American community founded in 1825, within view of the modern apartment buildings that today form the western border of Central Park. Seneca Village was razed in 1857 by eminent domain to make way for that Park.

In his installation Lost in Cotton, the centerpiece of the exhibit, John Dowell has constructed a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling fabric panels, covered with photographic images of cotton plants, to echo his grandmother’s frightening childhood recollection of getting lost in the tall fields of cotton, a thorn-filled maze ripping into her skin and with no apparent way to escape.

Cotton was at the heart of the burgeoning New York garment industry and economy, and in Bursting Out and The Long Road, John Dowell overwhelms Wall Street, site of an historic slave market, with cotton. In Sending the Message, John Dowell shows the spiritual side of cotton, with cotton balls ascending from the church altar like rising angels in Renaissance paintings.

"Cotton is our symbol," John Dowell says. "That's black people in this country. You just mention cotton, you know what I mean, and for those of us who are a little aware, all the torture, all of that stuff — it's there. And it makes you stop and think. That's why I'm doing the cotton. I couldn't think of a better symbol."

In February 2018, the African American Museum in Philadelphia presented John Dowell’s Cotton: The Soft, Dangerous Beauty of the Past with extensive critical response. In HYPERALLERGIC, Megan Voeller wrote “Dowell’s images don’t recount stories as much as serve as vivid signposts of the stories’ hidden presence.”

John Dowell is a Philadelphia native and Professor Emeritus of Printmaking at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He has worked as an artist for over four decades, and his prints, paintings and photographs have been featured in 50 one-person exhibitions. His artwork is represented in the permanent collections of 70 museum and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Fogg Museum of Harvard University; the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design; and the Lehigh University Museum.

LAURENCE MILLER GALLERY
521 West 26th Street 5th floor, New York City 10001
www.laurencemillergallery.com