Past Exhibition

𝓖𝓪𝓻𝓭𝓮𝓷

Dec 14th, 2024 6-8pm

Justine Kurland Studio, 20 Jay St. #309C, Dumbo Brooklyn

Justine Kurland Studio is pleased to present Garden, an exhibition featuring twelve lens-based and lens-adjacent artists. The title refers to a space of cultivation and growth, a metaphor for the artistic process itself. In this case, one might view the artists’ work as part of an ongoing, associative dialogue—an open-ended, collaborative approach to world-building that spans digressive themes and processes.

Sara Abbaspour’s staged photographs, made in Iran between 2016 and 2024, extrapolate the socio-political landscape through imagination and hyperbole. Katherine Finkelstein presents a series of photographs made over three years of participation in an annual gathering and ceremony that encourages its participants to shed their inhibitions in order to perform, channel, and embody a collective sense of belonging. Both Abbaspour and Finkelstein play off of their shared foundation in documentary traditions to unfold speculative possibilities of the photographs futurity. Graylen Gatewood operates as a cipher through which the internet’s persistent stream of political horror quickly turns toward commodification and irony. Her recent work begins with  9/11, reflecting the vicious cycle through which events crystalize into historical fact. Lily Dabe makes self-portraits with her mother, painting both of their faces silver. The silver–of their faces, of the screen–mirrors the mother daughter relationship while alluding to the culturally reinforced femininity inherited through the Hollywood stereotypes.

Sam Margevicius erases himself from the self-portraits he made Riga, Latvia through darkroom manipulations. Sutures applied to layered prints function as inward-facing portals–lacunae of photographic inversion. Carly Ries’s 16mm video distorts the self-portrait form altogether, distilling their reflected image into a rhythmic whirr of refracted light and contorted reflections in mylar. Holes open in their flesh, and portals give way to new configurations of a fluid self. Levee Wolf’s image-text self-portraits likewise examine the world through this mediated portal of self. The artist’s handwritten text renders God’s words from the Book of Exodus, “I Am What I Am.” Here, these divine words, scrawled over a deep blue self-portrait, assume a defensive posture. Jenny Calivas’s sewn photo-collage uses the distension of her pregnant stomach as a tool for spatial-temporal measurement. Affixing photograph to photograph, the twelve images read like the notches on a ruler, charting the duration of her pregnancy, the distance between two walls, and the length of a crack on the floor of her studio. Cassandra MacLeod’s three-dimensional assemblage paintings are propelled by the physicality of her materials, with references to the body cradled by the layered architecture of her constructions.

Ashima Yadava’s mixed-media work repurposes family photographs of the figure of Krishna used in rituals to preserve the family’s patrilineal line. Yadava’s bodily interventions shift his blessing to the matrilineal. Mayita Mendez’s painted photographs similarly investigate religious ritual and mythology as markers of misogyny. She casts herself as La Siguanada, the Salvadorian sorceress known for seducing and destroying men and reclaims these negative attributes as forms of empowerment. Jenny Riffle’s photographic interventions test the limits of the medium to picture the material world and reference Victorian spirit photography. In one instance, she left pinhole cameras staged in the forest for weeks, with the apertures left wide open to absorb every fluttering ghost.

Please join us for the opening reception on December 14th from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The exhibition will be open through January 8th by appointment.