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Laurence Miller Gallery - Lalla Essaydi

Lalla Essaydi: Converging Territories
January 6 - February 26, 2005
Reception for the artist: Thursday, January 6, 5:30 - 7:30

Laurence Miller Gallery takes pleasure in presenting Converging Territories , the first New York one-person show of Moroccan-born artist Lalla Essaydi. Converging Territories is a series of large-format color portraits of women and children taken in a large, unoccupied, family-owned house in Morocco , the same house that as a young woman Essaydi was confined to for a month at a time whenever she transgressed her permissible roles.

Revisiting that house, Essaydi creates a mysterious and timeless space with a cloth background, entirely covered with Islamic calligraphy that she herself has written in henna. She then painstakingly covers the women and children with henna before photographing them in front of the cloth. Essaydi’s intent is to explore cultural patterns within both Arab and Western societies, to reach beyond stereotypes, and to convey her own experience as an Arab woman. She states: “Through these images I am able to suggest the complexity of Arab female identity – as I have known it – and the tension between hierarchy and fluidity at the heart of Arab culture.”

Representative of the show is Converging Territories #21, a four-part sequence showing the progression from childhood to womanhood and from public to private identity. Converging Territories #29 shows a single woman, completely hidden except for one foot covered in henna, about to step into the background. Converging Territories #10 shows the artist from behind, seated on the henna-covered cloth while writing in calligraphy.

After a childhood spent in Morocco , Lalla Essaydi spent many years in Saudi Arabia , where she began her basic art education. She attended the L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris during the early 1990’s, then received her BFA from Tufts University in 1999. In 2003, she received her MFA from Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts , Boston .

Essaydi’s photographs are currently on exhibit at The Art Institute of Chicago in About Face, in NAZAR: Photographs from the Arab World, presented by the Noorderlicht Foundation, Holland , and at Williams College Museum in In the Company of Women. The DeCordova Museum in Lincoln , Massachusetts , will exhibit a selection from Converging Territories in their Annual Exhibition this summer. In conjunction with the current exhibition at Laurence Miller Gallery, powerHouse Books will publish an illustrated monograph under the same title, and Aperture will publish a portfolio of images in February.

Ray K. Metzker: Drawing the Line
January 6 - February 26, 2005
Reception for the artist: Thursday, January 6, 5:30 - 7:30

Laurence Miller Gallery takes pleasure in presenting Ray K. Metzker: Drawing the Line, an exhibition celebrating Ray Metzker’s unique and continually evolving mastery of light, shadow and line. The twelve vintage works on exhibit express the variety of different ways that this 73-year-old modern master of black-and-white has transformed the ordinary into the realm of pure visual delight.

Perhaps more than any photographer of his generation, Ray Metzker has successfully explored a multitude of techniques and strategies while staying true to his medium. He has challenged our definition of documentary photography in Mykonos , Greece , 1979, from his series Pictus Interruptus (1979-80). In Arrestation #10, 1996, he has merged the photogram and the collage into an abstract landscape. He has probed the rich textures of the urban landscape in Philadelphia , 1992, and the natural landscape in Tennessee 1992. And he has captured the nervous energy of the big city in his large multiple-image Composite, Yikes, 1966-02. Hung together, the works in the show interconnect into a poetic narrative, referencing back and forth, revealing a personal visual vocabulary more typical of a career painter than a photographer.

Ray K. Metzker has exhibited his photography since 1959 throughout the United States , Europe and Japan . One of his rare and celebrated Composites, Trolley Stop, 1966, is now on view in the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art , where it was first exhibited in 1967. Museums throughout the world have acquired his work, and a retrospective exhibition and book are being organized by William Ewing, Director of the Musee de l’Elysee in Lausanne , for 2006-2007.

Metzker continues to live and work in Philadelphia .

Laurence Miller Gallery 20 West 57th Street New York City 212.397.3930


Contact: Vicki Harris vicki@laurencemillergallery.com
Hours: Tues - Fri 10 - 5:30, Sat 11 - 5:30

 



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