Archive for May 15, 2010

May 20th: Opening of Darcy Padilla’s award winning work, “Julie” at Fifty Crows Gallery in SF

May 15, 2010 at 3:58 pm · Filed under APPROACHING EVENT, MUST ATTEND, MVS MUSTS

From the Fifty Crows Gallery website:

“May 20th-June 26th, Opening: May 20th, 2010 4:00-7:30pm at the Fifty Crows Gallery in San Francisco.

Julie- For the last 16 years Darcy Padilla has been documenting the life of an AIDS-afflicted woman, Julie Baird. Julie has been on her own since her sexually abusive stepfather threw her through a glass window when she was 14 years old. She ran away from home, lived on the street, used drugs, contracted HIV, and had five children. When I first met Julie in February 1993 in the lobby of a SRO hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, she was 18 years old and had just given birth to her first child, Rachel. Julie and Jack Fyffe, the 19 year-old father were both HIV positive. Rachel, they said, was their main reason for living. Throughout the years, Darcy Padilla has photographed Julie’s complex story of AIDS, abusive relationships, drug use, multiple homes and poverty. A victim of child abuse, Julie often neglected her own children. A high school dropout, she depends on welfare to feed her family. HIV-Positive, she fights to stay off drugs. Julie’s is a story of a survivor. The telling of it enriches the understanding of the poorest and most desperate among us. I am continuing to document Julie’s life and it is my fervent hope that Julie’s story inspires a greater awareness of the plight of people like her.

Darcy Padilla is a San Francisco based photographer who works on assignment for editorial, corporate and advertising clients, as well as personal documentary projects. Since 1990, Padilla has been photographing the poor in the United States and abroad and following the struggle of people who live with the complexities of poverty and AIDS. Padilla’s list of awards includes: The John Simon Gugenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Soros Foundation Open Institute Individual Fellowship and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace Professional Grant. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Miami Herald.”

Leave a Comment

May 20th: David Maisel Lecture at The Annenberg Space for Photography in LA

May 15, 2010 at 3:57 pm · Filed under APPROACHING EVENT, MUST ATTEND, MUST HEAR, MUST SEE, MVS MUSTS

From the Annenberg Space for Photography website:

“David Maisel:
“Black Maps”
 Registration for this event will go live Wednesday, May 12, 12pm PT and Thursday, May 13, 9:30am PT.

David MaiselFor more than twenty years, David Maisel has been making aerial photographs of sites of environmental impact. This extended series, called Black Maps, shows the undoing of the natural world by wide-scaled human intervention in the landscape. His images of zones where the natural order has been eradicated are both spectacular and horrifying. Although Maisel’s photographs evidence the devastation of these locations, they also transcribe interior, psychic landscapes—for, as otherworldly and surreal as these images appear, they depict shattered realities of our own making. The forms of environmental disquiet and degradation function on a metaphorical level, and the aerial perspective enables one to experience the landscape like a vast map of its undoing. Black Maps has unfolded in chapters, focusing on such subjects as strip-mines, clear-cuts, leaching fields, tailings ponds, and firestorms. The Lake Project (2001-2003) is comprised of images made in the vicinity of Owens Lake in California, which was drained and depleted to bring water to the desert city of Los Angeles, and which became an enormous environmental disaster in this process. Terminal Mirage (2003-2005) uses aerial images made at the site of the Great Salt Lake as a means to explore both abstraction and, as the curator Anne Tucker has written about this series, “the disturbingly engaging duality between beauty and repulsion.”

David Maisel was born in New York City in 1961. He received his BA from Princeton University and his MFA from California College of the Arts, in addition to study at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He was a 2007 Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, and a 2008 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Maisel is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and others. His monograph The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004), was selected as one of the Top 25 Photography Books of 2004 by the critic Vince Aletti. His second monograph, Oblivion (Nazraeli Press, 2006), depicts tonally-reversed black and white aerial views of Los Angeles.”

Comments (1)