<span class="text"><font color="#FFFFFF" class="text"> <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><font style="line-height: 20px;"><font style="color: rgb(153, 204, 0);">URBAN RELICS and SLOW GLASS </font></font></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><font style="line-height: 20px;"><br /> </font></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><small><font style="line-height: 20px;">After the shattering events of 9/11, I felt the need to photograph the streets of New York City where I was born and raised. This was a sharp departure from my previous work, which had consisted primarily of hand-painted figure studies photographed in a studio environment, using traditional black and white methods. These images, made with a digital camera, are predominantly close-ups of abandoned buildings, walls covered in graffiti, rusted metal, peeling paint, and dilapidated fences. These decaying structures called out to me. I was fascinated by the way neglect and exposure to the elements transformed intact and integrated structures into separate decaying elements. Like all things organic, man-made constructions obey the same life cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline and death. Traveling along the same time/space continuum by forces seen and unseen as everything in our universe, all things organic and inorganic alike interact with and upon each other, creating uniqueness both beautiful and hideous at each interval.</font></small></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><small><font style="line-height: 20px;"><br /> </font> <font style="line-height: 20px;"> </font></small></span></p> </span></p> <p><small><font style="line-height: 20px;">For several months I focused on windows as I found them on the streets; in sunlight or in shade, wet or dry, damaged, broken or whole, covered or uncovered, dirty or clean, with light behind or without, composed of glass bricks or single panes; all mysterious by what they elusively revealed hidden in their depths. The glass either reflected my literal perception of the world around me, or exposed those metaphors concealed deep within my unconscious mind.</font> <font style="line-height: 20px;">I wandered the neighborhoods searching out those things we pass by and usually never notice thousands of times a day. I looked for the beautiful hidden beneath the façade and the message in the peeling paint. Taken together these photographs show a magnified detail of the richness and complexity of inorganic life cropped from the larger image of the living city.</font></small> <font style="line-height: 20px;"><br /> </font></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><br /> </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><font style="line-height: 20px;"><font style="color: rgb(153, 204, 0);">SANCTUM</font></font></span></span></p> <p> <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/bleven/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" /><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>269</o:Words> <o:Characters>1537</o:Characters> <o:Lines>12</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>3</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>1887</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>11.1025</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG /> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:DoNotShowRevisions /> <w:DoNotPrintRevisions /> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:UseMarginsForDrawingGridOrigin /> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> </span></span><style type="text/css"></style><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> <!--StartFragment--> </span></span> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">March 30, 2005: It is cold, windy and grey. While I am aware that the event is imminent, I do not yet know that my Father will pass in exactly eight days. In need of solace I pick up my camera and take a long subway ride to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a place I have never been.</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span>The trees are still bare but when I look closely I see the promise of spring in the beginning buds. The wind ripples across the sleeping lily pools, the pale sun glinting on small tangerine bodies darting here and there beneath the shadows.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[endif]--><span>I begin to be transformed as I inhale the green air and am drawn into this garden world of nature “in captivity”. Through the camera I penetrate deeper into the secrets of this world and see what I could not without it. </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">I will have to come back, again and yet again. I will come almost every week for nearly two years. The seasons change and I am there, in the cold and in the heat. Armed with both a macro and telephoto lens I am compelled to record each new discovery — the lacy delicacy of the skeletal winter hydrangeas, the alien quality of the tree peony in early April, the whimsy of the goldfish in the lily pools, and the treacherous thorns on the bark of the African Aloe. </span></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Each visit to the Steinhardt Conservatory affords me the experience of different climates and plant environments. In particular I study the Daubeny’s water lily, which is grown in a tub in the aquatic room. It is an intimate affair. I connect to this plant. I watch and record the mutable beauty of its birth, maturity, decline and death — and then its rebirth. I watch the tiny snails travel its leaves and the water insects swim inside the magic circle of the tub.</span></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: Optima;"><o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Through these visits, I will experience a spiritual metamorphosis. The weight of my own mortality will ease as I come to deeply understand the cycles of life of which I too am a part. </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><br /> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p> <!--EndFragment--> </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: Arial;"><font style="line-height: 20px;"><span style="color: rgb(153, 204, 0);">WHAT'S FOR DINNER </span></font> </span></p> <p><span style="font-family: Arial;">You are what you eat. </span></p> <p><span style="font-family: Arial;">I am not a vegetarian.</span> <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/bleven/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" /><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Template>Normal</o:Template> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>274</o:Words> <o:Characters>1566</o:Characters> <o:Lines>13</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>3</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>1923</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>11.1025</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG /> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:DoNotShowRevisions /> <w:DoNotPrintRevisions /> <w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:UseMarginsForDrawingGridOrigin /> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> </span><style type="text/css"></style><span style="font-family: Arial;"><style type="text/css">I am not a vegetarian. </style></span><style type="text/css"></style><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <!--StartFragment--><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><o:p></o:p></span> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </meta> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;">I like meat and chicken and fish. I like my steak rare, so rare that steak tartare was one of my favorite dishes until it became too troubling to eat, worrying about <i>E. coli</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, salmonella, and mad cow disease. Even as a child, growing up in New York City, I would surreptitiously sample the ground meat my mother brought home from the butcher freshly wrapped in brown paper. The taste of the soft, raw, slightly fatty meat filled my mouth in a distinctively satisfying way. It was a primal taste, a savage taste, and a taste that connected me to millions of years of evolution.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--></span><o:p></o:p><span style="font-family: Arial;">However, until a couple of years ago, I would walk past the butcher shops in my neighborhood averting my eyes from the window displays I found grotesque, where whole carcasses hung, heads with their dead staring eyes and lolling tongues, meant only to appeal to and attract buyers with their potentially succulent flesh. I was much more comfortable with chops wrapped in supermarket plastic that one could easily dissociate from a living animal. One day I just stopped and thought, if I can’t look at it, how can I eat it?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[endif]--></span><o:p></o:p><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thus began a photographic project to look at food in order to examine my relationship to it — after all, the animal I consume becomes part of my own living body. I started with raw food, really raw food as in still alive or newly deceased. I photographed the fish markets with their lobster tanks, the live chicken markets with their piled up cages of squawking birds, and the markets where barrels of live frogs and crabs entice customers to scoop out their dinners. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">I moved on to the open-air fruit and vegetable markets astounded that there were so many gorgeous and exotic looking varieties of </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">edible plants I could not name. This has expanded to photographing vegetables still on the vine and fruit on the trees. It is now an ongoing process.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> <!--EndFragment--> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><font style="line-height: 20px;"><br /> </font></span></span><font style="line-height: 20px;"><br /> </font></p> <p> </p></font></span><br>
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