Sharon Core: Early American

Alex Yudzon (b. 1977) began photographing in hotel rooms in 2014, when a trip abroad found him stranded in a foreign city with an abundance of free time and a dearth of creative outlets. He began assembling the furniture in his room into a series of installations, photographing as he went along. Since then, his fascination with the hotel room as both a laboratory for creativity and a zone of transgression has only intensified.

In the intervening years he has developed a stringent approach to making the work: he uses only the furniture found in the rooms he occupies; he works in secret; he works alone. Using this approach, Yudzon stacks, leans, and balances furniture in configurations that transform these generic interiors into hallucinatory worlds where the laws of physics are suspended and dormant emotions released. After the installations are documented, they are dismantled and the rooms returned to their original condition. The resulting photographs, shot in a style reminiscent of crime scene photography, remain the only existing evidence of what transpires during his stay.

Initially conceived as a series of journeys, A Room for the Night focuses exclusively on American hotels. The aim of this book is not to present a comprehensive overview of hotels in America. Rather, the images and text contemplate our uneasy relationship to the hotel as a liminal space operating beyond the codes and conventions that govern the outside world. Combining dark humor, loneliness and creative obsession, this work tells the story of not just the installations, but of the hotels themselves, the people that own and operate them, the communities in which they're based, and the journey through which they are connected.

Learn more about the artist’s accompanying Limited Edition prints HERE.

Neel’s intimate portraits of her friends and family become a painted diary, documenting what it was like to be a part of her immediate milieu.

— Lily Koto Olive, The Brooklyn Rail

With a practice spanning the 1920s to the 1980s, Alice Neel (1900-1984) is widely regarded as one of the greatest figurative painters of the twentieth century. Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, this book presents a selection of portraits and still lifes from the last two decades of the artist’s life. Based in New York City, Neel chose her subjects from her family, friends, and a broad variety of locals: writers, poets, artists, students, textile salesmen, psychologists, cabaret singers, and homeless bohemians. Her eccentric selection was thus also a portrayal of, and dialogue with, the city in which she lived. Through her forthright and at times humorous touch, her work engaged with ongoing political and social issues, including gender, racial inequality, and labor struggles.

This volume includes portraits and still lifes made between 1964 and 1983, the last two decades of Neel's life. The portraits affirm the shift in her work towards more luminous compositions, as witnessed for example in Abe's Grandchildren (1964) and Richard (1969), where the background is partially rendered and supplanted by abstract areas of paint. Likewise, in the still lifes—a genre Neel continued to address throughout her career—such changes are evident in the arbitrary use of perspective and the artist's bright palette. In Still Life (Breakfast Table) (1965), a bird's eye view of a strident yellow table is set off by many of the objects on its surface, which are shown from their sides, and in Light (1980), a shadow cast by a sun-lit table omits the flowers arranged on its source. In other still lifes, potted plants and cut flowers take on anthropomorphic presences, and even hint at a subtle version of self-portraiture. Aside from two paintings made in her family home in New Jersey, and a portrait from San Francisco, all of the works in the show were painted in New York.

Her series question the notion of gender and the customs of our Western culture.

– Fisheye Magazine

In The Hunt, artist Céline Bodin creates a brief encyclopedia of female hairstyles across various periods in time, within the framework of Western culture. The series reflects upon the pictorial qualities of hair: studying its materiality, its ability to convey identity, also recalling the Victorian “hair medallion”—a small, decorative keepsake made from an ornate curl of a loved one’s hair, a pre-photographic memento that draws connections between portraiture, identity, and memory. The figures appear as ornate statues, each characterized by the aesthetic associations and revisited stereotypes ofx their hairstyle. The anonymity of the images presented in The Hunt activates the mind’s associative aptitude, drawing upon one’s own fantasies and projections of sensuality, innocence, order, freedom, frivolity, and social rank. Echoing classical art, these images refer to a mystical icon rather than presenting a portrait of an individual.

Learn more about the accompanying limited edition HERE.

Galembo’s images offer an awe-inspiring counterpoint, a rare bridge onto a culture in which creativity and self-expression are close to the divine.”

— Chiomi Nnadi, Vogue

Since 1985, photographer Phyllis Galembo has traveled extensively to photograph sites of ritual dress in Africa and the Americas. In this body of work, Galembo turns to Mexico, where she captures cultural performances with a subterranean political edge. Using a direct, unaffected portrait style, the photographer captures her subjects informally posed but often strikingly attired in traditional or ritualistic dress.

Masking is a complex tradition in which the participants transcend the physical world and enter the spiritual realm. Masks, costumes and body paint transform the human body and encode a rich range of political, artistic, theatrical, social and religious meanings on the body. In her vibrant photographs, Galembo highlights the artistry of the performers, how they use materials from their immediate environment to morph into a fantastical representation of themselves and an idealized vision of a mythical figure. She captures her subjects suspended between past, present and future, with their religious, political and cultural affiliations—their personal and collective identifications—displayed on their bodies.

This book is bilingual in English and Spanish. Limited edition of this book available HERE