I was immediately taken with Irina Rozovsky’s current body of work, In Plain Air, a series of photographs taken in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. There is something quietly transcendent about these vignettes – a tranquility rarely evident in public space. I was so pleased to have the chance to ask Rozovsky about these recent photographs and how they relate to her consideration of place.

Irina Rozovsky. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

How do you feel In Plain Air relates to your previous bodies of work? Does it represent a continuation of certain concerns that are central to your practice?

It’s a new way of working for me—I am slowing down, returning again and again to the same location, balancing the vague images I have in mind and the elements of chance encounters.  Previously, I was a shoot-on-the-go photographer, akin to a version of Eggleston’s democratic camera.  But while what I am looking at and the way I go about it has changed, there is a continuation of interests here.  When I was photographing in Israel, I started to think about history and the essence of time that’s encoded in a landscape and permeates the people of the day.  I think land has age-long, entrenched rules and its contemporary inhabitants subconsciously follow these rules, entering a cannon of history.  In a way, nothing in Israel has changed since it’s beginning. And the park, constructed in the 1860s during the artistic movements of Realism and the visions of democracy, is still running on the same agenda.  It’s simple but profound stuff.  I think it was Gerry Badger that stated by clearly photographing the present, you can access a larger human realm of time.

Irina Rozovsky. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

I was hoping you could speak a bit about your relationship to your subjects in these photographs.  Are these candid moments or are people aware of your presence?

The subjects in my series In Plain Air are strangers I encounter visiting the park.  We have not met before and typically do not see each other again, but the photograph coalesces in a kind of shared moment—for a split instant, I am let in on a private reverie.  I am drawn to situations where people have carved out a solitary spot in the park to be alone or alone with someone, so very often there is an awkwardness in approaching this intimate space, like coming up to knock on someone’s front door. The pictures are usually made quietly. I don’t tend to say a lot and people seem to accept implicity. It is, after all, a public space, so the rules seem to be the same as on the street. They are not staged, but there is a type of posing that’s going on, since people kind of open themselves for the camera, without breaking from their flow.I usually don’t linger after the photo is made, so as not to impose on or puncture the daydream.

What is the importance of place in your work?

A few years ago, my photography was placeless or worked to undo a solid connection to any specific place. I was traveling a lot and shooting endlessly, but the images never revealed their locations. Instead, they acted as a group alluding to a general pilgrimage, a movement rather than a destination.  With One to Nothing and In Plain Air, the photographs are really playing with a sense of place, but still the connection is amorphous.  For instance, it’s very important that the pictures are made in this particular park and that viewers understand it is a real park and I would not include photos made elsewhere.  Nevertheless, the pictures are not exactly about the park; it’s used as a stage, as a backdrop, as a stand in for a larger human space—the Garden of Eden, America, a mini world.  And many times, it looks to me like the photographs were taken in different places—the south, the bayou, a fictional place.  So it’s interesting to stretch this idea of place.  The photos from Israel work the same way—I’d like the experience of looking at One to Nothing to feel closer to what you already know and feel even if you have never been to Israel.  I hope the places in my pictures have this shifting, virtual nature.

Irina Rozovksy. From "In Plain Air." Courtesy of the Artist.

In discussing In Plain Air, you have asserted, “the park is seen as a kind of gritty paradise that wraps its everyday patrons in a sublime, redeeming, equalizing light.” How do you feel the quality of this place serves as an equalizing force?  Is that part of what drew you to this location?

Yes! I was drawn to this place because it felt like a gritty, imperfect paradise outside of time where most traces of modernity are erased and people are returned to themselves.  In the summer, when I started this project, there was bliss in the air, it felt like a sacred place, almost a virtual release from an oppressive life beyond the gates.  Outside on the streets, these same people would have seemed intimidating or unapproachable, but within the park, guards are down and everyone seems to be at their very purest and best. A strange perception of reality sets in and it hardly seems credible that so many different races and backgrounds are all in the same place, all around the same lake, lounging on the same grass.  Fredrick Olmstead designed this park to be shared by all, as a democratic, common land. To see that goal materialized, and hold true today, in some form, a realized vision, it’s uncanny.  Of course, this is idealistic, and ideals are unattainable, but that’s the power of this place; its illusion is that at moments, it seems to come close.

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In November 2011, Kehrer Verlag published Rozovsky’s One to Nothing, which was included on Alec Soth’s Top 20 Photobooks of 2011. Selections from In Plain Air will be in the group exhibition “Everything That Rises Must Converge” from March 2 through March 18 at The Current Space in Baltimore, Maryland.

Now on view at SOFA gallery, a DIY space in the living room of an Austin apartment, is the work of Jeff DeGolier. This pairing is fitting since both the artist and gallery make due with what is on hand. DeGolier, who is based in Brooklyn, came to Austin for a week and harvested bric-a-brac from trash piles and swap meets. Day by day, he assembled a sculpture at the center of the room that runs from floor to ceiling. Hung on the walls are a few digital prints based on similar assemblage sculptures.

The sculpture starts with the ceiling fan that becomes a source of electricity for a faux hearth made of a painted tire and an illuminated white plastic bag as well as some small fans with flashing blue lights, typically used to trick out computers like low riders. Pompoms, plastic hangers and a mop head are also carefully assembled in a way that approaches a kind of ritualized fetish object for our American consumerist wasteland.

This space of assemblage, in which objects hang, pivot and tilt, is flattened and framed in the prints. Color is heightened and patterns emerge to quote the psychedelic without falling into the traps of its potential sentimentality. What holds this work in check is the intensity of its realism and directness combined with a quirky specificity of craft. Like many of the artists in the New Museum’s 2008 exhibition Unmonumental DeGolier dispenses with slick expensive production in favor of the quotidian, making this living room both extraordinary and accessible.

Gabriel "Specter" Reese, Guerrilla Billboard, via Gothamist

Opening today at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA) in Brooklyn is the group exhibition, The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks. Before it had even officially opened, the show generated a fair amount of controversy. It seems to have created a Brooklyn—and Internet—divided. The exhibition was guest curated by Brooklyn native, Dexter Wimberly, and features 20 artists working in various mediums whose work “investigates the controversial impact of gentrification on the great borough of Brooklyn,” according to the museum. Though MoCADA’s mission seeks to “give a more accurate portrayal of contributions to the historical, artistic and cultural landscape of the world by people of African descent,” Wimberly recently told The Brooklyn Paper, “As a curator, it was important to me to make sure this exhibition was not just an African-American perspective, or a white perspective or an Asian perspective or a Latino perspective.”

Josh Bricker, The Order of Things (partial), courtesy the artist

I talked to Josh Bricker, whose installation piece, The Order of Things, is on display in the exhibition. Bricker, who is an MFA candidate at Parsons The New School for Design, told me that The Order of Things—which is made up of ten Anatex “roller coaster” toys in various stages of manipulation—”confronts a lot of the major issues surrounding gentrification, through a slow process of homogenization and conversion.” Bricker says that the toys “were chosen for their iconic status and place in our memories to allow for a re-contextualization of the mundane, as well as an easy entry point into a much heavier and more serious issue.” The ten roller coaster toys follow a spectrum of visual shifts until the last piece becomes almost unidentifiable from the first. Of his process, Bricker says, “If you know color like most artists do then you realize that while white in light is the presence of all color, it is actually the absence of all color in pigments and, therefore, I felt the perfect representation of homogenization and the loss of individuality.”

Josh Bricker, The Order of Things (partial), courtesy the artist

Not everyone in Brooklyn, and elsewhere, though agrees with the message of the exhibition. A casual post about the show on the popular New York blog, Gothamist, turned into an all-out war of words and ideologies when commenters began discussing (not always eloquently) issues of gentrification, race and class. One commenter replied sarcastically to the image of Gabriel “Specter” Reese’s piece for the show, Guerrilla Billboard, saying, “Oh boy here we go… How dare you try to come in and actually contribute to the quality of life here. How dare you try to come in here and open up business, and create jobs. How dare you try to put a boutique clothing shop in place of the 3rd liquor store on this block. How dare you pay taxes!” Another disagreed by responding, “I don’t necessarily think: 3 starbucks per block plus several overpirced [sic] organic fairtrade coffee emporiums, plus…3x rent increase for the same shitty apartment is an ‘improvement’.”

The artists whose work will be on view in The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks include: Josh Bricker (Installation), Valerie Caesar (Photography), Oasa DuVerney (Drawing), Zachary Fabri (Video), Rosamond S. King (Installation), Irondale Ensemble (Theater Performance), Nathan Kensinger (Photography), Jess Levey (Photography / Video Installation), Christina Massey (Painting), Musa (Sculpture), Tim Okamura (Painting), Kip Omolade (Painting), John Perry (Painting), Adele Pham (Video), Michael Premo / Rachel Falcone (Photography / Multimedia), Gabriel Reese (Painting), Marie Roberts (Painting), Ali Santana (Music Video), Monique Schubert (Mixed-media), Alexandria Smith (Painting), Sarah Nelson Wright (Installation).

Additionally, photos and essays by students at The Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School and The Secondary School for Research will be on display in a vignette representing their study and documentation of the impact of gentrification in their neighborhoods. The exhibition runs through May 16, 2010 and features a roster of public events surrounding the issues it seeks to explore, including talks and documentary screenings.

Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance at MIT List Visual Arts Center

Currently on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston is the solo exhibition, Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance. The exhibition, which features works based on Jackson’s artist residency at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA, was originally on view at MIT from May through July of 2009. The work on view reflects Jackson’s curiosity with aspects of MIT’s research, as well as his own while in residency at the institution—particularly the Energy Initiative, since the Brooklyn-based sculptor has historically employed the use of recycled and repurposed objects in much of his work. Chariot—a crashed race car frame that the artist’s cousin, Skip Nichols built, raced and then crashed—has a body rebuilt by Jackson and is lit underneath in a ROYGBIV spectrum of lights generated by solar panels on top of the museum. In a video interview with MIT, Jackson says that “bringing it [the piece, Chariot] to MIT and working with the Energy Initiative was a…seamless, perfect fit in the sense that it was an opportunity to sort of explore perhaps…some poetic aspects of what they’re doing.”

Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance at MIT List Visual Arts Center

Born in Panorama City, CA, Matthew Day Jackson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He earned his BFA from University of Washington and his MFA from Rutgers University. Jackson’s solo exhibitions include Terranaut, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY; Diptych, Mario Diacono at Ars Libri, Boston, MA; Paradise Now!, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and By No Means Necessary, The Locker Plant, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX. His work was included in the 2005 exhibition Greater New York at P.S.1 in New York City. For the 2005 Whitney Biennial of American Art, Jackson contributed Chariot, The Day After the End of Days (2005-2006), a pioneer covered wagon floating above a bed of fluorescent tubes.