Mathew Pokoik - news

Announcing SIGNS, a group photography exhibition curated by Mathew Pokoik, as part of the Mt. Tremper Arts Festival. Featuring:

-Walker Evans - Tim Davis, Shannon Ebner, Lisa Kereszi, John Lehr, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Zoe Strauss, Brian Ulrich - and Stephen Shore.

July 19 - August 31, 2008

Opening reception and party, July 19 at 8:00, will include a modern dance installation by Jill Sigman/Thinkdance, and the klezmer/punk band Golem at 10:00.

Tickets for the opening are $20. More details about the summer festival will be posted soon, along with information about a series of related photography lectures.

Berlin, Germany, 2007. ©Mathew Pokoik

from Domesticated ©Amy Stein

Next Sunday will be the closing of The Interactive Landscape. This is a great time to visit the Catskills if your located in the city. The leaves are approaching peak color, the air is cool and smells like fall, and its your last chance to see this fantastic show!

Over the weekend one of the exhibiting photographers Amy Stein, came up from the city for a visit. We had a relaxing dinner on the porch, and spoke about photography. Then went over to the annual Center for Photography at Woodstock’s benefit auction, where Amy outbid me on a fabulous Alessandra Sanguinetti print from her series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. All in all a photographically jam-packed evening in the backwaters of Ulster County.

You can see Amy’s point-of-view on her blog here.

The Interactive Landscape will be open at Mt Tremper Arts from 9/2/07 - 10/14/07 in the Catskill Mountains of NY.

Curated by Mathew Pokoik and Featuring the work of Ian Baguskas, Aaron Diskin, Emmet Gowin, John Daido Loori, Daido Moriyama, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Matthew Porter, Susana Raab, Stephen Shore, Amy Stein, and Mark Wyse.

A photographic web preview can be found here.

Curators Statement for The Interactive Landscape

Landscape has always been tied to our deepest desires as a culture. It is the place where our sustenance comes from and the place we return to for respite. It has become a place where wonder can still be found, a place we actively seek to escape from modern day realities, a place of return, a place endowed with a secular sacredness, a modern day pilgrimage site.

In Stephen Shore’s Yosemite we are presented with what appears to be a family contained within an almost sexual and certainly sensual landscape. The way the tip of the beach meets the water is like a gentle caress of skin touching skin, or the shape of a breast. The entire landscape conjures up the female goddess of fertility and nature that has been banished within our Judeo/Christian framework. And within this landscape we have the act of photographing, what appears to be a brother photographing his sibling entering the water. Worlds within worlds – photographs within photographs, it asks the question: what is the act of photography?

©Stephen Shore Yosemite

Imagine the Interactive Landscape as a journey through mythological time. Beginning with the Garden of Eden and onward to temptation and the fall. Could it be that all landscape-based art is a conversation with our original mythos of nature? A conversation with the Garden - with paradise - with temptation and death? Aaron Diskin’s mysteriously dark and beautiful untitled photograph speaks to my eye of Eve in the garden with temptation, or the medieval maiden, sexuality and death. It is one of those rare photographs that is exactly what it is yet also touches upon the mythological, the otherworldly.

In John Daido Loori’s photographs of Mt. Tremper and Morning Light, rather than dealing with Eden we might say he takes up the Buddhist perspective of the non-dual; his photographs are of simply mountains, clouds, snow, trees, light. We are presented with the conundrum that the Fall never happened – it is an invention of our mind. His photographs present an experience of landscape that is not apart from us, not of the other – these photographs are direct / present / accessible. They are the gateway we pass through as we enter the physical space that contains this photographic exhibition.

©Mark Wyse Fishing Hole

Respite / recreation / a oneness with nature is a theme within Mark Wyse’s two images, Fishing Hole and an untitled image from his Surfer’s series. In Fishing Hole we have a scene like Shore’s; we find mountains, water, people, the classic themes of landscape, yet the culvert in the foreground hints at a larger perspective that shades the possible meanings of his photograph with additional layers of complexity and subtly. Ian Baguskas’s Maiden of the Mist IV also presents us with a landscape of extraordinary beauty, the waterfalls, the rainbow, and this seemingly dwarfed ship precariously close to the falls. It hints at an underlining tension and the raw power of nature contained within this tourist based landscape.

©Ian Baguskas Maiden in the Mist IV

At some point in our history, the landscape became an abstract and separate entity, a place to photograph, to visit as a tourist, to photograph in an attempt at claiming it. Or a place to re-create, such as an in-door ski resort in Dubai or a photographic backdrop that allows us to capture the illusion of great expanse in a take-home snapshot, as in Susana Raab’s, C2 Marketing Event, McSoccerfestival. We encounter this again in Christian Patterson’s girl with cellular phone, who sitting within a natural landscape is engaged with capturing its appearance within her digital phone/camera. It asks the question: can photographs separate us from this very landscape we seek for respite?

©Mathew Pokoik Dubai, Indoor Ski Resort

In other instances we seek to protect ourselves from that landscape, to create homes and structures, yet nature has its ways of creeping in. Amy Stein’s photographic re-creations of animal and human encounters, hint at the fierce wildness that we are unable to suppress or control. Or Daido Moriyama’s Stray Dog from the streets of Misawa or the flight of Birds through the old city of Dubai, even in an Urban setting Nature lives and breaths and finds a way to survive, to interact with us.

©Amy Stein Trash Eaters

This show speaks of our modern day conundrum, what is our interaction with landscape? With nature? With our world? We stand on this ground surrounded by the undeniable force and ineffable quality of nature. Yet this ground is the cliff’s edge, and we have -like Matthew Porter’s Car Crash - launched ourselves over the precipice.

©Matthew Porter Crash

The Mt Tremper Arts Party is this Sunday night, which will include the opening reception of the Interactive Landscape along with a dance and physical theater performance and DJ. It looks like we’ll have as many as 30 presenting artists across the mediums, I’m quite happy at how it has shaped up. I’ll be posting more related materials as they become available, curators statement, video from the Q&A, and party snap-shots. Hope to see you this weekend!

Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group ©Mathew Pokoik

A Group Photography show curated by Mathew Pokoik as part of the Mt Tremper Arts Party
Open 9/2-10/14 by appointment, see the MTA website for info.

Black Canyon, looking below near Camp 8, Colorado River, Arizona, 1871 ©Timothy O’Sullivan

Maiden of the Mist ©Ian Baguskas

Fishing Hole ©Mark Wyse

Yosemite ©Stephen Shore

Stockholm, WI, August 2005 (Girl with cellular phone ©Christian Patterson

C2 Marketing Event, McSoccerfestival, Poolesville, MD, 2006 ©Susana Raab

Dubai ©Mathew Pokoik

Golf Course Under Construction ©Emmet Gowin

Surfer ©Mark Wyse

Dubai ©Mathew Pokoik

©Amy Stein

©Amy Stein

Stray Dog ©Daido Moriyama

Crash ©Matthew Porter

Work by John Daido Loori coming soon.

Aaron Diskin prefers that his work not be posted on the internet.

Check back soon for a curators statement and a video from the Q&A!

A part of the 3rd annual Mt Tremper Arts Festival

The Interactive Landscape - A group photography show curated by Mathew Pokoik.

Featuring, Ian Baguskas, Aaron Diskin, Emmet Gowin, John Daido Loori, Daido Moriyama, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Matthew Porter, Susana Raab, Stephen Shore, Amy Stein, and Mark Wyse.

Opening party and Q&A at 8:30pm

Dance Performance at 7:00pm.

More information can be found on the Mt Tremper Arts web site, and will be coming to this blog soon.

Dubai, 2007, Mathew Pokoik