John Cullen
“All About Reflections”
June 11- June 29, 2013
Reception: Thursday, June 13, 5-8pm

Chelsea:  Viridian Artists, Inc. is pleased to present John Cullen’s first solo exhibition at our gallery entitled  ”All About Reflections” from June 11 to June 29, 2013. There will be a reception to meet the artist on Thursday June 13, 5-8pm.

The focus of Cullen’s imagery is water, presented abstractly, with flowing lines that echo the fluidity of water’s movement and currents. His acrylic paintings on wood panels are not large and are described by the artist as “abstract impressionism”.  Sometimes he is painting the rhythms of flowing water in such a way that narratives of movement are created and filled with the simplicity of nature abstracted. Occasionally other forms overlay the liquefied tendrils, but always the viewer is confronted with water’s beautifully rhythmic journey.

Though he has worked many years and in many differing ways studying and recording the waves and currents of streams and rivers, the current selection of work encompasses selections from the last five years with a concentration on the “rhythm” series of the past two years up to the present.

Cullen feels his most inspired work comes through a sheer force of labor that ultimately fills him with a renewed sense of insight and revelation.

The artist studied at Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, New York University and Pratt Institute, where he received a Masters Degree in Art Education in 1970. He taught art on both the secondary and college level. He has been exhibiting his paintings since 1988, receiving many awards in exhibitions throughout New York State and the Northeastern coast as well as at the Vera Beach Museum of Art, the Schweinfurth Museum and the Cooperstown Museum of Art.

We look forward to your joining us at this exciting new exhibit at Viridian Artists.

For further information please contact the gallery at 212-414-4040 or  viridianartistsinc@gmail.com  or  view our website: viridianartists.com

BOB TOMLINSON
“Divas & Heroes”
oil and collage paintings
May 21 – June 8, 2013

Reception: Thurs. May 23, 5-8 pm
Coffee/Conversation with the artist:  Saturday, June 1, 3-4 pm

Chelsea, NYC: Viridian Artists is pleased to present recent oil and collage paintings by Bob Tomlinson on the ironic theme “Divas & Heroes”.  The exhibit opens May 21st with a reception on Thursday May 23^rd, 5-8pm PM. The work will be on view through Saturday June 8^th. The artist will be at the gallery on Saturday, June 1st, for coffee and conversation from 3-4 PM.

The dictionary defines diva as “a great woman singer, a prima donna.”  These are present in the person of Josephine Baker etc but the word is also taken in the broader sense of a flamboyant heroine, here historical or literary.  The same holds true for the heroes.  Whether heroes and heroines are possible in the modern world is open to question.  The paintings are of modest format; the focus is on single or three-quarter figures.  Having said that, the usual suspects are present, Genghi, Marie Antoinette (at least in painted versions) as well as James Baldwin, Lena Horne, Chet Baker etc.

The paintings are combinations of areas painted in oil, elaborately textured and printed papers, as well as computer manipulated photographs.  These papers are collaged on canvas and represent elements of costume or abstracted background areas.  The painter believes that the frontier between figuration and abstraction is an illusion. There is no monolithic distinction between the two modes. Whether naturalistically depicted or abstracted in various degrees, the “object” perceived in a painting (a figure or a bowl of fruit) is in fact only a combination of visual cues. Such objects are not “natural signs” (to use the terminology of semiotics) but “arbitrary” ones, that is to say only constituted at a second degree by true natural signs: colors, lines and shapes.

Art critic Lawrence Downes wrote: “Tomlinson employs classical anatomy as a vehicle for gestural abstraction.” Focusing on form and rhythm as formal autonomous entities, the artist sets his figures hovering in baroque atmospheres awash with subtle color harmonies.

Tomlinson’s themes are substantial and implore us to search our memories and connections to myth as well as to reality, but they are executed with an elegant surface treatment that often belies the anguish & emotions that lie deep in the layers of the work.

Bob Tomlinson is a Jamaican-American painter born in Brooklyn, New York.  A graduate of Pratt Institute and the City University Graduate Center, he is also a scholar of French Literature and Aesthetics. Tomlinson has shown widely in Paris, London, Amsterdam and New York and is represented in many international public and private collections including those of the Clark-Atlanta University Museum, Dr. Maya Angelou, Lord and Lady Hirshfield, M. Franco Trecanni di Montichiari, M. Pierre Cochet and Herr Waldo Klick.  He figures in the recent books, 100 New York Painters by Cynthia M. Dantzic (Schiffer, 2006), Black Paris Profiles by Monique E. Wells (2012) and is also the subject of a projected film by the well-known documentary filmmaker Louis Massiah.

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday 12-6PM           

For further information please contact Vernita Nemec, Gallery Director at 212 414 4040 or viridianartistinc@gmail.com

SUSAN SILLS
“CUTTING LOOSE/ A Walk Through Art History”
April 30- May 18, 2013
Reception Thursday May 2, 6-8pm

 Chelsea:  Viridian Artists, Inc. is pleased to present Susan Sills’ exhibition “CUTTING LOOSE/ A Walk Through Art History” from April 30 to May 18, 2013. There will be a reception on Thursday May 2, 2013 6-8pm.  Sills has been a featured artist in the book “100 New York Painters” and will be interviewed by the author, Cynthia Dantzic on Saturday, May 11th at 4pm.   On the last day of the exhibition, Saturday May 18^th, there will be a closing reception from 4-6pm.  Gallery hours are Tuesday- Saturdays 12-6pm.

With her life-size freestanding painted 2-D sculptures, the artist Susan Sills whimsically restructures and re-constructs art history. Enlarged to life size, they are cut out of birch plywood and skillfully painted in oils in the style of each Old Master. Using a jigsaw, she releases familiar images from the confinement of the frame and thrusts them into real space to confront the contemporary viewer.

Continuing a project she started 20 years ago, Sills’ sculptures explore the magic of encountering familiar personages from Art History in a totally new context, often putting them together in combinations that tell a completely new story. This time however, the artist is not only adding new characters to the mix, but she is bringing them together in today’s world, juxtaposing them in their differing times and histories with an insouciant disregard for ordinary reality.

“Sills takes us on a journey through art history with wit and humor.” Pensacola Museum of Art, 2004.“… her groupings provide fresh insights and evoke quiet chuckles as she gently challenges our established beliefs about art history.” Vernita Nemec, 2005.  “As with all of Sills’ delightful post-Pop takes of familiar figures from art history, encountering them out of context, blown up to … life-size, is like spotting one’s favorite movie stars on the street. They look just as good in person!” Ed McCormack, Gallery and Studio, 2003.

Ms. Sills has had 16 Solo shows, has shown in Tokyo 6 times, and has been in group shows too numerous to mention. Her work is included in the Sylvia Sleigh Collection of Women Artists at Rowan University. She has had solo exhibitions at the Queens College Art Center and Pensacola Museum of Art which sponsored an educational experience for 4500 children and their teachers. Her 2-D sculptures have also been used as a set for a dance performance at the Whitney Museum.

We look forward to your joining us at this exciting new exhibit at Viridian Artists.

For further information please contact the gallery at 212-414-4040 or  viridianartistsinc@gmail.com  or  view our website: viridianartists.com

VIRGINIA EVANS SMIT

 ” “F” IS FOR FLOWERS, FISH AND FRAGMENTS “

 April 9 – April 27, 2013
Reception, Saturday, April 13, 4 – 6 pm.

Chelsea NY: Viridian Artists is pleased to present a solo exhibition of prints of all sorts by the artist VIRGINIA EVANS SMIT. The exhibit will continue from April 9 – April 27, 2013 with a reception, Saturday, April 13, 4 – 6 pm.

The “F” word usually brings to mind a host of either negative or at the very least controversial associations, but in the case of the art in this exhibit, Virginia Evans Smit is instead showing us the beautiful and the flamboyant of the floral and aquatic side of nature, then playing with it ingeniously. Smit is an artist of diverse skills & interests. Foremost in her artistic explorations are the varieties of printmaking and the artist expands the media to its fullest. In this group of works she is presenting a wide range of silk screen, monoprinting, Chine colle – a unique technique in printmaking in which the image is transferred to a surface that is recollaged in the printing process- solar etchings and digital prints that echo and evoke variations on all the above.

She loves color so the floral life in Barbados, where she spends her winters, accounts for much of the subject matter in this exhibition. In her last exhibition at Viridian in 2007, the focus of the work was the blooming beauty of the Caribbean plant life residing in her garden and in 2003, the images were remembrance of travels in Japan and across the U.S. In this current exhibit, she pushes her skills to encompass a wide range of experimental approaches to both her printmaking techniques and her subject matter.

The artist has the distinction of being the first African American female to receive a Masters of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania where she received The Thornton Oakly Creative Achievement Award. She has been associated with Viridian Artists since 1978. Over that time period she has had more than fifteen solo exhibitions at Farleigh Dickenson and Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, Mehu Gallery in Manhattan, the James E Lewis Museum at Morgan State University, the Barbados Museum and Historical Society and others. Her work is in many collections including General Foods, the Hewitt Collection of African American Art, the Library of Congress, The Fuba Collection in Johannesburg South Africa, Colgate Palmolive and many other private and public collections in the U.S. and abroad.

 Gallery hours: Tuesday through  Saturday 12- 6 PM

For further information please contact Vernita Nemec, Gallery Director at 212 414 4040 or viridianartistsinc@gmail.com or view the gallery website: www.viridianartists.com

 

“Wally Gilbert: New Black and White Images”
March 19th – April 6th, 2013
reception Saturday, March 23, 4-6
closing reception Saturday April 6, 4-6

Chelsea: Viridian Artists Inc. is pleased to present the exhibition “Wally Gilbert: New Black and White Images”. The show opens March 19th and continues through April 6th, 2013. In celebration, a reception will be held on Saturday, March 23^rd, 4-6 pm and a closing reception will be held Saturday April 6^th, 4-6PM.

Wally Gilbert’s latest works play with the effects of monochromatic light. These new  works range from images taken in his travels, such as the “Roof Tiles – Tuscany” and “Chimneys – Paris” as well at the series of Water Tower studies taken in New York City, to abstractions created by overlapping images in the computer.

A world renowned scientist, Gilbert explores the medium of photography zealously, working in the past primarily with color and focusing on a wide variety of subjects. In this exhibition however, he has omitted color entirely, instead translating all the images into black, white and shades of grey, focusing on the contrast of the forms and shapes, sometimes as pattern, sometimes as objects against a background. Chimneys, roofs, stairs and other architectural elements are most often the subject translated by Gilbert into artistic images enhanced digitally both creatively and scientifically.

The Artist states, “While most of these are photographic images, converted to a grayscale continuum, some of the images were further modified in the computer to alter and to rearrange the dark and light portions in extreme ways. This procedure produces effects akin to the process of solarization that was used with wet photography and creates novel, enhanced views of the world. The printing of these images directly onto aluminum metal emphasizes the contrast between light and dark and brings out the force of the whites and the blacks.”

We hope that you will be able to meet this outstanding artist and share his vision through seeing these incredibly fascinating artworks.

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday 12-6PM          

For further information please contact Vernita Nemec, Gallery Director at 212 414 4040 or viridianartistinc@gmail.com

Hommage a Meret Oppenheim, Betty Hirst. Photograph: Eat Me Daily

YOU ARE INVITED!

Come to Viridian Artists “ARTMEAT” for discussions of thoughts about art with artists and art lovers!

Wednesday, March 20 at 5:45pm

(if you’re late please call 212-414-4040)

Please RSVP at viridianartistsinc@gmail.com

Disconnected realities at Viridian 

I stopped into Viridian Artists last week to pick up a painting I’d shown in Endings and Beginnings, because I needed to ship it to Manifest for their current exhibit. With the parking maneuvers of an unlicensed limo driver, risking big parking tickets at rush hour, I got the job done, I’m proud to report. I’m getting as bold and improvisational as a seasoned New York driver, though I’m only an interloper in this town. I parked illegally at Second Avenue and 51^st St., in the bus lane, andon a crosswalk. (You would think I was kind of a big deal.) I sprinted into UPS, plopped my big, pre-labeled pre-paid shipment onto the counter, and rushed back out to the car before anyone would have time to ticket or tow me. Gotta love those emergency blinkers. Before all of these urban scofflaw antics, I had time to catch up with Vernita N’Cognita and Lauren Purje, who were both on duty at the gallery desk. I lingered quite a while taking some iPhone shots of the current Viridian affiliate show, Disconnected Realities, getting in everybody’s way and in general feeling like an uninvited guest. It gave me time to warm up to the way the whole show looked. It seemed to hang together more coherently than most of the group shows we’ve had at the gallery over the past year, including ones I’ve been in. There was a lot of work on the walls, but it was hung in tight clusters of individual style that gave me a pretty clear sense of each artist’s strengths. It helped that most of the work was fairly small. A few quick impressions:

What I noticed about the photographs by William Atkins was how they captured contemporary sitters with techniques that give the look of 19^th century figures in sepia prints, daguerreotypes, and tintypes. He induces a mild sense of perceptual friction in the contrast between the antiquated style and little clues that you’re actually looking at contemporary figures: anachronistic details such as body piercing or boxing gloves at rest on a woman’s lap. (A recent slideshow in theTimes online called my attention to another photographer working in the same vein, pulling screen shots from video games like Call of Duty to create images that induce flashbacks to Matthew Brady’s Civil War.) Atkins’ photographs are wonderfully shot and printed and fun to search for those telltale signs that they were shot now, rather than a century ago.

Renee Kahn’s best painting in the show, The Card Players, despite its title, owes far more to Milton Avery than to Cezanne. It’s a quietly musical study in extremely muted, subtle greens and violets, with her three players clustered like confederates on a picnic, their bodies reduced to the simplest abstract shapes. As with Avery, by softening the edges of her geometric simplifications, and layering her paint until it vibrates with life, Kahn conveys a lot of emotion with an image reduced to its most fundamental elements. As she puts it: “maximum intensity with the least . . .  means.”

Like Atkins’ photography, Lauren Purje’s paintings ride in the gap between her anxieties about contemporary disasters—things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, yo—and her love of the traditional masterwork of Durer, Turner, and Constable. She’s also smitten by a few contemporaries like Walton Ford, but mostly she’s got a crush, big-time, on the Romantic sublime. A couple fine examples of how she melds present and past are on view, but I wanted to see a couple of her witty and self-deprecating drawings, unveiled weekly at Hyperallergic. They offer wry commentary on contemporary art as well as the joys and sorrows of Purje’s nocturnal, Brooklyn-centric habitat, as well as the fauna populating the small region of her zip code located inside her skull. Her default setting about the world, and herself, is essentially, “I’m just not sure I feel good about all this.” I hear that.

Two colorful works on paper from Vernita Nemec, the gallery’s director, are quite different from the performances she’s contributed to the shows I’ve seen in the past year. The one I liked the most appeared to be an image created by immersing the plume of an ostrich fern in red paint and then using it to lay a flat, patterned shadow of itself on paper—a monoprint off a natural, botanical design. It has subtle variations in the predominant red with faint cooler tones showing through in patches, like sky through clouds. The effect is moody but cheerful and almost Chagall-like, She’s been pulling monoprints from nature’s ready-mades for many years, including her own body in a nod toward Ives Klein. It’s part of what she calls an “archeology of the self.” Her work—performances, installations, photographs, prints, and collages are assembled from found materials to convey a kind of inner autobiography. She tells me she has yet to do a monoprint of her cat, though. If that happens, I’m going to have to go ahead and ask her to do a YouTube video of the process. Now that’s a cat video even I would watch.

Meredeth Turshen offers only the briefest reflections on her gestural abstractions in her artist’s statement, which refrains from explaining much of anything. Wishthat would become a new standard. Her colors are rich and subtle, and she can load the rifts with ore by saving the most saturated passages of intense hues for the tiniest slivers of line and form. Sounds geometric, I know, but her work is anything but. Formal properties suggest a kind of mammal warmth more than abstract precision. Shards of color melt at the edges and lope in friendly, lazy swaths across the paper. Irregular figures huddle like badly-fitted puzzle pieces. There’s a slight sense of unfinished business about all of it: the energy of what she chose at the last second not to quite finish, leaving the viewer room to imagine the rest in a way that makes what’s there even better.

I suggest you take the photographs of Sheila Smith as an invitation to view more of her work on her website. The work on view at Viridian seems to marry the feel of a Matisse cut-out with Pollock drips. She assembles large crinkly collages from what appear to be colored tissue paper—the sort you might wrap around a new blouse in a gift box. Then she dribbles and splatters paint across the surface, and finally takes detail photographs of the work, which she modifies with Photoshop and then prints onto cradled painting panels. It’s all good, but it’s only a small taste of her diverse photographic work. She seems to constantly try to reconcile her schooling in both photography and painting: her detail shots of New York City graffiti sing with a surprising sense of push-pull visual depth and a deep affinity with the abstract expressionists, both from the 50s and 60s. One thinks of Mark Tobey at one point, while another image on her site is a dead ringer for de Kooning. Good de Kooning. I’d love to see her try one further step: to do actual paintings based on photographic images she thought she’d Photoshopped to completion.

Joshua Greenberg’s sophisticated photo-based images combine photography with digital processing to create surprisingly textured images that look as if they’ve been painted on a rough surface. My fingertips had to resist temptation. His artist statement spins around on itself, generalizing in abstract terms about the balance between photograph and computer manipulation. In other words, he gives nothing away about what he’s actually doing—what image he shoots, and what specifically he does to it once he uploads it. The results look unapologetically modernist. The way Jeffrey Melzack’s images hearken back to Klee, Greenberg’s stir memories of Braque’s analytical Cubist phase at one point and Mondrian at another, if Piet had been way more into blue. What’s most enjoyable is how painted his images look.

A balance between photography and painting seems to be a major thread running through this show. Katherine Smith’s paintings carry this dialectic to a more complex extreme: she shoots digital photographs of paused movie scenes on her flat-screen, then uses these images as sources for large, nearly monochromatic water-based oil paintings, done on polymer film. Process-wise, it’s a bit of a sandwich of paint between layers of film—one at the start of the process and one at the end. The paintings she’s included in the show, painterly and nearly expressionist in their brushwork, are only two of a series based on shots that took her nearly three years to compile by sifting through vintage films for just the right image. The effect is to lift an image completely out of its original narrative by isolating it and stressing its formal properties as a painting—yet in the process the figures in her scenes evoke complex, subtle emotional responses, a hint of passing time just as powerful as the flicker of frames shuttling through a projector.

Elvira Lantenhammer’s statement about her Site Maps offer a pretty concise reflection on what she’s up to in her work, which has grown from her practice as an art restorer. I pass it along with only slight editing: “I reprocess details of maps and street plans into painted tableaus – sometimes in large format. Through an intensive study of topographical map works, historic and contemporary, I arrive at the formal basic structure . . . of the place. In my abstract acrylic paintings on canvas or egg tempera paintings on wood, the main points of orientation for the viewer are the dominant colors. I am inspired by the wonderful brightness of the colors of the early Italian paintings. With the background of my education as restorer, I use this traditional materials pigment/ egg tempera on wood to express what I feel about a certain place.” In an email, she emphasized that color is her primary focus. To increase the brightness and intensity of her color, she uses wood panels, three layers of chalk, and then paints with egg tempera. She says she strives for “a remarkable, deep shining surface, like velvet.”

When I stood before Michael Rippl’s photography I had no idea it was based onPolaroid prints. I was admiring the sense of disconnected reality he achieves, as if he’d taken the show’s title to heart a long time ago as a philosophical principle. The patina of faded color evokes lost time—again a convergence of past and present that runs through a lot of this show. Yet he underscores that feel of lost time by giving the images a look of  rough usage: slightly faded, slightly worn. What amazes me in retrospect is that I started talking with Lauren, at the desk, apropos of nothing, about how Polaroids might be the last really trustworthy photographic technology available (not for long, since the technology isn’t as readily available anymore), given the ubiquity of digital manipulation. At that moment, I didn’t realize I was looking at digitally manipulated images based on Polaroids. (Subconsciously I must have picked up on it.) For these images, Rippl shot his Polaroids, which he altered as they developed—not in the manner of Andre 3000’s sage advice (shake it Suga, shake it like a Polaroid picture)—but by massaging them with his fingers, among other things. He then uploads digital images of these Polaroids for further manipulation. So what I saw here destroyed my fatuous nostalgia for a mythically untampered-with photographic image. I was seeing yet more evidence that photographs aren’t any more “objective” or literal or trustworthy than any other form of representation. Not that I cared. The beauty of the images justified whatever it took to achieve it.

I kept coming back most often to the smallest work by Jeffrey Melzack. His finely wrought images hover, like Paul Klee’s or Escher’s, in a world where geometry seems to represent a visually inviting but mostly unfamiliar world. His work is seemingly abstract but full of feeling. With the slight caveat that it’s impossible to pin down exactly what’s being represented, his world here is dreamlike, full of trap doors and stairs that lead nowhere and colors that seem to airbrush themselves into the void. There’s a quietly upside-down, inside-out enchantment going on that feels exactly right, as if this is what you came to art for in the first place, back when you had no need to know what the point of it all was. No excuses, no explanations, just my world and welcome to it. Back when you loved art because it was so irresistibly where you wanted to lose your head for a while and all the significance would dart away if you tried to take dead aim at it.

ELIZABETH FEATHERSTONE HOFF

“RECEIVED IMAGES” 

February 25- March 16, 2013

Reception, Thursday, March 7, 6 – 8 pm.

Wine and words: Sat. March 16, 4 – 6 pm.

 Chelsea NY: Viridian Artists is pleased to present “RECEIVED IMAGES”, a solo exhibition of mixed media works by the artist ELIZABETH FEATHERSTONE HOFF. The exhibit will continue from February 25- March 16, 2013 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 7th, 6 – 8 pm and a Wine and Words event with the artist on Saturday, March 16, 4:00 – 6:00pm. During the opening reception, the Lou Hoff Jazz Trio with piano, bass and alto sax will be performing.

 The artist Elizabeth Featherstone Hoff states that her images come to her “unawares”, hence the show title, “Received Images”. Hoff’s presentation is always a mixture of sculpture and painting, often issue-oriented but the artist feels she would prefer that viewers find their own meanings in what they see. Her sculpture is sensate and she follows the message and instructions given her by the materials she is working with. The artist possesses a photographic memory for images and though she often plans a work from start to finish, most of what she creates evolves out of the work as it is being created.

As a child, Hoff could not see with any clarity until she was almost four years old and learned to first “see” through the use of her hands and ears. Perhaps as a result, she sees things differently still, but her differently wired vision only adds to her visual perception and expression.

There is a diverse list of things that she cares about and that inspire each work. Her reactions to motherhood and the state of the environment are high on that list, but events like 9/11, that have affected us all, also find places in her work, both directly and indirectly.

The artist came to Viridian as a winner in Viridian’s 22^nd International Juried Exhibition curated by Elisabeth Sussman in 2011. In that exhibit Hoff showed two ceramic sculptural figures of women, both of which evoked an almost tribalistic aura of feminine powers, naked and primitive in our urban twenty-first century world. In this exhibition, she will be showing sculptural objects as well as paintings.

The artist studied painting, sculpture and printmaking with artist/teachers Ann Truitt, Hermann Zagge and Jennie Lee Knight. The artist has two daughters, both artists and one who is also a research scientist. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in Europe, America, and South America, and museums in America.

Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday 12- 6 PM

For further information please contact Vernita Nemec, Gallery Director at 212 414 4040 or viridianartistsinc@gmail.com or view the gallery website: www.viridianartists.com

YOU ARE INVITED!

Come to Viridian Artists “ARTMEAT” for discussions of thoughts about art with artists and art lovers!

Wednesday, January 23rd at 5:45pm

(if you’re late please call 212-414-4040)

Please RSVP at viridianartistsinc@gmail.com

Viridian Artists’ 3^rd International Juried Photography Competition
Nat Trotman, Curator, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum

February 5 – February 23, 2013

Opening reception Saturday, February 9th, 4:00 – 7:00 pm

First Prize: Roger Generazzo  Second Prize: Jordan Sibley  Third Prize: Mark Dorf
Honorable Mentions:  Jodi Lynn Concepcion, Klaus Knoll, DeeDee Maguire 

Danielle Austen*Zel Brook*Jodi Lynn Concepcion*Manuel Cosentino*Lindsay  D’Addato*
Lauren Dishinger *John Eaton*Taylor Firestein*Roger Generazzo*Aimee Hertog*
Matthew Kaelin*Klaus Knoll*Jennifer Lin*Misha Macaw*Timothy Macy*DeeDee Maguire*
Mark Dorf*Freja Mitchell*Robert Moran*Ida Roden*Noah Rabinowitz*Chip Rutan*
*Jordan Sibley *Stafford Smith*Judith Stuart

Chelsea: Viridian Artists Inc. is pleased to present their 3rd International Juried Photography Exhibition. Curated by Nat Trotman, Associate Curator, Guggenheim Museum, New York. The exhibition opens February 5^th and continues through February 23rd, 2013. In celebration, a special reception will be held on Saturday, February 9th, 4:00-7:00pm.

This exhibition is a diverse gathering of twenty-five photographers from the United States and abroad. They share a common interest in capturing a specific moment and situation using the photographic image as a starting point with a variety of ending goals.  First, second & third prize winners are Roger Generazzo, Jordan Sibley and Mark Dorf.

Viridian Artist, Robert Mielenhausen, chair of the committee that organizes the Juried Photographic Competition at Viridian, invited Nat Trotman to serve as the Curator for Viridian Artists third annual competition. Trotman joined the curatorial staff of the Guggenheim in 2001 as curatorial assistant and holds an M.Phil. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he focused on performance, photography, and time-based art. In his role as Curator of the photography competition at Viridian Artists, he spent many long hours viewing over 500 images sent to Viridian from around the world.

In his curatorial statement, Trotman states: “Whether through their stylistic refinement, conceptual clarity, emotional power, or sheer beauty, these images offer a brilliant glimpse of what photography has to offer today”.

As part of Viridian’s mission is to give exposure to outstanding under-known artists, the gallery’s director, Vernita Nemec, selected the images of thirty-one photographers to be shown in an ongoing Power Point presentation during the exhibition. She states: “the multiplicity of creative expression in photography today is staggering – being uniquely creative in today’s digital & virtual worlds is no easy feat.”

“Director’s Choice” Winners include:

Geoffrey Agrons*Juliette Argent*Danielle Austen*Robin Becker*James Bell*Deborah Cahn* E.M. Castonguay*Virginia Coleman*Gregory Colvin*Jodi Concepcion*Pierre Cook*Mark Dorf* Megan Douglas*Miska Draskoczy*John Eaton*Taylor Firestein*Cynthia Fleury*Erika Gagnon Miranda Gatewood*Roger Generazzo* Barbara Habenstreit* Flora Hogman* Jennifer Lin * Robert Moran*Marc Newton*Noah Rabinowitz* Jane Rothman* Mark Savoia * Jeanette Serrat Priscilla Smith*Denise Tarantino

Gallery hours: Tuesday through  Saturday 12- 6 PM

For further information please contact Vernita Nemec, Gallery Director at 212 414 4040 or viridianartistsinc@gmail.com or view the gallery website: www.viridianartists.com