IN DER FREMDE | PICTURES FROM HOME. A haunting photobook on Berlin & the search for home by Romeo Alaeff ?>

IN DER FREMDE | PICTURES FROM HOME. A haunting photobook on Berlin & the search for home by Romeo Alaeff

New on the Fordham University Galleries website.

Internationally exhibited artist, Romeo Alaeff, presents a haunting, cinematic photobook on Berlin & the search for “home.” The book features haunting, never-before-seen images of Berlin at night—a city infamous for its nightlife—now presented in a desolate, eerie, and deeply personal light.

Framed by six essays by renowned writers, the photographs are tinged with a deep sense of longing & touch on themes of migration, alienation, and the search for home. Essay contributions by: Yuval Noah Harari, Christian Rattemeyer, Charles Simic, Eva Hoffman, Rory MacLean, Joseph Kertes (+ Romeo Alaeff).

The book will be published by the esteemed Hatje Cantz, “one of the leading publishing houses for art, photography, design, and architecture books with a focus on contemporary art” — a 75 year old publisher with over 800 titles. The book has already received half of its publication funding via a generous grant from Stiftung Kunstfonds.

THE PRE-ORDER KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN – FULLY FUNDED IN 48 HOURS

Immediately labelled by Kickstarter as a “Project We Love”, the campaign reached over 80% of its goal in the first 24 hours and surpassed it within 48 hours (almost to the minute), record time for a photobook. Books and prints will still be available for the duration of the 30 day campaign, while they last. Nocturnal street-photo workshops and night-portrait sessions, as well as postcards sets are also available as rewards. The kickstarter campaign runs from June 9th, 7pm – July 9th, 2020 (Berlin time).

The link to the campaign, which includes a cinematic photobook trailer, is: here. More info about the project can be found on Degrasse Projects and a Press Kit can be downloaded from Google drive here.

Romeo Alaeff

Romeo Alaeff was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1970. He received his BA in Photography from Tulane University in 1993 and his MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1996. He has exhibited internationally in exhibitions and film festivals and has produced work in a range of media, including photography, film/video, drawing, and writing. In addition, Alaeff has been a guest artist at the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, Pratt, Parsons, The University of Georgia and Georgia state University. Alaeff is the author of “I’ll be Dead by the Time You Read This: The Existential Life of Animals” (Penguin/Plume, 2011), a humor/philosophy book of drawings. His stickers also appear in “Stickers: Stuck up Piece of Crap: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art” (Rizzoli, 2010) Alaeff is also the founder and Editor-in-chief of Lines & Marks, an online publication dedicated to the role and practice of drawing across the arts and sciences. He currently lives in Berlin.

Photographs by Patrice Aphrodite Helmar ?>

Photographs by Patrice Aphrodite Helmar

“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion.” —James Baldwin

“One can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.” —Jean Genet

“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.” —Carson McCullers

Polaris and Down By Law are ongoing bodies of work that I began in 2015. My photographs picture, but aren’t limited to, the dark mythology of the American dream and the timeless story of returning home.

In Polaris, characters, archetypes, and dreamlike landscapes inhabit 50 miles on a road to nowhere. I grew up in a working-class family catching salmon on a twenty-six-foot hand troller. My parents taught me where the north star was in the night sky. This was a practical instruction given in case I was ever lost in the woods or at sea. This constellation alluded to in literature, myth, and song has guided seafaring people for time immemorial. These photographs were made in my hometown of Juneau, Alaska. One of the few capital cities in the United States without a road to the outside world.

The photographs made in Down By Law are made as I’m headed home to Alaska in the summertime. In 2016, I bought a car to bring home to my family and drove from the Bronx to Alaska through the southern states and up through British Columbia. It was a roughly 8,000-mile journey that included a grand finale getting the car and myself into town on a ferry.

I was a resident with Antenna Gallery the following year and spent three months living in New Orleans. For the past five years, I’ve photographed rodeos in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. The rodeo is a contemporary colosseum and a meeting place for folks in big cities and small towns.

The history of photography is rife with work made by the upper classes. These visitors often have little connection to people and places they image. In my work, I’m not attempting to document or sensationalize working class, and queer life. I’m authoring what I would like to exist about my communities in contemporary culture.

I continue to return to the places where I make photographs. Revisiting friends, making new friends, meeting strangers, staying for as many weeks and months as I can before I run out of money or film or both, and letting the spirit move me.

—Patrice Aphrodite Helmar

Websites:
Patrice Helmar
Marble Hill Camera Club

Image caption: Rodeo Queen, Silver City, New Mexico, 2017

Fordham Student Film Festival 2020 ?>

Fordham Student Film Festival 2020

Student films made in Visual Arts classes Film Video I, Film Video II and Film Video Post Production. Some films deal with our current situation, others take us to imaginary worlds.

“Case Study Tokyo 2020” by the Gabelli School of Business is now Available! ?>

“Case Study Tokyo 2020” by the Gabelli School of Business is now Available!

I am pleased to announce to you the completion of a project that is very dear to me. Clocking in at 438 pages with over 4500 images, Case Study Tokyo 2020 by the Gabelli School of Business is finally here!

Take one part working methodology from the influential 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, combine with the megacity of Tokyo, add Fordham University Gabelli students, stir for ten days in Japan and what do you get? You get direct acquisition of knowledge through experience with a small team, realized in a hardback research volume focusing on branding, sensory marketing, architecture, design, photography, and urban planning.

Hearty congratulations to the intrepid researchers: Madison Burkart, Branden Cheung, Kaia Corthell, Alexa Cucchiara, Shauna Fortier, Alexander Gardner, Sekai Kaminski, Fionna Lui, Declan McCabe, Sraboni Paul, Anja Pelkola, Raimundo Sanchez, Amanda Scacalossi, Samantha Schwartz, Joseph Sellmeyer, Polina Yafizova, Kevin Zhang, Yiyun Zheng.
Preview the entirety of the book HERE. As well, you can order in softcover or two different hardcover formats. Enjoy!

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: AN ARCHIVE OF COVID19 ?>

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: AN ARCHIVE OF COVID19

Call for Submissions
Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of CoVid19

The Visual Arts Program has initiated a partnership between Fordham University and Arizona State University (as well as other schools across the country) to contribute to a remarkable public archive of materials related to how the CoVid19 pandemic is affecting our lives on a local level. You can submit images, text, videos, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram or Snapchat memes, screenshots of the news, emails — anything that speaks to the moment. Here is a link to a fuller description of the project. Here is a link to the archive’s submissions page.

In the “Your name, as the contributor” field, add Fordham University after your name. This will allow us to search for your submission on the back end of the website and publish it more quickly. At some point in the not-too-distant future, there will be a Fordham Featured Collection that contains all Fordham submissions in one place.

In the “Description” field, add #FordhamUniversity.

Important: At the end of the form, check “Publish my contribution on the web.” If you don’t check this box, your submission will remain private and not appear on the website.

To see what other Fordham students have submitted so far, search “Fordham University” in the search bar at the top of the home page. Please contact Artist in Residence Casey Ruble at caseyruble@gmail.com if you have any questions or need help making your submission.

Faculty Spotlight 2019 ?>

Faculty Spotlight 2019

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Faculty Spotlight 2019


Featuring work by Abby Goldstein, Richard Kalina, Carleen Sheehan
November 25, 2019 – January 5, 2020

Reception: TBD

The Ildiko Butler Gallery
Fordham University at Lincoln Center MAP
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
The galleries are open from 9 am to 9 pm every day except on university holidays
fordhamuniversitygalleries.com


The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the 2019 installment of the annual Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. Each year three members from the Department of Theater and Visual Art are asked to share a sampling of their production with the Fordham community. This year the Painting concentration is represented by both Richard Kalina and Carleen Sheehan with Abby Goldstein representing the Graphic Design concentration. Despite the differences in their mediums and approaches, their works generate a lively dialogue.

Abby Goldstein

Deep red by the side of the road, 2019, pigment and matte dispersion on paper, 44″ x 30″

My work is shaped by my surroundings; to what I see, to what I read, what I hear, and how I feel. I begin by setting visual guidelines, e.g.: medium, color, form, and size. I then develop a visual narrative using repetitive shapes, linear marks that transverse the picture plane. Improvisation is integral to my process. Each mark informs the next defining the composition as it develops. I move between representation and abstraction; my objective is to suggest an imaginary landscape that is based on environment, observation, and memory.

Richard Kalina

Prospect 9, 2014, 16″x16″, collage, acrylic, flashe on linen

The works in this show are nine out of the twelve paintings in the Prospect series. I began work on them in the early summer of 2014. I had been looking at and thinking about Le Corbusier and visionary, Machine Age architecture. A question arose when I drew and painted these works: were they plans or elevations, diagrams (with rooms and balconies) or fully fleshed abstract images? The paintings are built from a toolkit of components: panels, bars, circles, and complex linear connectors. They are constructed from painted and torn rice paper layered and collaged on linen. There is also a governing, game-like logic — a way of putting a rational order on sets of intuitive processes. In this case, the number of the internal panels matches the number of the color bars (and no color bar repeats) and the circles always come in two of each color. This sounds rather serious, but the paintings are meant to be playful and while they are at it, musical in a baroquely contrapuntal way. Importantly for me, they opened the door to my investigations of abstraction over the last five years.

Carleen Sheehan

detail, Cove (2019), acrylic, gouache, mixed media on canvas, 48″ x 34″

A central focus of CARLEEN SHEEHAN’s work is the intensity of contemporary space, with its accelerated temporal shifts and collaged eccentricities. Recent imagery celebrates the spectacle of the natural, depicting small fragments of ephemera: the movement and density of water, shifts in light, color and atmosphere. The work relies on the inter-connectedness of visual forms and processes across categories and disciplines, and on descriptive qualities inherent to different levels of information.


For further information on the exhibition please contact: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock


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