Elijah Wheat Showroom is proud to announce “Quiescent,” a ‘straight’ photography exhibition with Brooklyn based photographers: Jackie Furtado, Alex Yudzon and Sara Maria Salamone, all deriving compositions from a formalist standard, incorporating memory, and presence. Works will highlight a ‘decisive moment’ that upends the contemporary burst of social shutters. Public image-makers’ current obsession with documenting and curating their memories fall prey to a motionless shoot, a determined instant yet seemingly edited instant. All artists create work that has a stain of nostalgia in the present moment. Photographing now, for what will be gone later is a moment of really seeing. Opposed to photographing in lieu of experiencing, they each are in the state of looking at, present in the moment.

The stillness lingers on a chromogenic print of Furtado’s, (taken with a 4x5 camera) “Shotgun Sun I & II” at rest within a frame, proof of soft whispers with desert hues bouncing off the negative. An image of the artist’s brother, stationary, stuck in the weeds or “The Overlook” capturing a windless and instantly by an omniscient viewer. Furtado powerfully freezes her figures in a landscape. “Rose after Edith” proves that a monochromatic setting perfectly halts a horizontal figure, embedded in a site where a tranquil light stands. Furtado escapes the rapid fire shoots of her generation of cell-phone photographer, and instead promotes a latent luminosity within her compositions.

Amongst the tiered stage, back center of the gallery, lay objects replicated from an historical Russian Cookbook that Yudzon sculpturally recreates and then photographs, without manipulation, from “The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.” Enjoy “Sausages with Beer” above the display, then, peer into "The Book…” both the original and recreated. From 1939, until its collapse, it was the only cookbook available inside the USSR. He states that the photographs “…act as memory images, combining fragments of the real and the false to create a simulacrum that looks convincing on the surface only to fall apart into a jumble of inconsistencies upon closer examination.” Like the programmed teen exploration of “Finsta” and “Rinsta,” Instagram accounts, the ‘real’ or the ‘fake’ photo is anything but a sincere and accurate documentation of an instant. Yudzon’s images combine a fictional painting quality to a non-fictional, straight image caught on a 4 x 5.

Slowly and deliberately, Salamone’s series honors the daily inventory of objects and relationships most of us are indifferent to, such as errant weeds, and window tchotchkes. Amidst change, she documents a grammar of stillness and double-takes. Form and composition merge with a domestic photographic tradition. Wrapped in immobility as snapshot “Palm Tree Cars, Maspeth” becomes a remembrance to a hidden street, the image encapsulates its stasis with cleverness.

Please join the artists and us, July 7th between 7pm and 10pm for the opening of the Showroom’s first photography exhibition, “Quiescent.”

BIOS:

Jackie Furtado (b. 1990, Germany) is based in Brooklyn and the product of young military divorcees. Arriving to the states shortly after, Jackie split her time in southern California and Chicago. Furtado received her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally with: Of the Afternoon, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Coat Check Gallery, Iceberg Projects, Higher Pictures, and Elijah Wheat Showroom. Her work has been noted in: Bad at Sports, Artnet, New Yorker, Lenscut, ArtFCity, among others.

Alex Yudzon (b. 1977, Russia) graduated with a BA in painting from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London and studied extensively at Pratt Institute in New York. Over the past decade, Yudzon has exhibited works extensively nationally and internationally including: Art Basel Miami Beach, AIPAD, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Art Bastion Gallery in Miami, La Bottega Lab in Italy, Galerie Le Magasin de Jonets in France, and Kolkata International Performance Arts Festival, in Telaviv, Israel, Zengzou, China and in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has been a resident at Wassaic Project, NY, & The Headlands in CA,  He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Sara Maria Salamone (b. 1983 Albany, NY) is a photographer and curator who has earned her BA in Photography from Hampshire College and her MFA in Photography and Related Media from Parsons The New School for Design.  Recent exhibitions include, CRUSH Curatorial, Amagansett, NY, New Hampshire Institute of Art, Manchester, NH, and her most recent solo exhibition was held at GCA in Brooklyn, NY.  Salamone has curated exhibitions at Albany Center Galleries, LAUNCH F18, site95 and Doppelgänger Projects.  Salamone also comes from a diverse and experienced background, having worked at Casey Kaplan, site95, LAUNCH F18, The Armory Show, Frieze New York and is the founding Director of Mrs. in Maspeth, Queens.