Duncan Oja

Show ran from 9/1/2013 to 9/21/2013

Join us for our Opening Friday, August 30 from 6-9 pm

Duncan Oja’s work focuses on the American landscape, roads, and the culture of interstate travel. His photographs are often about people, but rarely of them. He is more interested in the structures that we create, inhabit, and leave behind. In Significance he focuses on road signs and billboards across America. Ignoring their specific messages, the signs become symbolic of the general link they create between the physical landscape and the invisible world of language and concept; metaphors for metaphor. By looking at signs from behind, that link is severed and their purpose subverted. The signs lose their intended message and become only things, signifiers without their signified, monuments of absence.

Perhaps more like the backs of signs than the fronts, the meaning of these photographs is somewhat ambiguous and left to the viewer, more aesthetic than semiotic. As the signs become only objects and find a place in the landscape, the photographs are quiet and stand on their own as images, outside of any conceptual framework.

Manal Deeb

Show ran from 9/1/2013 to 9/21/2013

 Join us for our Opening Friday, August 30 from 6-9 pm

anamneses is a recollection of images from Manal Deeb’s past; her soul had known in a previous existence in her homeland, Palestine.

When forced to be away from one’s homeland, that is so dear to the heart, but not in the view anymore, one can still imagine it with an internal language by creating mental symbols for presentation.  Marvelously, the storage system of the brain allows the idea of home to outlive the homeland itself. One will still have the capacity to remember for the simple reason that the brain continues to hold the symbols of the homeland in the matrix of one’s mental neurons. In this sense, the homeland appears to exist, even if it does not.

Cheri Reif Naselli

Show ran from 9/1/2013 to 9/21/2013

Join us for our Opening Friday, August 30 from 6-9 pm

Naselli’s installation and performance, Accumulations, investigates the propensity for accumulating more and more stuff in our lives to the point of there being entire businesses to store that for which we no longer have room.  She investigates and questions, through her own experiences, how these objects obtain such value and why we continue to accumulate more. Do these objects represent our past? Do they hold our memory materialized? By accumulating more are we suppressing our own mortality? Does acquiring and owning these objects fill a need or give us value? And when these objects become an albatross and burden, how difficult is it to let go of them?

Cheri Reif Naselli will be creating her performances at the gallery every aftertoon from 1-4pm during the exhibition.  There will be no performances on Sept. 7, 12, 13, 14, and 15.