August 30 - October 5, 2000
Gallery talk: Tuesday, September 12, 4:30-5 pm
Reception: Tuesday, September 12,
5-7 pm

Art curator Deborah Frizzell writes, "by combining word and image, Chernow's Fictitious Icons transmute mythic film goddesses and their signature glossy snapshot stills into ordinary women, self-reliant working women in the process of seeking and forming identities, fictitious and illusionistic, they are also believable and yet elusive. And most important, they require us to finish their story."

The artist says, "My work is based on specific images related to American films from the 1930s, 1940s and early 50s. Film characters, settings, publicity releases, fan magazines, and other film related genre are departure points, reinterpreted, often with contemporary models used in place of the original film catalyst. Gender is important, but establishing a dramatic moment is paramount."

Chernow is an elected member of the National Academy. Her work has won numerous prizes and is in many public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Art Gallery.

October 12 - November 24, 2000
Reception: Thursday, October 26, 5-7 pm

Marte Previti, a chemical engineer by profession (Cooper Union, NYC), was assigned to Allied Chemical Corporation's Buenos Aires, Argentina office in the early 1930's. He began photographing almost immediately upon his arrival in South America. He entered his work in photography competitions and received several awards.  His photographs began appearing in Buenos Aires and Santiago, Chile newspapers.

Previti's South American images recorded Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia during the 1930's and 1940's. They depict cityscapes of South American capitals, as well as daily life in smaller villages. Numerous photographs portray Argentineans and other South Americans engaged in leisure time activities; other images represent the world of work at a time which could not possibly have anticipated the technological revolution of the second half of the twentieth century. Previti also photographed several of South America's  important Precolumbian sites, such as Peru's Machu Picchu.

Previti's images are characterized by the highly dramatic and pictorial effects of nature upon the handiwork of man, as well as by the photographer's ability to capture the material designs and daily patterns of life in South America which would be overlooked by a less observant image maker.

November 28, 2000 - January 18, 2001 Gallery talk: Thursday, November 30, 4:30-5:00 pm
Reception: Thursday, November 30, 5-7 pm

Peggy Cyphers, art critic of Arts magazine, has said of her work,"(her sculptures are) ethereal in their implication of a space that is inhabited by the unseen, matter which looks to have left its skeletal structure for a new form. Baroque and constructivist devices merge in Goodell's works, their efficacious natures obsessively hand-made and exacting in their symmetry and biological patterning." Kathi Norklun of the Woodstock times has said, "the pleasures of gravity sling seductively through (her work).there is a complex honesty that tugs at the viewer with a gut-felt urgency."

Of her own work the artist says, "My primary interest is in the interrelationships between sculpture and the body's vitality and vulnerability, its conditions of seeing, feeling and being. In her current work a silk sack, hand colored body red is magnified through a large lens, to gargantuan proportions; honey incased in a glass vessel crystallizes with the cold but softens with the warmth of light. In another piece, entitled, `In the Beginning,' a singular piece becomes two, revealing the center, a dark vortex. In yet another, the center expands and encapsulates a hemispherical vacuum, sheltered by a glass membrane. These sculptural situations reflect my idiosyncratic relationship to the body and spirit, and attempt to address the complexity of our lives, the vibrancy and stillness, the familiarity mixed with strangeness, the disharmony and harmony of just being alive."

Goodell has had numerous one-person exhibitions, most recently at the Willoughby Sharp Gallery in New York, and group exhibits, most recently at the Klienert\James Art Center in Woodstock, New York, and the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, N.Y. This coming February she will be included in a drawing exhibition at The Wake Forest University Art Gallery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her works are in numerous public and private collections. She has also been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including two from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Goodell currently teaches studio art at SUNY New Paltz and The School of Visual Arts, in New York City.
 
 

January 29-March 16, 2001
Reception: Wednesday, February 7, 2001, 5- 7 pm

Born in Bogota, Colombia, photojournalist and social documentary photographer Ligia Botero lives and works in New York City. Her poignant and compassionate photo essay Portraits of Chimborazo affords the viewer a penetrating vision into the lives of the Ecuadorian farmers who struggle to eke out a marginal subsistence by cultivating the land surrounding Chimborazo, a volcano which rises to 20,700 feet. The farmers cling to a life-cycle which depends almost entirely upon an ancient, communal way of life which is characterized by a symbiotic relationship between man and his environment. This life-cycle gives meaning to the very existence of the Chimborazo campesinos.

The Chimborazo farmers lead lives deeply rooted in Andean societal traditions and, as a result, they are far removed from the mainstream of Ecuadorian urban dwellers. Their traditional life-style has insulated them from the fashions and values of the twenty-first century--even those of small towns and villages in Ecuador. The young farmers, however, have tasted the pleasures of the city and, combined with the tardy arrival of modern agricultural techniques and previously unknown land-distribution practices, this traditional society is experiencing a major threat to its existence. Portraits of Chimborozo is an effort to document the fears and hopes of the Chimborazo campesinos at a precise moment in time.

Ligia Botero holds a bachelors degree in fine arts and she completed an independent studies program in photography at the International Center of Photography. Portraits of Chimborazo appeared in Americas, the journal of the Organization of American States where it was seen by the exhibition curator. Her photo essay on child labor and education in Ecuador will appear shortly.

The photographer has exhibited her work widely in the New York area and she has printed for International Center of Photography exhibitions and for Magnum.