Artist Lori Nix, Lorie Novak and Rose DeSiano talk with critic and curator Saul Ostrow about contemporary photographers practices of “Re-Staging”. By employing handmade miniatures, reenacted theatrics and, elaborately staged room installations these three artists draw attention to the uncanny state of the real world.
Presenters: Rose DeSiano Lori Nix Lorie Novak
Moderators: Saul Ostrow
Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza
Number 1 on the official photoville map
Artist Lori Nix, Lorie Novak and Rose DeSiano talk with critic and curator Saul Ostrow about contemporary photographers practices of “Re-Staging”. By employing handmade miniatures, reenacted theatrics and, elaborately staged room installations these three artists draw attention to the uncanny state of the real world.
Since 1999, Lorie Novak has been analyzing New York Times images appearing “above the fold”, Novak has noticed history repeating itself in the form of recurring image tropes. Carefully, she physically sorts, reorganizes and re-stages these newspapers in front of the lens. By re-photographing them in their new state, she questions how our world-views are heavily mediated through a very limited range of reoccurring photographic messages.
Hyper aware of these exact same tropes, Rose photographs 20th-century war reenactments carefully considering the compositions and lens optics originally implemented during the historic battles. Back in her studio, DeSiano splices and reorganizes them into realistic singular compositions as a nod to these motifs and an examination of how we visually represent our own histories.
As a child in the rural Midwest Lori Nix was witness to countless natural disasters. Now living in New York, Nix carefully observes the ever-changing urbanscape. Pulling from both her real world observations and photographic tropes, she constructs intricate table top environments in front of the lens, which draw attention to the absurdities of life.
Rose DeSiano uses photography and sculpture as tools to examine cultural symbolism, collective consciousness, and the long, tangled history of the photograph as both a truth-teller and myth-maker.
Her work has been exhibited at solo gallery shows in New York, the Northeast, on the West Coast, and in Europe. It has been included in group exhibitions and biennials at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYC, the Allentown Art Museum, PA, and the Municipal Heritage Museum, Málaga, Spain. She has shown at international photo fairs such as Photoville NYC, FotoFocus Ohio, and the Orange Changsha Photo Festival, China.
Equally engaged in a public art sculpture practice, DeSiano’s artwork has been commissioned by the Port of San Diego, CA, by New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, appearing in Central Park, on Randall’s Island, at Rufus King Park, and also at Connecticut’s I-Park. Most recently, she unveiled a large public photo-sculpture in New York City, the winner of the 2018-19 UNIQLO Parks Expression Grant.
DeSiano earned her Master of Fine Arts from the ArtCenter, Los Angeles and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from New York University’s Tisch School of Arts, Photography and Imagining Department. She is currently a Professor of Photography at Kutztown University, PA, while living and working in Brooklyn, NY.
Lori Nix is fascinated by the intersection of the natural and manmade worlds that surrounds her. They react to and inform each other in meaningful ways that we still can’t fully comprehend. Her work examines this coexistence and its potential future in the face of a rapidly changing environment. Through the construction of dioramas Lori explore nature’s strength and perseverance in man’s absence. Painstakingly created in miniature, these constructed scenes raise awareness and inspired reflection on our everyday actions and means of survival. Lori is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Museum Schloss Moyland in Germany, ClampArt Gallery in New York, the George Eastman House and other venues. Lori is a 2014 John S. Guggenheim Fellow and a 2010 and 2004 NYFA Artist Grant recipient and a current Smack Mellon Studio Artists in residence.
Lorie Novak is an artist and Professor of Photography & Imaging at NYU Tisch School of Arts. She is the co-curator with Deborah Willis of the exhibition cit.i.zen.ship: reflections on rights,part of the For Freedoms 50 state initiative, on view at Photoville and Tisch School of the Arts. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally, and she is a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in Photography. She is also Director and Founder of Future Imagemakers, a social practice project at NYU Photography & Imaging, offering free digital photography classes to NYC area high school students. Novak’s installation Random Interference was exhibited at the first Photoville in 2012.
Saul Ostrow is an art critic, curator and self-described “opinionated bastard” originally from New York.In 2012 he founded Critical Practices Inc. a non-profit organization committed to facilitating critical discourse. His writings have been published in numerous art magazines, journals, catalogs, and books in the U.S. and Europe. He is the Art Editor at Large for BOMB Magazine and, was the editor of the book series Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture published by Routledge and the journal Lusitania. Ostrow has curated over 80 art exhibitions in the US and abroad since 1987. These include such exhibitions as Working Digitally: no Websites Please at The Center For Visual Arts and Culture, University of Connecticut and Modeling the Photographic: The Ends of Photography for the McDonough Museum of Art located in Youngstown, Ohio. As an art instructor Ostrow has taught at The School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, served as the Director of the Center of Visual Art and Culture at The University of Connecticut and as acting head of the MFA studio program at New York University. He was the chair of Visual Arts and Technologies at The Cleveland Institute of Art.
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