Showing posts with label Miss Aniela. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Miss Aniela. Show all posts

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Natasha Egan on Miss Aniela

Natasha Egan, Curator at MoCP Chicago and judge of the 6th annual Art of Photography Show at the Lyceum Theatre, recently spoke with Maureen Cavanaugh on the program "These Days" on KPBS radio. They spoke about what distinguishes great photography from the countless number of images being produced on a daily basis in the current age of prevalent digital media. This discussion is also the basis of the exhibit, the Art of Photography, which is free through November 7 if you happen to be in San Diego.

During the discussion, Miss Aniela's "The Smothering" is compared to another artist's image, quite literally entitled "Chris helps his girlfriend, Mona, smoke crack in their apartment in Hackney, London" by Sebastian Meyer. Cavanaugh, referring to the Photoshop manipulations of Aniela's image in contrast to the documentary style of Meyer's image, purposes the question of, "I wonder how do you compare such two different photographs?"

Egan responds that they are not so different after all. She explains, "I actually don’t think they’re quite different because for me both of them are very psychologically challenging," and goes on to say, "They’re both in a box, both pictures are taken in these tight quarters, and yet the results are different people experimenting with... life’s challenges."

Read or listen to the conversation in it's entirety on the KPBS wesbite, and check out the many links available there for more information about the show, Egan and the 111 chosen images, narrowed from thousands of submissions from around the world.

Images: (Top) Miss Aniela The Smothering (Bottom) Sebastian Meyer Chris helps his girlfriend, Mona, smoke crack in their apartment in Hackney, London

Friday, August 27, 2010

Amanda Friedman & Miss Aniela Reviews, Season Opener

Next week marks the conclusion of our current exhibit, Amanda Friedman & Miss Aniela.

Read reviews by Michael Weinstein in Newcity, and by reporter Lauren Veira in the Chicago Tribune and come out by next Saturday to see the show.

Our next exhibit features a solo show from David Burdeny's new series Sacred & Secular and a group show in galleries 2 & 3 with prints from the Yale University School of Art 2010 MFA Photography candidates. Check out the press release on our website, and come out for the season opener on September 10. Galleries in every district will be open; this is a night to clear your schedule and make sure you get out and see some art!

You can find a complete list of galleries that will be premiering new shows for the season opener (September 10), and a schedule for the rest of the year on Chicago Gallery News' website. They also now organize the Saturday morning art tours around River North, and you can find that schedule here.

Images: (above) Amanda Friedman, Santa Monica #8
(below) David Burdeny, River Nile, Cairo, Egypt, 2009

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Coming soon: Miss Aniela

The work of one of our photographers, Miss Aniela, arrived at the gallery today. We are proud to be the American premier show for London based Miss Aniela. She will be exhibiting with California photographer Amanda Friedman. This will be Friedman's second solo show with the gallery and the first in our main space.

The exhibit opens on July 23rd and runs through September 4, 2010. An opening reception will be held on Friday, July 23 from 5-8pm. Below are a few examples of Miss Aniela's photography:

Miss Aniela, An impromptu performance, 2008


Miss Aniela, The smothering, 2008


Miss Aniela, About Time too!, 2006


Our press release on her work:

This is the first American gallery show for the artist known as Miss Aniela. Born Natalie Dybisz, the artist adopted the alter ego of Miss Aniela (taken from her middle name), as a way to distance her personal identity from the one she explores in her self-portraiture. Aniela first gained notoriety in 2007 when she started, as an untrained photographer, to take and then load her self-portraits onto the photo-sharing site Flickr. Within a year she had over one million hits and had earned a reputation as an inventive, playful and sometimes-brooding young artist. One of her works even graced the cover of the 2009 May/June issue of American Photo with a feature article on so-called “Flickr Superstars.” Aniela is also outspoken on her blog about the method of her work, which is often times manipulated in PhotoShop. Aniela is sometimes attacked for appearing “pretty” in her work (including by world renown photographer Martin Parr who posted just such a comment on her blog) and thus, as the criticism goes, not being concerned with any deep or formal conceptual considerations. On the contrary, Aniela has exhaustively and articulately outlined her point of view on her personal blog, which includes musings on feminist theory, issues of artistic craft, and thoughts on artistic intention vs. viewer bias. Aniela has also engaged audiences at numerous workshops and teaching events, including Photocamp at the National Media Museum in Bradford, England and at the Microsoft Pro Photo Summit in Seattle, with plans to expand her workshops in London later this year. This show will feature works from several bodies of work, including her Self-Gazing series of straight portraiture and her Multiplicity series, which features multiple iterations of the artists within the same image.