Summer Gallery Shows in New York with New Work by Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, Sky Hopinka, and Cozette Russell
Image: Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, Shaft, 2021, Gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 inches
Patrice Aphrodite Helmar recently opened their solo show Polaris at PARTICIPANT INC, which runs through August 18. “’These photographs explore the dramatic potential and complexity of returning home: characters, archetypes, and landscapes of 50 miles on a road to nowhere. As a child in a working-class family growing up on a twenty-six-foot hand troller, my parents taught me where the north star was in the night sky. This constellation alluded to in literature, myth, and song has guided seafaring people for time immemorial. These photographs were made in my hometown of Juneau, Alaska. One of the few capital cities in the United States without a road to the outside world.’ Helmar’s photography and installation-based work more generally captures the quotidian in dreamlike landscapes and utopic communal spaces such as bars, alluding to the failed American dream and all of the fantasy associated with its “dark mythology and the timeless story of returning home.” Helmar references their own background growing up in Juneau, presenting the characters and archetypes of small-town America — queer, working class, ordinary and unusual — to address the sensationalizing of working-class America, giving their portraits an authorial framing that counters often distancing portrayals.”
Sky Hopinka’s solo show, Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns, at Broadway Gallery runs through August 2 with a reading on July 18 at 6 pm, when Hopinka will read from Denizens of Hell, his new chapbook published by Inpatient Press. “Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns demonstrates Hopinka’s sophisticated keen sense of scale and breadth; not just formally, but in his historical consideration. The photographs and two-channel film signal a return as well, resituating and revising the artist’s ongoing pursuit of the ethnopoetic that’s long been present. Poetically, Denizens of Hell offers a narrative linchpin across the exhibition, weaving together a subterranean sleepwalk through ways of survival and the resistance to the inculcation of dogmatic culture and beliefs.” – Julie Niemi
Cozette Russell has work in the group show, “Write me letters” you write to me at A.I.R. Gallery, up through July 28. “Letters occupy an anticipatory temporality. The letter writer extrapolates the future of their recipient, looking ahead from a present that is already past. The letter’s uncanny entwinement of temporal frames is insistent in Cozette Russell’s Untitled (summer studio/winter studio), a photographic installation in which two stacks of two bricks support a collaged photo print. Visible in the print is an identical doubled image of a woman, blurred by motion, who appears to fall, twice, and each time to catch herself on hands and knees. Drawing on the essential latency of photography—which parallels that of the epistolary form—Russell’s work is like a hall of mirrors that divides and deepens time, reaching simultaneously into a past twice removed through layers of film and into a possibility proposed by the bricks and their gravity.” – Nicole Kaack