New opening date and location for Hearth and Home!

Please join me at PushUp Gallery in Bushwick on Saturday, May 16^th from 6-9pm.

If you’re in New York and can make it out, please RSVP on Partiful.

PushUp Gallery is located at 94 Bogart Street on the ground level, just a block from the Morgan Avenue L train station. I hope to see you there, and to talk about my work with you.

After the opening, the show will continue at Third Story Gallery. The exhibition will run from May 17^th to May 31^st at Third Story Gallery, 349 Suydam Street, Floor 3R which is nearby in Bushwick.

If you’ve talked to me any time in the last few months, you’ve probably heard how excited I am to be showing my work here in Bushwick, especially in such a long-running show. The pieces I’ll be showing are a more intimate side of my work than I usually show, outside my usual subject matter (and for that matter, aspect ratio.) Portraiture is an important, if infrequent, part of my body of work. I am a trans artist, and in making my art I want to show my life and the lives of those I love. They are an inseparable part of my art, the world around me, and the way I see.

As Rosemary, Eevee, and I chatted during the moments when I took the photos in this exhibition, I found courage to keep pursuing this art. The quiet moments shown in these photographs inspired me to submit my work to shows, to expand my focus, and to consider myself a serious artist. I’m very fortunate to have been invited into the lives of these wonderful people.

Underfoot

On Saturday I attended the opening night for a different show, Underfoot, at PushUp Gallery to see work by Sam Leone.

I met Sam getting off the L train at Union Square on Thursday, and begged the wonderful girls at Full Spectrum to rush my film so I could post it before his show. It’s wonderful to find someone so transfixed by the same subject matter and to have a chance to talk about our work. The image of Sam painting diligently inside the station is just a perfect bit of the uncanny; an artist with an easel in the decaying palace, a modern ruin stripped of decoration for functionality. It serves as a representation of myself and my adoring, reverent eye to the subway, and you, the viewer, studying these photographs of the same environment. Please check out Sam’s work.

PushUp is a wonderful and intimate space, and I can’t wait to be there myself next weekend. 

Ongoing Work

My work around New York continues. I’ve made some incredible progress already this last week, crossing off stations and shots I’ve been planning for months, slowly working my way uptown, station by station.

While the completion rate as compared to new additions in my task manager is definitely cause for concern, I’m having a wonderful time. It’s always interesting to me how being in a place intending to complete (or merely advance) a project invariably demonstrates new ways to improve my work, suggests more things to do, or presents a moment of opportunity I could never have planned for with a photograph better than I could have planned for in hours of Apple Maps scouting. Understanding a place through time spent inside it lures me deeper into a fractal. Somehow I convince myself that this time, surely this time, I’ll be done, just one more tweak, and I can move on to something else.

Definitely this week I’ll finish my shotlist for lower Manhattan, or maybe I should take just a few more shots of stalactites climbing down the Gustavino tile in Chambers St. Some days, it feels like I can’t even make it past Myrtle Av without feeling like I could spend a whole week just observing what goes on at that platform.

Wish me luck. Please come to my show.

XOXO, ClaireViolet