In 511’s study space, The Other is an exhibition of color photographs by four contemporary artists who examine the human subject – sometimes in portraiture genre; sometimes as figure in a landscape – as the other.  Tria Giovan, Cig Harvey, Mariette Pathy Allen, and Rebecca Soderholm come from differing backgrounds, landscapes, social and cultural contexts, but each uses her practice to find out about relationships between herself and another, herself and her self, and herself and the camera.

Mariette Pathy Allen is a noted photographer of (among other subjects) the transgender community.    Her work does not represent the individuals she chooses to portray as  members of a community very different from ours own or rely on what Edward Said identified as  “the underlying assumptions of identifying one as The Other,” in this case, using cultural constructions about sex and gender to make for otherness and distance.  In images such as Marilyn, at the Red Parrot Nightclub, Pathy Allen shows a beautiful, exuberant nightclub performer, preparing to go onstage, in the dressing room with her assistants, delighted by her reflection in the mirror.  The photograph has little exoticism or so-called objectivity to it; it rather presents a whole person viewed by the photographer and her camera in an intersubjective relationship. Marilyn could be any of us.

Tria Giovan’s photograph of young people ballroom dancing in an outdoor pavilion, Dancing – Isabela de Sagua, Cuba, would seem to have as its subject the near-travel-photo objectivity of the photographer intent on depicting another, “foreign” but intriguing, culture of others engaged in an activity we do as well, which is westernized ballroom dancing. But Giovan, who was raised in the Caribbean, reaches into the scene for its human and universal meaning, and we see it in the way she frames the scene, provides entry points, close and at almost eye-level, into it, and shows the people to be as individuated --- in dress, body language, and style – and not simply representative of a culture, a nation, or a people.  Giovan’s body of work, whether of suburban socialites, the beaches of Sagaponack, or the hair salons and architecture of Cuba, in the end are photographs about relationships, including the relationship of the photographer to the places and the individuals she cared to photograph.

Cig Harvey photographs the figure in the landscape (which can be an interior one) and very often the figure is herself.  For this well-known artist, the self-portrait in a particular setting, seems to have served as a personal means of understanding the world, other people, and herself as photographer and as individual woman.  Pool Bar, Miami Florida is of a woman in an long, elegant gown with her back to the camera (and so to us the viewer), positioned on the foredeck of a commercial yacht or cruise boat.  At a quick glance, it feels like a fashion shot for a magazine, but the subject’s body language does not ring as happy or fun-loving; we cannot see her face to determine further, but the back facing us and the emptiness of the deck scene (the bar is closed) make us aware of a possibility for elegance with loneliness or an adventure that turns bad, which we all know as being accessible to ourselves and our experiences, as well as being universal.  It is a remarkable photograph of an artist making herself “The Other” yet still in dialogic relationship to herself and to the individual viewer.

Rebecca Soderholm is from a small, upstate town in New York.  Though she has come “downstate” for her arts education – taking her MFA from Yale and now teaching at Drew University in New Jersey – and has traveled abroad, she remains, in her art and her heart, from small-town upstate New York. Emma and Water-Glass, New Haven, CT is a photograph of her daughter sleeping.  In a way, Soderholm is the fortunate photographer of this group, who can move easily back and forth into the lives, landscapes, and relationships of those she photographs. They are not “The Other” to her.  She is both one of them and close to them while, as an artist, able to withdraw just enough from the reality of a scene to make it accessible to anyone.

THE OTHER: Photographs 

by Tria Giovan, Cig Harvey, Mariette Pathy Allen, and 

Rebecca Soderholm

14 February - 5 April 2013

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511 Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located in the Chelsea area of New York City. In addition to our representation and exhibition of contemporary artists working in all media, we have an extensive practice, 511 Projects, that specializes in deaccession of art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on behalf of both public and private collections. 511 Projects also includes a curatorial practice, in which we organize art exhibitions and events with curators at museums and art centers in the U.S. and abroad.

For further inquiries, contact Yeorgia Anastasiou, Gallery Manager at 212.255.2885.