David Saxe

Two Stars. St. Albans, VT

2013

This item is available unframed or framed, They are in edition of 20 in he 16" x 20" paper size. Amodaj created the Hoop and Ball series of photographs in June 2010 with dancer and author Shawnrey Notto. The photographs were based on an earlier series of drawings Nenad made of Notto wearing parts of the deconstructed wedding dress during his figure drawing study in Michael Markowitz’s 23rd Street studio in San Francisco. The hoop skirt serves as an augmentation device, a skeletal extension meant to alter the visual perception of the human form. To realize the full associative power of the hoop, Amodaj created a counter-shape to the hoop, a white sphere (the Ball) made from plaster strips, to match the cloth texture and placed it in a dynamic relationship with his model. Notto improvised the poses from Nenad’s drawings in constant slow motion. The whole project was done in two 3-hour sessions with no rehearsals and no replays. The minimalistic setting, uniform lighting, and central vantage point shift perception from a trivial reality to a metaphysical one. The intent was to induce the spectator to spontaneously alternate between the three aspects: the human form, the symbolic function of the skirt, and the geometry of the cone and sphere. The spontaneity of dynamic poses and the imperfections of a handheld camera balance this sparse imagery. The exhibition presents a selection of 15 photographs from a project collection of over a hundred. Most of the series are gelatin-silver prints from a 35 mm film, with a few exceptions for large-scale digital color prints. Amodaj was influenced by the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies of industrial buildings and František Drtikol’s nudes. In the spirit of Becher’s “typologies,” Amodaj’s Hoop and Ball series of photographs explores endless mutations of the hoop skirt architecture, a clothing item with a curios geometric form that can be classified as a “flexible cone.” It is a form that appears both in nature and in artifice: flowers, bells, horns, nuclear power plants...

David Saxe - “Photography has always been the simple act of looking and being inspired to strip the unnecessary elements from the scene and frame the image down in a way to discover what is not apparent on the surface. My photographs are as much about me as what I am seeing: In Southern California, 2010 is a perfect example of this process of seeing. When I first noticed this scene, it was a simple mural of a whale on a wall. After looking at it for a while I realized that by eliminating the sky and foreground from the image the whale now had an undulating rhythm and movement. In another image Restaurant Hostess, Palm Beach, FL 2012, I would go to this restaurant every week and sit in the bar behind the reception area. One day, I turned around and saw the back of a woman. Through this process of deductive framing, the image became one of dark shadows rhythmically trickling down her back interwoven with the tattoo of the lizard. David Saxe was born in Montreal, Québec, Canada in 1943 and studied fine art at l’ecole des Beaux Arts in Montreal. He started taking pictures in 1970, after being influenced by the work of Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier Bresson. About 10 years ago, he decided to take a workshop with Constantine Manos...

An original signed archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Baryta 315 gsm paper by Scottish artist Ian Sanderson (1951- 2020) titled ‘ Franci and Rachael ‘ who was capture...

Tennis Guests 1953 Slim Aarons Estate Edition Michael Canfield and Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy and then Onassis) at Newport Casino for Tennis Week, 1953. Original Publicati...