Inna Art Space presents “Memory & Longing”, an exhibition premises by artists Carla Shapiro and Liu Beining at New York. The exhibition opens on June 29th 2020 and features more than ten photographic and mixed media works by the artists, exploring notions of human sentiment, historic remnant, memory and longing.
The nine black & white photographs by Carla Shapiro come from the same series, “Memory & Longing”, for which she scoured flea markets, antique shops and the Internet to purchase and appropriate old photographs. For the artist, these unfamiliar images communicate universal themes and collective sentiments. She uses techniques including manual manipulation, enlargement, palladium (platinum) print &c. to imbue the photographs with a certain eery indeterminacy. She fixes paper, fabric and bric-a-brac to their surfaces, resulting in a collaged effect expressive of the fragmented nature of memory. These elements excel at bringing tender emotional experience into close association with the fate of photography and its vicissitudinous ages. With the evolution of photographic technique, these photographs bore witness to the camera’s first entrance into the average home, the photographic subject’s thus shifting from what it had been when the medium was still costly (the photographers documenting the wonders of the world) to the middle classes. These scattered fragments document the good life as viewed by the individuals who pushed the shutter and the memories yet to be they shaped actively for themselves. These processed Images on the other hand render indistinct the conventional pathways of recollection to precipitate a far broader, more holistic experience of time and the timelessness.
The six mixed media paintings Liu Beining exhibits are pieces he produced between 2018 and 2019. The appearance of the works is on the whole dense and forest-like, a quality arising from the producer’s deft use of black and white and his combined practical experiences in both painting practice and dark room techniques. In this dual practice, incorporating the accrual of pigment with the screening of light and shadow, the whitest of the white areas and the blackest of the blacks is each fathomless and void like in its rich silence. Painting practice enriches this double expression, manifesting the producer’s aesthetic whilst at the same time following on from a wealth of material from both the Western and Eastern art historical canons, from antiquity through to modernism. Liu Beining’s works thus also more often than not elaborate historic-canonical connections that invite the viewer’s reflection. Although as a buzz word of academic discourse “the hand of the artist” emphasizes the artist’s creative percepts precede rational judgment, with Liu Beining it is another organ we find come to the fore: the artist’s eye, expressing how when the individual faces the artistic tradition and the contemporary landscape, possessing both instinctive and intellectual understandings, they respond more often than not on the basis of tradition. Many among this selection of works deserve attentive reflection. For instance, one based on a Northern Song landscape scroll, or another derived from a carved wooden torso of Jesus Christ from the middle ages. The work of hands too embrace the creations of others, from French revolutionary period artist Rodin to Meiji restoration era Japanese sculptor Takamura Kotaro, all of whom here manifest their originality of character, setting in motion a new spirit for the times. This selection of Liu Beining’s works not only adroitly invert certain conventions or traditions, nor does it piously advance any lost body of knowledge, rather, it allows that one note certain similar points of illumination, perhaps certain mutualities between personages and their appearances. This too provides a new means of behaving toward artistic lineage - bound up in the rupturing of old with new, the shifting of the times - the pose that is of a conversant who understands how to respond ably enough to permit dialogue continue.
（written by Feier Ying, translated by Alastair Mclnnes）
About Artists：
Carla Shapiro has been a visual artist working in photography for over 25 years. She has created bodies of work about women, aging, longing, 9/11, beauty and decay. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and she has received many awards including the Fellowship Fund from the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Golden Light Award at Maine Photographic Workshops, New Jersey Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the O’Conner Foundation. Carla holds a BFA from Syracuse University. She currently teaches at Pratt Institute and resides in upstate New York.
Liu Beining was born in 1991 in Zhejiang province, China, earned his B.F.A. in 2014 from the China Academy of Art. He moved to New York in 2014 and got his M.F.A. in 2017 from Pratt Institute. Liu Beining’s works focus on exploring the richness, impermanence and silence of visual heritages. In producing bodies of work like painting, photograph and installation, the artist portrays water, stones, dusts, heavenly bodies, skulls and landscape to explore notions of self-reflection, historic remnant, stillness and longing.
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