Untitled, from the series Party Alone, 2010 by Laurie Kang

Hello, photographers! It's your last week to view work by the five First Edition 2011 Hot Shots: Laura Plageman, Kevin Kunishi, Laurie Kang, Robert Grimm and Uygur Yilmaz. The Hey, Hot Shot! First Edition 2011 Showcase at Jen Bekman Gallery closes this Sunday, January 22nd.

Recently mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, the Showcase features Robert Grimm's images of male strippers taken from live video streams; Laurie Kang's serene still lifes and sculptural photographs; Uygur Yilmaz's photographs of an abandoned beach setting along the Turkish coastline during off-season; Kevin Kunishi's intimate look at pro- and anti-Sandinista guerrillas in war-torn Nicaragua, and the environments and objects that surround them; and Laura Plageman's luscious, but torn, bent and crumpled landscapes.

Get to know the artists: Check out their recent interviews on the blog.

Kurt Tong Goes Solo at Jen Bekman Gallery

On Friday, January 27th, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., there will be an opening reception at the gallery for 2009 Ultra Kurt Tong's debut solo show, In Case it Rains in Heaven. Featuring images of traditional Chinese paper offerings to honor the dead, the work will be on view January 28th through March 4th, 2012.

As Kurt Tong says in his artist statement for the show, "in Chinese culture many believe that the dead are unable to carry their possessions with them. It is therefore up to their ancestors and loved ones to properly equip them for the afterlife. The practice has evolved from simple 'spirit money' offerings to modern-day items ranging from bizarre to pragmatic, and each painstakingly made of paper." Tong photographed numerous offerings for the series, and then burnt them to honor his ancestors.

Hey, Hot Shot! First Edition 2012

The first round of competition for 2012 will be kicking off very, very soon. Keep an eye on your inbox and start editing your portfolios.

Response to Print of Kudzu, Texas, 2010 by Laura Plageman

Our final Q&A with the First Edition 2011 Hot Shots is with Laura Plageman. The images she submitted from her Response series were not only visually arresting, they also warranted closer examination. To create the striking landscapes, which featured buckling, torn and surreal land and skies, the photographer responded to her original prints by manipulating and interacting with them—tearing at and crumpling the paper, and experimenting with lighting—then re-photographing them with a large-format camera. First selected to be a Contender, Laura's images landed her a Hot Shot win, which led to being in the Hot Shot group showcase currently on view at Jen Bekman Gallery through January 22nd. Laura is now also a 20x200 artist.

You can own your own print of Response to Print of Kudzu, Texas (above) by clicking here.

Living in: Oakland, CA (SF Bay Area)

Your formal and/or informal education and training in photography:
MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA; BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT

How you pay the bills:
Photography, teaching photography

Best advice you ever received as a photographer:
Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes. (John Cage: Some Rules for Students and Teachers, Rule #8)

Three artists who inspire you:
James Welling
Gerhard Richter
Lee Friedlander

Reading now:
Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, by Errol Morris

Tell us a little about the inspiration/impetus behind the series you submitted, and why you felt it was important to share this work:
The Response series images are more true for me than some of their first generation counterparts. What I remember of a place I photograph is what draws me to it—the feeling of plants interacting or taking over a space, for example. So altering the image and rephotographing it helps me to get closer to its true nature, as I experience it.

Next project(s): I'm developing a few new projects, but I'm still focused on the Response series.

Candy #2, 2010 by Robert Grimm

Tonight is the night! The Hey, Hot Shot! First Edition 2011 Showcase opens tonight, Friday, January 6th, at Jen Bekman Gallery, located at 6 Spring St, in New York City. The opening reception is from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Come join us in celebrating the work of these very talented photographers—meet and mingle with some of the First Edition 2011 Hot Shots: Robert Grimm, Kevin Kunishi, Uygur Yilmaz, Laurie Kang and Laura Plageman. See you there! If you can't make it to the opening, the show will be on view January 7th through January 22nd.

Hot Shot Laurie Kang is an artist who combines photography, collage, sculpture and installation to create her work, often creating new abstractions or "surrealities." Of her winning submission, Party Alone, Laurie says:

This series is the result of creating images that consist of both 2D and 3D collages, sculptures and installations. It's an exploration of abstraction, and a conceptual exploration of the medium of photography; the images express a 3-dimensionality but are rendered 2-dimensional through the final product of a flat print.

For the Hey, Hot Shot! First Edition 2011 Showcase, which is on view through January 22nd at Jen Bekman Gallery, the artist will present her work in its original 3D form.

And check out this great video interview of the artist explaining her work and her competitive nature.

Untitled, from the series Party Alone, 2010 by Laurie Kang

Living in: Toronto, Ontario

Your formal and/or informal education and training in photography: BFA in photography from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec

How you pay the bills: I work part time at The Power Plant. It's a contemporary art gallery in Toronto with great programming. I also do some freelance work, whether it's photography, collage or album artwork and design for bands. Sometimes I'll sell work. It's always changing; the unreliability of it all keeps me on my toes.

Best advice you ever received as a photographer: Work that is made with passion will find its place.

Three artists who inspire you:
General Idea
Thomas Demand
Paul Butler

Photograph (or other work of art) that you can't get out of your head, ever: Mike Nelson's I, Impostor

Reading now: I just finished Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace last night. I'm now onto the F.R. David series, The Artist's Joke, and Murakami's 1Q84.

Top three photo-related websites/blogs:
I Heart Photograph
JSBJ
Blind Mist

Top non-photo website/blog:
Currently into Super/Collider

Tell us a little about the inspiration/impetus behind the series you submitted, and why you felt it was important to share this work: Party Alone is a project where I made installations and sculptures within my living space. I used objects that I'd collected, then abstracted and re-contextualized them. They're meant to be ironic and humorous, with darker undertones of isolation and the strange. The work also addresses photography's inherent tensions concerning dimensionality. The photograph turns these 3-dimensional situations into 2-dimensional prints. For the Jen Bekman show, the images will be re-established as 3-dimensional objects through their final renderings.

Next project(s): I'm working with pairing landscape (the organic) with non-organic textures and surfaces. It centers around the idea of psychogeography and creating a psychic experience through the landscape. I'm reconfiguring images of abstract textures and idyllic landscapes that I shot, combining them to make collages, sculptures and photographs of sculptures. Again, underlying this work is playing with the dialogue concerning photography's nature.

Our third Hot Shot Q&A is with Robert Grimm, whose webcam-based portraits of online, amateur male strippers capture the moments of "focus, melancholy and exhaustion, when the performance falls apart and sex objects become human again." (His series of female online strippers, Bust, can be viewed here.) Though the strippers he photographed—believed to be located in Latin America or Eastern Europe—were advertised as amateurs, Grimm points out in his artist statement that "repeated visits to the websites show the same strippers appearing in different rooms and different strippers appearing in the same rooms. This suggests a degree of organization inconsistent with strippers being amateurs." You can view more work from this series at the Hey, Hot Shot! First Edition 2011 Showcase at Jen Bekman Gallery, on view from January 7th through January 22nd.

Candy #3, 2010 by Robert Grimm

Living in: Brooklyn, NY

Your formal and/or informal education and training in photography: I am largely self-taught as a photographer. I started exploring photography in high school and have, with some interruptions, continued since then, working with 35mm, medium format and digital cameras.

How you pay the bills: As a professor of computer science.

Best advice you ever received as a photographer: To tell a compelling story.

Three artists who inspire you:
Olafur Eliasson
Pierre et Gilles
Wolfgang Tillmans

Photograph (or other work of art) that you can't get out of your head, ever:

Untitled (Falling Buffalo), by David Wojnarowicz

Reading now:
Haruki Murakami's 1Q84

Tell us a little about the inspiration/impetus behind the series you submitted, and why you felt it was important to share this work: In observing strippers on the internet, I was fascinated by the contrast between the carefully staged backgrounds and the moments of focus, melancholy and exhaustion, when the performance falls apart and sex objects become human again. Combined with the ever present theme of watching, they make for poignant photographs.

Next project(s): I am working on a series called Homeward, featuring portraits of my ancestors. They include literal ancestors, women in my family, and figurative ancestors, gay artists, all of whom fundamentally changed how I think, listen and see.

Our second installment of Q&As with First Edition 2011 Hot Shots is with Uygur Yilmaz, who first caught our attention in 2010 with his photographs of a beach at night. His winning submission for the First Edition 2011 round again found the photographer (and poet) oceanside, capturing a desolate beach during off season.

Untitled, from the series Missing Parts, 2008 by Uygur Yilmaz

Untitled, from the series Missing Parts, 2008 by Uygur Yilmaz

Living in: Istanbul

Your formal and/or informal education and training in photography: Took just a few classes here and there, but I can say I'm not educated [in photography]. I was experimenting to see what can be done with minimum knowledge. I still don't know much technically. But I was very lucky to meet Leyla Gediz. I learned a lot from discussing my work with a painter like her.

Best advice you ever received as a photographer: Don't try to be a photographer. Don't produce much. Learn how to give up and extract. Learn how to bring together and make sense.

Three artists who inspire you: I'm not really inspired by other artists, at least not nowadays... I dont know in general where the inspiration comes from. Sometimes I think [it's fortunate] we cannot find its source. If we could, I'm afraid, it would already be patented and marketed by Unilever or Microsoft.

But talking about influences, Richard Wentworth's and David Hockney's approaches to photography both had a very refreshing effect on me. William Eggleston used to be like a god to me. I also love him for saying in an interview that he doesn't look at other people's work.

Apart from that, talking about personal likes, I was very happily surprised when I came upon the works of Luigi Ghirri. The same goes for Götz Diergarten. Also, I love the earlier work of David Armstrong. And there are so many painters and poets, besides photographers, I couldn't mention all of them here.

Tell us a little about the inspiration/impetus behind the series you submitted, and why you felt it was important to share this work: Well, basically, I thought you might like them and share with more people. I would be happy if they added something to your life, your experience.

Next project(s): I'm working on my new poems. It's a new body of work and I think it will take some more time, reduction and editing. In the coming months I'm also planing to produce some objects that've been on my mind for a while—a few sculptural works exploring matters of memory and transition.

Reading now: Beni Deliler Anlar, by Sevim Burak

On Friday, January 6th, the five winning Hot Shots from the First Edition 2011 round of the competition kicked off a group showcase, exhibiting works from the series they each submitted, at Jen Bekman Gallery. Ahead of the opening reception, we introduced each Hot Shot via an interview. Get to know our Hot Shots: their backgrounds, inspirations and future endeavors. The first is Kevin Kunishi, who shot portraits of Sandinistas and their opposing Contra veterans, and photographed artifacts, in war-torn Nicaragua over the course of two years.

Of the war, Kunishi wrote:

In 1979, after over a decade of struggle, the socialist Sandinista movement in Nicaragua overthrew the dictator, Anastasio Somoza. The Sandinistas quickly began the work of applying their social and ideological values in the hopes of creating a better Nicaragua. Unfortunately, the United States government had other plans. In the Cold War environment of the 1980s, the prospect of a socialist/communist government gaining a foothold in Central America was deemed unacceptable. The CIA began financing, arming and training a clandestine rebel insurgency to destabilize the government. These anti-Sandinista guerrillas became known as Contras. Between 1980 and 1990, Nicaragua became the battleground of conflicting political ideologies; the promise of a bright future was lost as the nation descended into civil war. Although these two sides held polarized political philosophies, their survivors are united by the burden of a war-torn history. As political ideology evolves, dilutes or disappears, the horrors of war endure.

Nelita, 2010 by Kevin Kunishi

From: Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Currently surrounded by eucalyptus and redwood trees in the hills of Oakland, California.

Formal and/or informal education and training in photography: I received my BA in history from the University of California at Santa Barbara and my MFA in photography from the Academy of Art University. Outside of my formal education, I have been extremely lucky to have been mentored by various photographers over the years, who have shared their time and knowledge with me.

How you pay the bills: I assist various editorial, commercial and corporate photographers to eat, pay rent and fund my own projects.

Best advice you ever received as a photographer: "What must you photograph now?" —Robert Adams

"Each photographer's struggle is accompanied by a question: Are the new pictures I have made true? If that cannot be answered affirmatively, there is no peace to be found in the profession." —Robert Adams

Three (or four) artists who inspire you:
Terrence Malick
Robert Adams
Jim Goldberg
Timothy O'Sullivan

Photograph (or other work of art) that you can't get out of your head:

A Room Maid in the Urashima Hotel, Katsuura, Kii, Japan, by Leo Rubinfien

Reading now:
Hawaii Pono, by Lewis Fuchs
Of Walking in Ice, by Werner Herzog
Hawaiian Legends of Volcanoes, by William D. Westervelt

Top Three photo-related websites/blogs:
American Suburb X
Fraction
Daylight

Top non-photo website/blog:
TED
The Black Harbor

Quilali, 2010 by Kevin Kunishi

Tell us a little about the inspiration/impetus behind the series you submitted, and why you felt it was important to share this work: Most of my work comes from my own deep rooted questions. I usually start with a basic premise or subject. From there the work expands or contracts. In the broadest sense, I am drawn to the aftermath of events and the variations within human nature.

This body of work was created between 2009 and 2011, over the course of several extended periods in the highlands of northern Nicaragua. I have always been interested in the events surrounding the Nicaraguan civil war that occurred in the 1980s. I wanted to move beyond the broad recital of policy and ideology within the textbooks I read during my undergraduate studies and explore the personal experiences of individuals directly affected by those policies.

For me, this work is many things: It is a journal of sorts, a dialogue and exploration, but most importantly, it is evidence. I hope these images function as a catalyst for engagement and discussion.

Next project(s): I'm working on three projects right now. All are rooted in aftermath and identity. Currently my work in Hawaii, entitled Okaga Sama De, occupies my mind the most. I am in the process of ingesting large amounts of information to consider as I continue to move forward.

I am also in the process of editing and sequencing my work in Nicaragua for publication. It will be released in the fall of 2012 by Daylight Publishing.

Wailea Road, from the series Okaga Sama De, by Kevin Kunishi

Procession of the King, from the series Okaga Sama De, by Kevin Kunishi

Response to Print of Green Hill, Washington, 2010 by Laura Plageman

Hi, photographers. We've been (quietly) working towards a big month, and now we're kicking off the new year with big Hey, Hot Shot! news. The Hey, Hot Shot! First Edition 2011 Showcase opens THIS Friday, January 6th, with a reception from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Come join us in celebrating the work of these very talented photographers—meet and mingle with some of the First Edition 2011 Hot Shots: Robert Grimm, Kevin Kunishi, Uygur Yilmaz, Laurie Kang and Laura Plageman.

The Hey, Hot Shot! First Edition 2011 Showcase presents a diverse selection of contemporary photography from around the globe. Robert Grimm gleans images of male strippers from live video streams, exposing a complex portrait of the young men who strip online and the yearnings of those who pay to watch them. Laurie Kang's serene still lifes and sculptural photographs reveal a world of loneliness and boredom where we least expect it. Uygur Yilmaz finds rhymes and cadence among the abandoned beach setting of a Turkish coastline during off-season. Traveling through war-torn Nicaragua, Kevin Kunishi takes an intimate look at pro- and anti-Sandinista guerrillas and the environments and objects that surround them. Laura Plageman pushes photography to its limits as she tears, bends and crumples up her luscious, green landscapes.

Our distinguished panel of arts professionals, together with the Jen Bekman Projects curatorial team, chose these five artists for their unique contributions to contemporary photography. Since its inception in 2005, Hey, Hot Shot! has awarded more than one hundred and forty photographers—including 2010 Whitney Biennial artists Nina Berman and Curtis Mann—with unparalleled opportunities for support and exposure.

Robert, Kevin, Uygur, Laurie and Laura are now under consideration for our Grand Prize—a $10,000 honorarium, solo exhibition and representation from Jen Bekman Gallery. The grand prize-winning Ultra will be announced in the coming weeks. The chosen photographer will join ranks with other JBG-represented artists, including 2010 Ultra Chikara Umihara and 2009 Ultras Mike Sinclair and Kurt Tong. We're looking forward to many collaborations with all of these photographers at the gallery and on 20x200.

The exhibition will be on view January 7th through January 22nd, 2012.
The opening reception will be Friday, January 6th, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Jen Bekman Gallery
6 Spring Street
(between Elizabeth + Bowery)
New York, NY 10012
e: info@jenbekman.com | w: www.jenbekman.com | p: +1.212.219.0166

The gallery is open Wednesday – Sunday from noon – 6:00 p.m., or by private appointment.

More Hey, Hot Shot! news to be announced. Stay tuned!

+ In just a matter of weeks, you'll find out who the Second Edition 2011 Hot Shots are, and the Second Edition 2011 showcase will be announced.

+ Hey, Hot Shot! 2012 will be opening its first round of competition soon!

+ Keep an eye out for more limited-edition photographs on 20x200 by Hey, Hot Shot! photographers.

The time's finally come! Join us in heartily congratulating the First Edition 2011 Hot Shots:

Robert Grimm
Laurie Kang
Kevin Kunishi
Laura Plageman
Uygur Yilmaz

The winning photographers each win a $500 honorarium, participation in the Hey, Hot Shot! group show at Jen Bekman Gallery (in January 2012) and are now in the running to win the Grand Prize:

+ A $10,000 honorarium
+ A solo show at Jen Bekman Gallery
+ Two years of gallery representation from Jen Bekman Gallery

We had an amazing array of incredible submissions this round, and narrowing the list down was quite the task. Thankfully, our panel of exceptionally talented professionals, together with our curatorial team, dedicated their time, energy and critical eye in selecting our first Hot Shots of 2011.

We'd like to also congratulate all of the Contenders and Honorable Mentions for having submitted exceptional work and raising the bar, making it challenging (but oh, so worth it) to select this first round of Hot Shots.

The Honorable Mentions are:

Luis Fabini
Baldomero Fernandez
Meggan Gould
Matt Gunther
Yuji Hamada
Yojiro Imasaka
Alex Kisilevich
Rubi Lebovitch
Martina Lindqvist
Lydia Anne McCarthy
Michelle Marie Murphy
Walker Pickering
Georgina Reskala
Ralph Schulz
Julia Staples
David Welch
Philip Welding

If you want your chance at the support, exposure and cash prizes, stay tuned: The Second Edition 2011 round of competition will be opening very soon.

Untitled, from the series Counter-Act, 2011 by Uygur Yilmaz

Untitled, from the series Counter-Act, 2011 by Uygur Yilmaz

Untitled, from the series Missing Parts, 2008 by Uygur Yilmaz

Untitled, from the series Missing Parts, 2008 by Uygur Yilmaz

Untitled, from the series Missing Parts, 2007 by Uygur Yilmaz

Uygur Yilmaz

Website: http://www.uyguryilmaz.com

Bio:
Uygur Yılmaz (Mersin, 1975) is a self-taught photography artist, living and working in Istanbul. Most of his work focuses on the tension between abstract and reality, the banal and poetic, applying a detached and reductive photographic language. He also published two poetry books of short and experimental pieces. He is represented by Galeri NON, Istanbul.

Artist Statements:
Counter-Act: It's a true story and a false promise. It's a series of questions designed for the camera. It's an ongoing work. It's a childish reaction. It's counter-painting. It's executed on my kitchen counter.

Missing Parts is a photographic series limited to the Susanoglu Beach and its off seasons, in terms of space and time. The project has been realized through returning to Susanoglu many times, working repeatedly on the subject, and has intensified, gaining a sharper focus since 2004. Social and political issues inevitably come into frame of this series immediately, as the area has been rapidly urbanized since the '80s. Limiting the study to the off season might be an attempt to question the flipside of leisure culture—investigating the pain to understand the pleasure better. The tourism boom, and its utterly devastating effects, are still at work today. But the transformation and its social or cultural implications are not the core issues of this project. Far from claiming to be an objective photographic documentary, the artist defines Missing Parts as a series about documenting the euphoria of a raised awareness and is a personal project. Commonplace things become the visual material of an extraordinary experience; the banal reveals its poetic aspect. Worn out things become brand new questions and are rehandled, emphasizing their simplicity and formal elements, foregrounding their subtle palettes with painterly concerns. The fact that the location has a significant importance in the artist's memories since the early days of his childhood also deepens the emphasis on the personal nature of the project.

Response to Print of Egret Rookery, Louisiana, 2010 by Laura Plageman

Response to Print of Kudzu, Texas, 2010 by Laura Plageman

Response to Print of Vulture Roost, Texas, 2010 by Laura Plageman

Response to Print of Green Hill, Washington, 2010 by Laura Plageman

Response to Print of Through the Trees, Oakland, 2011 by Laura Plageman

Laura Plageman

Website: http://www.photolp.com

Bio:
Laura Plageman is an artist and educator who lives and works in Oakland, CA. Her images explore the relationships between the process of image making, photographic truth and distortion, and the representation of landscape. She is interested in making pictures that examine the natural world as a scene of mystery, beauty and constant change—transformed both by human presence and by its own design. Plageman has exhibited her work in San Francisco, New York, Portland and Galway, Ireland. She earned a BA at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) and an MFA from the California College of the Arts (San Francisco, CA).

Artist Statement:
Response series: In this series I am responding to photographs both as representations and tangible objects. Through physically altering enlarged prints and then re-photographing the results, I create works that oscillate between image and object, photography and sculpture, landscape and still life. While they may appear illusory, the resulting pictures are documents of actual events and are thus as authentic as the original representational images contained within. My process unfolds through observation and experimentation--I let the image and its materiality dictate its direction. Playing with paper and with light in unplanned and organic ways, I look for new ways to perceive the space, form and context of my subjects. In some works, large pieces of the original image are torn out, while in others, smaller parts are more subtly altered. I use a large-format view camera throughout my process so I can control perspective and record as much detail as possible. Whether focused on a ripped paper edge or a nesting bird, I hope to reach a place where picture elements interact and merge in unpredictable and expressive ways.

Nelita, 2010 by Kevin Kunishi

Quilali, 2010 by Kevin Kunishi

Museo de los martyres, 2010 by Kevin Kunishi

Mario's grenade, 2010 by Kevin Kunishi

Mario Zelaya, 2010 by Kevin Kunishi

Kevin Kunishi

Website: http://www.kevinkunishi.com

Bio:
Kevin Kunishi has an MFA in photography from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2004, where he continues work on numerous projects, both at home and around the globe. His work has been recognized by American Photo, PDN, CMYK Magazine, Photographer's Forum, the New York Photo Festival, Blue Earth Alliance, Review Santa Fe and Prix de la Photographie, Paris (PX3).

Artist Statement:
After receiving my undergraduate degree with an emphasis on U.S. foreign policy in Central America, I wanted to move beyond the broad recital of policy and ideology within textbooks and explore the personal experiences of individuals directly affected by those policies. This body of work was created between the years 2009 and 2011, during a prolonged stay in the highlands of Northern Nicaragua. These photographs are from a larger series consisting of portraits of Sandinistas and their opposing Contra veterans, as well as artifacts and landscapes significant to the civil war that took place in Nicaragua during the 1980s. In 1979, after over a decade of struggle, the socialist Sandinista movement in Nicaragua overthrew the dictator, Anastasio Somoza. The Sandinistas quickly began the work of applying their social and ideological values in the hopes of creating a better Nicaragua. Unfortunately, the United States government had other plans. In the cold war environment of the 1980s, the prospect of a socialist/communist government gaining a foothold in Central America was deemed unacceptable. The CIA began financing, arming and training a clandestine rebel insurgency to destabilize the government. These anti-Sandinista guerrillas became known as Contras. Between 1980 and 1990, Nicaragua became the battleground of conflicting political ideologies; the promise of a bright future was lost as the nation descended into civil war. Although these two sides held polarized political philosophies, their survivors are united by the burden of a war-torn history. As political ideology evolves, dilutes or disappears, the horrors of war endure.

Untitled, from the series Party Alone, 2010 by Laurie Kang

Untitled, from the series Party Alone, 2010 by Laurie Kang

Untitled, from the series Party Alone, 2010 by Laurie Kang

Untitled, from the series Party Alone, 2010 by Laurie Kang

Untitled, from the series Party Alone, 2010 by Laurie Kang

Laurie Kang

Website: http://www.lauriekang.com

Bio:
Laurie Kang is a Toronto-based artist working in film photography, collage and sculpture. She received her BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. Examining the medium of photography, she explores abstraction, drawing from both fictions and realities to create ambiguous, new sur-realities. Her strong imagination and keen sense of color and shape entices viewers to re-examine their relationships to, and within, familiar spaces. Kang's artwork has been exhibited widely at galleries within Canada, including Tinku Gallery (Toronto, ON); Roberts Street Social Centre (Halifax, NS); Lowercase Gallery (Vancouver, BC); Art Mur (Montreal); and most recently at Gallery 44 (Toronto, ON). Her work has been published in print in Canada, the U.S. and U.K. Still early in her career, Kang has already worked with such prominent artists as German artist Candice Breitz. Kang was a participant in Breitz' Factum Kang/Same Same art project at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto (2009). She was also commissioned by Breitz to create a collaborative video work entitled Face to Face (2009) with artist Hanna Hur. In 2011, she was selected by the Magenta Foundation as an emerging Canadian photographer for their annual Flash Forward competition. She is the recipient of 2nd Prize from the prestigious John B. Aird Gallery's annual juried photo exhibition, Photo-Op (2011). Most recently, she received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council to extend her practice and career to Berlin.

Artist Statement:
My practice is based in film photography, collage, sculpture and installation. I employ the photographic image's ability to capture an image and present it as an apparently true document in time and history. Using both created and found images and objects, I merge fact with fiction, distorting and challenging perceptions of reality, dimension and space. Combining 2D with 3D--photography, collage, sculpture and installation, I explore a staged abstraction using the camera, paper and found and created objects to make images that focus on symbolism, composition, color and shape. Following elementary rules of design, more complex questions of space and reality are formed in contrast. The resulting images evoke tensions between fact and fiction, ultimately blurring their distinctions as they become sur-realities with ambiguous open narratives. This series, Party Alone, is the result of creating images that consist of both 2D and 3D collages, sculptures and installations. It's an exploration of abstraction, and a conceptual exploration of the medium of photography; the images express a 3-dimensionality but are rendered 2-dimensional through the final product of a flat print. Undertones of the fantastical and strange in the banal, as well as boredom, loneliness and depression, are also expressed.

Candy #3, 2010 by Robert Grimm

Candy #14, 2010 by Robert Grimm

Candy #10, 2010 by Robert Grimm

Candy #2, 2010 by Robert Grimm

Candy #21, 2010 by Robert Grimm

Robert Grimm

Website: http://www.apparebit.com

Bio:
Robert Grimm was born in Germany in 1968 and moved to the United States in 1991. He lives and works in New York City. When not creating art, he conducts research in computer science.

Artist Statement:
The photographs in the series Candy are taken off a computer's screen showing video streams with male strippers. The video streams are transmitted live, in real time across the internet, and are accessible through several websites, without registration, for free. Payment is only necessary for private one-on-one time with a stripper. In addition to the video streams, the websites support mutual text messaging between strippers and viewers. Strippers are advertised as amateurs. However, repeated visits to the websites show the same strippers appearing in different rooms and different strippers appearing in the same rooms. This suggests a degree of organization inconsistent with strippers being amateurs. Judging by the language of text messages, many strippers are located in Latin America or Eastern Europe. Each image is filtered through two digital cameras. A stripper's webcam captures the original, continuous stream of images. It also tends towards coarse pixelation and color shifts. The artist's still camera then recaptures individual frames. It also reproduces the structure of the computer screen that is displaying the video stream. As a result, it underlays each image with a fine grid of light and shadow.