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Houston, Texas (January 26^th, 2011)— From  February 26^th through March 26^th, the DeSantos Art Gallery will reveal the veiled secrets held within icy containers in a special exhibit featuring the photographs and sculptures from artist Judy Haberl’s Hidden Agendas.  The DeSantos Art Gallery invites you to preview the collection at a special evening reception from 5:30pm until 8pm on Saturday the 26^th of February at the Gallery located at 1724 Richmond Avenue, Houston TX 77098.

The DeSantos Art Gallery makes a rare exception by including Haberl’s sculptures alongside her photographs in this exhibit.  The photographs in the series Unutterable feature vase-shaped ice sculptures and purse-shaped sculptures Haberl crafted with ice and rubber.   Haberl encases normally hidden and private items within the containers that are obscured yet reveal private, Hidden Agendas within the translucent ice and rubber.  “I have been fascinated for a long while by the terrain of secrets and the implications of being contained.”  Judy Haberl shares the history of the series.  “Everyone has a private, secret side and the ice obfuscates our ability to know exactly what is there.”  The ice sculptures quickly melt away and are destroyed when Haberl photographs them, leaving only the rich, 40” x 30” C-prints as evidence they once existed.   She has worked with ice as her sculpting medium for many years and after creating several ice purses and photographing them, she began working with translucent rubber to preserve some of the sculptures, which until then always remained only as images in her photographs.

About the Artist

Judy Haberl was born and raised in Northern Colorado and received her BA at the University of North Colorado before moving East.  She received her MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University in Massachusetts and currently resides in Newtonville, Massachusetts.  She is the professor of sculpture at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston and has developed highly reviewed art courses, including one she co-wrote and taught entitled Image and Object with photographer and colleague Laura McPhee.  Her solo exhibition of Unutterable at the Gallery Kayafas was voted Best Photography Show in Boston by the Boston Art Awards.  She is included in the current Discoveries traveling photography exhibition by FotoFest and it was through the FotoFest 2010 Biennial where DeSantos Director, Gemma DeSantos, first saw her pieces and reached out an offer to represent her work here in Houston, TX at the upcoming exhibit.  One of her most notable series entitled Freeze consists of cast ice sculptures photographed using the Moby C Polaroid camera, Edwin Land’s unique room-size showpiece in New York, to film the sculptures and create a portfolio of enormous 40” x  90” Polaroid photographs.   She has been featured at numerous galleries and exhibitions the DeCordova Museum, Gallery Kayafas, Akin Gallery, The M.A.C. Center, Dallas, the Cultural Center, Havana Cuba and many others.  Her complete bio is available on her website at JudyHaberl.com.

About DeSantos Art Gallery

The DeSantos Art Gallery is one of only two fine art photographic galleries in Houston and is dedicated to bringing fine art photography, both traditional and contemporary pieces, to the Houston community.  In 2003, DeSantos moved into a new location after unveiling a custom constructed stucco and glass 4 story building designed by architect Fernando Brave.  The gallery is located in the rapidly evolving artistic community near the Menil Museum, University of St. Thomas, and Houston Museum District.  The DeSantos Gallery represents both American and International photographers and prides itself in selecting fine art photographers from the 20^th and 21^st century regardless of short-lived trends.  The DeSantos Gallery also provides art consulting services, education and lectures on fine art photography and provides expert guidance to individual and corporate buyers regarding photography purchases and placement.

Copyright 2011 Sarah M Worthy

Provided by The DeSantos Gallery.  All Rights Reserved.

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DeSantos Gallery was selected to review photographer portfolios for the prestigious FotoFest 2010 Biennial and it was during reviews that Gemma DeSantos, the gallery Director, decided to invite Bontempi, Schlesinger and Vrba to exhibit at the Gallery.  In the first opening of 2011, the DeSantos Gallery combines these artists’ most recent sets within a united theme of a “Memory”.  Each artist’s series displays a traditional look and style, while also evoking a more contemporary and modern feeling.  The sets enhance each other while simultaneously highlighting the different styles of the artists.  The pieces of the 3 different artists are pulled together by their shared visions of memories: of people, objects, youth.

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“We are passionate about art and photographic art here at DeSantos and wanted to celebrate our success in bringing great artists to Houston with a theme that took a look back, and since photographic art is still sometimes looked at as a young medium and our Gallery features a majority of Contemporary pieces – we wanted to begin the year with an exhibit that brought that feeling of moving forward and the excitement of what is still to come for the medium also.” Explains Gemma DeSantos around how she chose the theme and collections for this unique exhibit.

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About the Artists

Francesca Bontempi grew up in Italy and received her M.F.A. degree from the Roman School of Photography in 2004 and her BA in Photography and Cinema from the First University of Rome in 2007.  She has mentored under photographic greats including Ernesto Bazan and Gianni Berengo Gardin, and currently holds a position at La Casa Del Quartiere in Rome as a Photography Professor.  Her recent work includes both more contemporary Giclee prints with her series Sofia and the Others and more traditional Silver Gelatin prints as in her Time Tables series.

Jennifer F. Schlesinger was raised in Connecticut and received her B.A. in Photography and Journalism from the College of Santa Fe in 1998.  She has several years of experience as a professor with photography programs including the CSF Marion Center for Photographic Arts and the SITE Santa Fe Contemporary Art Museum.  She has won numerous awards for her work in photography and her work has been featured in several print journals.  Her most recent collection Object Diaspora is a series of toned silver gelatin prints that were photographed using a pinhole camera.   Schlesinger experiments with a long exposure and lots of light and movement to try and capture the “spirit” or Memory of the items’ previous owners.

Lori Vrba is a native Texan and studied at the Glassell School of Art located here in Houston Texas.  Her photographs are shot using an old Hasselblad and then developed by hand in her traditional home darkroom where she does all of the processing, printing and toning herself.  She uses a unique toning solution consisting of a heavy dilution of selenium and tea to bring out the personality and detail of her artwork.  Her work has been featured around the globe, including at the 2009 Lishui Photo Festival in China, Foto 8 Summer Show in London and most recently in a very unique custom installation of her recent Piano Farm silver and toned gelatin print series in New Orleans in 2010.

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The intense colors created by this time-intensive non-digital technique and the lone and
cropped perspectives create an emotional tension. The interiors are locked in space
with no clear sense of time. Time and space fade in and out and planes bleed into one
another. They are borderline hallucinatory environments.
In normal still photographs any change is softened, rendered as a blur, and detail is lost.
I use a technique that captures that detail and boldly emphasizes change in vivid colors.
To maintain the essential ties to reality all work is done in-camera and on-film with no
digital creation or digital manipulation.

I shoot with a medium-format camera and print on a large scale to enhance the impact
of the colors. In addition, the intriguing details of the interactions between colors draw
one into an intimate distance to explore. To me, it is important that the images in this
series impact the viewer both from across the room as well as under very close
inspection. There is a lot of intriguing mystery to the nuances.

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Artist Statement:
Some photographers believe their strongest work comes from exploring their immediate surroundings. “I think of myself as a regional photographer,” Loranc says, “but that does not mean the photography cannot be understood beyond the region. Right now people all over the United States indicate to me that regionalism, born of an informed attachment, has universal appeal.” Loranc shoots most of his pictures within an hour’s drive of his home in Modesto, California, but he is also interested in exploring his ancestral roots in Europe. For this reason he makes occasional photographic forays into Poland and Lithuania.

“I’m fascinated by the ancient churches of my homeland,” he says. “These are holy spaces where millions of people have prayed for hundreds of years. They are places of great humility, and remind us how brief our lives are. I feel the same way when I’m photographing ancient groves of native oaks in California. I was unconscious of this when I began, but upon reflection, I think the oaks are just as sacred as the old cathedrals of Europe. They are sacred in that they have survived for so many years. I’m aware that the native people of California held all living things as divine. For me a grove of Valley Oaks is as sacred as any church in Europe.”
“I think about how interconnected the world is,” Loranc says. “When I’m out on a crisp winter’s morning, shooting a stand of native oaks, I see oak galls hanging from the trees. These were once used to make the pyrogallol chemicals I use to develop my negatives. So the oak trees I am photographing played a part in the developer I use to process my negatives of those trees. It is healthy to remember that we are often linked to the natural world in ways we don’t even suspect.”

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Image Gallery & Bio

About the exhibition
The title Time after Diamonds refers at two series of works I have been working since late 2007 till now. The 8 photographs and the video screening are a selection from the series Offerings and Possessions and The Passage of Time.

Offerings and Possessions conceals about our desire to posses even material things or even people. As it usual in Del Castillo’s works, the reversible action of the reflection appears as looking for ”equilibrium.” In this case, the success of possession depends on the offer by oneself.

The Magpie, a woman completely covered by sea of pearls, a dress made of 12,000 pearls; in the photo a magpie invigilate the reclined woman.

The Anthill, photograph of a woman holding one bronze piece made by Del Castillo, in the shape of the anthill or respectively a human organ. The golden shine is the feeling of desperate desire that reminds us the tale of the Midas king.

The Garden, a woman blinded by a mirrored silver sheet, that reflects the photograph that she holds above her that reveal complicated state between what is shown as artificial and natural flowers, with the hands caught in the act of taking away the flowers while the same time it appear it is taking away body of the woman at the same time.

The Bed, a photograph is the key that links the evolution from the worry about materiality to the worry of eternity.

Del Castillo has built for this photograph, 33 ceramic skulls with golden glazed. Each of the crane shell is removed and filled red velvet cushion, making one bed once you have all of them together. The woman in the photograph is sleeping on top of this bed. As it happened with the ancient tribes that they gain the cranes of their enemies to preserve their powers, this woman sleeps on top of the cranes, that even they are not real ones; they give us the idea of death. She sleeps on top of one Vanitas as if the time doesn’t affect her.

Recorridos, a photograph made of various collages of maps where the artist has resided the last 10 years due to her art practice. One red line links all these places. This red line is actually one sculpture made by her that is one red layered cooper stair that runs around one wooden broom connected to a wooden dustpan.

In transit, a photograph taken directly inside one elevator, where one girl is levitating and the only part that connects her to the floor is her hair that is linked to a sand clock situated on the floor of the elevator.

Matryoshka is a work consists both an installation and a performance, breaking the boundaries between disciplines in art of theatre, visual art and music concerts.

The original idea was directed and created by Naia del Castillo, where she served producer, artistic director for the project and creator for all the visual elements of the piece, photographs, scenery, objects…

In collaboration with vocalist and performer Gunnlaug Thorvaldsdottir, who brought life to Matryoshka through her unique voice and performance.

Matryoshka emerges from an eternal circular movement; expresses life cycle of unstoppable fertility channeled this motion by a large powerful doll while act of defiance expresses in form of shelter, are concealed with half of the body hidden by hairs. Her feet are anchored and frozen however from her ankle to head is unrestraint and free for movement. The layered of different dresses bound her as she slowly releases and undresses like a Matryoshka doll, while the music and voice accompany this transition of unfolding. In a continuous destruction and reconstruction, we trespass the boundaries of concealment, growth, fullness, death and renaissance.

This exhibition is organized as part of the “La noche de Luna Llena festival” with the support of the The Museum of Contemporary Art Esteban Vicente in Segovia and Segovia 2016.