June 26 - August 15, 2008
Joergen Geerds, Richard Roth and Carol Salmanson

Opening reception Thurs, June 26, 6-9pm

All three of these artists deal with architecture and its relationship to anthropomorphism. Buildings may not look like human beings, but they mimic our consciousness in that they project light from within, or have some innate sensory rapport with the immediate natural environment.

Joergen Geerds is an urban photographer, but there is nothing gritty or tough about these images, which portray the city as if it were the very horizon itself, stretching into infinity with every streetlight or desk lamp projecting like a star in the firmament of near-heaven, and all the light combining to fill the liminal edges of every building, so that despite a night shot there are no shadows. Though he uses the hyperbolic style of a 360-degree shot, Geerds has chosen such a timeless and immutable subject that his perspective never seems more important than its theme.

Richard Roth’s sculpture has its roots in the Constructivist forms of Naum Gabo or Eli Lizzitsky, but it also resembles a human spine or the waving sails of a tall ship. Its central plinth throbs with white light that then travels along the glass extensions creating a very interior illumination which nonetheless inhabits a very external, open, and urban space like that within business districts in which glass canyons ironically reflect a socially demarcated territory of corporate agendas.

Carol Salmanson also creates structurally sublime forms which are resplendent in the depiction of incandescent projections, slight intimations of an interior reality, a brooding and minimal presence that links the LED lights on household appliances to the neon signs of a once seedy and now family friendly Times Square. Out of the darkness, a necessarily voluble depth, her lights are signals leading us into esthetic symmetry.