Helen Sear @Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, New York

All images © Helen Sear

To those of you who are heading to New York for the festival why not drop by Klompching Gallery and check out the exhibition of work by Helen Sear.

In this new series of work, Beyond The View, Helen Sear continues her investigation into the sublime — and an engagement with the retinal and digital —through her innovative use of image superimposition and erasure. The dialogue between the artwork and viewer, as well as the labor of the artist’s hand, is enhanced by a shift in scale that emphasizes the artist’s concern with the viewer’s habits of looking.

Beyond The View is an ongoing exploration, with the photographs originating in and around the agricultural lands south of Milan. The images are a response to the ‘hidden’ presence of women in this rural environment on the edge of the city. Within this series, Sear develops the notion of a visual subterfuge, both in the construction of the image itself, as well as positioning the presence of the female subjects within a precarious dichotomy of power/subordination, referencing the clichés of landscape and portraiture, particularly the Northern Romantic tradition of painting.

This exhibition follows Helen Sear’s highly successful first show with Klompching Gallery in January 2009. Later that same year, she was named as one of the UK’s 50 most significant artist photographers by Portfolio. The artwork of Helen Sear (b. 1955) has been published in Arts Review, Creative Camera, HotShoe, Art Newspaper and Art Monthly amongst others. Her photographic practice has developed from a Fine Art background of performance, film and installation work made in the 1980’s with her photographs becoming widely known in the 1991 British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain, which toured Latin America and Eastern Europe. Collections holding her work include Ernst & Young, Victoria & Albert Museum, British Council (Rome) and the Paul Wilson Collection. She lives and works in Wales (UK).

Artist reception: Thursday 13 May 6-8 pm

Highly recommended.

Tessa Bunney

All images © Tessa Bunney

Tessa Bunney got in touch the other day to share some images from her Home Work series which focus on domestic labour in the suburbs and villages in and around Hanoi, Vietnam. In her statement about the project, she writes:

"Currently, around 75% of the population of Vietnam are farmers. As Vietnam moves towards urbanisation, the country’s agricultural labour force faces the prospect of losing its land to urban projects - and its way of life.

With Vietnam’s growing population also making less land available for farmers to work, families unable to sustain themselves are turning to the creation of various products in rural areas. These ‘craft’ villages have become the meeting place between rural and urban, agriculture and industry.

During the last decade, along with rapid national economic development many craft villages have increased production up to five fold through small-scale industrial development. However, the consequence of this shift is increased waste and environmental pollution with the resources of the landscape becoming overused.

My work draws attention to observing details which we usually let slip by unnoticed and aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about the changing nature of rural life".

Home Work is currently on show at The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, UK until 8 November and then will then be touring to Light House, Wolverhampton, UK (27 Nov 2009 to 13 Jan 2010).

Since graduating from West Surrey College of Art and Design in 1988, Tessa has worked as a documentary photographer undertaking personal projects and portraits and features photography for various magazines including Observer Life, Guardian Weekend and The Sunday Times magazine as well as a wide range of commissions and residencies nationally and internationally. In 2004, she completed a M.A. in Photography at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Previous projects include Moor and Dale, which was exhibited and published by The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate and shown at various venues in the UK including Hereford Photography Festival, 2004. Lamb, commissioned by The Culture Company, was shown at Impressions Gallery, York, in 2000. Eat Better, Eat British received an Honourable Mention in the Leica Oskar Barnack Award and was shown at Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles, France in 2000.

She is represented by the Klompching Gallery in New York and is currently artist in residence at Newby Hall, a private Georgian family home in North Yorkshire. She will also be artist in residence in Jyväskylä, Central Finland in early 2010 as part of Connections North, International Residency Exchange Project organised by Art Connections.