We are pleased to announce that Kurt Tong, one of the two 2009 Hey, Hot Shot! Ultras has been added to the Jen Bekman Gallery site.

We have included a selection of images from Kurt’s22 Steps to the Sea, Farewell in Labrador, and People’s Parkseries. Kurt has a large body of work and we encourage you to explore both the gallery site and Kurt’s personal site to see full bodies of work and other series.

A Bit More About Kurt:
Tong has worked and traveled extensively across Europe, the Americas and Asia. In 1999, Kurt co-founded Prema Vasam, a charitable home for disabled and disadvantaged children in Chennai, South India before becoming a full-time photographer in 2003.

He received a Masters in documentary photography from London College of Communications in 2006. He has since been chosen as a winner in the first Lens Culture – Rhubarb Photo Book Award, the Blurb Photography Book Now competition and the prestigious Jerwood Photography Award.

Kurt’s photographs have been widely exhibited around the world at venues including: Jen Bekman Gallery in New York, Impressions Gallery in Bradford, The Royal Academy in London, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Abbaye de Neumunster in Luxembourg and the CPA Exhibition in Chengdu, China. This summer and fall, several of Kurt’s projects will be on view in the UK and France.

Farewell in Labrador #19 by Kurt Tong

22 Steps to the Sea #26 by Kurt Tong

To see more work from Kurt Tong check out his site. and make sure to get on the gallery mailing list to make sure you hear more about Kurt and his solo exhibition coming to the gallery in the next year.

Speaking of Hey, Hot Shot! the 2010 deadline for submissions is this Sunday, August 22nd at 8 p.m. (EDT). Note that the deadline for Alec Soth’s Curator’s Choice Award is slightly earlier, Friday, August 20th at Midnight (EDT).

The prizes this round, other than getting your work seen by our amazing panel: $5K, gallery representation, a solo exhibition at JBG, a $1K Blurb credit to each Hot Shot, and a chance for editions on 20×200.

For more info head over to heyhotshot.com or just click here to apply now!

Isobel Schofield and Jacob Rhodes of Try Benefit Art Show blog are using our gallery space for a silent auction later this month to raise money for Team in Training (TNT), which is part of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.  In addition to auctioning their artwork, Isobel and Jacob are also training for a triathlon with TNT. The organization raises money to help combat and find a cures for Leukemia, Lymphoma, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and Myelom. At the silent auction for TNT, works by over a dozen artists will donated with all proceeds going directly towards finding a cure for cancer.

The Details:
Saturday, Aug 28th
7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.
Auction Winners being announced at 9:00 p.m.
Where: Jen Bekman Gallery, 6 Spring Street, NY NY
Check out artists and work in the auction here.

Come out to show these artists your support and help find a cure for cancer!

In Land Use Survey we highlight artists who are inspired by the landscapes around them; as a little departure, it’s quite interesting to see how the same group of photographers and painters depicts bodies of water. As these artists switch their gazes from fields and mountains to pools and ponds, it’s a small ‘Water Use Survey’ if you will. Hopefully these images provide a bit of a visual escape from the summer heat!

The Lake Project 12 by David Maisel

Untitled from the Haenyo series by Ian Baguskas

Untitled from California Vernacular series by Liz Kuball

Bathers in Wave Pool, Orlando, FL by Alex MacLean

These wet works are by a just a handful of the twenty-eight artists on view at the gallery, up until August 15th. Come in and see how they fare on land.

Over at Dwell.com, Aaron Britt had a few things to say about the current show, and featured a quote from me about the curation of Land Use Survey.

A group show that ranges across media that tries to understand how we use land in America, and it’s at once elegiac, angry, and bedeviled by the strange geometry of our present day infrastructure. Ranging from views of a single plant to aerial shots of our squirreling highways, Land Use Survey investigates where we are while still managing to suggest where we’ve been and intimate where we might be heading. ‘I think it is easy to focus on the dire, overdeveloped imagery but in the show I wanted to show as much of the diverse ways that the land is used alongside the diverse ways artists are capturing the land around them,’ says curator Jeffrey Teuton.

Come check out the show before it closes on August 15th!

Last Friday, Peggy Roalf from Dart wrote a review of Land Use Survey. Here are some of the highlights:

About Ian Baguskas’s Indian Beach Surf, Oregon, she writes:

Framed from a high point of view, with massive erratics rising from the sea, the scene includes a small group of people, engulfed in coastal mist and surf, with a dog looking on from the side. While absolutely contemporary in its style and content, this picture also bridges time; it commands the kind of majestic point of view shared by two opposite extremes in photography – for example, Stephen Shore’s 1979 Merced River, Yosemite National Park, as well as certain views of Yosemite by Ansel Adams.

About Alex MacLean’s houses in Housing Development at Different Stages, Las Vegas, NV, March 2005, she writes:

The only thing that differentiates one from another is the color of the roof. It would be interesting to see the way in which future inhabitants will put a personal stamp on these properties.

And about Andrew Scott Ross and Scott Lawrence’s Sighting (Avondale Mall), Roalf writes:

Sighting (Avondale Mall) by Andrew Scott Ross / Scott Lawrence, offers the kind of dreamlike scene that anyone who hates searching for a good parking spot at the Agway would love to encounter to relieve the boredom of small town living: a herd of bison galloping across the blacktop, horns down and heels flying.

To read the full review, check out Dart.

You can find Jen Bekman Gallery on Artlog — a site for art & culture in real time. The site provides comprehensive event listings, reviews and conversations about the latest and greatest in art. Artlog provides the tools to easily find, follow and engage with the best of art and culture in New York. Also, with a new section on the site called Artlog/ Collect you can now search through our artists and browse their work on the site.

Artlog also organizes “Collect” events which are private, one‐night art open houses devoted to introducing new collectors and art lovers to art communities across NYC.

Jen Bekman Gallery is participating in the Collect Lower East Side Artcrawl happening Thursday, July 22nd, 2010, from 6:30 p.m. to late. Get your tickets now! Collect LES is a 21+ event. Tickets are $20.

Here is the schedule:
7:00 – 9:00 p.m. Complimentary access to the New Museum’s exhibitions
6:30 – 9:30 p.m. Gallery crawl to over 20 galleries
9:00 – 10:00 p.m. Happy Hour & After Party at Panda Bar
9:30 – 10:30 p.m. Happy Hour & After Party at Gallery Bar

The LES is currently New York’s fastest growing gallery neighborhood. The area is also bustling with restaurants and nightlife, attracting many new creatives and collectors.

Last year’s LES Crawl brought together over 1,700 art lovers to tour the area’s galleries. This year’s event consists of receptions for Yale, Columbia and PENN alumni, special events and discounts to local businesses, access to over 20 galleries. In addition, participants will be granted free entry to the New Museum including Rivane Neuenschwander’s A Day Like Any Other, Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine, and Amy Granat’s Light 3 Ways.

Land development, and people’s interaction with nature is a topic that has been much on our minds of late, with the opening just last Wednesday of our new (and if we may say so ourselves, fantastic!) group show, fittingly titled Land Use Survey.

Thus, when we read that the people of Johnson County, Kansas have plans in the works to open a National Museum of Suburban History, the news certainly piqued our interest. While suburbia may seem like a distant, hazy memory to all you New Yorkers out there—somewhere you triumphantly left for a better life here in the city—it would seem that Suburban America is becoming a place of increasing interest, and even a concentration for academic study. For one, Long Island’s Hofstra University is now home to The Center for Suburban Studies, which only leads us to ask: could Suburban Studies become the trendy new Urban Studies? The program writes:

Suburban America has been the butt of jokes and stereotypes for decades. The portrayal persists in Hollywood, which continues to zing the ‘burbs with over-the-top tales of conniving, desperate housewives and wayward soccer moms in bed with Mexican drug lords.

Housing Development at Different Stages, Las Vegas, NV, March 2005 by Alex Maclean

It is here that we’ll implore you to stop wondering longingly when the next season of Weeds is starting, and pause to consider this astonishing statistic: more than 50% of Americans reside in suburban communities, and these communities are rapidly changing, moving quickly away from the stereotypes with which they are so often associated. As Alan Scher Zagier reports in an article on the forthcoming museum:

Change your mind about what the suburbs are…They’re not just bedroom communities for center-city workers. They’re not just rich enclaves. They’re not all economically stable. They’re not all exclusively white.

These are not your father’s suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s.

These are just a few tidbits to consider over the next couple of months when you (hopefully!) swing by to see Land Use Survey at JBG, and as you eagerly anticipate the August 3^rd release of the new Arcade Fire album, very appropriately titled…The Suburbs.

If you weren’t able to make it to the opening of Land Use Survey last night, stop by tomorrow for a look before we close on Saturday, July 3rd and Sunday, July 4th in celebration of Independence Day. We will re-open Wednesday, July 7th with new summer hours: 12 – 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday.

Below are a few works from the show to inspire wanderlust and whet your tongue.

Housing Development at Different Stages, Las Vegas, NV, March 2005 by Alex Maclean

Road to Road by William Wegman

Sighting (Avondale Mall) by Andrew Scott Ross / Scott Lawrence

Reflection by Dana Miller

Have a great long weekend; more next week!

Please join us on Wednesday, June 30th from 6 to 8 p.m. at the opening reception for Land Use Survey, featuring photographs, paintings and works on paper by twenty-seven artists.

Land Use Survey functions as a critical appraisal of land use across the country, as a document of the changing landscape vernacular, and as a celebration of the artists who take diverse approaches to capturing this genre. The show opens with a series of landscapes that remain untouched by man. Slowly, signs of human intrusion begin to appear: car tracks, empty bottles, a retaining wall and piles of dirt. As one progresses through the exhibition, both in the gallery space and within the areas described by the works, increasingly more land turns over to commercial and residential development, before finally giving way to the dizzying geometries of the modern metropolis.

The exhibition features work by Ian Baguskas, Chris Ballantyne, Beth Dow, Christoph Gielen, Todd Hido, Liz Kuball,Nick Lamia, Scott Lawrence, Michael Lundgren, Alex MacLean, David Maisel, Paho Mann, Louisa McElwain, Sarah McKenzie, Joel Meyerowitz, Dana Miller, Brad Moore, Matthew Moore, Michelle Muldrow, Justin Newhall, Ross Racine, Tyson Anthony Roberts, Andrew Scott Ross, Aili Schmeltz, Bryan Schutmaat, Alec Soth and William Wegman.

The exhibition will be on view from July 1 through August 14, 2010. (The gallery will be closed on July 3rd, 4th and 5th for the holiday).

Trojan Horse by Beth Dow

JBG artist Beth Dow is featured in the new issue of Photography Quarterly, published by The Center for Photography at Woodstock. PQ #99, guest edited by curator Debra Klomp Ching of KLOMPCHING Gallery, brings forth a fascinating dialogue on the current state of Photography’s Ontology as seen through the works of emerging image-makers from around the globe whose artwork mine the edifice and artifice of the photograph.

In the issue, Beth Dow says of her series Ruins:

“I’m drawn to subjects that puzzle me, especially incongruous elements in unlikely places. Ruins looks at the ways we appropriate and approximate the romance of ruins into modern American environments, and what this says about our longing for historic precedents. While genuine ruins remind us of our own mortality, they also suggest the opposite by showing it’s possible to endure, even if only in a reduced and degraded form. These photographs are an attempt to evoke nostalgia for inaccurate history, to wrestle with ideas of authenticity, and to question the value we place on classical ideals. It is natural to challenge the relevance of nostalgic longing, and I exploit this dynamic in my contemporary landscapes. Life goes on among the ruins.”

Palace Parking by Beth Dow

Also in the issue, is Larissa Leclair’s interview with 20×200 artist Curtis Mann. A Virginia-based writer and curator, Leclair discusses the process and motivations surrounding Mann’s haunting imagery which begins with mining the troves of imagery found on the website Flickr.

Tree Tops, from the series Somewhere in Israel by Curtis Mann

Argent 7 by Christian Chaize

Union 3 by Christian Chaize

Christian Chaize has been hard at work (albeit on the beach) since his solo show, Praia Piquinia exhibited at JBG from May 21-July 11, 2009. Stay tuned to his artist page for additional images from this series, coming soon!

Gregory Krum’s ...Practice..., on view at the gallery for just one more week till Sunday, June 27th, has been reviewed by Vince Aletti in The New Yorker, available to online (now) and in the forthcoming print issue of the magazine.

Aletti writes:

There are pictures of gravestones in the snow, artfully decorated interiors, and what appear to be night skies dense with stars. But a series of twenty-four unframed color photographs hung in a grid across from these images brings the exhibition into focus. Collectively titled “Offering,” they’re shots of the coconut-leaf baskets of flowers and food left at various public sites in Bali as gifts to the gods. Seen from above, these colorful packages are a more exotic form of Irving Penn’s urban debris, but even more allusive and alluring. Through June 27.

Here are some pics of the set up for Kate’s draw-a-thon going on all day TODAY at the gallery. Kate brought a massive amount of cool things to share with those who stop by like zines, buttons, shopping bags, and even a table runner. I will be posting pics all day but you should make it in to the gallery to draw with us from 12 – 6:30 and then stick around for Kate’s artist talk at 6:30.

Photographs often bring the realities of harsh social, economic and political conditions around the world to light, illuminating distant (for some) concepts of war, poverty, mutilation, starvation and other ideas that can seem far-from-home into graspable narratives. Photographers who choose to entrench themselves in issues of human rights and in war zones, enter the lives of the suffering, and in doing so, take on the weighty responsibility of creating and conveying what they see and learn.

Next Monday, June 21st, The Tisch School of the Arts is hosting a panel discussion, Photography and Human Rights: What Works?, to facilitate exploration strategies in human rights documentary projects. The Kanbar Institute of Film and Television is partnering with the Magnum Foundation to bring presenters like Jen Bekman Gallery’s Nina Berman to the table alongside photojournalist and filmaker Ed Kashi and Canadian photographer and folk singer Larry Towell, . Berman gas extensively photographed war veterans and the American political landscape surrounding war, Kashi has documenting the plight of the Kurdish people, the impact of the oil industry in the Niger Delta and strife between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq, and Towell has investigated issues of wealth distribution in India, relatives of the disappeared in Guatemala and the civil war in El Salvador. Each has directly confronted issues of human rights, and brought their images back into the public sphere.

The discussion will be moderated by Peter Lucas, a Photography & Human Rights Program instructor at NYU, who will address some of the following topics:

For a photographer, how is it possible to judge the impact of one’s documentary work on society? Do the people in the pictures, or others like them, gain from one’s intervention? To what extent are collaborations with non-governmental organizations effective? Can a photographer manage to work independently? What strategies are being used to alert the public? These issues will be discussed in tandem with possible pathways, insights, and practical advice for young and emerging documentary photographers and human rights activists whose aim it is to work in a changed and still evolving media environment.

Photography and Human Rights: What Works?
Monday, June 21, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Dean’s Conference Room
12th Floor @ 721 Broadway
For more information: 212.998.1930

p.s. Don’t forget a valid photo ID to enter the building!

The video, Always After (The Glass House), currently up at Mass MoCA as part of the exhibit Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With stands as an amazing example of really how great of an art-viewing facility this museum really is. Projected on a massive screen that you reach after a long walk through one of the exhibition halls, the video piece is something to experience. You are able to stand in the room alone and watch a striking visual of a glass pane shattering to a haunting soundtrack of echoing breaking glass. The soundtrack is the cherry that makes the space truly transform the work. Also key, is being in an uncrowded room, so you can surrender to the rhythm of the glass being swept up.

The absence of knowing in the piece—of what has caused the pane to break and who the responsible accomplices are, combined with the empty room you are ideally in, heighten the experience that catalog describes as “making you palpably aware you have arrived too late.” If perhaps you had just moved faster maybe you would have made it in time to see the responsible action. (It is worth noting that the glass breaking is actually caused by Mies Van Der Rohe’s grandson breaking windows with a gilded hammer.)

Born Madrid in 1961, Manglano-Ovalle was raised in Bogotá and Chicago. He studied art and art history, and Latin American and Spanish literature at Williams College, and received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. He currently lives and works in Chicago, and has been featured on the always-terrific Art 21. They write of his work:

Manglano-Ovalle’s technologically sophisticated sculptures and video installations use natural forms such as clouds, icebergs, and DNA as metaphors for understanding social issues such as immigration, gun violence, and human cloning. In collaboration with astrophysicists, meteorologists, and medical ethicists, Manglano-Ovalle harnesses extraterrestrial radio signals, weather patterns, and biological code, transforming pure data into digital video projections and sculptures realized through computer rendering. His strategy of representing nature through information leads to an investigation of the underlying forces that shape the planet as well as points of human interaction and interference with the environment.

You can check out more of Manglano-Ovalle’s work on his website. He also currently has work on view at the Williams College Museum of Art. The exhibit Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With remains on view through October 10, 2010. I highly recommend a visit, and you can also view the Sol Lewitt retrospective while you’re out there.

Kate-Bingaman-Burt began her Obsessive Consumption series in 2002 by drawing the purchases she made in her distinct and whimsical style. The idea was, and still is, to record our relationship with mass consumer products in a capitalist economy—as both a parody and a celebration—of what we want, need, and think we need, to get by.  This April, Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today? was released in printed-and-bound form by Princeton Architectural Press. Kate will be at the gallery with her book on Thursday, June 17th, talking about her stories of the things we buy—from parking tickets, coffee, packs of gum and shoes, to electricity bills and burritos. The book is a selection of three years worth of ink drawings of these sundry items, that manifests as a journal, a catalogue and critical commentary all at once.

Kate will be bringing her signed Super Duper Limited Edition Pack of the book and host a drawing event that’ll encourage others to draw what they have purchased during the event on the 17th. The Limited Edition Pack is available for $30.00 and includes a copy of Obsessive Consumption, plus a daily drawing, imprinted pencils and blank sheets for others to draw on. So, if you’re in town, come get a little artistic, meet an awesome artist, an oh yeah—buy something on your way.

Kate Bingaman-Burt Book Signing & Draw-a-thon
Thursday, June 17th at Jen Bekman Gallery
6 Spring Street, New York, NY

12:00 – 6:30 p.m.: Kate signs copies of Obsessive Consumption and hosts a drawing event to promote others to draw the items they have purchased that day.
6:30 – 8 p.m.:  Kate speaks with Faran Krentcil, the Digital Director of NYLON, giving an informal presentation about her work.

Later that week, Kate will be on NPR’s Studio 360, where they are asking her to give Uncle Sam a makeover. For more information go to Studio 360.