Kerry Schuss Gallery

Erica Baum
Travis Brown
Sam Contis
Jeri Coppola
Ryan Foerster 
Janice Guy
Shahrzad Kamel 
Barney Kulok
Vince Leo
Les LeVeque
David Schoerner
Steel Stillman

Erica Baum
Belonging to the series “Naked Eye”, these two works by Erica Baum are comprised of photographs capturing cross-sections of printed materials and slices of images, spontaneous encounters that re-contextualize the relationship between image and form through serendipitous arrangements.

“Unaided by digital image manipulation, Erica Baum finds the extraordinary in the most mundane materials and fixes fleeting moments for posterity. For the series “The Naked Eye,” she photographed the fanned pages of mass-market paperback books, transforming text and image fragments into a chance-based visual poetry…Baum’s keen aesthetic sensibility makes it difficult to discern between expectation and reality, or between poetics and pop culture.”
- Text from "The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing", May 26–October 28, 2018, Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Travis Brown
Traces, metadata, and embedded information are paramount and particular to Travis Brown’s work, whose titles follow a consistent format year/month/day/hour/minute/second, punctuated by the filename automatically generated by the camera. These two works belong to the first body of work that Brown produced with a digital camera, a departure from his background in analog film. Brown photographs most when traveling abroad, capturing nuances he encounters that evoke vestiges and impressions of people and their actions, without anyone physically present in the image.

Sam Contis
“Overpass {is} a series of photographs made while walking a sprawling network of footpaths in northern England. Following these public rights of way across privately owned land, Contis considers the movement of bodies through the landscape. In her handmade gelatin silver prints, she directs our attention to the stiles she encounters on these paths – the simple structures that allow passage over walls and fences. Contis shows these stiles as repeating sculptural forms, junctures where private and public interests intersect…Contis’s richly detailed photographs show multiple layers of presence: an animal tunnel dug under a wire fence, dense vegetation obscuring worn paths. A reorientation of the landscape genre, these images, all made in ‘portrait’ format, reveal the convergence of many histories and bodies in the environment.” - Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Jeri Coppola
In Jerri Coppola’s words, “I am not so interested in the new image, but I am very interested in drawing your attention to see something that is ‘always there’ but unnoticed….The internal space of memory bridges the external world around us. My landscapes become a metaphor for memory and sets the story into motion. I am the voice-over of my work, seemingly absent, but you know my intentions…The flow between real and imagined becomes blurred and travels between narrative and dream state. Often there is a hint of nightmare or discomfort, and I am as interested in loss of memory as I am in remembering. What is left out is often as important as what is said. Specific gestures and places hold memories that are personal but at the same time universal.”

Ryan Foerster
This work-in-two-parts showcases several processes within Ryan Foerster’s practice, which intertwines documentation, found objects, and the artworks made from these objects. Happenstance, imperfection, conservation, and domesticity become tools and themes for generative transformation. After buying shoe insoles, Foerster took the clear packaging they arrived in to the dark room and made a photogram. Here the shape becomes abstracted, evocative of outer space, but also a ghostly footprint of an unknown person, like a mark left behind. Paired with the simple photograph of a butterfly on the windowsill, a straightforward documentation crystallizes into a poetic chance encounter.

Janice Guy
In 1979 while living in Dusseldorf, Germany, Janice Guy created this series of 36 images, self-portraits taken in the mirror while draped in various positions over an armchair. Guy printed a small selection from the roll as test prints, hand-coloring them and working at on a small-scale, without ever making enlargements. In 2023, she returned to this work for a solo exhibition, this time printing the whole negative, whereas the initial test prints were cropped and unified, establishing straight horizon lines within the frame. Through this act of un-cropping and re-framing, the entire process behind the image-making reveals itself to the viewer, emerging as a living, performative series, rather than as portraits resulting from careful refinement.

Shahrzad Kamel 
For her series “re,” Shahrzad Kamel parsed through museum collection websites, exploring the concept of “public domain” and what it signifies and entails when an artwork becomes accessible to anyone, anywhere, through the internet and digital means. These two photographs were sourced from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection website: one is a photo of climbers in Mt. Blanc, taken in the late 19th century, while the other is a gondola prow, documented by the museum. The museum allows the public to reproduce these images, provided they cite the institution in the credit line; however, no mention of the artist is stipulated. Kamel was struck by how  realizing the ambition of an artwork entering a museum collections often culminates in that artwork residing in deep storage, nearly lost in the archives, unseen and hidden from public view. This series considers re-contextualization and recirculation as a means of resurrection by using accessible systems of information. The process of turning the digital source image into a transparency, and then a contact print, marks an elevation and reversal, a low resolution digital image transformed into an analog artwork, born in the dark room.

Barney Kulok
Photographed during the construction of Four Freedoms Park, the last design by famed architect Louis Kahn before his death, Kulok spent a year documenting the phases of building. Focusing on the peripheral elements of the process, Kulok eschewed the presence of workers or finished architecture for an emphasis on materials and their autonomous potential. The resulting series culminated in a book published by Aperture. Curator Joel Smith notes that "rather than represent “building” (the gerund) as the gradual, coordinated realization of a monumental design, Kulok represents it through a series of minutely observed details."

Vince Leo
“I make these photographs by leaving the camera shutter open for extended periods of time while the wind is blowing through the trees. I can see the trees and feel the wind, but I can’t visualize the trace they will create when I press the shutter release. Besides the sheer joy of relinquishing the desire for total photographic control, the indeterminacy of this technique allows me to enter into an expansive and unpredictable collaboration with the wind and trees, mediated by the camera. The goal is to establish and make photographs through a new relationship between subjects, a relationship that depends on recognizing multiple subjectivities and interdependent agencies. We (wind, trees, myself, camera) all make the photographs, all contribute to pictures none of us could make alone. "windtreesmind" is not a representation of the wind or of trees or even of my mind; it is a representation of their inter-being and mutual entanglement, long moments of photographic freedom in which the interconnectedness of the world is noted.”

Les LeVeque
During the pandemic near Les LeVeque’s studio in upstate New York, a local greenhouse was selling vibrantly-colored, homegrown anemones. The set up was socially-distanced and simple: a box of flowers would be waiting, and visitors could leave $20 and take the box home. After bringing some of the flowers back to his studio, LeVeque photographed them in a black space flooded with infrared light, using a camera that was able to capture low-end infrared signals and the high-end ultraviolet light waves, typically only experienced as heat, but invisible to the naked eye. The resulting images are psychedelically vivid, but un-retouched, the unseen, omnipresent spectrum emerging like a spectral presence.

David Schoerner 
Upon learning that his mother was planning to build a house on his family’s land in Sweden, David Schoerner purchased two disposable black and white cameras and sent them to his mother and aunt, asking them to take snapshots documenting the process since he could not travel there himself. Once he received the film, he began zeroing in on the minute details of each frame and printed them on a small scale of 5x7”. Schoerner later returned to these images with the desire to work on a larger scale, rephotographing the small prints and reprinting them in a more substantial format. The images speak to a process of abstraction through fragmentation, centering on the grain of the image and impressionistic quality rather than to any pure legibility or a clear document of the family home.

Steel Stillman
In Steel Stillman’s own words, “These two photographs are from the series Musicians (c. 1978-1983), one of several series that together constitute a decade-by-decade chronology of most of the twentieth century using, for the most part, anonymous snapshots. The original snapshots in Musicians (c. 1978-1983) were taken, I was told, at various concert venues around Phoenix, Arizona.”