Phenomenal Growth
Phenomenal Growth
photography, video and works on paper by
Christy Speakman | www.christyspeakman.com
November 8 - 18, 2007
Opening Reception and Video Screening Thursday, November 8, 2007
chashama 461 Gallery Space
461 West 126th Street
New York, NY
FREE and open to the public.
photography, video and works on paper by
Christy Speakman | www.christyspeakman.com
November 8 - 18, 2007
Opening Reception and Video Screening Thursday, November 8, 2007
chashama 461 Gallery Space
461 West 126th Street
New York, NY
FREE and open to the public.
Phenomenal Growth is a series of ink drawings where Speakman draws directly from video stills extracted from her short films. The resulting images function as compressed photographs, drawings of light and layered time. Also included in the exhibition are new photographs from Speakman's Eye-wall series, a body of work she began in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. Found on the streets of New York City after rainfall, the celestial stains form from oil dropped on pavement by cars in transit. Contradictory to visual resemblances to outer space or satellite imagery of storms approaching landfall, the photographs embrace the micro, momentary, and ephemeral- literally, the ground beneath your feet.
Oil slicks and vapor trails act as contemporary symbols for displacement, not only in a literal sense of evacuation, but may also suggest our cultural displacement from nature itself. Liquid Land (2007), a single channel video installation, takes the viewer to a hardwood forest on the edge of the Mississippi River levee within the city limits of New Orleans. It focuses on the natural world as a fluid and interconnected entity, studying Katrina's effect on the native ecosystem. Fixed landscapes have dissolved into ephemera and groundlessness, suggesting land that is in a constant state of both disappearance and phenomenal growth.
Christy Speakman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and now lives in New York City. Speakman holds a B.A. (2002) from the University of New Orleans and an M.F.A. in Photography (2005) from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Her recent work has been supported by artist residencies from A Studio in the Woods at Tulane University (2007), The Santa Fe Art Institute (2006), and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2005-2006). Speakman's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally; she is the recipient of an Artist Restoration Grant from Tulane University, and a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.