This Paris-based photographer has been absent from our active roster for about two years while she found a work-around for the absence of the Polaroid film she used to make her pictures. She succeeded brilliantly, as you will see, in continuing with her lunar set pieces, based on dreams, and drawings that she does from the memory of those dreams, and from other, more literary sources. The scenes (Solo) are played out by her cast of “players”, and “throwers” on the salt evaporation flats of her childhood memories, in Bages, on the southwest Mediterranean coast of France. The negative prints done in abandoned buildings (Black Screen), look at first like places we’ve been, but the glow-suffused common objects that our attention is drawn to take on an importance that is not supported by the more plausible backgrounds on which they are “found”.

This California-based photographer falls back on traditional natural subjects: trees, birds, and flowers. But knowing that tells you little of what she does, nor what it looks like. Nothing here is “usual”. The trees are often national or botanical treasures…trees melting down the walls at Angkor Wat, or existing solely on an island of the coast of Yemen. Carnivorous plants that mask their intentions with beautiful camouflage, made all the more effective by Ms. Moon’s masterful Platinum/ Palladium prints which look more like pencil drawings than photographs, another act of camouflage.

Finally there are her Ravens, not your average bird, more intelligent than most, some say, capable of speech. Moon has managed to get to know a pair of them ( they mate for life )in a preserve about an hour’s drive from her home in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. They recognize each other and enjoy their visits.

Robert RICHFIELD

Richfield’s continuation of his interest in documenting the ways in which we honor our dead in order to remember them, is now centered in Mexico, and is called, “Perpetuidad- Extending Life to the Dead”. This title is a quote from an essay on the Mexican sense of solitude, by writer Octavio Paz.

This series has evolved greatly since its inception with simple recording of the appearance of sepulchers, to these collage-like explosions of shreds of things which seem not to be tethered to any place, or to this world at all.

This last November we had a show of Takeshi Shikama’s new body of work related to his travels in our Pacific Northwest, and Japan’s Hokkaido, Japan’s northern-most island.

The photographs, hand applied Platinum/ Palladium emulsions on hand-made Gampi paper, are the largest he has made to date 10 ½ x 13 ½ inches, and display his usual mastery of subtle tonal gradations that are the hallmark of his work. Takeshi’s love is for forests and their trees.  Fortunately for him Japan is surprisingly 40% woodland, so there is lots for him to love, but even Central Park manages to look like a forest preserve, albeit one with an occasional skating rink, and with the buildings on the Park’s periphery mingled with the branches of the trees.

Jan STALLER

I have enjoyed watching Jan’s work get more and more complex, while the images themselves have become simpler and simpler. He is a painter who never pick up a brush, a sculptor who makes nothing in three dimensions, an installation artist who places nothing anywhere, and a wry wit who never tells a joke. Staller has a passion for industrial design, and has designed furniture. His environment of choice is industrial construction, demolition and manufacturing sites in and around New York City. They are the raw materials from which he selectively fabricates pictures about the act of fabrication and dissolution, in a society that can’t leave well-enough alone.

Forget the Parthenon, have you been to Jersey City lately?

Venue: A I P A D Photography Show Booth #314

Open: 4th - 7th of April 2013

For more information: www.klotzgallery.com