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Altered States of Reality provides a glimpse of the world as captured through the lens of a camera, technology, and through the artists own inner vision. The gifted artist’s participating in Altered States of Reality offer us a perception of the world, as seen, through a complex, enigmatic fusion of emotions and technical mastery. The old boundaries have come tumbling down and the new reality has been altered and is forever changing. This exciting exhibition allows us to challenge our ideas, parables and perceptions that constitute our own reality.
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Masaki Asakawa
 
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Masaki Asakawa’s digitally re-assembled urban imagery stems as much from architecture and urban theory as from his interest in mediated images and spatial relations. Appropriately he credits Cubism’s strong influence – evident in accumulated images of the same object from different angles – as well as postmodern architecture’s tendency to deconstruct familiar forms. His sense of space and structure, meanwhile, attests to his Japanese artistic training, as does his virtuoso manipulation of digital photography and imaging. Isolating, disassembling and repeating geometric patterns, architectural details and colorful forms from the urban fabric, Asakawa has evolved his own brand of digital graffiti.
His work is completely bound to the urban ecosystem, but is also playfully critiquing its harsh gridwork. The absurd repetitions of façades, cars, advertising surfaces, beams and pillars evokes an overwhelming post-urban dream where the stuff of cities is piled high, freed from the constraints of physics, the limits of vision or imagination. Asakawa’s cacophonic fantasy cityscapes thereby propose different ways of seeing and relating to urban space.
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"Colors Complex 1"
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"The Baroque in Hong Kong 1"
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Michael Bajko
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The photographs of New Zealand artist Michael Bajko depict the bush as a mysterious terrain in which the ground is vaster than the sky and supple trees move at will. Bajko, who references nineteenth century paintings and photographs of New Zealand rainforests, uses both the clarity and the ambiguity of the photographic image to capture the landscape’s timelessness. In his images, leaves and branches have an almost three-dimensional presence, suggesting a majestic, sensorial openness free from civilization’s influence. But whenever Bajko skews the images, swirling the tree branches or turning the bush into a circular eddy, he reasserts his contemporary voice, implying that imagination and technology simultaneously influence the way people perceive landscape.
Bajko, who is a fourth generation photographer, has a background in theatre as well as art and is attuned to the way images and dramatics influence perception. He is also constantly aware of his own history, especially his settler ancestry. Bajko lives and works in the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area in the Auckland Region of New Zealand.
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"Mamaku (Cyathea medullaris), Piha Bush, 36-56-59.09(S), 174-29-14.28(E)"
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"Ponga (Silverfern, Cyathea dealbata), Canty's Bush, 36-55-53.13(S), 174-36-16.35(E)"
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Julia Cher
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Born in Russia and raised playing the violin, Julia Cher made a major life change in 2000 by moving to the United States. She attended classes in creative photography, deciding eventually to pursue it as a profession. Her interest in the idea of beauty and its multifarious forms has led her to a career in fashion photography as well as to the creation of digital art that is focused on nature. Her artistic works are often close observations of flora and fauna that are easily and often overlooked. Her photographs include details of seashells, leaves, rocks, and minerals, that are often at first unrecognizable as elements from the natural world. Bands of minerals in agate stone can look like pouring paint or hard candy. Her brightly colored images encourage extended observation and evince a sense of wonder at nature’s intricacy and bounty.
Cher wishes only for her art to stimulate the viewer’s sense of awe and respect towards nature and to make visible some of the infinite beauty in the world around us. In Julia Cher's words, "Nature is Art. Give it a closer look. There is so much beauty in this world."
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"102"
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"98"
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John Howard Davies
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Photographer John Howard Davies pictures a world of open-ended possibilities, in which a city skyline is as relaxed and lyrical as a field at sunrise. Through his adeptly composed photographs, Davies aims to alert viewers to the allure of life’s natural diversity. His images always tell multiple coexistent stories—figures may socialize in the foreground while vast buildings in the background suggest a parallel corporate existence, or maybe grazing animals frame an immense lake that leads to another distant landscape. Davies uses color sparingly but effectively. Muted hues underscore the quiet openness of his scenes, reinforcing his work’s all-inclusive quality.
The cultural heritage of his native London has influenced Davies and his photographs often contrast London’s rich history with its contemporary liveliness. Extensive travel in Australia has also influenced Davies’ sensibility, amplifying his awareness of the world’s cultural and natural beauty. Davies has worked with acclaimed London photographer Alan Brooking and belongs to the London Photographic Association. He has exhibited his work throughout the United Kingdom.
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"Ireland"
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"The Eye"
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Rupert Davis
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Five years ago, waiting for a train, I had a strong impulse to buy a camera. I bought a disposable camera and just about made it onto my train... Since then my photography has developed as an intuitive and naturally evolving expression of myself and what I see around me. My thing is beauty, and the soul behind everything. I love to capture what feels like the essence of something, that which gives it life, uniqueness, and its own beauty, whether it is a tree, a building or a person. At times my pictures are abstract, at times more classical. It is the depth and feeling of a scene or person that calls me to photograph. Sometimes I can be lost in a state of joy, surrendered to whatever is unfolding around me, inviting it to fill the camera. I also teach photography and creativity, leading people to discover their own creative potential.
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"Red Sky at Night (Limited Edition of 25)"
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"Sea to Sky (Limited Edition of 25)"
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Justice De Los Santos
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Justice De Los Santos remembers peering through a keyhole during a childhood game of hide-and-seek, observing details of the world beyond his closet-hiding place. This feeling returned years later when he first picked up a camera, and from then on he has used photography to document the artistic impulse of lives, not just subjects. A first look at a De Los Santos print may not reveal anything unfamiliar—but this is by design, as the artist visually arrests what we are wont to overlook. "Through my work, I seek to represent the simple passage of time as art within itself," he states. His various incorporations of shadow, his portrayal of texture, and his play with space and dimension frame the intricacies of everyday life imitating art, and not the other way around.
Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in the Bronx, De Los Santos's photographs have been influenced by the works of Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, and Eugene Richards.
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"Summer"
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"Ancestors"
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Zeev Deckel
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With an elegant simplicity, Israeli photographer Zeev Deckel explores his fascinating world through a lens. His photography presents a distinct perspective, highlighting the dichotomy between old world and new world, pastoral lifestyles in an age of industry and technology, simple satisfactions and incredible feats of engineering. His oeuvre has been crafted over a lifetime, seeing his nation develop despite a tumultuous history while people carry on with their lives. By capturing their seemingly mundane daily activities Deckel's work explores the wonderful humanity that abounds.
Experienced in still life, landscape, and portraiture, he has enjoyed an extensive career in traditional photography well before the advent of the computer. Currently he has begun digitally manipulating his photographs with fantastic results, creating powerful graphic tableaus or dramatizing a subject by adding or subtracting color. Deckel's magnificently crisp and vibrant photography is his way of understanding and sharing a narrative with future generations. Over the years his work has been exhibited frequently around Israel and he is a member of several artists organizations.
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"Monk"
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"Still Life 1"
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Jonathan Doner
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Virginia-based artist Jonathan Doner's abstracted digital visions glisten with ethereal light. There is a pensive, grand logic weaving through each work, making this seemingly distorted view of something unidentifiable infinitely more important than the object itself. Dissecting his digital prints into innumerable units of smaller objects, Doner portrays his enigmatic world as a network of mosaics. Bright hues, dreamy forms and magnificently complex colors take on an otherworldly tint, dappled by masterly distributed light. Each small constituent part appears oddly blank, but taken as an element in the larger work, a hive of activity begins to play out between components.
Some of Doner’s works evoke familiar icons of the image world – shapes and objects taken from popular culture and art history – while others are surprisingly involved, layered arrangements of bright coloration, varied lighting effects and nebulous, floating shapes. In each of his pieces, Doner highlights the singular beauty of individual parts, simultaneously revealing the greater beauty of the whole.
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"Piscine Metamorph"
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"Floral Fair"
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Vicky Elliott
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Rich in a variety of soulful expressions, the digital art of Vicky Elliott has something to offer every art lover. She began her venture into visual art after discovering the powerful capabilities of Adobe Photoshop. Elliott quickly picked up ample computer skills and started producing fascinating imagery ranging from futuristic abstract configurations to ghostly amorphous figures rising from deep within a beautiful painterly abyss. “Monotony plays no part in my life, nor in my art,” she states. “There is nothing I like more that to take people on a great mental tour with my visions.” The textures that Elliott culls from Photoshop gives her work a hand-fashioned appeal not often achieved in digital art. After creating each piece, the image is Giclée printed on watercolor paper to complete the fine art aesthetic.
Born in Ireland to a family with a great appreciation for art, Elliott has a background in music and taught violin in Montessori schools. She later moved to the United States where she settled in Long Island, New York.
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"Lost Innocence"
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"New Life"
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Massimiliano Favilli
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Massimiliano Favilli synthesizes painting and photography, creating effervescent images that hover between documentation and expression. The fusion of photograph and painting allows Favilli to be both a social commentator and a free spirit. Initially, his photographs capture the corruption, the quietness, and the power struggles that characterize contemporary life. But when he works back into the images with paint, he opens them up to new possibilities. Prone figures become conduits of expressive energy and urban landscapes morph into dreamscapes. Determining whether the image is a photograph or a painting ultimately becomes impossible and irrelevant. Favilli eternalizes each moment and he aims to transcend the intolerance and prejudice that stifles every day reality by depicting.
Favilli learned from observing his father, also a photographer, that art can simultaneously critique society and express emotions. He has pursued art since childhood. Favilli has exhibited in both Italy and New York. He lives and works in Piombino, Italy.
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"Subway Dream"
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"At the Sunset"
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Arihiro Hamada
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Arihiro Hamada’s rich career as a designer and challenging history as a child of World War II era Japan led him to his current aesthetic: typography as a visual tool for promoting peace. Hamada’s dazzling digital prints often use letter forms and traditional Japanese imagery to embody the uplifting effects of international harmony. Light is a constant motif in Hamada’s work and letters and figures often rise toward a warm, inviting glow. The beauty of nature also drives Hamada’s prints. The naturalistic greens and browns that Hamada employs, coupled with the organic movement in his artwork, emphasize the implicit relationship that connects nature to the notion of world peace.
Hamada, who has been a successful designer since the 1960s, established his own design studio in 1985. Since the late 1990s, however, his focus has shifted to fine art and he redirected the fertile visual vocabulary he acquired as a designer toward creating poignant images that speak to the world’s need for reconciliation. Hamada lives and works in Osaka City.
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" Look for Mona Lisa of the 21st Century #00 1"
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"A Mind (ki) Dragon of the Space."
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Rory Isserow
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Rory Isserow’s beautiful, haunting photographs of natural and man-made forms have the ability to speak to us on many levels. Working with large scale photography on fiber based paper, Rory emphasizes the easily overlooked viewpoints in our world. He is acutely aware of how the interplay between atmospheric conditions, light and water in its various stages affects the emotive quality of a scene. Often avoiding traditional portraiture and landscape, he selects and crops the most interesting features of a subject for maximum graphic impact. The resulting abstractions are associated with moods, animals, natural phenomena and philosophy through witty or cryptic titles. Rory has an incredible sense for color, whether deep hues of sky blue or the blazing yellows and oranges of the morning sun splashed across a building facade, the palette remains crisp and sharply defined.
Rory was born in South Africa and holds a Masters in Computer Science, with an extensive career in the IT industry and commercial photography. He lives and works in London.
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"Lucca Sunrise"
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"Cumulus Iceus"
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Jemma Jacques
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Jemma Jacques’ two passions – anthropology and humanitarianism – are self-evident in the British, Los Angeles-based photographer’s black and white images of places and faces. Taken during several trips around the world, the tactile detail of her images accentuates surfaces and shadows, depicting subjects simultaneously realistic and mysteriously stylized. Brilliant reflections, flowing sunlight and gentle shadows evoke the soft hues of lives and monuments observed at a distance. This is the anthropologist in Jacques shining through her work, the vision of an outsider both enchanted by and invested in her subjects’ lives.
There is, however, a very involved side to Jacques’ art. The places and people she photographs are those who benefit directly from the sales of her works. Through her organization DCCT (Dreams Can Come True), Jacques uses art to support her humanitarian endeavors. Not surprisingly then, her work reflects the artist’s care for the people she photographs. Soft hues, gentle close-ups, awe-struck vistas, isolated areas of crisp and blurred detail, all intimate Jacques’ empathy for her subjects.
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"Prisoner of the Past"
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"Windows to the Soul"
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Ethel Jimenez
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I agree with Ruth Bernhard who said, "Light is my inspiration; my paint and brush."
I often hurry by scenes that I encounter on a daily basis without giving them a second thought. But, when I do stop and look at the interplay of shadow and light along with texture and color, the objects become wonderful abstractions. I shoot scenes that appeal to me and I hope they will resonate with the viewer. I hope my work will draw the viewer in and make him see in a different way.
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"Ellis Island of the West #16"
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"Alcatraz #32"
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David LaBella
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The greatest challenge to landscape photography is to its legitimacy as an art form. Comparisons with other subject matter, increased utilization of digital technology as a part of the process, market saturation with technically sound but occasionally repetitive images - all of these add up to much more than nagging doubts: indeed, uncertainty is always present. So much the better - for from doubt springs purpose and originality and the artist’s eye is stretched and made more bold by having felt its legitimacy called into question. For myself, I welcome the challenge and hope that I may contribute to the long and respected history of American landscape art.
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"Apples, Canfield Woods, Essex, CT"
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"White Sands National Park, NM"
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Christophe Moratal
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Franco-Swiss artist Christophe Moratal's stark photographs of people's bodies and faces engage two interwoven oppositions, one thematic the other aesthetic. Many of his images juxtapose figures rendered in striking monochromatic brilliance and detail with a surrounding darkness. Through Moratal's aesthetic manipulation of color and shading this intense visual separation between subject and surrounding seems on the verge of breaking, as if shadows were encroaching on his human figures.
This elemental and mesmerizing aesthetic of threat and vulnerability also informs the human forms Moratal depicts. His subjects are generally shown in portraits or full-body photographs, often striking a cautious pose in the latter and defiantly engaging the audience's gaze in the former. The impression conveyed by these figures is of people and bodies aware of their own vulnerability. Their skin and features rendered in crisp detail communicate an undeniable beauty that is also delicate. Ultimately Moratal's photographs pay homage to the beauty and fragility of humanity, so often forgotten behind the armature of modern technology.
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"Hybris Marsyas4"
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"Shadow and Light"
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No.
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No. photographs the urban landscape with a candid eye, capturing symmetries and relationships rarely if ever noticed by the city's regular passersby. The photographs bring across the labyrinthine nature of the urban space, communicating its overarching gravity and sensationalizing its proportions. As a result, the viewer finds himself a wanderer in No.'s framed capitals. No. grew up with a father in the French Navy and was inspired from a young age by her father's incessant travels across the world. This in turn prompted her to begin exploring at a young age, and freezing every sight that caught her attention with a child's sense of first-time wonder. Today, her work still retains this unique and curious quality, but has an added polish and sense of drama as well.
Having studied urbanism and geography, No. is passionately fond of architecture, and sees parallels between the city and its people, both being in her eyes "complex, changing, beautiful, sad…" And yet, as each work reveals and magnifies, No. sees "beauty where people see nothing."
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"columN fo.rest 2"
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"stoleN spo.t"
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Carol Reid
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Carol Reid’s photographs evidence an uninhibited ability to experiment and perceive. Her work occasionally has a sleek beauty reminiscent of Robert Mapplethorpe’s still life photographs but she also ventures into the wrought, textured vocabulary of process-oriented photographers like Sally Mann. Reid’s work is transfixing because it is as introspective as it is extroverted and these two sensibilities are in constant tension with each other. On one hand, Reid’s portrayals of plant life, light, and architecture suggest that looking at the world can lead to beautiful discoveries. On the other hand, Reid suggests that looking itself is but the beginning that leads to examining what lies within—she emphasizes the expressive qualities of seeing by capturing the colors, shapes and patterns that are there only in our mind’s eye.
While Reid’s photographs certainly do not exert any didactic, politicized message, they do something far more intrinsically powerful: they attempt to change the way people interact with the world around them. A self-taught artist, Reid lives and works in New York City.
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"Calla Blue"
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"Illumination"
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Makoto Sasaki
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Makoto Sasaki’s clean and elegant photographs masterfully utilize unique angles and negative space to create distinctively modern visions of the visual landscape of the world around him. Working in both color and black and white, Makoto’s photographs have a strongly graphic quality and elegant balance that draw on the Japanese artistic tradition while maintaining a clearly contemporary vision. Makoto’s photographs express a sense of hope and optimism in an unpredictable climate by capturing a rapidly evolving and fast-paced global community, thereby reconciling himself with his surroundings.
For Makoto, photography is a deeply personal, spiritual experience, and each press of the camera shutter is akin to a prayer or wish. He carefully selects and portrays his sleek images in an effort to communicate with the viewer and speak through visual means, directly the emotions, allowing the viewer to feel as part of something larger than himself. Sasaki Makoto lives and works in Yokohama, Japan.
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"Climbing in My Own"
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"Waiting Fingers"
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Shifra
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I love the bustle and noise of the city, and in it I discovered the magic world of reflections. This multilayered revelation is sometimes a perfect mirror image of reality, and at other times distorted, with the reflected image splintered into a strange, imaginary world filled with speckled shapes reduced into astonishing abstraction. More than once as I roamed the streets with my camera, I felt lifted from the real world and suspended in a parallel reality - a reality that only exists when it is spotted by the eye, and immortalized by the camera. More than once, I have wondered if the conventional world is really the only true reality. I capture and memorize with my camera - in a fraction of a second - an episode which is unique for the moment, because the same reflection will never appear again.
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"White Tree"
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"Ups or Downs"
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Ryan Van Der Hout
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Ryan Van Der Hout turns physical objects into conceptual beauty ripe with symbolism. He shows an apple, for example, with microscopic detail. While many artists have depicted the shapely red exterior of the fruit, Van Der Hout slices into decomposing fruit to show seeds sparkling like stars in the flesh of the fruit. In portraits of people, meanwhile, Van Der Hout prints mere outlines. Sometimes the figures are devoid of any filling, creating a stark contrast of black and white that allows the other object in the painting to become a symbolic focal point. Other times, a third color swirls within the outline of the body, suggestive of emotion.
The Canadian artist also creates religious icons in various design modes. There are classical renditions alongside photogramed interpretations that signify that beauty is a mere shadow of our own world. Even when he just prints shapes, Van Der Hout does so with such vivid colors that the centripetal patterns emit passion. Through photography, he examines the ever-transforming, circular nature of life.
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"In Chains"
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"Untitled (blue tree)"
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Benjamin van der Zalm
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Benjamin van der Zalm’s work elegantly emphasizes the contrast between the natural world’s vastness and life’s smaller moments. His sleek black and white images have all the nostalgic qualities of mid-20th Century landscape photography yet they also have an illusory allure, hovering between real and surreal. The natural imagery in his work is instantly familiar, yet the spiritual poignancy of the photographs suggests another, otherworldly dimension to his work.
Van der Zalm photographs majestic landscapes—ravines, canyons, or plateaus—but he always interrupts the grandeur with an intimate detail, merging awe-inspiring beauty with the more heartwarming beauty of personal moments. While van der Zalm’s work initially draws viewers in with its powerful aura, it also offers them access to a delicate personal experience with the natural world. Born in 1985 in Brasschaat, Belgium, van der Zalm studied art and metalwork in Antwerp. He currently lives and works in Ekeren, Antwerp.
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"Strength"
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"Under the Surface"
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Lawrence von Knorr
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Drawing inspiration from his artistically rich Pennsylvania Dutch roots, Lawrence von Knorr, creates brightly colored, beautiful visions of the world with a decidedly modern twist. Where his predecessors excelled in the folk arts, primarily furniture and hex painting, von Knorr uses the camera and digital imaging techniques to produce a painterly form of photography that transforms his mostly architectural subjects with radiant hues. By choosing empty spaces in faraway places, von Knorr takes viewers on a visual and mental journey, allowing them to escape into his pictures and for a moment imagine a world outside their own. Many of his bold architectural works recall German Expressionism for their strong use of emotive color. Von Knorr describes many of his landscape works as "Photo-Impressionism". By borrowing from the artistic traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch, the German Expressionists, and the French Impressionists, von Knorr conjures up scenes full of evocative color and visual interest.
A native of Pennsylvania, Lawrence von Knorr lives and works in Lewisberry.
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"Shadows of Katrina"
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"Red Room"
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Joy Wai
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Joy Wai's timeless photographs capture fleeting moments in a rapidly changing world. Behind the lens, Wai, focusing primarily on her former home of Beijing, coolly observes the advancing society and ingrained traditions that proliferate across the vast expanse of China. Against the terminally gray skies of Beijing, reds, oranges, greens, and yellows resonate within each image. By juxtaposing old cultural signifiers against new symbols of modernity and progress, Wai not only creates a historical document of a nation in transition, but composes a love song to the long-held traditions of China's past and present. In doing so, Joy Wai hopes to express the cultural shifts and struggles she faces as an individual, and more importantly those which we face as a global society.
Joy Wai began documenting China's dramatic changes in 2005 and the resulting photographs were exhibited in her one-woman show, Faces and Stages: My Journey in China at the Asian Cultural Center. The artist now lives and works in Manhattan.
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"A Girl Who Loves Blue Rose"
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"The New and the Old"
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