The Little Ones at Mercury Lounge, 04/24/08

Lumas Photography Exhibition

There’s a great photography exhibit at the Lumas Gallery in SoHo featuring an assortment of artists. I love the mantra of the gallery, which is to make fine art accessible. Signed and numbered editions of work can be purchased at a price range that doesn’t exclude everyone who isn’t in the super-rich category. And we’re not talking tiny postcard sizes; they’re generally respectable sizes that wouldn’t get lost on your wall.

The True Romance photo series by Jacques Olivar were particularly striking to me. The style is evocative of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, which I have always loved. In both artists’ work, there’s a juxtaposition between the sense of a candid moment while being obviously posed. There’s sensuality and vulnerability. A fragment of a story is being portrayed and the viewer is left to fill in the blanks. Olivar pushes the fashion model aesthetic of the subject further than Sherman did, thus widening the extreme between the person and the surroundings.

In Olivar’s piece, I love how colors of the subject’s dress and hair mesh perfectly with everything around her, yet she still stands out. It actually resonates with me personally, as if polar environments of my recent life are colliding: the fashionable beauty from New York City being dropped into the time-worn surroundings of a Texas dive bar.

Even though I was touting earlier the affordability of Lumas, this piece sits at the higher end, probably due to it’s large size. So as much as I’d like to have it adorn my wall, I’ll have to settle for a jpg on my blog. Although if she had been holding a Shiner, it might have sealed the deal.