Like the Spice presents new works by artist Johnna MacArthur

Johnna MacArthur
Between You and Me
(Images from the I and Thou archive)
February 23 - March 24, 2007
Artist’s Reception: Friday, February 23, 2007, 6:30-10:30pm
After Hours in Brooklyn: February 24, 2007, 6:00-11:00pm

Like the Spice Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of color and black and white photographs by Johnna MacArthur. The exhibition will open on Friday, February 23, and close on Saturday, March 24. There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, February 23, from 6:30 to 10:30 pm.

BETWEEN YOU AND ME is a selection of 30” x 36” C-prints and 11” x 14” silver gelatin prints culled from the artist’s expanding database of people she has known between 1972 and 2004. Predicated on the idea of portraiture as a conversation, MacArthur invites her subjects to participate in the construction of their own image. Subjects are asked to choose their own locations and, armed with the cable release, the moment of “click.” When she asks “where would you like to be seen, by me, by others?” MacArthur challenges her subjects, as well as her viewers, to ask if where we are defines who we are.

MacArthur transports her 4x5 camera and lighting equipment to settings as varied as bedrooms and mountaintops. She asserts herself as photographer through dense compositions and by directing her subjects gaze to meet her own. MacArthur writes:

I ask my subjects to look at me when the shutter is released. This is done not only to eliminate a mirror-like relationship between their gaze and the camera’s lens but also to request a commitment to the moment of seeing one another and to the camera as our witness. The result is a self-portrait, a portrait of I and thou.

Nodding to secrecy but also to something potentially untrue, BETWEEN YOU AND ME begs awareness of the fictions that make up any portrait and of the gaps between an image projected and an image perceived. The project’s title, I & Thou, is appropriated from Martin Buber’s acclaimed classic and invokes Buber’s notions of standing in relation to an Other and to the inherent complexities of this mutable exchange.

As in her multi media installations and performance based video vignettes, MacArthur continues to explore process, endurance, and courted interruption in BETWEEN YOU AND ME (images from the I & Thou archive).

Johnna MacArthur received her BA in photography and psychology from Bennington College, Bennington, VT in 1994 and her MFA from School of Visual Arts, MFA Photography and Related Media Department, New York, NY in 1996. From 2000 - 2005, Johnna MacArthur was a visiting artist/assistant professor in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY.

MacArthur’s work has been exhibited at Apex Art C.P., New York, NY; Bucknell Art Gallery, Lewisburg, PA; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, NY; ICA, London; Impakt Festival, Utrect, The Netherlands; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and P.S.1, New York, NY. She currently lives and works in New York City.