Persona-Personae in New York

now through February 24, 2006


Sara Tecchia Roma New York is proud to present PERSONA-PERSONAE, a group show of new work exploring different pathways into both psychological portraiture and the photographic medium.

http://www.saratecchia.com/gallery/current/05_persona_personae/

Sara Tecchia Roma New York, 529 West 20th Street, 2nd floor, NYC



BEN E GRAHAM's series, People At The Start Of The New Century, seeks to "pull people from their own egos and surroundings back to their neglected being." Using inversed photography and hyper-stylized electronic drawings, Graham captures "not so much vulnerabilities, but the essential connection that humans feel for one another when they feel safe." Most of his portraits portray women who have broken his heart.

An interview by G. H. Hovagiman with Ben E Graham is podcast online at


Media artist CHRISTINA MCPHEE presents large-scale images from her Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, a meditation on seismic memory and identify along the San Andreas Fault in California. The landscape is a riddle of identity: who is in place, is place persona(e)? Seismic data, together with layers of documentary video stills, film and digital photography imply both a landscape of information and a physical presence. The persona of the artist disappears within the digital trace. Black depths of field absorb and project fragments of traumatic memory. The architectural scale of the prints evokes the ‘big data’ of current natural disasters–the tsunami, Katrina–and the amnesia that follows. She recalls Persephone–the goddess who disappears into the ground, and is reborn in spring–as if to suggest a cybernetic link between site, identity, and memory.

This is the first time that a group of digital chromogenic prints from the Diaries will be seen in New York City. Videos from the related Carrizo Quartet series, incorporating Diaries content, were presented in a solo exhibition in Sweden at Bildmuseet, December 2005 - January 2006, ( . The Diaries will travel to Cartes Center for Art and Technology, Espoo, Finland (Helsinki) May to September 2006 as part of a 5 year retrospective curated by Maria Tjader-Knight. A related net artwork, using near-live ground motion data is archived at Whitney Museum of American Art Artport



Award-winning photographer LUCIEN SAMAHA also presents a new series, "From Above" approaching the portrait from quite literally a new angle. Using photos taken from a balcony in Venice, Samaha lifts his subjects from their settings, floating them in a white void free of distraction. He has also recreated his Italian balcony to present an experience pregnant with an angelic voyeurism.

Samaha is also showing a selection of "As Promised…," his ongoing e- mail archive project. With well over 4000 entries to date, Samaha records everyday and extraordinary people stating their e-mail addresses. Samaha interviews day and night, from the club scene to the street. The result is a series of intimate portraits as well as a clever play on the perfect mailing list. Now in its debut in the United States, "As Promised…." secured Samaha a nomination for last year's Nam June Paik Award in Germany.

Contemporary to PERSONA-PERSONAE in Germany, the exhibition "Gut ist was Gefallt (Good is what is liked)" , part of the series Frankfurter Positions, at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst (Museum of Modern Art) Frankfurt am Main has just opened with work by Lucien Samaha, together with Wolfgang Tillmans (with his students of the Stadtschule) and Hans-Peter Feldmann. The show runs from January 15th to February 15th, 2006.




SARA TECCHIA ROMA NEW YORK is located at 529 West 20th Street, between Tenth Avenue and Eleventh Avenue. The gallery is on the second floor. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For more information, contact 212-741-2900, [email protected] or visit