LISA ROSS | 'UNREVEALED'

Download Release

April 16th - June 13th, 2009

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery is very pleased to present Unrevealed by Lisa Ross, a solo exhibition comprised of photographs and video works made at holy sites in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Northwest China.

Lisa Ross's work Concerns itself mainly with memory, temporality and the visual expression of faith. It is on the embodiment of the secular and the sacred that this work relies; a reconceptualization of the corporeal and its interdependence with time and place.

The Solemnity of Ross's aesthetic incites contemplation: narratives, both real and imagined, emerge from her photographs viscerally engaging the viewer in rituals of visitation and gestures of devotion.

Included are two video pieces in which the body merges with the landscape and becomes the vehicle which invites - and desires - that the ephemeral become its own breathing, living entity: the only audible sound that of the wind and flags blowing in the desert.

Impermanence becomes tangible as the language of these works unfolds, then retracts. It is affirmed tha life and death are never finite; that the articulation of grief - as well as transcendence - is a collective experience. Unrevealed disarms the notion that trajectories may have only one beginning and one end. (Sherisse Alvarez)

May 4th, 2009 Lisa Ross The New Yorker, (Vince Aletti)

July 25th, 2008 Pearse, Emma, “Artist Lisa Ross Takes a Gravely Moving Photograph” New York Magazine

April 21st, 2006 Cotter, Holland, “Art in Review,” The New York Times

May 6th,2006 Madenci, Su, “Revelations from a Restricted Territory”, Genis Aci, Istanbul, Turkey

May,18-24, 2006 Kellard, Joseph, ”Photographer Brings Journeys Home”, The Long Island Herald

July 12th, 2006 Ayers, Robert, “Fair Review: The Affordable Art Fair,”

About Lisa Ross:

Using a visual medium to record something as intangible as faith, as subjective as spirituality, may seem like a paradox; however, it is a challenge that has allowed Lisa to investigate bounderies of genre. By focusing primarily on the sites themselves - their delicate structures, ephemeral materials & organic connection to the desert landscape - Lisa hopes to reveal elements of transcendence and devotion. The decision not to include people in the religous landscape departs from a photojournalistic reading, therby creating a direct intimate experience betweeen viewer and object.

Solo Exhbitions

2009 Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, projected date April 16-May 30, 2009

2006 Nelson Hancock Gallery, Traces of Devotion, Brooklyn, NY

2005 Lee Niger Studio, Burial Sites in Former East Turkestan, New York, NY

2005 Georgetown University, Sufi Mystical Experiences in Contemporary Xinjiang, Washington, DC

Group Exhbitions

2009 Gallery 456, How Chinese, New York, NY. Opening Date May 1st

2009 Rencontre D'Arles, Arles, France, July 7-September 3rd, Guest Curator Nan Goldin

2009 Bronx Museum, projected date June 2, 2009

2009 Affirmation Arts, PS:Parsing Spirituality, New York, NY

2008 Bellwether Gallery, If Love could have Saved You….You Would have Lived Forever, New York, NY

2008 Higher Pictures Gallery, Cosmological Embeddedness or The Flying Spaghetti Monster, New York, NY

2008 Lump Gallery, Heroes, Raleigh, North Carolina

2007 Dinaburg Arts, Fall Vernissage, New York, NY

2007 KINZ, TILLOU + FEIGEN, “By Invitation Only”, New York, NY

2006 Murray Guy Gallery, Lie of the Land, New York, NY

2005 Nelson Hancock Gallery, Landscapes, New York, NY

2003 Daniel Silverstein Gallery, Spiritual Hunger, New York, NY

2003 Art et Amicitiae, Violent Violence, curator elin o’Hara slavick,Amsterdam, NL

Publication

2008 Steppe Magazine Summer 2008, On Ancient Central Asian Tracks, p.50-80 Images and captions by Lisa Ross, Text by Alexander Papas

Awards and Fellowships

2008-09 Bronx Museum Artist In the Marketplace Fellow

2001-03 Hayward Prize, American Austrian Foundation. Salzburg Arts Academie, Austria. Juror: Lynne Cooke. (Two time recipient)

1991-2001 Merit Scholarship, Columbia University, New York, NY

Lectures/Presentations

2007 Artists Talk on Art, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY

2007 Uyghurs on the Silk Road, UC Berkeley, San Francisco, CA

2007 Silk Road House, San Francisco, Ca

2006 Presentation/Talk (with Rushan Gul, Uyghur Scholar), Murray Guy Gallery, New York, NY

2006 The Thirteenth Annual Central Eurasian Studies Conference Indiana University, Picturing the Ineffable, Bloomington

2006 IVth Turkish Studies Conference, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

2005 “Les Pèlerinages des Uyghurs,” 2nd Annual International Conference on Sufism, Music, and Culture, Tlecmen, Algeria

2004 “Contemporary Images of Sufi Mazars in East Turkestan,” University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK