Discoveries of the Meeting Place

Mariette Pathy Allen (United States)
Carolle Benitah (Morocco/France)
Martin Bogren (Sweden)
Calé (Rio de Janeiro)
José Guerrero (Mexico)
Jun Itoi (Japan)
Larson and Shindelman (United States)
Laís Pontes (Brazil/United States)
Jana Romanova (Russia)
Mariela Sancari (Argentina/Mexico)

Installation view of José Guerrero's photographs in the exhibition Discoveries of the Meeting Place 2014 at FotoFest. Photo courtesy of Nash Baker.

The tenth edition of the Discoveries of the Meeting Place delves into the essence of humanity, focusing on both the way we interact with each other and the impact we have on the landscape. The range of work at the 2014 Discoveries of the Meeting Place exhibition reflects the diversity of the international work presented at FotoFest’s Meeting Place Portfolio Reviews for artists, held every two years at the Biennial.

Mariette Pathy Allen has explored transgender issues around the world for more than twenty years. For this project, she focused on Cuba and two transgender women, Amanda and Nomi, who openly shared their world with the artist. Brazilian artist Calè has photographed young urban individuals, searching for their inner “nature” amid the city landscape.

Laís Pontes’s Born Nowhere is the product of a social media performance. Pontes posted fictional, digitally created portraits (based on her own likeness) and encouraged her network to imagine the characters’ personalities, revealing the human impulse to produce stereotypes based on looks alone. Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman captured tweets from the data stream, then photographed the physical locations of those tweets gleaned from the photographs’ metadata. The pairing of tweet and image prompts a range of emotion, from humor to loneliness.

Martin Bogren’s Tractor Boys investigates a new generation of teenage car culture in Sweden, where boys and girls bypass the legal and physical restraints placed on rural vehicles, turning tractors into race cars. Josè Guerrero has focused on the slow but continual changes in the southwestern landscape in his series To Come Back.

In different ways, both Mariela Sancari and Jun Itoi have used photography to address the sudden loss of their fathers. Japanese artist Itoi has photographed the forest and unique sunlight of Finland, his childhood home and the place of his father’s suicide. Sancari has staged ambiguous family narratives with her twin sister, leaving the viewer to question whether her memories are real or imaginary.

Carolle Bénitah also has explored family narratives, combining family photographs, thread, and beads in works that blend present-day emotions with a difficult family past. Jana Romanova’s series of photographs of young couples expecting a child shows them in bed, caught in their quiet, private moments just before the start of the day.

Each of these ten artists was selected as a particularly significant “discovery” by one of ten international reviewers chosen by FotoFest from the 160 curators, editors, publishers, gallery owners, and collectors who looked at the artists’ work at the 2012 Biennial Meeting Place.

About the artists
Mariette Pathy Allen (United States)
Mariette graduated from Vassar College and received an MFA in painting from the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She won an NYSCA grant in 1988. Ms. Allen has been a consultant and still photographer on five films. “Southern Comfort”, the most recent, won the 2001 Documentary Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Mariette Pathy Allen’s work is in the permanent collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the George Eastman House; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Frankfurt, among others. Ms. Allen has made hundreds of slide presentations at academic and other organizations. Mariette Pathy Allen’s book, “The Gender Frontier” (Kehrer) won the 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the transgender/genderqueer category. Some of the images in the book were included in the “7th International Exhibition of Photography” held in Mannheim/Ludwigshafen during the summer of 2005. Ms. Allen is the author of “Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them” (Dutton, 1989). An image from the book was included in the exhibition of feminist artists in the Sackler Collection at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008-2009. Her newest book: “TransCuba” will be published in 2014 by Daylight Books. Her work has been exhibited widely, in the United States and internationally.

Carolle Benitah (Morocco/France)
After graduating from Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne (Paris), Carolle Benitah worked as a fashion designer for ten years. She decided to study photography in 2001, and attended classes of photography in Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Luminy in Marseille, courses on photography with Christie’s Education in Paris, as well as evening courses in Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Photographie in Arles, and art classes in Université du Temps Disponible in Marseille. She participated in many photography workshops in France and abroad, working with Lise Sarfati, Antoine d’Agata, Klavdji Sluban, Mary Ellen Mark among others.

Some recent exhibitions include Pavillon de Vendome in Aix en Provence (France), Galerie Esther Woerderhoff, Paris, Galerie 127, Marrakech; Festival Pingyao, China, Festival Photomed, France; Festival de la Luz, Buenos Aires and fotofestiwal in Lodz (Poland). Her work has been printed in such magazines as Leica World, Shots Magazine, PHOTOS NOUVELLES 55, Images Magazine, SPOT, Foto Novini, De l’Air and Diptyk.

Her Art is in institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston or Bibliothèque Nationale de France and in prestigious private collections such as Marin Karmitz (Paris), Jan de Bont (Los Angeles) Sir Mark Fhers Haukhol (Houston), and collection Galila in Bruxelles to name some. such as the Mercosur Biennial (2007), the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation (2009) and the Project Row Houses (2012). His first Solo Museum Exhibition in the US will be held at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston (2014).

Martin Bogren (Sweden)
Martin Bogren was born 1967 in Sweden and is now based in Malmo. His photographic practice has developed by a personal documentary tradition in the early 90’s – photographing bands and artists. His first book was a close-up of The Cardigans, based on several tours with the band. The book Been It was published 1996.

Bogren's work became widely known in the mid-2000s as the book Ocean was published. It was shortlisted for Best Photobook in Arles 2009 and received the honorable prize for the Best Photobook in Sweden the same year. In 2011 Lowlands was exhibited at Fotografiska in Stockholm and published by Max Strom. The same year this work was awarded Scanpix Photography Prize in Sweden. In 2013 Tractor Boys was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing, with a foreword by Christian Caujolle, and the exhibition will be touring in Switzerland, France, and Sweden during 2013.

Martin's work has been widely exhibited in Scandinavia, Europé, and Asia and his work is included in several books/catalogues and has been featured in various publications including British Journal of Photography, Eyemazing, l`Ímages and Dulce Equis Negra amongst others. His work is represented in several public and private collections including Bibliothèque du Nationale de France, Oregon Fine Art Museum and Fotografiska Stockholm.

Calé (Rio de Janeiro)
Calé has been an editorial and commercial photographer for the last 16 years, having contributed to publications such as National Geographic, Newsweek, Vogue, GQ, NY Times among others. In the last 3 years, he has been dedicating more time to his artwork, part of a big life change he has gone through. His work looks into the universe of his inner experiences and the questions of love, sexuality, identity and spirituality arise. His work has been seen in galleries, museums and festivals in Denmark, Russia, Ireland, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and USA.

José Guerrero (Mexico)
José Guerrero, trained in architectural technique, works in the field of photography. The formal approaches involved in his work are the express state of human action in urban border areas, looking into the process of the expansion of cities and the seasonal cycles that these processes change. His work is structured in thematic series that have to do with toponymy; despite the singularity of the artist’s visual scheme, constant uncertain readings arise among his works, so that finally they suggest a kind of neutral space, without identity, impossible to associate with a specific geographic context for certain. Guerrero was awarded the Manuel Rivera Grant in 2011 and 2012 for the development of a collaborative project with Mark Klett, an American artist and professor at the University of Arizona, Phoenix. 

Jun Itoi (Japan)
Jun Itoi is a photographic artist based in Tokyo, Japan. Through his photographic works, Itoi deals with issues such as self-identity, childhood memory, and the boundary between public and private. The experience of living in foreign countries for one-third of his life is part of the foundation in his image-making. His latest project is about the light in the forest as a metaphor for the divider between life and death. After his father’s sudden death, he started photographing light in forests of Japan, and Finland. This group of works, titled “Cantos Familia” has been exhibited at the National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan; the Kurumaya Museum of Art, Tochigi; the Ginza Nikon Salon, Tokyo, Japan; and the Gallery Hippolyte, Helsinki, Finland. His other works have been featured in more than 30 exhibitions internationally and are included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Houston Center for Photography. He is a recipient of the Grant for Emerging Artists by the Japanese Ministry of Culture; artist residence of Fiskars, Finland; fellowship by Houston Center for Photography; and fellowship by National Graduate Seminar, American Photography Institute of New York. Itoi received a B.F.A. in Photography from Herron School of Art, and an M.F.A. in Photography from the University of North Texas. He was a visiting assistant professor of Photography at Indiana University.

Larson and Shindelman (United States)
Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman’s collaborative work focuses on the cultural understanding of distance as perceived in modern life and network culture. Their projects have recently been featured in Wired Magazine, The Picture Show from NPR, The Dish, PetaPixel, Fast Company, Gizmodo, Hyperallergic, the New York Times, Hostshoe Magazine, the Washington Post, Utne Reader, Flavorwire, Frieze Magazine, the British Journal of Photography, the BBC News Viewfinder, and on the radio program Marketplace Tech Report.

Larson & Shindelman’s recent project Geolocation tracks GPS coordinates associated with Twitter tweets and pairs the text with a photograph of the originating site to mark the virtual information in the real world. New site-specific work from the series was recently completed for Third Space Gallery in New Brunswick, the Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts in California, and the Format International Photography Festival in the UK. They created a site-specific series of digital billboards for the Atlanta Celebrates Photography Public Art Commission 2012, a time-lapse video for the final issue of Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art, and are currently completing a site-specific public artwork for the Indianapolis International Airport. In 2012, they were awarded an artist residency at Light Work in Syracuse, NY and will be artists in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2013.

Their solo exhibitions include Light House in Wolverhampton, Blue Sky in Portland, United Photo Industries in Brooklyn, and the Contemporary Arts Center Las Vegas. Selections have been shown at the Light Factory in Charlotte, the FotoFestiwal in Poland, the Athens Photo Festival in Greece, the Houston Center for Photography, Baltimore Museum of Art, the Moscow International Biennale in Russia, RAIQ in Montréal, Peloton in Australia, and Conflux Festival in NYC. Their work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Portland Art Museum.

Nate Larson (b. 1978, West Lafayette, IN) is full-time faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He received his MFA from The Ohio State University in 2002. Marni Shindelman (b. 1977, Clearwater, FL) is Lecturer in Photography at the University of Georgia. She received her MFA from the University of Florida in 2002.

Laís Pontes (Brazil/United States)
Laís Pontes was born in 1981, in Fortaleza, Brazil. She is currently pursuing her Master in Fine Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). In 2011 she graduated from the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. Her artwork is a process of research into social media issues and concerns of our time. She is interested in the construction of identity in the age of social media. Her artistic practice exists in the liminal space between the real and the digital. The artist uses virtual platforms such as Facebook and Instagram as real tools in the process of creation in the same way as the camera, canvas, and performance. The artist invites viewers to experience, interact, and develop a critical view of social media and how it affects our lives. Pontes has been exhibiting her work worldwide. Her work has been featured in Paraty em Foco 7th International Photo Festival in Brazil (2011), 6th Arte Laguna Prize in Italy (2012), Filter Photo Festival in Chicago (2011). Her project Born Nowhere received the Juror’s Prize from Barbara DeGenevieve at Filter Photo Festival in Chicago. Her work has been published in well-known magazines and blogs in South Korea, Romania, Spain, Italy, USA, Brazil and Mexico. These publications include El País, The Creators Project, Lenscratch, Itsliquid and PDN Pulse.

Jana Romanova (Russia)
Jana Romanova was born in 1984 in Russia, and got a degree in journalism from Saint-Petersburg State University. Her long-term documentary projects were selected for a number of exhibitions all over the world. In 2011-2012, her works were included in the Backlight Festival exposition (Finland), Encuentros Abietros (Argentina) and Fotovisa Krasnodar (Russia). She got several prizes and honorable mentions all over the world, such as PDN Photo Annual (USA) in 2011 and Photography Book Now by Blurb 2011 in the documentary category. Her works are represented by Anzenberger Gallery (Austria) and LookOut gallery (Poland). In 2011 she became a teacher of documentary photography at the Faculty of Photojournalists in Saint-Petersburg.

Mariela Sancari (Argentina/Mexico)
Mariela Sancari was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1976.

Graduated from Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, where she lives since 1997, her work has been widely awarded: Honorable Mention in National Biennial Artemergente CONARTE Monterrey 2012, Honorable Mention in the Mexican Contemporary Photography Contest 2012, Coahuila, Mexico; recipient of the Artist in Residency Program FONCA-CONACYT for a project in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2013; nominated for the 2013 PDN´s 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch; selected to participate in Trasatlantica, PHOTOESPAÑA; winner of the 3rd National Photography Contest 2012, La Membrana, Guadalajara, Mexico; shorlisted for the 2012 APA/Lucie Foundation Scholarship, Los Angeles, USA, among others.

She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Mexico City, Guatemala, Madrid, Barcelona, New York, Colorado and Cork, Ireland and four solo exhibitions in the Embassy of Argentina in Mexico, in Gallery Acceso B in Mexico City in 2010, at Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City in 2012 and in Fotogalería del Teatro San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina curated by Juan Travnick in 2013.

Her work revolves around identity and memory and the way that both are affected by time and space. She examines personal relationships related to memory and the thin and elusive line dividing memories and fiction.

DISCOVERIES OF THE MEETING PLACE AND THE FOTOFEST 2014 BIENNIAL are generously supported by The Cullen Foundation; The Brown Foundation Inc.; Houston Endowment, Inc.; National Endowment for the Arts; City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance; Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation; The Wortham Foundation; Texas Commission on the Arts; FotoFest Board of Directors; Brookfield Office Properties

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