Craters represent that which is beyond our world. They are the evidence of ancient collisions—the trace and proof of thousands of pounds worth of extraterrestrial meteorite fragments blasting into the surface of the Earth at the rate of roughly 50,000 miles per hour. Our planet's history is punctuated by the consequence of such impact events—the mass extinction of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago standing as the best-known example.
Infused with a child's sense of wonder and an adult's preoccupation with the fragility of life, artist Stan Gaz spent six years traveling the globe photographing significant impact structures ranging in age from those formed in this century to billion-year-old specimens. However, Earth's meteorite craters are actually deteriorating at a rapid pace. The best-preserved impact sites are often difficult to access, located in desolate regions in inhospitable climates, but for Gaz they represented sites of pilgrimage—steps in a journey begun as a curious young boy accompanying his father on geological expeditions, culminating in the experience of hanging out an open-sided helicopter with a twenty-pound Hasselblad in hand, thousands of feet above the ground. The fruition of such adventures—Gaz's extremely large-scale, black-and-white aerial landscapes—undoubtedly transcend the mere documentary, instead intersecting the aesthetic of the truly sublime: "[A] combination of majesty, awe, and more than a little intimidation. . ." (to quote art historian, Robert Silberman).
Stan Gaz is a graduate of Art Center in California. His photography and sculpture have been extensively exhibited in the United States for nearly a decade.
The exhibition coincides with the release of the monograph, Sites of Impact: Meteorite Craters Around the World from Princeton Architectural Press, 144 pp., 85 b+w illus, $60.
ANDREA DIEFENBACH: AIDS IN ODESSA April 30 – June 6, 2009
Known as the "Pearl of the Black Sea," Odessa is the port city of the Ukraine, one of the cities most severely affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The AIDS epidemic there is symptomatic of the problems facing the country. According to estimates, 160,000 individuals in the city are infected with HIV--a staggering number for a total population of one million. Yet, despite its magnitude, AIDS remains a taboo subject in the public mind, and many people infected with the virus attempt to conceal their illness from their family out of a sense of shame and fear. The Ukrainian health-care system was caught completely unprepared to deal with such an aggressive epidemic, and the crisis continues simply to amplify.
Touched by an article about the plight that she saw in the German newspaper, "Die Zeit," artist Andrea Diefenbach set out to document the situation and raise awareness of the Ukraine's predicament. Her quiet, empathetic photo-graphic series focuses upon the acute epidemic in Odessa, the scale of which is virtually unknown in the West.
The exhibition coincides with the release of the monograph of the same title from Hatje Cantz, 160 pp., 100 color illus, $45
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