Blue Sky October 2021 Exhibitions
Manal Abu-Shaheen: Mapping Utopia
Noelle Mason: X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility
Oct 7 - 30, 2021
Blue Sky is pleased to announce Mapping Utopia, an exhibition of photographs by Manal Abu-Shaheen.
Artist talk: October 9, 11 am PT at Blue Sky
Manal Abu-Shheen, Upside Down, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021
Manal Abu-Shheen, Dukkan, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021
Mapping Utopia is a selection of landscape and street photographs from Manal Abu-Shaheen’s ongoing series based in Beirut, where she was born. Shot on location, this series began with exploring advertising and urban construction, two of the driving forces of Beirut’s economy. A decade-long construction boom, aided by foreign investments and neoliberal interest, reshaped the city, rendering it almost unrecognizable. Alongside the development, Abu-Shaheen examines the monumental scale and congestion of western advertising in relationship to the post-war developing urban setting, bringing idealized images of one culture in contact with the realities of another. Motivated by a lack of visual records of the landscape in Lebanon, Abu-Shaheen seeks to build her own photographic archive of what Beirut looks like today: a city dominated by billboards purporting a mythologized western ideal that is incongruous in the post-conflict city.
Manal Abu-Shaheen (Lebanese-American, b. 1982) was born in Beirut and currently lives and works in the Bronx, NY. Her solo exhibitions include 2d Skin, Soloway, Brooklyn, NY; Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, NJ; and Beta World City, LORD LUDD, Philadelphia, PA. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY Old Westbury, NY; The Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea; Queens Museum, NY; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY. She is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, A.I.R Gallery Fellowship, and AIM Residency at the Bronx Museum. Abu-Shaheen holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and M.F.A in Photography from Yale School of Art. She teaches at The City College of New York.
Blue Sky is pleased to announce the 2019 Critical Mass Solo Exhibition, X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility by Noelle Mason.
Artist talk: October 7, 5 pm PT at Blue Sky
Noelle Mason, Backscatter Blueprint (The Deposition), 2020
Noelle Mason, Backscatter Blueprint (Vientra de la Bestia), 2020
Noelle Mason is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is about the subtle seductiveness of power facilitated by systems of visual and institutional control. X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility is a body of work about the phenomenological effects of vision technologies on the perception of undocumented immigrants. The images used in this series were collected from the Border Patrol and border-watching vigilante websites. This project remediates images made by machine vision technologies that are used to patrol international borders into the 19th century processes of cyanotype and wet-plate collodion, as well as hand woven tapestries and embroideries.
Noelle Mason (American, b. 1977) has shown nationally and internationally including the National Museum of Mexican Art, Orlando Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. They are the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant, Jerome fellowship, Santo Foundation Individual Artist Grant, the Florida Prize for Contemporary Art and the Southern Prize. They hold a BA in both theatre and fine arts from the University of California, Irvine and received their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Noelle currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Art at the University of South Florida and is the Founding Director and Curator of Parallelogram Gallery in Tampa, FL.