That Which Is: Marcia Lippman

June 1 - July 21, 2013

Photography dealer Kathy McCarver Root and her gallery, KMR Arts, proudly announce the opening of its latest show of fine art photography, “That Which Is: Marcia Lippman.” The exhibition will open June 1 with a reception with the artist from 2-5pm and will continue through July 20, 2013.

On June 1, 2013, KMR Arts will open an exhibition of new work by Marcia Lippman. Entitled That Which Is, this work represents an entirely new direction for the artist, yet it also connects deeply as a continuum of Lippman’s quest for beauty in the world and within life itself. The exhibit consists of Lippman’s exquisite gelatin silver prints combined with found photographs collected during decades of travels. The various vernacular vintage photographs are in the form of portraits, snapshots, hand colored photographs, cabinet cards, tintypes, and salt prints. Both Lippman’s prints and the found photographs are presented in groups that the artist has dubbed Cantos. These Cantos serve as visual poems or memoirs. At the heart of this exhibition is the idea that memory and photography share an alchemical relationship: photographs lead to and are closely connected to memory. The show addresses the ephemeral nature of memory, desire, secrets, truth, fiction, textures, time. The combination of Lippman’s own photographs with these found photographs results in a recontextualizing of both into something altogether new. The exhibition and the images in it invite the viewer to make his or her own narrative as inspired by the images in the Cantos.

Kathy McCarver Root says, “It has been exciting to witness the development of this body of Marcia’s work. These Cantos connect to the innermost human desire to create a personal narrative through images. This exhibition will ultimately have the feeling of an installation, a complete vision from an artist comprised of over 100 pieces. This work engages with a movement within the world of contemporary art; artists like Tacita Dean, Lorna Simpson, Duane Michals, and Dan Estabrook are incorporating found anonymous photographs into their work and giving them an entirely new context while undermining our traditional view that historical photographs are objective documents.”

Marcia Lippman has spent much of her life traveling the globe (Burma, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, India, England, France, Argentina, Italy, Czechoslovakia among others) to destinations that possess a deep sense of memory, of history, and of mystery. Her soulful, evocative, and meditative photographs resulted in a monograph entitled Sacred Encounters, (Edition Stemmle, 2000). A second monograph, West Point, (Stemmle, 2001), with an introduction by James Salter, comprised of photographs created during a year in residence at West Point and was published on the anniversary of West Point’s bicentennial. Lippman is a recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) grants and has been an influential teacher at Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts for many years.