For immediate release                                                                                     July 2, 2007 Mike Fitzpatrick / Ilkka Uimonen: Art Dealer Ties & One Billion, The Hundred Million Chinese July 11 - August 10, 2007 Higher Pictures presents Mike Fitzpatrick and Ilkka Uimonen Art Dealer Ties & One Billion, The Hundred Million Chinese. The exhibitiion will run from the 11th of July through the 10th of August, 2007. Art Dealer Ties is a 'Pomococo' project conceived and executed in New York City in the mid 1990's by Irish artist and curator Mike Fitzpatrick while in residency at the Clocktower PS1 studioes and the at the Whitney Independent Study Program.  Fitzpatrick sought to engage and map the gallerist community of New York City. Noting the doorstep to doorstep proximity of Canal Street's overflowing bins of $3 neckties with the sophisticated world of SoHo's white cubed dealers, Fitzpatrick fused the conceptual with the acutal, printing his 35mm snapped images of the dealers on identical white neckties. The fifty-nine neckties highlight each dealer's uniqueness of character and spirit, while documenting a historical period of art dealing.  Dealers include: Bronwyn Keenan, Brooke Alexander, Jose Freire, Stefano Basilico, Per Skarstedt, June Kelly, Jack Tilton, Steffany Martz, David Zwirner, Angela Westwater and forty-nine others. While being an artist, Fitzpatrick also directs the Limerick City Gallery of Art and is Commissioner for the Irish Pavilion for the 52nd Venice Biennale where he curated a critically acclaimed show by Gerard Byrne. Ilkka Uimonen's One Billion, Three Hundred Million Chinese is the artist's attempt to use the photographic medium as a philisophical inquiry into the nature of mental and physical space.  Over a two day period while traveling in Beijing, Uimonen photographed one thousand, three hundred Chinese citizens (representing a ration of one million to one) riding the subway to and from work.  One third of them will be displayed here. Uimonen writes in an email: "I was attempting to comprehend the feeling that is experienced internally when confronted with distant awareness... even though our phusical space was close then mental distance between our lives was great... I wanted to portray them as a collective face not individuals... The prints are made using an ink jet printer and then are re-photographed through the paper... ending up with a multi layer photograph that has the texture of the paper embedded in it... by doing this in stages... I gain the distance that is required to see the images as a singular layer instead of photographs that are disconnected from each other... I add to the photograph an additional space and remove it from registering as reality..." Ilkka Uimonen was born in Finland in 1966 just south of the Arctic Circle.  He attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, Netherlands.  He has been a resident of New York since the early 1990's. His work has appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine. He is a member of Magnum Photos.