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Sheree Hovsepian
Exhibition: Sheree Hovsepian
Dates: March 11 - April 22, 2017

Higher Pictures is pleased to present new work by Sheree Hovsepian. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York and with the gallery.

Hovsepian’s new series of assemblages continues her practice of combining photographic work with varied studio art disciplines. Darkroom photography is the consistent frame of reference for work that has included elements of painting, macrame, lost-wax casting, and woodworking.

Here, gelatin silver photographs and photograms—taken from the artist’s personal archive made over the years and used both altered or unmodified—are layered into compositions, along with pieces of sheer black or tan fabric that allude to women’s hosiery. The fabric is cut, stretched, and wrapped around the prints, creating areas of varying opacity above the photographs as well as eye-shaped apertures leaving the underlying images completely exposed. In larger-scale works directly mounted to the wall, lengths of black fabric are pinned at four corners, resembling flayed skin and, just as readily, a protective shroud; behind, there are gently suspended rolls of paper cascading down the length of the fabric or a partially unfurled photogram.

Hovsepian asserts the materiality of the photographic medium and the physicality of the process of making a photograph. In her work the photograph is malleable, both conceptually and as raw material. The prints are gently curled, rolled, and draped — carefully teased into place — and held gently by their fabric enclosures. Hovsepian creates a supremely tactile, haptic experience of a medium that is paradoxically defined, in literal terms, as vision, disembodied.

Sheree Hovsepian (b. 1974) earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. Recent solo exhibitions include Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago (2015) and The Whole Other, Kristen Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2014). Hovsepian’s work was also included in the recent exhibitions New Photography, 2016 Next Wave Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Photography Is Magic, Aperture Foundation (2016). Her work is held in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions. Hovsepian lives and works in New York City.

For more information please contact Kathryn McElroy at 212-249-6100.