GrandLife and Passionate Magazine were proud to present Danish artist Ditte Gantriis' project "A Note on Cravings", on display at Tribeca Grand Hotel from March 5th - 8th, 2009 coinciding with The Armory Show 2009.  The opening reception was held on March 6th, 2009 with music provided by DJ Lissie Trullie.

Gantriis draws inspiration from several 20th Century movements and other seedier sources to create an elegant and intensely erotic experience. The series introduces a new style of work for the artist, combining illustration and collage techniques. "A Note on Cravings" evokes Russian constructivism, Art Deco, and commercial illustrations of the 1950s. This was Gantriis' first show in the United States. Gantriis' work was featured in the debut issue of Passionate Magazine, an emerging-artists portfolio, launching at The Armory Show 2009.

The exhibit was also sponsored by Art Remix Projects, an emerging arts organization based in New York and Paris focused on new models for art production and the art market.

Tribeca Grand was proud to host an exciting exclusive film and video project in collaboration with VOLTA NY and Sketch Gallery during the Armory Show 2009.  Amanda Coulson, director of VOLTA NY, the darling of the Armory Show satellite fairs, commissioned Natalie Kovacs and Victoria Brooks to curate a 3-part project, entitled A New Stance for Tomorrow, including a site-specific screening program for Tribeca Grand:

A New Stance for Tomorrow - Screening Program Parts 1 & 2
The program was split into two parts, conceptually focused around the films of Charles and Ray Eames from the 1950s and 1980s and was screened daily in the Grand Screen at Tribeca Grand throughout the Armory Show. 

A New Stance for Tomorrow – Part 2 Wildflowers of Manitoba mixed-media performative installation
The second major piece was displayed in Tribeca Grand’s Sanctum throughout the Armory Show and comprised an arresting mixed media work that incorporated film, performance and a domed installation by Noam Gonick and Luis Jacob. Wildflowers of Manitoba is both a utopian vision of an idealistic world and a model or vision of how things to come could be.

A New Stance for Tomorrow – Part 3 Soundscape and installation at VOLTA NY 7W
A New Stance for Tomorrow continued in the elevators at 7W – the site of VOLTA NY with a series of artists’ soundscapes and audio projects, including with Byron Broadbent’s Cine-Pod – a solar-powered cinema made from ‘smart glass’ – a switchable material that transforms from translucent to opaque with the start and end of a screening.

Following on from last year’s success, Tribeca Grand hosted VOLTA NY’s VIP Opening Reception on March 5th, 2009 with a special preview of A New Stance for Tomorrow. The event was co-hosted with the Guggenheim’s Young Collectors Council and VOLTA NY’s media sponsor, Art Review, and beverage sponsors, Grolsch beer, Basil Hayden and Mansinthe – Marilyn Manson’s own brand absinthe.  Trèfles a 4 Fleurs scented candles were provided courtesy of L’Artisan Parfumeur.

For his first solo show at the Soho Grand Hotel, Ruvan Wijesooriya shows a departure from his vivid explorations of subculture and enters a more demure, melancholic landscape. The images featured in the show deals with lost ideals, beauty and disappointment whilst maintaining the humor, curiosity and quirkiness that is ever-present in his book, All Night New York. In this book, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem writes of Ruvans work:

"All of Ruvan’s pictures remind me of that feeling: That your life could be saved if you could get there right then. That you’re geographically fucked, and it’s all happening right now, somewhere else, without you. There is an enormous amount of intimacy in them, and promise, and intrusion…”

Ruvan Wijesooriya is known for exhibitions where his audience takes home the works. As inhibitions are dropped, image by image is peeled down from the exhibition walls until nothing remains. With this gesture Ruvan suggests that an image is never for him to keep, his subjects caught in some transitional moment that he claims no ownership over. This twist also points to the artist’s relationship to the image making process, featuring effervescent characters that fluctuate in and out of the image surface. Ruvan’s images are informed by the contemporary practice of a more hard-edged documentary look to fashion image-making that includes biographical elements. His close relationship to many of his subjects have resulted in intimate portraits wedged in-between the commercial and the arts, the autobiographical and the editorial.  However, unlike many of his contemporaries he does not rely on the personal drama of his subjects. Ruvan assumes the role of a mediator that allows for a subtle narrative to unfold within this series of images.

This is Ruvan’s first solo show in New York. He has had solo exhibitions in London and Barcelona, and participated in numerous group-shows worldwide.  In the last year he has completed commissioned projects for Paul Smith, The Museum of Modern Art, the TV show, Gossip Girl and more.

Shortly before Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994, Jesse photographed him in New York City. Kurt arrived 3 hours late and barely coherent, looking just as he appears in these photos. Recognizing a great visual opportunity, Jesse immediately scratched plans for the location shoot he had organized and chose instead to shoot Kurt in a studio environment. Because of Kurt's tardiness, Jesse had only 15 minutes to shoot.

"Sometimes the best pictures are taken when I'm under enormous pressure - everything becomes intensified and the shoot energy is elevated," says Jesse. The portraits are at once mysterious, as none of the images show Kurt's eyes, and yet very revealing of Kurt's strong and enigmatic character. Including images of various degrees of the life cycle of flowers, Jesse emphasizes the ephemeral quality of life as well as its beauty and decline.

Jesse has been shooting celebrities, flowers and other subjects since picking up a camera while earning a degree in economics at the University of Michigan. With no formal training, he decided to try photography as a career and was hired by legendary photographer Irving Penn who was intrigued by a shared interest in platinum prints.

Jesse has since photographed countless celebrities as well as still life for magazines such as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue, Bazaar, V Magazine, German Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, Interview, Spin and ID.

His advertising clients include Montblanc, Clinique, Estee Lauder, Motorola, Strenesse, Lucky Strike, and Levi's.

Jesse was born in New York City, where he currently lives and works.

The color prints are archival pigment prints on Harman Gloss paper. The black and white prints are selenium toned monochromatic archival pigment prints.

To purchase prints, please contact info@jessefrohman.com

Prints courtesy of Industrial Color  IC Lab www.industrialcolor.com

Curated by Everard Findlay, Cut/Break features works by photographers Joe Curren, Chris Gentile, and Martyn Thompson. The exhibit is an examination of surfing as a transformative cross-cultural platform. Each of the artists has donated their work for the exhibition. All proceeds from the pieces auctioned will benefit SFOTE’s current ventures, the Laventille Bus Project, which will provide free, sustainable school transportation to children in an impoverished area of Trinidad.

The reception, which was held at The Gallery and The Yard at the Soho Grand on May 28th was hosted by Stella Schnabel and also featured screenings of short films by directors Richard Kenvin, Brutton Caillouette, and Jakob Daschek.

On July 24th, “This Eclectic Explosion” opened at the Tribeca Grand. The show, which will be up for three weeks, was curated by Peter Miszuk and features artists Laura Helms, Ryder E. Robison, Clayton Cubitt, Stephanie Halmos, Jonathan Bookallil, Keegan Singh, Chuck Guarino, Derrick R. Cruz, and Jen Kao. Miszuk wanted to “bring together a piece of the New York’s collective creativity.” By giving the artists the freedom to contribute whatever they’d like, the exhibit is intended to make you “feel like you went to someone’s house and they had an amazing collection of art that you sort of envied” says Miszuk.

The work of Alex Salinas reverberates along the lines of contaminating the image with ideas of the object by fetishizing it in a doll-like way. In doing so, Salinas camouflages the distance between the viewer and what is portrayed. This is the case in the black and white photographs that measure time and light through contrast and dispersion, giving the images a texture of void and taking them to the edgy point where they could break. The color photographs show gesture and composure, portraying endurance and presence on demand, juxtaposing glamour with experience, vulnerability, and even decease. Alex Salinas's exhibition is multilayered; it doesn't just deliver a fragmented image, but rather one that works as a depiction of a fragment as a whole.

Alex Salinas was born and is based in Antwerp, Belgium. As a child he came in contact with photography through his photographer-father. This evolved into a continuous fascination for "capturing a moment." He worked with Belgian fashion designers such as Veronique Branquinho, Haider Ackerman, Bruno Pieters and Les Hommes and brands like Delvaux, Women Secret, Eastpak, Levi's, Lee Jeans and Fabuleux Marcel.  His editorial work includes contributions to A Magazine, Dazed & Confused, Jalouse, Intersection, Arena H+ and Harpers Bazaar UK.   Part of his portfolio covers album and press photography for bands like Magnus, Millionaire, Vive la fete,  dEUS, Daan, Soulwax, 2 Many DJ’s, and Absynthe Minded.

Operating under many differing guises, photographer Erik Madigan Heck's work collects itself within maison d'esprit, a house created in 2004 for his varying projects and imagery. The persona surrounding his many aliases and collectively that of maison d'esprit has always been that of ambiguity and invisibility, characteristics that are truly understood and felt in his work.

Erik was born in Excelsior in 1983 into a family of a painter and avid art collector. After being raised in the United States he finally left for Paris at the age of 21, finding his way into the fashion world after photographing La Collection Blanche for the Parisian atelier Sandrine Philippe.

In 2007 Erik was rumored to have joined the highly controversial trinity collective, although this information still remains speculative. Erik currently resides in New York where he photographs 
and art directs for various publications and fashion designers internationally, as well as finds time to be editor in chief of the avant-garde bi-annual fashion and fine-art publication Nomenus Quarterly www.nomenusquarterly.com 

Fashion designer Craig Robinson and photographer Rudy Archuleta showcase their work in an exhibition of portraits of rock musicians. These intimate black and white photographs capture members of Interpol, Secret Machines, The Raveonettes, New York Dolls, Radio Four, Dead Meadow, and Jon Spencer, among others. The work highlights the creative collaboration between Robinson’s Fifth-Avenue atelier and its unique clientele.

Following in a long line of image-defining designers, Craig Robinson brings the craft of bespoke tailoring to the inseparable bond between sound and image in pop culture. By combining tradition and forward design, Robinson’s work shows how fashion is an integral part of shaping rock-and-roll legends.

Upon Rudy Archuleta's arrival to New York City, he quickly became known in the music world as an image defining photographer. His signature use of light and composition is steeped both in classical skill and rock-and-roll edge. He has since become an in-demand photographer for Rolling Stone, Vibe, Premier, New York Times Magazine, MTV Networks, and New York Magazine.

Polaroid photographer Jeremy Kost has been a fixture in the New York nightlife world, capturing the unguarded moments of some of the most colorful characters and notable faces.  By gaining the trust of his famous subjects, he has redefined nightlife imagery with his evocative brand of photographs framed in the nostalgic white borders of Polaroid pictures.

Not a Play Area (curated by Eric Shiner) is a departure from Kost's renowned celebrity and pop culture imagery, composed of images and conceptual pieces that demonstrate his true artistic passion—a keen ability to use his dynamic world as an artist’s pallet.  Kost’s images are inclusive, inviting the viewer to become a voyeur into the city’s gritty, after-dark playground by freezing a range of emotions such as poise, beauty, insecurity, jubilation, and sadness as they crossed his subject’s faces in a single instant.  In "Missing Myth," he engages the viewer with a clean image of a doe eyed, milky Disney queen Snow white, who is lustful yet pure, naive yet coy, and intense yet soft.  A modern day Warhol with his unique brand of pop art, Kost’s work speaks to a theme of playfulness, which evolves from lighthearted revelry into a realm of passion and depth brewing beneath the surface.

Jamie Isaia evokes mood and atmosphere in a color-saturated, expressive photographic style that suggests dream-like, otherworldly scenarios.  Though her images are thoughtfully scripted, they also reveal the unexpected and the spontaneous, resulting in a rich blend of performative elements rendered in a painterly photographic style.  In this exhibition, her talent for bringing together landscape, portraiture and fashion is also apparent.

Isaia’s first ventures into fashion and portrait photography have demonstrated how successfully her unique and subtle vision translates to the page.  Her work for iD, Italian Vogue, and W Magazine reveals a talent in ascendance within the sphere of fashion photography. She is also a regular contributor to Muse magazine and has ongoing collaborations with fashion designer Zac Posen.

Given the facelift that the city has endured over the last few decades, it’s hard to remember the eccentric decadence of New York’s underground scene in late 1970’s to early 1980’s. The island was a hotbed of creativity that thrived in every nook and cranny of the unexploited Lower East Side, SoHo, and the Bowery, and transgressed into such clubs as Studio 54, The Mudd Club, Danceteria, and the Palladium. Fortunately for us, icon and style maker of the era, Maripol was there to capture the era all in its unabashed glory through the lens of her Polaroid SX-70.

French born Maripol came to New York in 1976 and landed a job as art director for Fiorucci, the 59th street boutique that also gave exhibition space to the likes of Keith Haring and Basquiat. Though she was best known as Madonna’s stylist during her “Like a Virgin” days, Maripol’s varied career as a jewelry designer, film and music video producer, and stylist for indie films and commercials, led her to the people and places that she ferociously documented. Her unguarded, optimistic portraits capture both the sincerity and explosive nature of the scene.

At the end of the era, over 8,000 polaroids have been snapped. A glimpse of them is featured in Maripolarama, published by Power House Books. On May 19, 2006 at The Soho Grand Gallery, the public experienced this enigmatic world with a show of Maripol’s enlarged Polaroid Prints. A special thanks to Agnes B. for a great collaboration to make this happen.