Joel Schlemowitz
PARALLAX REVERIES
April 5 – May 5, 2014
Opening Reception Saturday April 5, 6-9pm

Microscope is very pleased to present PARALLAX REVERIES, the second solo show at the gallery by Joel Schlemowitz. The exhibition marks the premiere of the artist’s new hand-made stereoscopic paper collages, works that are simultaneously “real” duplicate collages and “unreal”, perfect 3D images existing only in the eye of the viewer. In these works Schlemowitz – whose most recent exhibit featured light boxes made from celluloid filmstrips and a flickering light sculpture – expands upon his interest in the way images are created and seen.

In the six sets of 3D works, seen through turn-of-the-last-century stereo viewers, Schlemowitz draws parallels between the ways in which new technologies can derive from, compliment and absorb that which preceded them and the phenomenon of cultural melding over the centuries. Combining images from furniture and art auction catalogs, brightly colored Chinese joss sheets, delicately patterned Japanese chiyogami paper among other sources the Brooklyn artist, who has spent much time in Japan, focuses on the personal while alluding to the broader context.

Themes include The Tea Ceremony, “The Philosophy of Furniture”, “The Blessed Damozel” and The Age of Courtly Love (Tarot Series). In addition, four non-stereo collages, of which the 3D collages are recent derivations, will be on view utilizing related source materials and also alluding to questions about spatial relationship and illusions of depth of image.

“What interested me in the collage making was the relation between two dimensional composition and its suggestion of three dimensional space. The conceits of perspective in Western art from the Renaissance onward are ripe for the playfulness found in Hogarth’s “Satire on False Perspective.” … But of greater interest to me is the collage as a setting for working with a non-Western application of perspective, through the use of the space between things, the vital importance of the empty space of the unpainted areas in a sumi landscape, perhaps representing the fog in the valleys between precipitous, fairy tale mountains, dotted with a distant temple floating on a rocky outcropping as if deposited there from the sky. The emptiness between objects as a suggestion of their spatial relationship within the composition. … the collage exists in the geography of the reverie; an idealized space to be furnished with a sumptuousness that is only a scissor-clip away… ” – Joel Schlemowitz

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JOEL SCHLEMOWITZ is Brooklyn artist working with multiple mediums including celluloid film, installation and collage. His works have also exhibited at Courthouse Gallery at Anthology Film Archives, KUMUKUMU Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Cinema (Madrid), Ukrainian Institute of America, The Images Festival (Canada), Bound & Unbound Gallery. His films are widely screened at cinemas, festivals, and institutions including at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, Harvard Film Archives, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, The London Film Festival among many others. He has received grants from the Jerome Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts.

Joel Schlemowitz, “Philosophy of Furniture #2”, 2014, stereoscopic paper collage, 3 x 7”
1 of a set of 5 w/ antique stereoscopic viewer


© All images courtesy the artist and Microscope Gallery