Participating Artists: Diana Kingsley, Heidi McFall, Doug and Mike Starn, Miwa Yanagi

Short Stories is an exhibition of works by artists that have had a long association with Leo Castelli Gallery like Doug and Mike Starn, in combination with newer artists Diana Kingsley and Heidi McFall, and for the first time, a piece by Miwa Yanagi.

All of the artists presented use photography in various ways to create their final representations. Although the viewer is presented with works that may seem, without explanation, to be very different, it is the artist’s very individual use of the medium which unifies them.

Heidi McFall’s works are a combination of pastel and oil on paper with backgrounds that are often sparse and somewhat abstract; in her most recent works, she has also begun to incorporate photo collage. Yet, the figures, based on photographs of friends and family members, are presented with photo-realistic clarity.

Diana Kingsley uses photography in a more traditional way. She creates her own `short stories’ by staging specific moments within a larger narrative. Miwa Yanagi, an emerging Japanese artist, is showing a work entitled The Little Match Girl based on a fairytale of the same name. When Yanagi first exhibited this work from her series Fairytales last year in Japan, her photographs generated an instant sensation.

Doug and Mike Starn also use photography but in a way that borders on the scientific; each individual snow crystal has been isolated, magnified thousands of times with a scientific microscope and then photographed.

The works included in this show relate to one another through their use of media, and are held together by a common theme: water in its various forms. Water evokes memory using many of the senses including sight, sound, smell, and touch and with it, one can easily recall specific memories: the smell of snow, the sound of a stream, a fairytale, a day at the beach …