Kris Graves Projects is proud to announce the first New York solo exhibition of photographer Peter Baker. Curated by Kris Graves.

Peter Baker’s My Lost City: Photographs are images made from rooftops in lower Manhattan, where he lives. The title derives from the famed essay by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who having climbed to the top of the newly erected Empire State Building in 1932, saw that the city had limits and that New York was a city after all and not the universe we imagine it to be. As a photographer interested in landscape it was a natural urge for Peter to climb to the rooftops and see out and beyond the obstructed grid in search of new horizons. The roofs gave the artist the freedom and solitude to contemplate the changing urban landscape, compose relationships between neighborhoods and reexamine his immediate surroundings. They also became escape routes from the restrictions of photographing bridges, financial and federal buildings and using a large format camera in an era of paranoia. The photographs depict the transition from the familiar to the anonymous.

Peter Baker was born in Manhattan in 1981 and grew up in the Bronx. He graduated from SUNY Purchase College in 2005 with a degree in Literature and Photography. His work has been exhibited in New York and China and is represented by Kris Graves Projects, Brooklyn, NY. He currently lives in the Lower East Side.

In the project space, +Kris Graves Projects is pleased to present Libby Hartle’s newest series of works on paper entitled MAKESHIFT: Proposals for amateur architecture and other improvised monuments running simultaneous with Baker’s photography. Libby Hartle makes collages and paper constructions of speculative architecture and arcane geometric forms. The multi-colored paper cut-outs take up the history of utopian ideals embodied in the radical architecture of the past, romanticizing brightly colored homes and domes as spacious alternatives to the monochromes of city life. Her organic and geometric constructions aim to use pattern and color as a strategy to momentarily disarm language in favor of pure visual buzz.

Libby Hartle is a Brooklyn-based artist working in various media including drawing, sculpture and installation. She graduated with a BFA in sculpture from the School of Visual Arts in 2000. Her work has been exhibited nationally including shows at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, hueyhaus in Santa Fe and The Fresh Up Club in Austin. Exhibitions in New York include collaborative projects at HERE Art Gallery, the LMCC’s Looking In, and a 2008 solo show at Pocket Utopia. Her drawings were recently included in the Mass Moca publication, Visionary Drawing Building, a collection of drawings envisioning imagined architecture assembled by Matt Bua.