55 Bethune Street
New York, New York 10014
(between Washington & West Streets)

Please call 212-989-4650 for gallery hours

Westbeth Gallery will feature the recent work of Viorica Stan and Hugh Morris, the artist couples’ first show together. "Impressions" Impressions’ photographs and photograms explore the fundamentals of photography: form and time. Using light to create at the time the print is developed, just as she uses the light at the time the image is captured on film, Viorica Stan makes images that play with the inherent positive and negative qualities of photographs. Past and present overlap in deliberate multiple exposures and solarization. Time is a continual adding, overlapping and transforming factor in her images. Layers of fleeting images enter, crystallize and fade like memories, dreams, thoughts and ideas. Each photograph is planned in a way that fully utilizes the solarization of images and manipulation of time. She deliberately plays with forms, objects, images and time to express the continuous play between positive and negative, light and dark, reality and surreality. Viorica’s photographs and photograms (16” x 20” silver prints in 20” x 24” frames) refocus our attention to the dawn of this relatively modern medium. These works remind us in a poetic and painterly way that it is light that is registered on film and paper which makes the image and that form and time continually change as we try to express our inner meaning. “Fables and Muses” The paintings, stencilino prints and sculptural frames, which compose “Fables and Muses”, are Hugh Morris’ interpretations of the fables of Aesop and the nine muses of Greek mythology. Seizing inspiration from the ancient stories Hugh has twisted selected stories into unique works of art. Some works have an immediately recognizable source from within these pre-Christian morality tales but many may have need of repeated viewing and reviewing in order to discern a connection. The frames in Hugh Morris’ works are always an integral part of his work and aid in the identification of the paintings’ inspirational source.