Passages features black and white photographs taken during recent travels by Jessica M. Kaufman and Heather Boose Weiss. Using different stylistic and technical approaches to documentation, the artists convey the strangeness of foreign places in powerful ways.
While Kaufman starts from a Polaroid negative, both artists create traditional silver gelatin prints. Both celebrate the mystique of foreign lands, Kaufman by removing herself from the scene and revealing a world seemingly suspended in another time; and Boose Weiss by using her body to mirror the energy of a site, bonding with the raw landscape to find a spiritual resonance and harmony.

Passages is Kaufman’s first exhibition with SEFA and includes highlights from her Rendition series, photographed in Shanghai and Beijing China in 2005. Romantic images of architectural ruins, crumbling brick facades and timeless landscapes are often punctuated by ghost-like figures, glimpsed through doorways and windows. Kaufman achieves a hazy, sometimes dappled look by intentionally leaving the chemicals on the Polaroid negative. Based in NY, Kaufman has a BA in Art from Yale and an MFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art. Her work has been featured at NY’s Sikkema Jenkins and Robert Miller, Brooklyn’s Stain Gallery and San Francisco’s Rayko Photo Center. The Jewish Museum, NY has recently purchased two of Kaufman’s photographs.

Boose Weiss’s photographs are highlights from her 2008 series created in Europe, Central America and the US. The artist identifies with the natural elements of a place—wind, water, fire, rock/earth, light/darkness—and finds her way into that natural expression, in much the same way as an actor studies a script to find an emotional entry path. The results are stunning, often abstracted forms of the artist, cascading through a luscious, volcanic jungle in Costa Rica, perched on the edge of a watery precipice in Majorca or shadowed against an ancient sacred spot in North America. Boose Weiss studied photography at Cornell University and received a BA from the School of Visual Arts, NY. This is her second exhibition with SEFA, following the success of Shaping Space in February 2007.