Poissant Gallery

12/28/2021

10/23/2012

Have you visited 4411 Montrose Blvd yet?
Our exhibition continues through this Saturday, October 27, 2012!

Come see "Eye Candy," a group show, with work by: Felipe Contreras, Michael King, Randall Reid, Lee Littlefield, Liza Littlefield, Elena Lopez, Joyce Joe, and Haden Garrett.

10/19/2012

Come to the gallery (4411 Montrose) this Saturday October 20, 2012 @ 2 PM for the artist talk event! The following artists will be giving a talk: Felipe Contreras, Haden Garrett, Liza Littlefield, Lee littlefield and Elena Lopez! See you there :)

10/12/2012

PoissantGallery invites you to: "Eye Candy"
Reception is tonight from 6-9PM
at a new location: 4411 Montrose Blvd.
Come see our new exhibition!

10/12/2012

A friendly reminder that our reception is tonight from 6-9PM
at 4411 Montrose Blvd, Houston TX. Hope to see you there!

04/18/2012

Osamu James Nakagawa
Higashikawa, Hokkaido New Photographer
and Guggenheim Fellowship Award Recipient

PoissantGallery is pleased to present Banta + Gama, an exhibition for FotoFest 2012 featuring the work of Osamu James Nakagawa, funded in part by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and chosen for the prestigious New Photographer Award at the 26th Higashikawa Fotofesta in Hokkaido, Japan. Banta + Gama are images of the interiors of caves and the cliffs that surround the island of Okinawa, Japan, where thousands of Japanese citizens were driven to take shelter and ultimately, to commit su***de, as a result of pressure from the Japanese army during World War II. The photographs are stunning large format Pigment Ink Jet Prints mounted on aluminum. There is a crystalline quality to the cave walls that is metallic and breathtaking, in contrast with the somber concepts behind the work. Banta + Gama will close on April 28th, 2012. Please come by 5102 Center Street, Houston, Texas 77007 during our gallery hours 11:30 to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday or call 713-868-9337 to make an appointment.
http://poissantgallery.com/

Osamu James Nakagawa was born in New York City; raised in Tokyo, Japan and returned to Houston, Texas at the age of 15. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of St. Thomas Houston in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in 1993. Currently, Nakagawa is an associate professor of photography at Indiana University.

Nakagawa states, “With this work, I hope to challenge the ongoing cultural and societal ambivalence towards the conflicting histories of Okinawa through a hyper-real interpretation of the Gama caves, landscapes that witnessed the mass su***des of thousands of Okinawans at the end of World War II.”

His work has been shown all over the globe and is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago Columbia College and others.

04/13/2012

Check out today's Houston Chronicle, Page E5, to see Osamu James Nakagawa's photo, Gama #28, in print as a FotoFest 2012 must-see!

04/04/2012

Hello friends! Please be advised that PoissantGallery will be closed this Saturday in observance of the Easter weekend. Have a happy holiday and we hope to see you at the gallery soon.

03/19/2012

03/17/2012

"CONNECTIONS"

Laine Whitcomb, a native Texan, now New York based photographer continuing the series of photographing endearing, memory inducing favorite objects of close friends and family. In my present work, I am tying together both conscious and unconscious associations or connections. One idea doesn’t just lead to another, but it often sees itself reflected in some other manifestation.

Both “Ordinary Chairs in Unordinary Places” and “Beds I Have Known” are series of photos that have shared space – where the object depicted is a striking image in itself but it also evokes the subjectivity of the being(s) who inhabited this space, used the object and created some of the visual of the moment when I experienced it.

In the last series the notion of pairing reflects the same concept of absence and presence - two images that create a third thing – that which is not seen, the connection that brings the two together, that unknown intuitive recognition.

- Laine Whitcomb

03/17/2012

BANTA cliffs

In Okinawa, the precipitous cliffs that fall hundreds of feet to the ocean below are called banta.

For years I have carried with me a vivid memory of the first time I stood atop these cliffs – a memory of beauty in the endless blue expanse of sea and sky intensified by the fearsome height and history that met my downward gaze.

This memory later drove me to revisit and descend those very cliffs. Standing at their feet for the first time I felt in the cliffs’ full visceral weight, something so powerful that I was initially unable to take even a single photograph. The shadows seeping from the cliffs’ surface, the white craters riddling the cliffs’ coral limestone, and the charred black caves were stark reminders of all that these cliffs had witnessed.

I returned to my studio after six months of researching and exploring the South Pacific Theater with thousands of image files of the cliffs to piece together. As I re-shaped and re-experienced the original digital images, these cliffs became a metaphor for Okinawa’s history as well as digitally-manipulated, hyper-real vision of my experience standing between fear and beauty on Okinawa’s banta.


- Osamu James Nakagawa