New York designer Ji Lee has launched an admirable project to collect and archive photographs of logos that incorporate the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Lee rightly believes this project is vital, as many of the small business won’t last forever. A site is up, wtclogo.com, where visitors can add to the growing collection.

Projects like this are important for collecting and preserving American ephemera and visual culture. Worth exploring too, there are some good finds. (via Dezeen).

On February 13, Timberland opened their newest storefront at 474 Broadway, New York City. The shop is designed to promote the Timberland experience, and in that venture they partnered with powerHouse for an exhibition of photographs curated by Sara Rosen.

The exhibit, entitled Nature of a City, features images from the powerHouse archives that capture the energy and vitality of a city that – like Timberland – is constantly evolving, creating and defying trends.  For the exhibit, powerHouse and Timberland selected photos from New York-based photographers Janette Beckman, Vivian Cherry, Martha Cooper, Arlene Gottfried, Lisa Kahane, Maripol, Ricky Powell and Jamel Shabazz.

Nature of a City opened on March 27 and runs to April 29, 2009. I spoke with Gene McCarthy, co-President of Timberland, about the exhibition, the heritage of the brand, and Timberland’s special connection to New York City. Born in the Bronx, McCarthy achieved All-American status as a cross country runner while at Fordham University. He has been with Timberland since 2006.

Read the interview and view select images from Nature of a City after the jump.

Opening this Friday, April 17, 2009, at Philadelphia’s Area 919, Amie Potsic’s Skin Stories. The exhibition is a collection of large scale gelatin prints addressing skin, scars, and wounds as agents of seduction and spirituality. Amie Potsic began her career in San Francisco and currently works and lives in Philadelphia.

Full flier after the jump. And, yes, I will be delivering a lecture on Amie’s photography on May 14, 2009.

Matt Greene’s recent work is about finding a space for representational art in contemporary culture. How does our way of seeing fit into the natural world? The artist seeks to find some common ground between the historical form of painting and the indexed stacking of images created by digital media. In Pictures of Women, his second solo show at Deitch Projects, Greene presents large-scale works that further his investigations into the connections between sexual fetish, the female figure, and forms of nature. Asserting that painting occupies an inherently ambiguous space between fantasy and material, Greene’s landscapes depict environments in which multilayered images superimpose themselves over the experience of reality. Faceless androgynous figures engage in ritualized behavior in spaces resembling holograph viewing rooms from science fiction; gridded chambers into which fantasies are projected. These works incorporate drawing and photography interchangeably and indifferently; the heavily textured surfaces that emerge are dripped with thick coatings of varnish that trap the images like insects in amber.

The exhibition opens April 11, 2009. Catch it at Deitch Projects, 76 Grand Street, New York to May 2, 2009.

For April, Projects Gallery presents three distinct solo shows grouped under the theme Perception : Reality. From Canada, Ross Bonfanti forms creatures by filling found stuffed animals with concrete. Lauren Lyons is a local Philadelphia photographer specializing in highly stylized visions. Finally, Alex Querel transfers traditional wood carving techniques to phone books.

The work of the three remains on view until April 25 at Projects Gallery, 629 N. 3rd, Philadelphia, PA.

Exhibition views for Perception : Reality after the jump.

C E R A S O L I  gallery presents the fine art work of three painters invoking various photographic genres in their work:  John Grande in Gallery One, Franziska Klotz in Gallery Two, and Nick Potter in Gallery Three at the Cerasoli Gallery (8530-B Washington Blvd in Culver City). Opens April 18, 2009, and remains on view through May 13, 2009.

In Gallery One, contemporary painter John Grande’s oil on canvas portraits often resemble archival budoir photographs cleverly interwoven with archetypal gender narratives.  Grande’s approach to painting is influenced by high fashion photographers such as Annie Liebowitz, with whom the artist worked as a printmaker for years.  His doll-like subjects are rendered in high relief with dramatic light and dark contrasts, reflecting both innocence and idealistic beauty as well as eluding to underlying chaos and mystery.  Inspired by life and the consequences of its destruction, Grande’s paintings touch on enigmas of sexual culture and stereotypes while investigating the connection between art and fashion.  Grande’s work has been exhibitedworldwide with solo shows in Canada and the United States.

German-born artist Franziska Klotz collects, tags, and archives snapshots, which she then reconfigures as paintings that are often contradictory and dreamily abstract.  Klotz’s deconstruction and composition process is not unlike the creation of a recipe whose end result no longer bears any resemblance to its original list of ingredients.  Klotz’s layering technique allows viewers to make connections organically, rather than immediately: the representational quality of the paintings are embedded  deep within the works. Delicious pastel hues are engulfed in shadow, cloaked in encroaching darkness and discord, conflating references to Monet and De Kooning. In many of Klotz’s large-scale paintings, brush and spackle paint applications coincide with graphic elements and aerosol techniques, further emphasizing Klotz’s consideration of the boundaries between depiction and abstraction, image and afterimage, expression and impression.

Influenced by the banality of everyday spaces in his native England, Nick Potter’s current works use architectural spaces and images of desire to explore the implicit interrelations between class, materialism, isolation and anxiety.  Visually seductive, photo-real depictions of familiar Modernist settings and subjects constitute Potter’s compelling and, at times, unnerving imagery.   Utilizing a gorgeous, sliding scale of grays in his black and white works, Potter employ elements of simplification and abstraction to build tension and to sow the underlying sense of anxiety and foreboding of our post-Cold War society within his dewy utopias.  Potter’s recent exhibitions include a 2008 show at the La Salle University Art Museum in Philadelphia.  He is an Associate Professor at Cal State University, Fresno.

In 1892, photographer Paul Martin took a trip to Yarmouth. There on the Norfolk coast he set up his camera, disguising it as a leather box, and took some remarkable candid photographs of fellow holiday makers. Martin’s photographs make up a new show at the V&A’s Museum of Childhood, Victorians at the Seaside: Photographs by Paul Martin. The work opens to the public on April 20, 2009 and runs to July 24, 2009.

V&A Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2.

For the last 10 months, Todd Selby has been exploring the working environments of creative people. His premise is quite simple, personal space reflects personality. These photographs found way to The Selby website which has generated a significant fan base. Selections from the Selby photographs are also now on view at Colette. They will remain up until  May 2, 2009.

Gallery shots after the jump.

Two new shows open at Mixed Greens on April 23. Coke Wisdom O’Neil’s The Box (Texas) is presented in the main room, with Lee Stoetzel’s Big Fall in the South Gallery. Mixed Greens is located at 531 West 26th, New York, NY. The Shows run to May 23, 2009.

Above is a shot of O’Neil’s The Box. The piece is the result of a study in South Texas of identity and identification. At the end is the creation of a large scale specimen box, a stage for photographic viniettes of the San Isidro community.

After the jump check out work by Lee Stoetzel. Stoetzel reworks popular icons in wood – specifically his local Pecky Cyprus. Big Fall is his largest solo showing to date, and his 4th at Mixed Greens.

Currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts – Houston, is Eye on the Third Ward. On view until May 24, 2009, the exhibition is an annual celebration of works created by students at Jack Yates High School.

More about the exhibition.

A historically black community, the Third Ward is home to many important political, cultural, and educational organizations as well as strong religious and community groups. The MFAH´s education department and the Magnet School of Communication at Jack Yates High School founded the Eye on Third Ward photography project in 1995 to encourage students to hone their technological skills and powers of observation by documenting the neighborhood and its residents. Yates photography teacher Ray C. Carrington III challenges his classes each year to make photographs that capture the personality of the area and the people who live there. About 60 high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors, ages 15 to 17, participate in the project each year. A select number of the works created during the year-long class are chosen for the annual exhibition.

Selected photographs follow.