NEW YORK, NY.- Bruce Silverstein announces this year’s curatorial nominees and their corresponding selection of artists for the Silverstein Annual, Bruce Silverstein’s fourth annual invitational exhibition.

As part of the gallery’s ongoing effort to provide exposure to emerging artists, Bruce Silverstein with the guidance of curatorial advisor Nathan Lyons, annually invites ten prominent curators to each nominate one artist whom they feel deserves the opportunity for further exposure within New York’s cultural milieu. This year, the gallery has broadened the group of nominating curators to include industry leaders, scholars, artists, and critics. The gallery announces this year’s curators and their selected artists:

What surprises me about Raúl de la Cruz’s photographic series, "La Casa" is not the innovation of his topic – a survey of the residence he called home for ten years—but the acute and arresting observation with which he describes this otherwise familiar terrain. Madrid-based photographer de la Cruz has made within the accumulations of these rooms a telling and original appraisal of the articles and environment defining his domicile. Pared to a stark and vivid depiction of surface and stuff, he composes images that distill the marks and materials of life, of time shared and soon to be no more. In his deft use of color and balance of precisely seen detail with abstracted order, he evokes a sense of place, and expresses through items of everyday element a feeling that is particular, persuasive, and mutedly vibrant. De la Cruz’s photographs captivate with the parameters of a life lived, along with the offer of possibilities anew. --Edward Robinson, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The root of Colvin’s manner is that he has distrusted the photograph. The earliest work of his that I remember was almost graffiti-simple, just a black line drawing of a figure, painted over the desks and chairs of a schoolroom in such a way that nothing coherent would be visible from any other view than precisely that occupied by the camera. Colvin the painter had done complicated things which played with layers of perception and with perspective, but the camera was given only a very simple task to perform.

Here we are, years later, and the same dance is going on. Calum Colvin has added strings to his bow: he paints better than he used to, for a start. He used to be satisfied with coarse, rough markings, which were barely more than an invitation to the viewer to complete the view, like a cartoonist or a poster-artist. Now he paints with more relish in the virtues of paint itself. In addition, he has introduced us to Colvin the sculptor and Colvin the model-maker and Colvin the set-designer, and even Colvin the digital manipulator, and in tandem with all those, to Colvin the researcher, historian and thinker. New skills, new messages. But the elements are still there. First among these is always the collision between the picture surface and any visualisation we can make of what the space looked like when he photographed it. Reading the surfaces is what holds us in the pictures. It’s almost a tactile pleasure, trying to keep one’s balance among all these shifting planes. --Francis Hodgson, Arts Critic

Ludovica Carbotta is engaged in a project in which photography is as much a toll of investigation as one of formal translation of ideas. In this way, photography encompasses all the different moments and definition of processes of actions and images that in the case of patologia da compressione, are ultimately realized in the form of a photographic sculpture.

Using the environment of a lake, physical elements are testified and preserved in the film, a material that brings forth an idea of reality thanks to a symbolic form and not through the usual reproduction of images. In this work everything is subjected to an elaboration that calls into action our capacity to imagine, see and feel things, relegating the replica of the vision to a subaltern moment with respect to the conceptual process. --Alberto Salvadori, Museo Marino Marini

French-photographer Sebastien Girard has chosen his home as a starting point for a long-term photographic project: Nothing but Home, Desperate Cars, and Under House Arrest are the promising titles. His pictures look like mystifying close-ups, but they are full of hints and possibilities with great clarity of vision. Sebastien Girard didn't study photography but architecture. In 1990 he realized the importance of the photo book as a medium with the discovery of a Japanese version of Ed van der Elsken's famous book Bagara. Since this time photo books have become his main obsession. --Markus Schaden, Schaden

What to do as a young photographer, trained in, enamored of, yet burdened by the weight of certain American photographic icons: Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Robert Adams, Joel Sternfeld? Team up, go on a road trip across America, and take the piss. Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (both Swiss and born in 1979) made a series of trips between 2005 and 2008, during which they photographed the clichés: desert landscapes, tract houses, funny signs, motel rooms, and the road itself. Yet instead of generating a subjective vision of America through documentary photographs, honoring that sacrosanct tension in art photography, the Salingerian duo has desecrated their own work, manipulating, splicing, puncturing, montaging, spattering, and rephotographing the original prints, as if in an effort to make the photographs emote more, to insert (or doubt?) the romantic loneliness of that other Swiss roadster Robert Frank; to enhance (or make fun of?) the deadpan humor of Stephen Shore; to augment (because maybe one just couldn’t quite feel it at the time?) the sense of revelation of William Eggleston. The Great Unreal asks how true photography is and goes further: are we—were we ever—capable of authentic experience? -- Kevin Moore, Independent Curator

Ivan Mikhailov is one of the most outstanding young Russian artists. He appeared on the Russian art scene a few years ago with his project “Metropolis” at the Moscow Photo Biennale, 2009. This series is about young people from the rural provinces who moved to an urban center, and has an autobiographical element while at the same time represents a generalization and a metaphor comprehensible to all, regardless of country or language.

Born in the city of Cheboksary, one of the photographic capitals of the Soviet Union, and educated in the field of Art History, Ivan Mikhailov obtained the skills for a perfect photographic technique from his father, one of the leaders of Soviet photography in the 1970s-80s.

Whatever the analyzed subject, the energy of his photographs is one of idealistic openness to the future. In the contemporary art-world where ironic and de-mythologizing paradigms play the leading part, Ivan Mikhailov’s desire for a new romantic utopia (the search for which becomes necessary today) makes us follow his work with a particular interest. -- Olga Sviblova, Multimedia Art Museum

I´ve had the pleasure to follow Nelli Palomäki´s work for many years. What fascinates me the most about Palomäki’s photographs is how she chooses her subjects based upon her own intuition. Her strength as an artist lies in the weightlessness of how her subjects seem to float from their backgrounds, pulling themselves to us through the gaze in their eyes. Palomäki’s photographs capture the moment when she and her chosen subject meet halfway, in a sense she closes her eyes to see. -- Timothy Persons, Aalto University School of Art and Design

For over a decade I have been following Sharon Yaari's work – from his early beginnings as a promising new talent on the Israeli art scene to his blossoming into one of the most remarkable photographers working in Israel today. His early work, though mostly staged, had the appearance of a snapshot. Its power lay however in Yaari's distinct knack for turning the banal and seemingly unimportant into a disturbing scene, embedding the mundane with a sense of danger or threat lurking underneath. In recent years Yaari turned to black-and-white photography. ‘Black and white’ is somewhat a misleading term in his case as he masters the color gray in all its richness. The immanent sense of threat has made way to a more contemplative mood, verging on the melancholic, endowing the large format prints with a poetic quality.

Yaari's work has been exhibited widely both in Israel and abroad and he has been the recipient of noteworthy prizes in Israel. -- Suzanne Landau, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem

In recent years we have seen a large increase in hybrid forms of art. Thus, photography can be used by artists who do not consider themselves strictly as photographers, and traditionally educated photographers combine photographic work with painting, video art, sculpture and installation, whether their own work or not. A result is that customary designations such as ‘painter’, ‘photographer’ or ‘sculptor’ are slowly but surely coming under pressure and increasingly belonging to the past. An increasing number of artists within the newest generation are no longer concerned about which label gets placed on them, within which tradition they fit or which conventions they should comply. The result is a welcome sort of anarchy and non-conformity, as well as a clear-cut focus on subjects which are relevant for them at the time.

An example of such work are the series entitled ‘Density Drawings’ and ‘Parallel Planes’ made by Dutch artist Katja Mater, created by capturing various moments in the creation process of a drawing and by using multiple exposures to fuse these into one single negative. The final photo is a non-manipulated account of the process, though not an accurate visual rendering of the actual drawing. The photograph in this context becomes a remarkably unreliable object: is it an image, a drawing, a sculpture, a performance, or a hybrid? Is it documentation or a primary object? -- Marcel Feil, Foam Museum, Amsterdam

Katrin Winkler's work speaks for itself. I met Ms. Winkler at a workshop I was teaching at CalArts. The questions that her work presented about culture, redemption, forgiveness and evil were really striking to me. -- Zoe Strauss, Artist