Rebekah Jacob Gallery Press 2008

DECEMBER 11, 2008

The IMAGIST:

A group exhibition of Southern Artists working with cameras

Rebekah Jacob Gallery is presenting The Imagist through Dec. 31, 2008. The display features photographic and video works from diverse genres that relate to the South. In provocative color or richly toned black-and-white applications, each artist has a poignant, visual story to tell of "their South" through studio portraiture, landscape photography and urban street photography. And in some cases, moving pictures.

The exhibition will gather significant examples of Southern artists, photographers and filmmakers.

COLOR

Artist Jack Spencer traveled the Carolinas in 2007 to capture the mysticism and grandeur of the raw landscape. Most of his images look like mythological fairylands, with sweeping trees weighted by clusters of moss.

Often, a strong source of sunlight is central to the composition.

Karekin Goekjian also has explored the Carolinas and beyond, focusing on Southern ruins at night. Using the moonlight as his only source of light, his repertoire includes architectural portraits of empty places, such as Old Sheldon and stone churches at Georgetown. Local photographer Kevin Hoth stays close to Charleston's urban sites to photograph industrial buildings and miscellaneous objects in variations of blue.

BLACK AND WHITE

Local artist Julia Cart exhibits images of the barren, untouched Lowcountry in a black-and-white format. Using negatives from a large format box camera, she prints most of her work using antique processes, primarily silver gelatin.

Also included in the show are Cart's most recent images that explore the rare botanicals of the Carolina Lowcountry.

Having produced more than 200,000 black-and-white negatives throughout his career, Joshua Mann Pailet of New Orleans is a published photographer as well as one of the top photo dealers in the country.

VIDEO

Having shown at Miami, New York and beyond, Chris Miner will show video work, including "The Best Decision Ever Made," "Auction" and "This Creature, I Am."

The film, "The Best Decision Ever Made" is a 17-minute video from 2005 that takes the form of a confessional documentary in which Miner tours and films the house of his deceased grandparents, full of furniture, memories, and family photos.

NOVEMBER 12, 2008 | Laura Stokes

THE HIDDEN NATURE OF THINGS

Photographer Jerry Siegel reveals the new in familiar Southern scenes

Sometimes you don't realize the significance of a place while you're there.

The surrounding fields, cracks in the street, even the people living there — only when you come back home do you begin to see things that lay hidden beneath the surface.

Jerry Siegel points out these particular things, makes them noticeable, through the lens of his camera in a new exhibit at Rebekah Jacob Gallery called Black Belt Panoramas.

These landscapes, spanning Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, are lonely and quiet. There are small stamps of human life in each picture, signs almost swallowed entirely by acres of rolling land. Man-made structures rest in sharp contrast to large expanses around them.

There's more here than bucolic scenes of rolling hills and green pastures. These are the pictures of everyday life in a small Southern town, a place that people rarely visit and that some are dying to leave. Visitors find it charming when they pass through on their way to someplace else.

OCTOBER 16, 2008 | Olivia Pool

'Something New' opens on King Street

Local curator Rebekah Jacob has just recently opened her own gallery at 169-B King Street on Upper King, called Rebekah Jacob Gallery.

Jacob says this is the only gallery in Charleston to run a contemporary program, photography program, a folk art program and an African-American program.

The gallery plans on maintaining an accelerated, non-media specific exhibition schedule displaying both one-person and group shows.

The gallery is a venue for acclaimed contemporary artists and photographers whose work is inspired by the South, the first of which is "Something New," on display now.

This exhibit features selected works by a progressive group of Southern artists and photographers who have powerful visions of their native land.

Works include landscape painter Eric Abrecht and Charleston's own William McCullough, as well as abstract figure painters Jere Allen, and Cynthia Knapp. Also on display are works by regional photographers Michael West, Jerry Siegel, Jack Spencer, Melissa Springer and Charlestonian Julia Cart, all of whom use Southern landscapes, historical buildings, and portraits a subject matter.

MARCH 2008 | Kevin Murphy

Beyond the Door

Charleston International Arts Festival

If you need a Cuban fix but can't find your favorite cigar smuggler, have a stroll down Bull Street to the College of Charleston's Avery Center, where Beyond the Door, the debut exhibit of the Charleston International Arts Festival, opened Thursday with a robust smattering of Cuban artwork.

Beyond the Door features numerous Cuban artists whose work varies in technique and subject but also forms a composite sketch of Cuba's aesthetics, philosophies, and challenges.

Rebekah Jacob, a gallery owner, is curator of Beyond the Door. For the Charleston International Arts Festival, a debut event, she visited Cuba and returned with pieces of artwork that reflect the complicated circumstances that dictate life on the island just 90 miles south of the Florida Keys.

Artwork is one of the few materials to remain exempt from the U.S trade embargo on Cuba, a curiosity considering art's ability to depict a culture's status. Given these expressions of discontentment, one has to wonder if the U.S. allows art legal passage, because it's nature as a lens through which the failings of Castro's oppression, and now that of his brother, Raúl, are plain to see.

Rebekah JacobFebruary 22, 2021

Press & Recognition

Rebekah Jacob Gallery Press 2008

DECEMBER 11, 2008

The IMAGIST:

A group exhibition of Southern Artists working with cameras

The exhibition will gather significant examples of Southern artists, photographers and filmmakers.

COLOR

Artist Jack Spencer traveled the Carolinas in 2007 to capture the mysticism and grandeur of the raw landscape. Most of his images look like mythological fairylands, with sweeping trees weighted by clusters of moss.

Often, a strong source of sunlight is central to the composition.

BLACK AND WHITE

Local artist Julia Cart exhibits images of the barren, untouched Lowcountry in a black-and-white format. Using negatives from a large format box camera, she prints most of her work using antique processes, primarily silver gelatin.

Also included in the show are Cart's most recent images that explore the rare botanicals of the Carolina Lowcountry.

Having produced more than 200,000 black-and-white negatives throughout his career, Joshua Mann Pailet of New Orleans is a published photographer as well as one of the top photo dealers in the country.

VIDEO

Having shown at Miami, New York and beyond, Chris Miner will show video work, including "The Best Decision Ever Made," "Auction" and "This Creature, I Am."

The film, "The Best Decision Ever Made" is a 17-minute video from 2005 that takes the form of a confessional documentary in which Miner tours and films the house of his deceased grandparents, full of furniture, memories, and family photos.

NOVEMBER 12, 2008 | Laura Stokes

THE HIDDEN NATURE OF THINGS

Sometimes you don't realize the significance of a place while you're there.

The surrounding fields, cracks in the street, even the people living there — only when you come back home do you begin to see things that lay hidden beneath the surface.

Jerry Siegel points out these particular things, makes them noticeable, through the lens of his camera in a new exhibit at Rebekah Jacob Gallery called Black Belt Panoramas.

These landscapes, spanning Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, are lonely and quiet. There are small stamps of human life in each picture, signs almost swallowed entirely by acres of rolling land. Man-made structures rest in sharp contrast to large expanses around them.

There's more here than bucolic scenes of rolling hills and green pastures. These are the pictures of everyday life in a small Southern town, a place that people rarely visit and that some are dying to leave. Visitors find it charming when they pass through on their way to someplace else.

OCTOBER 16, 2008 | Olivia Pool

'Something New' opens on King Street

Local curator Rebekah Jacob has just recently opened her own gallery at 169-B King Street on Upper King, called Rebekah Jacob Gallery.

Jacob says this is the only gallery in Charleston to run a contemporary program, photography program, a folk art program and an African-American program.

The gallery plans on maintaining an accelerated, non-media specific exhibition schedule displaying both one-person and group shows.

The gallery is a venue for acclaimed contemporary artists and photographers whose work is inspired by the South, the first of which is "Something New," on display now.

This exhibit features selected works by a progressive group of Southern artists and photographers who have powerful visions of their native land.

MARCH 2008 | Kevin Murphy

Beyond the Door

Charleston International Arts Festival

If you need a Cuban fix but can't find your favorite cigar smuggler, have a stroll down Bull Street to the College of Charleston's Avery Center, where Beyond the Door, the debut exhibit of the Charleston International Arts Festival, opened Thursday with a robust smattering of Cuban artwork.

Beyond the Door features numerous Cuban artists whose work varies in technique and subject but also forms a composite sketch of Cuba's aesthetics, philosophies, and challenges.

Rebekah Jacob, a gallery owner, is curator of Beyond the Door. For the Charleston International Arts Festival, a debut event, she visited Cuba and returned with pieces of artwork that reflect the complicated circumstances that dictate life on the island just 90 miles south of the Florida Keys.