Opening Thursday, April 11, 6-8 pm

CC Projects is pleased to present As it Was Give(n) to Me, an immersive installation of works by the American photographer Stacy Kranitz (b. 1976). Working within the documentary tradition, Kranitz makes photographs that acknowledge the limitations of photographic representation, considering the consequences of regarding photographs as a representation of truth. Probing the fantasy of objectivity, the artist reclaims the medium as a vehicle for deeper understanding and engagement with the moments, lives, and regions she explores, provoking a triadic conversation between the artist, the subject, and the audience.

Since 2009, Kranitz has focused on documenting the Appalachian region of the United States, presenting an intimate perspective on a region forced to transition away from coal extraction as its dominant source of economic stability, an opioid epidemic that has wreaked havoc on communities, and the role of Appalachia in a politically divided nation. Confronting photography’s legacy of perpetuating a simplistic portrayal of poverty in the region, Kranitz explores how the medium can both reinforce and challenge stereotypes. In As it Was Give(n) to Me (2009-2024), Kranitz neither seeks to rectify nor perpetuate past portrayals of the region. Rather, the artist implores us to reconsider our perceptions of culture and place.

This exhibition marks the artist’s debut presentation of As it Was Give(n) to Me in New York City. The installation showcases an extensive archive of the artist’s exploration of the region and its evolution over time, featuring over 90 works including photographs, accumulated imagery, texts, and sculptural artifacts presented in five chapters: Arrival, Exploration, Extraction, Mutiny, and Salvation. The presentation also includes a selection of photographs from From the Study on Post-Pubescent Manhood, a concurrent ongoing series in which the artist documents a group of young men at a dystopian compound in Ohio to understand how violence can function as catharsis.

Opening Reception featuring a performance by Shirt: Friday, 9 June, 6–8pm

Abrons Arts Center presents Island Letter, featuring work of 2022–23 Visual Artist AIRspace Residents Alex Dolores Salerno, Emily Manwaring, nina macintosh, and Shirt. Island Letter is organized by 2022–23 Curatorial AIRspace Residents Laura Serejo Genes & Kiyoto Koseki together with the artists. The exhibition is presented in partnership with CCProjects, an independent gallery and community space based in the Lower East Side.

The artists assembled in Island Letter are bonded by time shared in their studios at Abrons Arts Center. Each artist offers a personal entry point through which to consider what holds us—from the stillness of a moment of repose or the sentimental inertia of home, to the satisfaction of the perfect accessory or the gripping energy of a concert party. The range of tones and mediums on display speaks to the dual meaning of letters as both a written exchange between correspondents and the sounds that make up a word. Drawing from the artists’ shared home of New York and studio space in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the works tell lyrical stories of city life and its persistent weight—a force that compresses but also joins.

In the face of ceaseless development, the artists create moments of relief, both in their processes of fabrication and in the meditation their works invite. Evoking prayer beads and bones, Alex and Shirt thread together common goods to measure time and affection. Modular armatures serve as supports for their bespoke textiles, draped to articulate missing figures. In nina and Emily's allegorical compositions, painted and sculpted bodies are compressed to form densely intimate scenes. Giving shape and texture to seemingly opposite ends of an emotional spectrum—bliss and mourning—they point to the presence of something earthly and divine. Altogether, the exhibition collapses varying timescales, synchronizing the passing bloom of flowers with endless nights and generations of displacement.

Reverberating between the visual, sonic, and tactile, Island Letter serves as both an invitation and a sensuous ode. Emily and Shirt provide musical accompaniment to their sculptural installations, bridging mediums and musical genres, while Alex and nina create points of entry to occluded spaces, existing and imagined. Together with curators Laura Serejo Genes & Kiyoto Koseki, the artists use the frameworks of residency and exhibition to model forms of camaraderie and communion.

CCProjects is pleased to present Vital, a two person exhibition featuring Devlin Claro and Aniza-Imán Íñiguez, opening Friday, April 28th, 2023. Organized in collaboration with Quinn Schoen, this is Claro and Íñiguez's first presentation of collaborative works. Vital debuts an ongoing body of photographs by the duo and a new series of tear droplet paintings by Íñiguez.

World-building is at the center of Claro and Íñiguez's practices. Employing techniques of cinematography, production design, and documentary, the two develop environments that heighten the familiar and mimic its forms to uncanny effect. In Vital, the city is situated at a fulcrum; disaster is imminent or just in rear view. The show marks this turning point through portraits, still lives, and studies of ordinary ritual set within a simulacrum of the outer boroughs..

The thumbnail is given precedence in Vital. The intimate scale of Claro and Íñiguez's prints suggests a still that has lost its source, its scene now rendered as a repertory of behaviors and actions. This brevity is mirrored and iconized by the single tear, or droplet, in Íñiguez's pair of paintings, Tear Droplet 1 and 2. In these works, Íñiguez magnifies the singular and combined effects of the tear droplet and its various connotations as an emotional tell, biological secretion, molecular compound, and scarce environmental and economic resource. Here, the tear droplet is cast in extreme close-up, rendering ecological catastrophe and water crisis as slick melodrama.

Vital glimpses a future, not one that is lost but fugitive and made momentarily visible. A reference for Claro and Íñiguez: halfway through Roma (1972) a documentary film crew captures footage of tunnels being constructed for the city's new subway. The burrowing machine unearths something extraordinary: a 2,000 year old villa, undisturbed until now, its frescoes preserved by the airtight bedrock chamber. Fresh air has been introduced; the fresco vanishes, visible long enough to register the painted image but before it can be captured on film. Its disappearance is scored by panic and the rush of new wind.

CCProjects is pleased to announce “Touch,” a group exhibition co-curated by Steven Traylor and Roman Zangari. Featuring works by Arinze Umenyiora, Aya Brown, Daniel Regan, Devlin Claro, Frank Dorrey, Jeremy Grier, Nathaniel Matthews, Sister Engineering, Taylor Simmons and Zev Magasis, the exhibition presents a diverse array of perspectives on the notion of touch, explored through a range of mediums spanning painting, photography, digital illustration, sound, and video.

Touch is integral to the human experience. Facilitated by complex networks of sensory receptors throughout the body, touch informs how we perceive and relate to our physical surroundings, experience emotions, engage with others, and connect with ourselves.

In a time when physical contact has become increasingly limited by pandemic restrictions and the prevalence of digital technology in our daily interactions, it is more pertinent than ever to consider our relationship to the vital sense of touch. Reflecting on the past two years and their impact on our collective relationship to tactile sensory experience, curator Steven Traylor asks, “what does touch look like now?”

Working in collaboration with Roman Zangari, Traylor invited artists of diverse backgrounds and practices to contribute works that speak to how they understand and think about this vital sense. Considering the breadth and subjective nature of the subject, Traylor organized “Touch” both as a presentation of contemporaries making compelling and evocative work across a variety of media and a bellwether of our individual and collective consciousness.

“The concept of touch is a rabbit hole. The deeper you go, you start to figure out more things about it,” says Zangari. “There are so many different implications of what touch means from person to person.”

The artist's contributions present a complex range of interpretations that broaden and reframe our understanding of what tactile sensation means on both a personal and interpersonal level. From examining how different senses like sound can touch us emotionally, to exploring how we interact with material reality; the works defy categorization, instead emphasizing exploration and investigation. Each artist presents a unique perspective with thematic and visual throughlines, examining themes such as intimacy and a sense of belonging, how physical objects may facilitate relationships in unexpected ways, and how we experience interpersonal relationships through modalities ranging from figurative representation to abstraction and surrealism. Individually, each work speaks volumes; together, they converse in harmony.

CCProjects is pleased to announce New York-based artist Adam Zhu’s debut solo exhibition Nice Daze, opening on December 10, 2022. Curated in collaboration between Zhu and Daisy Sanchez, the show coincides with the launch of the artist’s first book of photography co- published by CCProjects and Paradigm Publishing and will feature a selection of works from the series presented in large-format prints, works on linen canvas and metal, and a multi-media installation.

The culmination of seven years of work photographed between 2013 and 2020, Nice Daze is an intimate portrait of community and coming of age in downtown New York City. A lifelong resident of New York’s Lower East Side, at age 16, Zhu began documenting experiences and friends in his social circle—a multi-generational network of contemporaries and mentors including skaters, graffiti writers, musicians, poets, and visual artists.

The artist’s documentary photography is an extension of his life and work as a community organizer working to protect vital city landmarks including Tompkins Square Skate Park that have served as a safe haven for marginalized activities and become a hallmark of youth culture in lower Manhattan. His photographs are an act of preserving transitory moments and documenting participants within these communities and spaces that cocoon creativity.

“Adam is somebody who has always been very community focused. He thinks about things in terms of connections with other people, and these photos bridge the gap between time periods and individuals and friend groups, all unfolding within a certain radius downtown. The series is both a portrait of himself and his upbringing as well as a portrait of his community. It is an individual endeavor but it is shared with so many other people.”— Daisy Sanchez, Curator

Captured with the gaze of an active participant inspired by an impulse to preserve fleeting moments, Zhu’s photographs and portraits convey a striking honesty and palpable sense of movement.

“Being young is a brilliant time, especially if you are a seeker in New York City. The people in these photos and the person behind the camera all seem like seekers. They are seeking something, that ever-elusive thing. I still haven’t found it. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” — Dumar Novyo, “Youth Culture, Over Time, NYC ‘80s ‘90s ‘00s Teens.”

Nice Daze was designed in collaboration with artist and curator Jack Shannon. An assemblage of film photographs, the majority of which have never been shared publicly, the book is an homage to Zhu’s formative years populated by friends, lovers, contemporaries, and mentors. Employing several different methods of scanning and printing, the images range from scans of original works printed on newsprint and 3D scanned negatives with borders to full-bleed black- and-white and color photographs. The composition and design reflects the artist’s emphasis on the relationship between physicality and ephemerality. While depicting a specific time, place, and intimate personal relationships, Zhu’s gestural approach reveals a timeless portrait of youth on the fringes of the mainstream. The series favors emotional resonance over a linear documentary narrative, presenting an accumulation of fleeting moments with a lyrical abstraction that is at once immediate and nostalgic, euphoric and melancholic, hopeful and longing.

The series opens with a spread of the artist’s collage installation which appeared in a group show at artist and D.J. Spencer Sweeney’s warehouse studio at 49 Market Street in 2017. Printed on newsprint and weathered with time, the collage work is woven throughout the book as a lyrical refrain, coalescing past and present iterations of the series. “Creating the book is like closing a chapter in his life and also revisiting it at the same time—being reconfronted with these memories and thinking about their resonance and how to juxtapose those together,” says curator Daisy Sanchez. Nice Daze features an introduction by Dumar Brown (Nov York), a graffiti writer, writer, and teacher. Credited as Dumar Novyo, the writer describes youth culture as a song sung in rounds—the “same song but from different voices at different times.”

Adam Zhu is a photographer and creative director based in Chinatown, New York City. The artist’s work captures the abject grit and visceral beauty of New York’s contemporary youth culture. Characterized by a raw, untouched effervescence, Zhu’s photographs are an accumulation of fleeting moments in time that coalesce as a love letter to the diverse neighborhood he grew up in. In addition to photography, Zhu works in a variety of mediums including painting, collage, video, and printmaking.

As part of his practice, Zhu curates group art shows, or “cultural happenings,” featuring multimedia works made by his friends. Inspired by the collective creative energy of his community, the artist regularly hosts dinners at galleries and spaces across New York City that bring people from different scenes together to converse and share ideas.

Welcome to A Season in Hell by Sean Pablo, the first solo exhibition by the skater, musician and artist. The show is as much an immersive experience as a solo show of artworks: it is a transference of Sean’s life into the gallery space.

Born to an Irish father and El Salvadorian mother (high school sweethearts), Sean Pablo was raised in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was a natural skateboarder and gained sponsorship from Supreme, Converse and skater-owned label Fucking Awesome at the tender age of 16. Skating—and the travel required to shoot skating videos—took over his life. He missed so much of high school that his father, Brendan, decided to homeschool Sean for his Senior year. An artist himself, Brendan’s curriculum was culled from art books and his exhaustive personal collection of prison art (a portion of which is on view, strung lovingly together with safety pins). It was during this era of homeschooling that Sean was encouraged to get into an extracurricular, and he took the opportunity to begin his own clothing and skate label, Paradise NYC.

The Instagram account of the Paradise brand hits like frenetic, hallucinatory and beautiful episodes of a public access show or a closed-circuit creation. Its lo-fi aesthetic pairs with canny editing and beautiful players; the audience wants to be wherever Paradise is. Sean understands his brand as an extension of everything else he is interested in: making music, making art and skating. To this end, the current exhibition positions the brand centrally as part of the artist’s artwork. Videos made for the Paradise label play on loop inside the show. Even the title of the show itself is a reference to the forever unfolding ‘seasons’ of new pret-a-porter fashion we produce as a species.

With similar direct transcription, wall drawings around the main gallery space recreate those inside Sean’s home. These drawings are mostly text-based and also taken from Sean’s father’s prison art collection, offering pat but cheerful affirmations like, “Heaven is Always Here and Now,” “Let Go,” and “Dissolve the Walls of Separation with Love.” If there’s irony here, it would feel shitty to lean into it, and the cozy, ambient intimacy cuts it like a warm knife.

Given the fast pace at which Sean’s life has moved, the artist has said he used photography to ingest and appreciate what was going on all around him on a deeper register. He shoots his friends, and in so doing canonizes them for himself, and for his audience, amplifying their bonds and their actions and postures.

Eschewing standard photographic C-prints on paper, Sean prints onto various tender objects, creating multi-media assemblages that use domestic furniture and resemble altar pieces. The reverent stillness of the artist’s photographs, sometimes illuminated in handmade light boxes, seem at odds with the chaotic skate-tour life during which most were shot. Skating and touring skateboarders are subjects in the show but not overtly in a skating context. Instead, subjects range from the bonds of friendship to family histories, to faith as well. A friend of Sean’s since 9th grade, photographic subject Isaac Soloway is the lowest-key celebrity on record. Here, Soloway’s image is stitched lovingly into throw pillows and emblazoned on the show’s t-shirt for sale.

Growing up without organized religion, Sean Pablo took an interest in the lapsed Catholic practices of his parents. A Season in Hell reflects the conundrums of religion in this indirect way, or as in the paradoxical piousness projected by gangster iconography while gangster culture contains so much violence. The artist’s work examines what happens to imagery as it is pulled in these different directions.

CCProjects is pleased to announce “Namedaruma,” the first solo exhibition in the United States by New York-based Japanese photographer Jiro Konami. The show emerges from a book of photographs Konami made in collaboration with i-D magazine and The Black Eye Patch, who worked with the artist at the end of 2020 to shoot a vastly popular but previously unseen Japanese rap group, also called Namedaruma. For the project, Konami traveled two hours north of Tokyo to the musicians’ hometown of Kumagaya City in Saitama prefecture. In the book comprising his shots of the band, Konami writes of violence he experienced in the US in 2020 due to bigotry against Asian people, which swelled horrifically around the coronavirus pandemic. Of Namedaruma themselves Konami writes, “My heart was stung by their red gaze. The needle has been sticking in my heart since then.”

Konami came to prominence in Japan on the forefront of a new generation of young photographers electing to use analog film in our digital age. The artist skillfully makes use of both the evidentiary quality and the uncontrolled haze of analog, which he treats almost as a living organism prone to imperfection, error and surprise. Konami has spoken about the importance of a vigilant and voluminous practice as a photographer; he was once advised by Takuma Nakahira to “take one photo every three steps while walking,” and to “be a camera.” In an age where our idea of photo has migrated from documentation to concoction, Konami’s work stands as a reminder of something grimier, more natural, and more palpably real.

The photographs on view at CCProjects emerge almost entirely from Konami’s trip to Kumagaya City. The members of Namedaruma grew up in this tough, industrial city in the 90s and 2000s, at the same time that the Japanese government cracked down with extreme force on gang activities. A part of the younger generation who would usually enter Yakuza gang life, the band instead began their defiant artistic collaboration, rapping about their highly contraband marijuana use, lost friends and street life.

Konami’s photographs of Namedaruma were the first the musicians allowed to be taken and shared in mass culture. He was welcomed into spaces never before seen: the rappers at home with their families and even bathing at their local bathhouse. Confrontational portraits mix with a still life of glittering golden jewelry, a huge, ominous sky, urban landscapes, and an interior painted reproduction of a landscape that draws our attention to the kitschy absurdity innate to human design. Konami’s unprecedented access and raw style bring our minds back to actual flesh and felt human connections. His work suggests that castaway seediness can indeed come to fruition, that those forced underground will find a way to flourish, and it also reminds us of the thumping, unconventional beauty of a larger natural world that witnesses all of our strange projects here.

Jiro Konami has won several awards, including the Prospect Prize at the EPSON Color Imaging Contest, and the Fuji Photo Salon the New Face Prize. His work has been featured in The New York Times, i-D Magazine, Interview Magazine, Vogue JAPAN, and WIRED. In 2021/22, Konami presented a solo exhibition with accompanying monograph, “Burning Drop,” at the PARCO Museum, Tokyo.

Feed Folks Workshop is a community initiative produced by CCProjects. Founded in 2020, Feed Folks Workshop is an ongoing collaborative project that brings together artists and organizations across the United States to raise awareness surrounding critical social issues and provide essential resources to those in need. To raise funds, Feed Folks Workshop produces limited-edition zines, T-shirts, and prints featuring works by contributing artists that capture and celebrate the visceral energy and cultural diversity that makes up the fabric of a community. Feed Folks Workshop is pleased to announce the launch of Series 01 in partnership with Playground Youth in Brooklyn, New York, featuring works by Quinn Batley, Adam Zhu, and Dave Schubert.

CCProjects is pleased to present Dumb Kid by Ciara Gabellini. Dumb Kid is an immersive installation that amalgamates Gabellini’s own photographs with found imagery, notebook pages, and collages made from a combination of all her source materials. Gabellini’s subject matter reflects the reality of American adolescence today, with a preoccupation on sex, drugs and death. Her photographic work reveals an acute tension between the loss of innocence and vulnerability. This is Gabellini’s first solo exhibition

CCProjects is pleased to present Our Beautyfull Future, a solo exhibition by photographer Davide Sorrenti, opening June 26, 2019 at 431 East 6th Street. The exhibition displays a range of photographs including self-portraits, photos of youth culture in New York City, and intimate portraits of those who were close with him, all of which act as a visual diary to Davide’s world before his death in 1997.

Davide Sorrenti (1976–1997) was born in Naples, Italy where he was diagnosed with Thalassemia Major, a genetic and chronic illness, which prompted his mother, fashion photographer Francesca Sorrenti, to move him and his siblings, Vanina & Mario, back to New York City in the early 1980s. It was there that Davide began taking photographs at the age of 17, documenting the daily life of his skate and graffiti crew, SKE.

Davide’s images are characterized by a promiscuous, youthful vision and ability to immortalize personal moments that serve as a time capsule of downtown New York in the mid 1990s. He had a need to document everything he observed and engaged with his surroundings in a way that invites the viewer to become a part of his life.

This collection of photographs unveils Davide’s sense of urgency to live beyond his years by immersing himself at the center of a cultural movement and recording every waking moment. What remains is the gift of a rare and personal account of a momentous generation that continues to influence contemporary youth till this day.

“The intimacy and love that Davide Sorrenti conveyed in his photographs will never fade. Still full of the visual charge that he gave to his life through photography, they are disarmingly truthful in their emotional articulation of being wildly, and intensely young. Set within the still raw and menacing pre-Giuliani playground of New York in the early to mid 1990s, this precious cache captures the last passionately youthful moment on the cusp of the city’s commodification and sanitization. They are an elegiac and close testimony to a young man’s life, filled with curiosity and unbounded enthusiasm.”

— Charlotte Cotton, 2016

CCProjects presents Laurie. Documentary film by Zev Magasis. Laurie is named after a woman Zev met in the beginning of a road trip across the United States. Zev lived and slept in his car for two months by choice, whereas Laurie still lives in hers to this day. She once said, “I just want peaceful existence, there’s just no chaos 24 hours a day, you cannot close both eyes, you always gotta have one open.” She struggles to keep her soul and spirit afloat in spite of her situation, preserving herself in her deeply personal writings stored away in her car. The wisdom and strength passed down to Zev by Laurie and her poems kept him going throughout the ups and downs of his trip, and through life in general. This video is dedicated to Laurie and to all the people Zev encountered while driving across the country.

Desire Lines are paths created by human, animal or vehicular traffic, often representing a short cut or disruption of land. These paths run contrary to the designs of urban planning and resist the rules of how public and private spaces are meant to be used. They are an index of disobedience and movement.

Shot entirely in parking lots over the course of a year and a half, Desire Lines records humans, animals and automobiles behaving in a similar manner with the urgency to perform actions that override the behavioral programming of the place they occupy. The film surveys various customs and rituals that are carried out in the vast areas adjacent to shopping malls, sports stadiums, schools, and other venues throughout the United States.

“The shopping strip and its paved surroundings are so ubiquitous in the American landscape that often people never give this entire phenomenon a second thought, it is a universally accepted part of everyone's collective unconscious… but then some have a subliminal identity with things in their environment, they recognize the presence of this hostile slab which inspires a range of interpretations… things are done spontaneously that give life to what is otherwise considered dead.”

— James Wines

Desire Lines was filmed in Birmingham, AL, Huntsville, AL, Los Angeles, CA, Fort Lauderdale, FL, Hallandale Beach, FL, Miami, FL, Atlanta, GA, New Orleans, LA, Berlin, MD, Greensboro, NC, Greenville, NC, Raleigh, NC, Statesville, NC, Philadelphia, PA, Albuquerque, NM, Belen, NM, Edgewood, NM, Columbia, SC, Pine Ridge, SD, Yankton, SD, Bartlett, TN, Memphis, TN and South Boston, VA.

The film features original music and sound design by Joe Williams.

Tommy Malekoff (b. 1992) is a New York based artist from North Carolina. His work with video and photography deals with insular words and displaced phenomena in the American landscape. His work has been exhibited in New York, Detroit, and Tokyo.