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Intimate Truths refers to Mehlman’s visual response to sexuality as she ages. Her series of colorful, abstract photographs introduces the viewer to her visual diary, which juxtaposes her changing perspectives on sensuality with current fears and threats. Woven throughout her visual roadmap are themes such as femininity, the exploration of the female body, concealing and revealing and taking charge of ones sexual destiny.
The apprehension of the loss of youth, vigor, beauty, and attractiveness to others, while celebrating femininity and sensuality leads her to incorporate and pair intimate items within the compositions such as lingerie – items that had previously defined sexuality – with objects that symbolize her current preoccupation. Mehlman uses the layering of these objects together with color, light, skin, and reflections to investigate the many layers of life, proposing a psychological and quasi-biological examination of our inner-selves. The resulting images are lush, seductive, playful, exhuberant, and full of unexpected angst and hope.
Because of their abstract nature, Mehlman invites the viewers to bring their own experiences and interpretations to her images to identify and share these universal concerns.
Janice Mehlman is a New York photographer.
Janice Mehlman was born in 1958 in New York City.
She studies photography at the Long Island University where she graduates in 1981. For the next two years she attends a photography course at the Brooklyn College Graduate School in New York City.
Janice Mehlman exhibits her photographs in many group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe since the early 1980's, such as: A Photographic Retrospective (1983) at the Queen Museum in Flushing Meadown (NY), Twenty-nine Photographers (1984) at the Brooklyn Museum (NY) and Fotoforum U.S.A. (1986) at the Museo del Art Moderno in Buenos Aires (Argentina).
In 1982 she inaugurates her first solo exhibition at Jean Claude David Gallery in Grenoble (France) and, after two years, she exhibits at Espace Canon Gallery in Paris (France).
In the 1990’s she won several prizes: the William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award in 1991, the PSC-CUNY Research Award in 1996, in 1999 and in 2000.
In 2002 she shows her artworks at Galleria La Subbia in Pietrasanta (Italy) and the next year at the Focus Gallery in London.
Her work is featured in International Museum and Corporate Collections as well as in major books about the history of photography as “A World History of Photography” (3rd edition, by Naomi Rosenblum, 1997, Abbeville Press). She is a Professor of Photography, in the Art Department at Kingsborough Community College, of the City University of New York. She divides her time between Pietrasanta (Italy) and Brooklyn (New York) where she lives and works.
Janice Mehlman creates images which deal with light and shadow, abstraction, mystery and illusion. Using a variety of angles to affect perception and plane, she creates a complex, abstract spatial arrangement, from architecture and landscape. Her work continues to evolve, following a continuum. As a photographer, she begins by photographing real and architectural spaces and transforms them into abstractions of a philosophical dimention. In her black and white artworks, the recognizable segments of a costructed world dissolve into a radiant black and white field of imagination.
In her most recent explorations, the elements are enhanced by subtle color, with intense dark blacks and white light emerging from deeper spaces beyond.
4 Mandeville Place, London, W1U 2BG, UK
