Gowanus Open Studios 2014

Gowanus Open Studios is this weekend and I'll be participating this year in two locations. First up is Gowanus Wild at Ground Floor Gallery, a show conceived to take place in conjunction with Gowanus Open Studios and highlighting the wild and unique character of the neighborhood. It's a great place to start your open studios day (hint, hint...) and Hyperallergic agrees - check out their concise guide to Gowanus Open Studios which has Gowanus Wild on their shortlist of things to see:

Gowanus Wild @ Ground Floor Gallery
October 10th - November 9th
walking tour Sunday November 9th, 5-7pm (RSVP here)
343 5th Street (@ 5th Ave)
Brooklyn, NY 11215 (google maps link)

Next, stroll down the street a few blocks from the gallery where I'll have my home studio open to visitors for those who want to stop by and chat while checking out more Gowanus Wild images and behind the scenes demos of how the photos are captured and refined. I'll also be showing new work from two projects in development, panoramic shots from Raw Are the Bones of My Earth, a new series about adventure and the elemental, and book dummy mockups from Adverse Reaction, a very NYC project exploring ad graffiti in the subways. Light snacks and drinks will be served, so come by and enjoy some art and conversation:

Gowanus Open Studios
October 18th & 19th, 12pm-6pm 
Studio of Miska Draskoczy
698 Sackett Street #2R
Brooklyn, NY 11217 (google maps link)

Ground Floor Gallery, Gowanus Wild opening

Last night the Gowanus WIld show opened at Ground Floor Gallery in Brooklyn to a great crowd!  Thanks to all who stopped by, check out some photos from the night below.

Gowanus Wild solo show @ Ground Floor Gallery Brooklyn

I'm thrilled to announce that a new solo show for my series Gowanus Wild will be opening Friday October 10th at Ground Floor Gallery in Park Slope, Brooklyn. With the gallery right next to Gowanus, this is the first time I'll be publicly showing the series in its local habitat, a real treat! Please join us for the opening on October 10th or for a special event I'll be leading to close out the exhibition: a walking tour around the neighborhood to revisit some of the sites I photographed for the series.

Gowanus Wild @ Ground Floor Gallery 
opening Friday October 10th, 6pm - 8:30pm 
closes Sunday November 9th, w/ Gowanus walking tour 5pm - 7pm 
343 5th Street (@ 5th Ave) 
Brooklyn, NY 11215
F, R or G train to 4 Ave – 9th Street

Photolucida Critical Mass 2014 Finalist

The top 200 Finalists have been announced today for Photolucida's Critical Mass 2014 and I'm very excited to have made the list this year!  Looking forward to the top 50 announcement in November, fingers crossed...

Photo Center Northwest

Several images from Gowanus Wild have been chosen for the Documentary: 19th Annual Photo Exhibition at Photo Center Northwest in Seattle, WA. I'm honored to not only have my work chosen for this show by juror Whitney C. Johnson of The New Yorker but also to have won an Honorable Mention / Director's Choice Award from director Michelle Dunn Marsh. It was a lot of fun to go out for the opening weekend and meet so many other passionate practitioners of our craft. If you are in Seattle, go check it out, this is an excellent organization!.

Center Forward 2014

This week the Center for Fine Art Photography's Center Forward 2014 show opens which includes 'Sunflower' from Gowanus Wild. Thanks to juror and director Hamidah Glasgow for selecting my work!

Mapping Gowanus

I was recently asked to participate in Mapping Gowanus, an interesting project of friend and fellow Gowanus resident, Marin Gazzaniga.  Marin asks local Gowanus artists to investigate one particular block of Gowanus and produce a piece inspired by what they find there.  My assignment was Douglass Street between Bond Street and the Canal.  This just happens to be the site of the recently reactivated Gowanus Canal Flushing Tunnel and so after shooting some raw material down there, an idea was born to make my first ever Vine animation.  I call it 'Infinite Flush' in homage to the flushing tunnel and you can read more about it here on the Mapping Gowanus blog.

PDN Photo Annual 2014

I'm truly honored and thrilled to announce that I've been included in PDN's Photo Annual 2014 issue! The magazine hits the newsstand this week and you can see portfolios of the featured photographers online here. Very proud to be included in the company of many other talented photographers.

CURRENT: Gowanus show

My photo 'Sunflower' from Gowanus WIld is in this week's CURRENT: Gowanus group show here in Brooklyn, NY. The show is curated by Benjamin Sutton of Artnet from 44 local artists who live or work in Gowanus, an industrial neighborhood with a traditionally high concentration of artist studios and fabrication shops. The event is run as a benefit by Arts Gowanus, the organization which puts on the very popular Gowanus Open Studios event in the fall. Come check out a full slate of activities including panels, talks, parties and art from May 14th-18th. Full details here. 

Dreams Less Sweet screening at BAM

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge founded the pioneering industrial music group Throbbing Gristle and later went on to form 80's experimental electronic group Psychic TV. With video always at the forefront of Psychic TV, Breyer commissioned a group of 47 artists to produce a full length music video commemorating the 30th anniversary of the band's seminal album Dreams Less Sweet. Each artist was given a secret code word, a magic number, and approximately one minute of music from the album to which they could set any moving images they wanted. The pieces were then reassembled into a massive video collage that continues the arc of avant-garde cut-up cinema, whose frontiers Psychic TV helped forge in the early 80's.

Below is my contribution to the piece and I'm thrilled to announce that after debuting at the Andy Warhol Museum last year it will have its NYC debut at BAM Rose Cinemas on Tues, May 13th.

Davis Orton Editions

Davis Orton Gallery has launched a new venture called Davis Orton Editions which aims to make small edition prints from fine art photographers available to a wider audience online. As a photographer who has shown with them in the past (Night Photography: Portfolio Showcase, May 2013), I was delighted to be invited to participate. Some of my work from older series and one-off images are available in their online store.

Jolie Laide at Tepper Takayama Fine Arts

I'm pleased to announce that several images from Gowanus Wild are featured this month in the group show Jolie Laide at Tepper Takayama Fine Arts. 'Jolie Laide' in French translates literally to "pretty ugly' and expresses the concept of a type of beauty found in things which on the surface appear to be ugly or unusual. It's an apt moniker for the work I'm doing with Gowanus Wild and gallery director Martha Takayama has curated an intriguing set of images between photographers Renan Cepeda, Cassio Vasconcellos, and myself which inform and speak to one another. Jolie Laide  can be seen online at artnet.com.

interview with the World Photography Organisation on Gowanus Wild

The World Photography Organisation (which runs the Sony World Photography Awards) has partnered with United Photo Industries to feature long form interviews with all the photographers from THE FENCE at PHOTOVILLE 2013.  My interview went up today, you can check it out here. A big thanks to the WPO and UPI for putting this together! It was great to have a forum to expand on the backstory of Gowanus Wild and my process behind it.

Gowanus Wild opens at the Vermont Center for Photography

After many weeks of printing, framing and preparation, my solo show for Gowanus Wild opens today at the Vermont Center for Photography. Gallery director Joshua Farr did a a great job hanging the work and putting on the finishing touches along with some help from VCP board members. Also, local arts writer Arlene Distler has written an illuminating review of the show, so check it out for more information.

Gowanus Wild runs through March 2nd in Brattleboro, VT. Stop by if you're in southern Vermont or central Massachussetts!

The New Yorker covers Gowanus Wild

I'm thrilled and honored to have Gowanus Wild featured on The New Yorker's Photo Booth blog this week. This kicks off press coverage for the project in advance of my upcoming solo show and I couldn't be happier to debut with such a venerable New York institution for a project which has been a labor of love to highlight a slice of the city in all its complex, gritty glory.

Gowanus Wild exhibition preview & reception

For the last few weeks I've been printing and framing like mad for my upcoming solo show for Gowanus Wild which opens at the Vermont Center for Photography in early February.  It would be a shame to ship off all the work without having a chance to share it with the local community so I'm hosting a one night preview of the show on Saturday evening, February 1st before it gets packed up.  Cocktails and light snacks will be served for an intimate gathering of friends and supporters in Brooklyn.  

If you'd like to join please RSVP to info@miskadraskoczy.com for more details.  Hope to see you there.

Silent Auction @ The Gowanus Canal Conservancy

The Gowanus Canal Conservancy is an organization that does great work educating the public about the environment and taking action to create a cleaner and more vibrant Gowanus watershed.  It's an organization whose work I naturally identify with, so it was a pleasure to donate a print of 'Egret' from Gowanus WIld to the GCC's annual winter fundraising event, ANTIFREEZE.  

Come down to the neighborhood Saturday, January 25th and help support environmental awareness and improvement in Gowanus not to mention have the chance to bid on a lovely framed print from Gowanus WIld. 

Click here for tickets and full details.

'Egret', from the series Gowanus Wild

The Photo Review 2013 Competition issue

Two images of mine are soon to be published in The Photo Review 2013 Competition issue.  I'm looking forward to seeing the printed version as Paul Roth, Senior Curator and Director of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art did an excellent job curating the show with an interestingly varied, yet focused selection.  The web galleries of the issue are now online, you can check them out here. 

group show @ Jeffrey Leder gallery

Join me this Sunday in Long Island City for the opening of 'Photographic Being', Jeffrey Leder gallery's first group show dedicated exclusively to photography. Five images from Gowanus Wild will be in the show, a couple of which have not been exhibited before.  Hope to see you there!

''Photographic Being' - Jeffrey Leder Gallery
opening reception Sunday December 15th, 6pm-8pm
2137 45th Road
Long Island City, New York 11101
google maps link

solo show + new gallery affiliation

Two great pieces of news this brisk November morning.  First is that I have a solo show (my first ever!) opening February 7th at the Vermont Center for Photography for my urban wilderness series Gowanus Wild.   The show will be a culmination of almost two years of work on this project so I'm eager to see it exhibited for the first time as a comprehensive body of work.  

Second is that I'm thrilled to announce a new gallery affiliation with Tepper Takayama Fine Arts in Boston, MA.  I'm excited to be working with Martha Takayama and starting off my gallery career in a city where I went to school for many years and which was at the core of my photo education and influences. Works will also be listed through the gallery's online presence on Artnet.com.  Very excited to see where things go next!