High Chair #1 ©Marget Long

  Safe-T-Gallery is pleased to announce “Blinds,” an exhibition of new color photographs by Marget Long. The exhibition will open on Thursday, March 1, and close on Saturday, March 31, with a reception for the artist on Thursday, March 1 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. This is Ms. Long’s first solo exhibition in New York.

   The human presence is always seen or implied in every landscape image. Marget Long has taken this commonplace as the starting point for a series of beautiful large-scale photographs of the makeshift, intricate, man-made structures that she finds in the forests of upstate New York and New Jersey -- hunting blinds. These homespun hideouts and treetop perches are made from materials both found and dragged deep into the woods, built and perfected over many years. Meant to be unseen by deer, they are equally unseen by most people, so represent a vernacular building style that expresses the unfettered dreams and desires of the hunters themselves.

   Unlike the cinematic constructions of photographers working in a staged documentary vein, these are documents of existing sites embedded in the natural landscape. The photographs were shot with a daylight flash and the static, hyper-realisitic “eye” of a large format camera, yet they are not entirely “straight” photographs. Ms. Long writes, “The blinds’ very theatricality reveals their own fictions, and these artificial worlds are, ironically, blindingly visible. They sit quietly in the woods where violent fantasy, imagined threat and nature intersect.”

    Marget Long received a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. For the past ten years she has exhibited work in a wide range of media—photography, sculpture, film and video—in the U.S. and internationally. Her work has appeared in numerous group shows and non-profit spaces, including the Contemporary Artist’s Center, Exit Art’s “Homomuseum” and most recently at Future 86 in Parksville, NY. She lives and works in New York City.

High Chair # 21 © Marget Long