Images by Vasilios Smaragdas

SOHO20 Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photographic works by Debbie Rasiel, Paradise, which questions the notion and possibility of rest, escape, and removal in the present moment.

Although her last project at the gallery also explored attributes of vacation, with Paradise this consideration has, literally and figuratively, submerged. Using snorkeling, a popular tourist activity, Rasiel flips the notion of paradise with bodies cropped or foreshortened at odd angles, captured in ambiguous moments between movements. Their limbs, at times abstracted by sputtering water, appear to float nebulously as if in placid reflection, or death. While the exhibition’s title may suggest ease and escape, from what or how remains intentionally obtuse: reminiscent of Goya’s canine, her figures swim in a morose landscape. It is this quality of held or caught in-betweenness, or “the dichotomy between the beauty of the surface, and its potential dangers, below,” that beautifully catches the images.

Rasiel, whose work in general suggests a desire to reference human struggles of the universal and the quotidian, connotes potential layers of meaning within the figures’ floating heldness. They speak to a peculiar balance of privilege and frustration, and even question societal frameworks in defining notions of ease, rest, luxury, escape, security, release, safety, or being “off-grid.” That vacations are, for those lucky enough to partake of them, assumed opportunities for escape, is a question from the work.

Soho 20 Gallery

October 12th - November 10th

Thursday - Sunday, 12-6PM

56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn NY 11206

For more information, click here.