Never let it be said that a single image can't change lives. I discovered this photograph by Hungarian photographer Tamas Dezso in April of 2012 at an AIPAD fair in NY and it knocked me accross the room. It was taken in an abandoned Soviet military base in Hungary. I couldn't take my eyes off of it and included it in a few shows I put together. It was always the piece that got the most attention and spawned the most questions. I started to look more deeply into his work and loved what I saw and decided I wanted to meet Tamas.
It's a bit of a leap of faith to invite a total stranger to stay in your home for a month but I had a very good gut feeling and in March 2013 we invited Tamas to the residency for June of 2014. The response was immediate. He said he had been working on a book about Romania for several years with his partner Eszter Szablyar, a writer, and they had just been talking about finding a place to retreat to the following summer to do final sequencing and finish the book. It was meant to be and we got two artists for the price of one!
We fell in love with them immediately. It was a wonderful connection and fascinating to see their process and their new work that we hadn't seen before. Some new favorites:
They asked us to help with the book sequencing which exposed us to the entire project.
Tamas has had quite a bit of international press on his work and he also has received numerous awards including a Daylight/CDS Award and show in Durham so he has a following in the area. We were shocked by how much demand there was for his and Eszter's artist talk. We had to remove the dining table and light fixture to get 55 people in our living room.
They set the tone for the talk in an interesting way. As people were coming into the talk they distributed 25 short but grim texts at random explaining conditions during the Nicolae Ceausescu dictatorship and had them read sequentially aloud. It was sobering and very effective.
We are hopeful the book will be out in Spring 2015 and we can go to Budapest to celebrate. Tamas and Eszter we miss you.
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