Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1956 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province China. He studied stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute from 1981 to 1985. Accomplished in a variety of media, Cai began using gunpowder in his work to foster spontaneity and confront the controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. These projects, while poetic and ambitious in their core, aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe.

Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1965. She attended Oberlin College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Repetition and revision are central to Gallagher's treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines like Ebony, Our World, and Sepia and uses in works like eXelento (2004) and DeLuxe (2004-05).

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1948. Central to Sugimoto's work is the idea that photography is a time machine, a method of preserving and picturing memory and time. This theme provides the defining principle of his ongoing series of photographs. Sugimoto sees with the eye of the sculptor, painter, architect, and philosopher. He uses his camera in a myriad of ways to create images that seem to convey his subjects' essence.

Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968. She received a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The precision with which Ali creates her small figurative gouache paintings on paper is such that it takes her many months o complete a single work. In style, her paintings resemble comicbook serials, but they also contain stylistic references to hieroglyphics and American folk-art traditions. She often achieves a high level of emotional tension in her work.

Josiah McElheny was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He with master glassblowers Ronald Wilkins, Jan-Erik Ritzman, Sven-Ake Caarlson, & Lino Tagliapietra. McElheny creates finely-crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning & memory, often recreating miraculous glass objects in Renaissance paintings.

Alpha Gallery

11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019.

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