MARK SINK & KRISTEN HATGI   

Mark Sink and Kristen Hatgi have been collaborating to create images using one of the earliest photographic methods, wet plate collodion. Their romantic mix of still lifes, portraits, nudes and landscapes are a mix of modern and antique elements. Frederick Scott Archer developed the wet plate collodion process in 1851. Collodion on glass is known as an ambrotype, while the same process on tin is called a ferrotype. Collodion positives were extremely popular from 1852 to the mid 1860's. The photograph is created by pouring a thin layer of collodion on a glass plate before sensitizing it in a silver nitrate solution. The plate must then be exposed and developed while it is still wet. Sink and Hatgi use this historic process and an antique camera to create their modern ambrotypes. The revival of this photographic method once used by William Henry Jackson and Civil War photographer Matthew Brady, can also be seen in the work of contemporary artists, Sally Mann and Scully & Osterman.

MARK SINK            

Mark Sink, photographer, curator and teacher, has been creating fine art photography since 1978. His personal works are in numerous museum collections as well as solo gallery and group shows in the US, South America and Europe. As a photographer he has worked with and documented noted artists' lives such as Andy Warhol and Jean Michel Basquiat and Rene Ricard.

KRISTEN HATGI
Kristen Hatgi received her BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in 2008. She has exhibited her photography in the Denver Public Library, FLASH Gallery in Belmar, Gallery Sink, and the Art Institute of Boston. She was inspired a decade ago by the local teacher and collector Paul Harbaugh and later she came to work for Mark and Gallery Sink.

This work was made with my partner Kristen Hatgi in the fall of 2009 while staying at the Hotel Chelsea. I am a big fan of the Chelsea. To me it is NYC, one foot in the gutter and one foot in royalty. I lived there in the early 80s. Stanley the long time desk manager would always greet me loudly "Stieglitz". Little did he or I at the time know my great grandfather James L. Breese who founded the Camera Club of NewYork was very close to Alfred Stieglitz.

Every time i stay at the Chelsea i think this will be my last. It is rapidly upgrading. Hotel Chelsea bohemia life is slipping away. Where in NY can you still get a room for under 150 a night ? Much less a room that has two sets of double french doors and a fireplace. Its close to an end of an era with the Chelsea. The north light is magnificent. And only in the Chelsea could we have a darkroom in the closet and drip black forever staining silver nitrate on floors. (the floors are beat up blackened wood). We are lucky to have close friends who live in the Chelsea they introduced us to wonderful set of actor artists and models for this series of portraits. Artistic magic is in the air in that hotel. I could live and make work there for the rest of my life.
 

MARK SINK

Kristen on Balcony, Hotel Chelsea, 2009
Aluminum tintype, 6 x 6"