Our newest offering for the Project Gallery features the large-scale photography of the Jersey City-based artist Raïssa Venables. Rendering familiar places unfamiliar, the artist plays with both color and perspective to distort—ever so slightly—stairs, elevators and bedrooms. Our perception of these intimate spaces is manipulated by the artist’s use of digital technology. Creating seemingly impossible scenes, the artist asks us to reconsider how we understand the formation of space and the meaning of reality. For example, an elevator with a mirrored ceiling reflects everything but the photographer’s camera, which was obviously used inside this same space when the image was captured. Erasing the evidence of her creative intervention, the artist presents us with a flawless yet distorted image of the elevator’s interior. For the first time ever, both the floor and the ceiling of the Project Gallery is used in the installation of an exhibition – an image of the artist’s own bathtub is placed in the middle of the gallery’s floor, while a counterpart image of an elevator ceiling graces the space above our heads. Raïssa Venables received her BFA at the Kansas City Institute of Art and her MFA at Bard College and also studied life drawing at the Art Students League in New York.