Photographs by Sharon Kalstek & Gene Witkowski at Buffalo Big Print

There is a sensual if ethereal quality to Sharon Kalstek’s photographs. They are staged with a theatrical flourish. A theme of concealment underlies her dreamy portraiture. Subjects don masks, faces and bodies are partially hidden or obscured. A restrained eroticism pervades the pieces.

The mannerly poses of her subjects lend her prints an antiquated, 19th-century feel. Models are poised in stylized stances; many appear hazy and ghost-like. Some resemble store window mannequins, statues or dolls.

Kalstek’s black-and-white images are silver gelatin pieces processed in multiple veiled layers through optical darkroom techniques.

As a child Gene Witkowski would hide in the attic of his home in Buffalo’s First Ward. He would gaze out at the tops of the grain elevators dominating the skyline, wondering what they held. There were neighborhood stories of children wandering through them and meeting tragic ends. While playing, some would fall through hatches and plunge the height of the tower, or would tumble through floors or roofs that suddenly gave way. Walls suddenly crumpled and crushed trespassers. The attraction to these lumbering, decaying, architectural behemoths drew him to explore them as an adolescent. He’d spend countless hours inside these remnants of a once thriving industry.

Their gradual deterioration fascinates him now as a photographer. He enjoys capturing these ruins which line the Buffalo River along the Ohio Street Bridge, documenting the way nature and time slowly dismantle these manmade structures. Wind damage from Lake Erie exposes the infrastructure of the lakeside titans, flaying the sheet metal open, rust bleeding down the sides.

“These are our pyramids,” he says in his artist’s statement. “They represent what Buffalo was at one time. They’re too expensive to tear down and they’re landlocked because they’re blocked in by the railroads, so there’s a lack of access to them. I wanted to show how skeletal they’ve become.”

Columns of broken windows pock the concrete edifices. Missing roofs reveal open skies above, allowing the elements access to further damage.

He attempt to convey their monumental size through the dimensions he has chosen for his images. The series contains large color prints, each 22 inches wide by 33 inches high. They are deeply hued with oranges, siennas, grays, the rich greens of oxidizing copper.

Witkowski imagines how they bustled once, employing hundreds to thousands of workers, and the noise that accompanied the activity, now silenced, isolated and forlorn.

Kalstek’s and Witkowski’s works are on view at Buffalo Big Print Gallery, 78 Allen Street, through Sunday, January 20.

Andrew Hershey at Big Orbit Gallery

Andrew Hershey was Big Orbit’s Best of Show winner in its 2006 Members’ Exhibition. Hershey’s pieces are created through both an abrasive and destructive process. He repeatedly sands layers of paint over a woodcut relief block, erasing and revealing his images. This lends his prints a scratched, grainy, weathered appearance.

The subprime mortgage crisis, the collapse of the banking industry, global warming, the environment, sustainability and credit card debt are not just buzzwords for Hershey. They inform his work. These issues are all related in how we have become a disposable society, voraciously consuming valuable resources to feed our insatiable appetite for bigger houses, bigger cars, more clothes, more food, an excess of gluttony infecting our society.

Hershey’s works are primarily divided into rural or suburban scenes.

For the suburban pieces he has chosen to present mundane places, highways, parking lots, malls. These are part of a daily background we barely think about, a way to get to work, a place to park your car or pick up groceries. However, he challenges us to think that the creation of each of these places has had a huge detrimental impact on the land. Tracts of nature were destroyed, trees and plant life uprooted, animal life eliminated. Even the most quotidian of activities can affect the earth.

His rural images are barren trees, starkly set against a gloomy backdrop. They have been denuded of their foliage, the nightmarish results of our actions, poking out stick-like in a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter.

Hershey’s monochromatic landscapes are a commentary on the impact of the modern consumerist lifestyle and the legacy it will leave behind.

Hershey’s show, titled Insatiable, or the Wearing Out of the World, is at Big Orbit Gallery, 30 Essex Street, until Saturday, January 19.