Helac Fine Art (New York City) presents There is More to the Story, an exhibition of recent photographs by Mónika Sziládi from her Wide Receivers series and Hrvoje Slovenc from his series, Marble Hill. The exhibition will take place at Site/109 on the Lower East Side from November 3rd–25th, 2012.

Focusing on the inherent tension between reality and fiction in photography,

Mónika Sziládi’s digital collage constructions investigate the complexities of human behavior and group dynamics. Her photographs illustrate the paradoxical relationship between the multitude of possibilities for re-invention and individual expression offered by society along with the pressure for assimilation perpetuated by interactions with new media.

Approaching her subjects from an anthropological perspective, Sziládi identifies the ways in which mass media dictates social behavior

and how it has supplanted other societal institutions that historically performed this function. In the series Wide Receivers, Sziládi candidly photographed the attendees at offline networking, meet-up and public relations events that originated online as they interacted in their mediated environments. A nod to current conventions of media display, she rearranges focal points and group interactions to mimic the experience of viewing an image, as one would scan a computer screen with multiple windows open.

In photographs such as Untitled (Candy), 2009, consumption and desirability manifest themselves in body language, clothing and disjointed social interaction of the young women at this event. The self-consciousness of the participants is amplified by the tenuous relationship between public and private personas that each woman chooses to display within this ephemeral environment.

Hrvoje Slovenc documents psychologically charged domestic environments that evoke the illusory relationship between fact and fiction. He possesses a deep interest in the many visual languages photography offers and exploits varied techniques such as documentary photography, sculpture and set design to blur temporal boundaries and evoke a sense of displacement in familiar spaces.

In his newest series, Marble Hill, Slovenc investigates the grotesque yet eerily beautiful world that lies beneath his own neighborhood in the Bronx. Through a series of time-intensive interventions that often take place over a period of weeks, Slovenc seamlessly crosses technological and stylistic eras through a series of black-and white photographs that transcend time and place. In II-II, (2012), he develops the work as a wallpaper installation on a monumental scale; a local man laden with grocery bags - seemingly covering his face in fatigue-- is positioned against a classical background of drapery that evokes the feeling of a stage set or Renaissance interior. The overlapping frames and uneven light effects collapse the three-dimensionality of the space and reveal the ultimate artifice of the image.