NEW YORK.-Luxe Gallery is proud to present: "Phantoms" - Dominik Lejman, Nicole Cohen, Trine Lise Nedreaas, and Heather Bennett, on view through December 16, 2007. “Phantoms” calls up shadowy intangibles, dusky opacities shrouding a hovering yet vacated presence, stealing away on a foggy midnight in a muddied white dressing gown without a trace. The four artists’ work presented in this exhibition all take issue with illusive existence and our fear of fading into black. Dominik Lejman’s ghostly projected figures betray a feverish trajectory toward collective anonymity, his common man struggling against the pursuant fear of non-existence. The ordinary dissolves us. Trine Lise Nedreaas’ “Testify”, a literal interview with a vampire, addresses the extremes to which an individual will go to avoid this trap of the habitual. Trying to pry himself out of the homogeneous blob of society, her subject creates an alter presence, even a false identity. By physically embodying her characters, Heather Bennett, also obscures identity. She confuses presences; subsuming her own self within a hollow stereotype, leaving us to look at her apparition through a dark jeweled glass, smoky with society’s prejudice and our own residue. While Nicole Cohen collapses the specters of past and present in work from her upcoming “Postdam” series, in which filmed figures frolic superimposed on the historic home of ancestral German royalty. So maybe with this exhibition we are put into the peculiar position of Gogol’s conniving Chichikov, that of having a chance to purchase a few lost, dead souls. Halloween is not quite over. (courtesy www.Artdaily.org)