I like this art

redirecting to http://ilikethisart.net

2011-01-12T21:40:00.002-05:00

New Site Live!

2010-08-13T05:09:00.000-04:00

http://ilikethisart.blogspot.com has officially moved to a new URL/server/design @ http://ilikethisart.net. All new posts will happen there from now on, and all content has been imported to the new site, so there is no need to switch back and forth. Also, the images are bigger and verticals no longer have to be compressed.

For feed readers, the new feed is here. Come check it out!

Hellicar and Lewis

2010-08-02T16:40:00.003-04:00

Hellicar and Lewis

Work from Mirror Mirror.

"We were invited by the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Learning & Interpretation department to create an installation to engage people of all ages over their Baroque weekend, in support of the recent Baroque exhibition. Using the departments existing range of iMacs, we made an installation that would create a spontaneous mask from various Baroque elements from the exhibition. Users were able to take grabs of their creations, and share them with other visitors. Created using openFrameworks, the software was Open Sourced (Mac OS X 10.5 or above, iSight camera or other required) after the event, allowing for people all over the world to create their own masks. Indeed, the installation is the first piece of open software to be released by the V&A, in conjunction with Hellicar & Lewis. Source code listing available here." - Hellicar and Lewis

Aslak Vibæk and Peter Døssing

2010-08-01T22:53:00.003-04:00

Aslak Vibæk and Peter Døssing (AVPD)

Work from their oeuvre.

"Only by the use of semi-transparent PVC foil mounted in several layers in different combinations this series of works examines the perception of how the light penetrates the layered transparency film creating vibrant light differentiated surfaces/tones
The visibility of the works depends on the light angle which makes the perception of each work physical because the viewer has to move the body to find the right angle to make the work appear.

____________________________________

"Pladsen" is an exhibition space situated in the basement of Charlottenborg in Copenhagen. The entire building is listed and to solve the situation of exhibiting works without damaging the walls of the architecture the responsible exhibition group of "Pladsen" decided to erect a detached floor-to-ceiling wall construction, which resulted in a white uniform room.

Flip deals with the situation of this temporary uniform covering of the original historical walls of the room by simply disassembling, flipping and reassembling the five sections of the wall construction. This way creating a new order of the room by exposing the backside of the wall construction."- AVPD

Marissa Textor

2010-07-31T13:07:00.002-04:00

Marissa Textor

Work from her oeuvre.

"Can you talk a little bit about your content, you seem drawn toward epic nature, Why do you draw what you do and how do you decide what you want to draw next?

It's exciting to me. In an over-stimulated world this is the stuff the holds my attention and surprises me. I'm not sure if it is because I grew up in Southern California and I'm not used to dramatic weather but there is something very shocking but at the same time very beautiful about events like a thunderstorm. My mom and I where in Santa Fe one time when a huge thunderstorm broke out, we were absolutely captivated and watched it for hours like it was TV. As long as it has that ability, I'll be drawn to it. I am also interested in subject matter that is not tied to a specific time period and that can be relevant outside of the context of my personal experience. These naturally occurring events are much bigger than you and I and are something we have no control over. I think that is a nice reminder of our time and place here and understanding why things happen the way they do in the natural world can answer a lot of life's big questions. When I'm deciding what to draw for the larger pieces it is usually based on a current fascination that I've spent a lot of time researching. I pull a lot of photos and create folders for each subject and then it becomes a matter of piecing different elements together to create the image." - interview via Fecal Face

via field notes.

Taryn Simon

2010-07-30T13:32:00.003-04:00

Taryn Simon

Work from Contraband.

"Passengers, airliners, workers, baggage, cargo, taxis and trains flow ceaselessly through Kennedy International Airport.

Taryn Simon recorded another ceaseless flow — one the public rarely sees: contraband detained and seized from international flights.

Ms. Simon, 35, a Guggenheim fellow who lives in New York, spent five days and nights at Kennedy, barely sleeping. Her daily rhythms were driven by the relentless arrival of newly impounded goods.

After setting up makeshift studios at inspection sites in Terminal 4, Ms. Simon photographed 1,075 items that were taken from passengers and express mail. They ranged from banal bags of nuts to a falcon corpse from Indonesia in a package that declared it to be “home décor.”

“This is a look at an attempt to control what is considered threatening to economies, to personal safety and to a nation,” Ms. Simon said.

She has meticulously cataloged every item alphabetically for a 500-page book, “Contraband,” that Steidl will publish this fall. The New York Times Magazine is featuring an excerpt of 40 images.

Viewed collectively, her simple, uniform images offer a fascinating portrait of the world through objects from “alcohol” to “zolpidem” (Ambien).

Some items turn up again and again: sexual stimulants, counterfeit luxury goods and drugs. “I think it’s a depressing reflection of what everyone is chasing — all these forms of escape that create quite a flat representation of human desire in all corners of the world,” Ms. Simon said.

Fake Louis Vuitton handbags, steroids from Pakistan and counterfeit boxes of Viagra from China (labeled “USA American Visagra”) are just a few of the images that serve as a time capsule of contemporary desire. Not everything is so predictable, however. Among the more surprising objects were two dead guinea pigs. They were taken from a passenger flying in from Ecuador, where the animal is considered a delicacy.

”You have people arriving from different cultures with the normal parts of their everyday life, and then these suddenly take on a wild identity under U.S. Customs,” Ms. Simon said.

The idea for the project emerged from a 2006 session photographing seized food in the same terminal for “The American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.” In this book, Ms. Simon made the inaccessible accessible, from C.I.A. headquarters to the den of hibernating black bears.

After negotiating for four months with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Ms. Simon received permission to photograph all newly arriving contraband from Nov. 16 to Nov. 20, 2009. She used a large-format camera and a neutral backdrop.

“I wanted the shoot to be somewhat of a performance piece, where my photographs were replicating the actual flow of goods during a very fixed period of time,” she said.

The process was exhausting. “There’s video footage of me at the end of the shoot, being woken up by someone to press the shutter,” Ms. Simon said. “I was literally falling off my seat.”" - via The New York Times.

Teo Ormond-Skeaping

2010-07-29T08:48:00.001-04:00

Teo Ormond-Skeaping

Work from In the Fulcrum of Our Dreams.

"In Ormond-Skeaping's multi-layered canvas the more bewildering aspects of dreamscape are invoked: sensations of symbolic import paired with faces that may have no relevance in daily life but in dream logic summon up powerful archetypal associations, creating wave of skin-prickling wave of weird emotional resonance. Is the figure below a harrowing relation? A stranger in decline? Someone with menacing and supernatural powers? A reflection of super ego? Untitled, from the series In the Fulcrum of Our Dreams by Teo Ormond-Skeaping The open-ended, free-association and stream-of-consciousness that runs thickly throughout this work brings to my mind the work of Bill Viola, who works masterfully at themes which combine spirit, rites of passage, Jungian psychology and the uncomfortable, seemingly unending spaces of dream life. While it may seem initially intimidating to learn the language of a new medium and/or incorporate into an existing practice the threads of an entirely new one (or two or three), artists that are unafraid of the learning curve and forgiving of self-created messes and mistakes are eventually rewarded with a much larger tool chest and language set by which to communicate their visions." - Stacy Oborn for Hey Hot Shot!.

Jessica Labatte

2010-07-28T07:20:00.002-04:00

Jessica Labatte

Work from her oeuvre.

"My photographs are formalist explorations of everyday objects and materials that engage the subjectivity and experiential qualities of matter. Juxtapositions of content, form, and color imbue dynamism into the still life tradition in their ability to place a still object into a state of becoming. In this state of action, the images have an autopoietic, or self-generating visual rhythm established within the composition’s architecture. Perspectival manipulations created with the large format camera shift and tilt the picture plane, creating a confusing sense of depth and scale. These images play with the illusionistic tendencies of photography and its potential to simultaneously reveal truths and spin falsehoods. By creating a tension between accurate representations of form and deceiving attempts at flatness, my photographs lead viewers through a strange questioning of what it is we are actually seeing and how it was created. These mind- bending forms result in pleasurable questioning that provokes an active looking. Looking back to Dutch still life paintings, my photographs present objects for contemplation on the social, political and technics of the time. These objects are from the street as much as from the studio–representations of the discarded and the treasured. However these images do not engage in the creation of specific symbolisms, as the objects in the pictures never stand for something else. They are content to be themselves, formally captivating us through a chaos of sensations. Fragments act as catalysts allowing a wide range of references to float in and out of the viewer’s consciousness, as they incite provoking questions about how to reconcile our subjectivity with the objects surrounding us. And while the images foreground human presence as much as they play archaeologist for contemporary consumer culture, they also engage photography’s potential as the link between physical and immaterial worlds." - Jessica Labatte via Humble Arts Foundation.

Richard Mosse

2010-07-27T06:53:00.000-04:00

Richard Mosse

Work from Quick.

"...His work from Eastern Congo, a part of the world largely overlooked by mainstream media, is no exception. Mosse used Aerochrome, an obsolete technology, to create an alternative image of the complex social and political dynamics of the country. The film, designed in connection with the United States military during the Cold War, reveals a spectrum of light beyond what the human eye can perceive. He aims “to shock the viewer with this surprising bubblegum palette, and provoke questions about how we tend to see, and don’t see, this conflict.”

Mosse finds inspiration for his work in art and literature, citing Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” as an influence for his journey to Congo. “That novella is full of preposterous and enigmatic images,” Mosse wrote in an e-mail. “And in Houston’s Menil Collection, I saw some Congolese sculptures made with metal rivets, and remembered that the native crew members on Marlow’s steamer were paid with the same useless rivets, a kind of placebo currency invented by the Belgians. Here were those very rivets beaten into extraordinary forms—really excellent art. That’s all it takes, a few strikes to the imagination.” - Whitney Johnson for The New Yorker.

Yao Lu

2010-07-26T06:25:00.000-04:00

Yao Lu

Work from New Landscapes.

"Rarely exhibited in the West, Chinese artist Yao Lu (b. 1967) documents his changing country in atmospheric works that look to the future through the lens of the past. In his first show in the U.S., Yao presented 16 photographs, most circular or rounded windowlike compositions floating on a white ground, 47¼ inches square, with two horizontals measuring 6 and 10 feet across. The neutral backgrounds and compressed spaces suggest traditional Chinese landscape paintings; the works even bear the red signature stamps and collection seals known as chop marks. But these mist-shrouded scenes (ranging from 2006 to ’08) are digitally composed montages of photographs taken by Yao of China’s ubiquitous construction sites and trash heaps.

In these cleverly disguised scenes, Yao subtly critiques China’s willingness to sacrifice its history and despoil the environment in its breathtaking sprint to modernization. Deceptively pastoral scenes of rivers, lakes and mountains blanketed with flora or dusted with snow are, upon closer inspection, ravaged landscapes awaiting development. Lush-seeming hillsides are actually green mesh-covered mountains of debris. A flowing river is revealed to be a road wending around mounds of rubbish, and rocky outcrops are broken chunks of concrete. Some scenes are nonspecific, while the titles of others provide locales—fishing boats near Mount Yu, a house on Mount Fuchun, a spring picnic beside Lake Dongting—all soon to be lost, presumably, to sprawling construction. The lone tree, pagoda or house illustrates not an ideal but the lone holdout still standing in the revision of a national narrative.

Yao’s work is akin to that of Masami Teraoka, Yun-Fei Ji, Shahzia Sikander or any number of artists who recycle traditional art forms to suit contemporary themes. With tiny human figures visible in some works, Yao’s pictures also touch on the tradition of the sublime, here with humanity overwhelmed not by nature but by the forces of commerce and “progress.” While many of his compatriots found expression in physical feats or Western modes of representation, Yao’s message seems more poignant and mournful than defiant. His transformation of environmental depredation into nostalgic renderings of natural beauty raises the question of whether the new China, like Yao’s fabricated scenes, is built on falsehood." - Stephanie Cash for Art in America.

David Ope

2010-07-25T06:59:00.002-04:00

David Ope

Work from dvdp.

One of the most reliably mesmerizing sites I visit these days is the op-art inspired "visual Chinatown" of Hungarian artist David Ope. While generally Ope presents animated gif works that employ illusory tricks that add dimensions of both depth and time to the screen based images, he occasionally branches out and creates some fantastic, and hilarious, gifs that you wouldn't expect. While the experience of stumbling into the vortex of a wormhole or watching a sphere eat itself stretches our understandings of the third and fourth dimensions, these more metaphysical works are perfectly balanced with the more indulgent and accessible works interject themselves into his site.

Paul Sepuya and Timothy Hull

2010-07-24T06:54:00.000-04:00

Paul Sepuya and Timothy Hull

Work from The Accidental Egyptian and Occidental Arrangements.

"The book The Accidental Egyptian and Occidental Arrangements features over 25 photograph-based collages of xerox imagery on cut paper. Culling from our personal image collection, the collages reflect not only our personal aesthetics and sensibilities but new compositions and relationships. This project is also furthering our respective use of xerox collage and book/zine format. The series is very much about arrangements, with repeating deconstructed portraiture and images of Coastal Maine, Rainforests and Ruins all taking cues from each other to suggest various relationships of cultural and humanistic qualities. We were inspired to make this book a reality after being asked to produce a piece together for TOKION's February 2010 "collaboration" issue." - Sepuya and Hull

via i heart photograph

Affiliati Peducci / Savini

2010-07-23T06:42:00.001-04:00

Affiliati Peducci / Savini

Work from their oeuvre. Their exhibition is on until the end of the month at Galleria Rubin in Milan.

I find it appropriate to include the press release from their current exhibition, translated via google translate as it mirrors translations of classical sculptures in their works. Ironically, many of these busts recall the ephemeral and incorporeal avatars of second life, among other transient and temporary media.

"Rubin presents the first solo artist Milan Affiliates corbels / Savini. Among young contemporary sculptors and 'widespread use of poor materials or recycled. Corbels and Savini, on the contrary will be challenged with a noble and dignified as marble demonstrating technical knowledge and experience by virtuosos.

In relation to this choice on their path and 'exemplary graduates at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, where is' done their meeting and is' born artistic partnership, they could increase their production by working on important projects abroad completed in part in their great studio in Carrara and partly to the destination.

Their research work comes from the extraordinary familiarity with the material condition and irony with the forms of sculptural tradition that is normally experienced. Classical busts, holy figures or purely ornamental, portraits.

This iconography, from the great masterpieces until the items' Run, is taken up and reworked with insight or humor to become a gallery of amazing improvisations on well-known themes: the Farnese Hercules in polystyrene, a pair of cherubs garden that seem wood burned up to more 'daring distortions arising from handling of the tires with which they are traced. Recently, we have sent more decisively in this direction by creating portraits that combine and integrate different parts of sculptures.

It 's a job that many evidence from contemporary artists, among which there is not only inappropriate, the phenomenon of' materials and forms, but also a certain satisfaction in hybridization and grotesque. However corbels and Savini demonstrate against classical iconography, a love and familiarity that prevents any cloying degeneration and suggests a free hand but respectful coexistence." - Galleria Rubin via Google Translate

Erin Shirreff

2010-07-22T06:18:00.000-04:00

Erin Shirreff

Work from her oeuvre.

"We are dealing with replicas, but of what? For her first solo show ‘Landscapes, Heads, Drapery and Devils’ at Lisa Cooley Fine Art, Erin Shirreff presented an arrangement of cryptic objects, films and photographs that appeared to be mundane, but stubbornly managed to defy recognition.

The title of the show derived from the most common associations that people make when confronted with ambiguous forms – they are, perhaps, the most basic categories by which we generate meaning. In his unfinished essay ‘The Artist as Site-Seer’ (1966–7), Robert Smithson related the origin of the visual to language, or what he called the ‘enigma of blind order’, to reflect on the process of creating meaning through classification. A similar investigation can be found in Shirreff’s recent works, which employ the idiom of the all-too-familiar as a visual trap. They lure the viewer into familiar terrain by employing a visual language that mimics well-known things in the world, as well as the pseudo-scientific aesthetics established by Conceptual art. However, the familiar quickly becomes unfamiliar, and the viewer – unable to make sense of what he or she is seeing – has to rely on perception that is based less in recognition than in observation.

In Two Moons (2009), a moon-like sphere hovers in the middle of each of two adjacent monitors. Both spheres are lit from the side: while one slowly appears and disappears within the brightening and dimming lights, the other rotates on its own axis, gradually revealing its cratered surface. The changes are hardly detectable to the wandering eye, the slow pace turning the investigative gaze into a mesmerized stare.

There is a similar effect in Roden Crater (2009), a single-channel video that was projected onto a large screen suspended in the back corner of the gallery. Shirreff took hundreds of photographs of a photograph of the dormant crater that houses James Turrell’s iconic, still-unfinished earthwork. She photographed the image repeatedly from the same distance and perspective, but under changing light conditions, then edited the pictures together to create a 15-minute film, mimicking a time-lapse shot of the actual terrain. The altering light environments create the impression of changing daylight and seasons while the flash reflection on the image’s surface is reminiscent of the travelling sunlight.

In Shirreff’s recent series ‘Untitled’ (2009), angular geometric forms made of compressed ash leant along the long gallery wall, their relatively thin surfaces suggesting veneer or casts rather than actual structural elements. With no immediately obvious function, these shells may evoke ancient temples as much as they might the papier-mâché architecture of Disneyland. It is difficult to find the right angle from which to examine their multiple surfaces, which encourage viewers to continually shift their body in relation to them; an erratic dance, examining them from all sides and angles. Shirreff’s work plays with the relationship between appearance and the actual object, collapsing the things that we think we see with the actuality of compressed ash, plaster casts and pictures of pictures. All the action occurs on the surface; it is where our knowledge and the objects’ inherent references meet. It is also where the artificial nature of the works is revealed. Once the sleight of hand is exposed, and the viewer realizes what he is actually looking at, the stand-in nature of the works becomes apparent. It is not about the reference to moons, craters or architecture but much more about the process of recognition, about how something may appear to be a landscape, a head, drapery or a devil." - Anna Grits for Frieze Magazine.

Michael Mandiberg

2010-07-21T07:07:00.000-04:00

Michael Mandiberg

Work from AfterSherrieLevine.com.

"In 1936 Walker Evans photographed the Burroughs, a family of sharecroppers in Depression era Alabama. In 1979 in Sherrie Levine rephotographed Walker Evans' photographs from the exhibition catalog "First and Last." In 2001 Michael Mandiberg scanned these same photographs, and created AfterWalkerEvans.com and AfterSherrieLevine.com to facilitate their dissemination as a comment on how we come to know information in this burgeoning digital age.

Here on AfterSherrieLevine.com you will find a browsable selection of these images. Links to the high-resolution exhibition-quality images to download and print out. Along with a certificate of authenticity for each image, which you print out and sign yourself, as well as directions on how to frame the image so that it will fulfill the requirements of the certificate.

By building the image's URL into the title - the image to the left is "Untitled (AfterSherrieLevine.com/2.jpg)" - the images are locatable and downloadable by anyone who sees or reads about the image. By distributing the images online with certificates of authenticity, the images are accessible by anyone. Unlike the work of the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres ‹ known for his spills of candy and stacks of paper from which the viewer can take a piece of, though the sculpture stays complete because the owner possesses the certificate of authenticity, the right to reproduce ‹ the certificates here are used to insure that each satellite image be considered with equal authenticity, not the opposite. This is an explicit strategy to create a physical object with cultural value, but little or no economic value." - aftersherrielevine.com

Sam Songailo

2010-07-20T06:09:00.000-04:00

Sam Songailo

Work from Media Centre.

"'Abstraction has been less a search for the ultimately meaningful… than a recurrent push for the temporarily meaningless.'*

Paintings that look like something are rubbish. Why not take a picture? Or just look at the real thing? Or if you really want to see something differently, just use your imagination. Or hang it upside down. Or take a pill. Or squint. Painting a painting that looks like something is a kind of arrogance. Rudeness, even. What do you suppose the aliens think about paintings that look like things? Rubbish, that's what. The same goes for music. Songs are rubbish. Why would I want to hear you sing about your own shit? Sing about your own shit on your own time please. I'm having enough trouble dealing with my shit without having to listen you sing about yours. I'd much rather listen to some static, or some droning, or throbbing, or pulsing. How about a nice hum? Can all musicians just hum from now on please? For real, I'm trying to think.

Years ago Sam Songailo was asked to paint the inside of a tiny venue in town called Delacatessen. Among other things it played host to an event called the 'Festival of Unpopular Music'. Minimalist noise-niks would once or twice a month subject seated crowds of turtlenecks to a variety of interesting humming sounds. I make it sound pretentious – and it probably was – but I liked it. It was very therapeutic. Your job was to sit there and pretend to listen to people extract sustained droning sounds out of an array of expensive effects pedals, hoping to God that you'd remembered to turn off your mobile phone. You think you were bored – which is what you'd afterwards tell your less pretentious friends at the pub – but as soon as the music stopped the ideas would tumble out in torrents, sure as birdsong after rain. We're surrounded by meaning. Every object has to have a moral, a point, a purpose, an explanation – some figurative reflection of ourselves, or else a clever-clever whiff of humanity, as if to say 'Oh, hello there fellow human, isn't this nice? Isn't it lovely that art – my art – can bring us together like this? Let's all have a big phenomenology party, but only invite people who think they get Sinedoche.' All this desperate yearning for significance. All this vanity. It makes me a bit sick sometimes. Sometimes I think the aliens are looking down – if they're bothered enough to look down at all – saying 'duh'. Rare is the work of art that doesn't pretend to relate – that invites you to bring your own meaning to the object. Rarer still is art that invites nothing at all, only a frame of mind. When you look at Songailo's work, you aren't immediately struck by anything meaningful. Songailo is the first to admit that he wants to place a great deal of distance between his work and the banalities of everyday life. He wants his work to act as kind of circuit breaker – a means by which you can remove yourself from your life, from that which makes you human, in order to appreciate how strange the world really is. Like all truly abstract artists Songailo wants you to see the world the way the aliens see it – in all its weirdness, its beauty, its irreducible complexity. 'Post-human' is a misused phrase. In many ways, post-human is more human than human-human. That which truly makes us human has nothing to do with romance or humor or pathos, it has more to do with a cold appreciation of aesthetics, of geometry, of the overwhelming beauty of colours and shapes – unsullied by the petty trivialities of the so-called human condition." - Stan Mahoney

*Varnedoe, K., Pictures of Nothing, Abstract Art since Pollock, Princeton University Press 2006

Michael Naimark

2010-07-19T13:14:00.002-04:00

Michael Naimark

Work from Displacements.

"Displacements is an immersive film installation. An archetypal Americana living room was installed in an exhibition space. Then two performers were filmed in the space using a 16mm motion picture camera on a slowly rotating turntable in the room’s center. After filming, the camera was replaced with a film loop projector and the entire contents of the room were spray-painted white. The reason was to make a projection screen the right shape for projecting everything back onto itself. The result was that everything appears strikingly 3D, except for the people, who of course weren’t spray-paint white, and consequently appeared very ghostlike and unreal.

Displacements was produced three times between 1980 and 1984. By the third time, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1984, it was done.

Twenty-one years later, in 2005, my long-time friend and colleague Brenda Laurel cajoled me into a redux. The young couple in the original living room are now middle age with a teenage daughter. Mom is still pensive, Dad still watches TV, and the daugther is curious. Displacements 2005 was shot and projected in digital video rather than 16mm film, which, it turns out, was much more challenging." - Michael Naimark

via Rhizome

Phillipe Halsman

2010-07-18T07:43:00.001-04:00

Phillipe Halsman

Work from Jump.

"Jump was born in 1952, Halsman said, after an arduous session photographing the Ford automobile family to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary. As he relaxed with a drink offered by Mrs. Edsel Ford, the photographer was shocked to hear himself asking one of the grandest of Grosse Pointe’s grande dames if she would jump for his camera. “With my high heels?” she asked. But she gave it a try, unshod—after which her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Henry Ford II, wanted to jump too.

For the next six years, Halsman ended his portrait sessions by asking sitters to jump. It is a tribute to his powers of persuasion that Richard Nixon, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Judge Learned Hand (in his mid-80s at the time) and other figures not known for spontaneity could be talked into rising to the challenge of…well, rising to the challenge. He called the resulting pictures his hobby, and in Philippe Halsman’s Jump Book, a collection published in 1959, he claimed in the mock-academic text that they were studies in “jumpology.”
Portraiture is one of the greatest challenges in photography, because the human face is elusive and often mask-like, with practiced expressions for the standard range of emotions. Some photographers accept these preset expressions—think of annual-report portraits of corporate officers—and others try to eliminate expression altogether, to get a picture as neutral as a wanted poster. Halsman was determined to show his sitters with their masks off but their true selves in place." - text via the Smithsonian.

Cody Trepte

2010-07-17T09:02:00.000-04:00

Cody Trepte

Work from On Exactitude in Science.

"Every period from Jorge Louis Borges' "On Exactitude in Science" enlarged and then drawn from the third edition of Collected Fictions.

"... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."" - Cody Trepte

Daniel Shea

2010-07-16T08:36:00.000-04:00

Daniel Shea

Work from Plume.

"Plume is a photographic exploration of Southeast Ohio and its unusually dense concentration of coal-fired power plants. The project serves as a follow-up to the work I made in 2007 in Appalachia, Removing Mountains, which focused on mountaintop removal, a particularly pervasive form of coal mining. Plume follows this coal up river to Ohio, where it is being burned to generate electricity.

Geographically rooted in two towns along the Ohio River, Plume focuses on Racine and Cheshire, who sit in close proximity to 4 power plant stations, all within a 15-mile radius. The landscape of these towns presents itself in distinct layers. The subdued palette of the river, with its plodding pace, carries not only coal, but a unique regional sentimentality. Off the banks of the river exist people and sparse economic growth, and above them sprawl small mountains and Appalachian biodiversity. The trees, reaching for the sky, are outpaced by their synthetic allies in upward ambition. These smoke stacks are as ubiquitous landscape accompaniment in contemporary life as any, and in this series they are presented in their social environment, separated from their industrial foundation. Their repetition in the landscape creates a stabilizing visual element throughout the series. I want the viewer to scan the horizon line, looking for the visual cue that connects subject to place, and ultimately, to narrative.

Southeast Ohio resonates a hidden fragility, not just in the industry’s inevitable demise, but in the dejection of its citizens. Like many mono-industrial cultures the resources are being exhausted, much like the emotions of the residents. Coal-fired power plants present myriad of environmental hazards. Burning coal releases carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the air, in addition to equally toxic solid by-products that erode from nearby landfills into local ecosystems. Hypothetically, state and federal regulatory bodies exist to monitor the process, but systematic and longstanding deficiencies within these organizations allow these coal-burning facilities to continue to threaten the environment and local communities.

Coal exists beyond industrial and historical development as a larger abstract presence that is woven into the cultural fiber of Ohio. Here, the air of restlessness predicts an overwhelming ambivalence towards the coal industry. The citizens and land of Ohio and West Virginia are the source point in a vast grid of energy distribution. This burden of heavy resource usage is a type of political and industrial play, mirrored in other industry-specific rural economies, and constitutes an act of complex resource siphoning. In other words, non-Appalachian citizens are benefactors of not only inexpensive energy access, but of distance from the destructive industry that makes this access possible. This sociopolitical paradigm, as old as industry itself, calls into question our confounding relationship to power." - Daniel Shea

Jimmy Joe Roche

2010-07-15T09:26:00.000-04:00

Jimmy Joe Roche

Work from his oeuvre.

While not an essay on Roche, it is very fitting, and he is linked later in the article (not included).

"Imagine a technological stew. In this big bubbling cauldron are piles of images, jpegs and mpegs of Super Mario Bros , Thundercats and Care Bears, strangely scratched 80s TV adverts, fractals left over from early-rave culture, old computer game animations and lots of other odd and seemingly random found snippets. Imagine this neon-coloured pool constantly moving and morphing like a garish cheap Flash animation. This pool forms the basis of some of the most interesting contemporary artworks to emerge from this decade - art that is all around, and all over the internet. Art that is about the overload of imagery in the modern world. Art that is about how technology has infused our everyday lives and is slowly dissolving our identities. Psychedelic art.

This, however, is a very different movement to the one that emerged in the 60s and 70s, when politics, drugs, pop culture, art, music and graphic design all came together in one enormous wave. That was a moment about perceptual distortion and cultural upheaval, about the group experience. In terms of its merit, psychedelic art was always largely considered sensorial and populist. Minimalism and pop were thought of as more conceptual and serious, and have remained in the high canon of art forms. Cosmic cinemas, fantastical imagery, dream machines and oil-wheel light shows were seen as having more to do with altering consciousness than anything "important", Although the original psychedelic movement started out as socially and politically radical, it was swiftly seen as superficial and tacky.

Cult critic Dave Hickey is one of the few wordsmiths who has examined psychedelia in any real depth. In his essay "Freaks", Hickey pointed out that what made psychedelic culture different was that actually taking the drugs didn't really matter. "Extreme experience was no! required, nor was cultural production," he writes, "One simply proclaimed a commitment to whatever ideology psychedelic experience signified at that particular historical moment... It was a communal. polemical art, vulgar in the best sense and an international language." Hickey's essay was written at the tail-end of acid house, that last great wave of hallucinogenic pop culture, which, much like its 1960s predecessor, quickly began to feel kitsch and out of fashion, with all of its drug-affiliated visuals (all those smiley faces and imploding fractals) deemed utterly tasteless.

That very tastelessness is what makes today's neo-psychedelic works so interesting. This is art that employs faded technologies and forgotten TV clips, cheap methods and trashy references, and it's filled with animated gifs, video mash-ups and constantly disintegrating images. Sometimes it feels shamanic or disturbingly child-like. It veers wildly from the anti-academic to the uber-geeky and often resembles the chaos of changing TV channels at warp speed with a remote control. Here, everything becomes pixel and byte, Although the artists involved
are unlikely to call themselves psychedelic (no one likes a pigeonhole), the work is nonetheless an extension of the chaos, colour and creativity of "old" psychedelia, What also makes this new art so interesting is that it can be seen as an illustration, and extension of, the internet." - Francesca Gavin for Dazed and Confused.

Elodie Pong

2010-07-14T11:53:00.000-04:00

Elodie Pong

Work from her oeuvre.

"Pong’s works explore the complexity of human relationships, the function and validity of cultural codes and references, and other social phenomena in contemporary society - specifically her own generation. “We are knights on the trajectories of a post-everything era,” she says. Her recent body of work can be seen as a multi-layered and ongoing analysis of how to inscribe oneself into today’s hybrid reality, devoid of fixed structures and identities. What are the guidelines or role models? Are there still any at all? Always with a strong sense of humor, Pong raises a multitude of questions. Her visual language is cinematic and precise and unfolds through metaphors rather than linear narration." - DBA Christian Haye

Guthrie Lonergan

2010-07-13T11:56:00.000-04:00

This model is from a dream i had. i dreamed it would be a home for a person in outer space. it would float out in space aimlessly. the person would get his oxygen from the tree and his food from different fruit and vegetable plants that he would plant before being sent into space. it obviously doesnt have all the things i dreamt about. in my dream there was a pond with fish and that is how the tree got its water. there was a dirt pathway from the tree to the pond and there were rocks that the person could sit on.

i'm curious what was in the dream that is not in the model? also, was the surface of the sphere visible like it is here?

In my dream, I was inside it, and the whole thing was floating out in space. I remember looking at all of the stars and seeing planets slowly go by. The sphere was crystal clear, but you could tell that it was there. It was so clear though it was almost amazing. There were also other spheres around mine. Each had one person in it. Oh yeah and the people in the spheres, including me, were dressed in white robes. Within mine, there was a huge tree, as you can see in the picture, and a stream. The whole sphere in its self was massive. I remember there being a little hut where supposedly I would go sleep. the thing that was most noticable though was that all the colors were so vibrant and deep. They were all earthy colors, but it was just so beautiful.

i had the wierdest dream last night. i was walking downtown when a space ship landed in the street, naturely i dove for cover behind a bush. thank you to dj orion for the road

i'm curious if the blue flames from the jets on the spaceship were in the dream? also, there seems to be some sort of steering column inside of the spaceship, is this something that you remembered?

to answer your questions, yes there was blue flames from the spaceship, and yes, i do remember the steering column was something i remebered. i remember the aliens comming out and there was that steering column.

_______________________________________

Guthrie Lonergan

Work from Google 3D Warehouse.

Lonergan gained inside access to a tight knit Google 3D Warehouse community, allowing him to question their intentions and motivations in recreating their dreams in the 3d software. - curated by JstChillin.

Robert Wodzinski

2010-07-12T14:01:00.005-04:00

Robert Wodzinksi

Work from jpgmess.org/nastynets. Go to his website, you won't regret it.

"jpgmess.org is a web project started in summer 2006. in the beginning most content was generated through the corruption of jpeg files using a text editor. fragments and, occasionally, full bodies of texts were inserted into the jpeg's data. eventually this method became hypnotic and clipping of code and animating of broken images brought to mind burroughs/gysin and cut-up under the influence of the dream machine applied to photography and JPEG reproductions of art for the screen. a small edition of prints resulted as well and can be found in the Rhizome offices or in some basement in portland, OR (i think i lost them all). texts used: selections from e. dickinson's complete poems: part IV time and eternity, louis zukofsky's "A", pts. 7/8/12, adorno's minima moralia, baudrillard'ssimulacra and simulation, deleuze and guattari's thousand plateaus, etc. some images were found art-historical and some were made. corrupted files were animated in the order that they were corrupted, resulting in the animated dissolution/reformation of the image. the site is continually updated, but the work with deformed jpegs no longer continues. is there more ground to cover there? " - Robert Wodzinksi

Mark Beasley

2010-07-11T16:00:00.000-04:00

Mark Beasley

Work from his oeuvre. Much of his work is web-based, so please follow through to his site.

"When fire fills the sky, When the sun erupts in ecstasy And fading furies die. I promise you my innocence And mine a darting fish: Your soul is like the vastest sea I live within your heart. I lose myself within your love; Castles must be built with sweat and tears: It may be hard at times for you to know. Know, my love, I'm yours for all your years. Never think that I don't love you, though Eden wasn't half as pleased as I! Just as though the sea stopped needing rainbows, Knight of my nights, champion of swallows: A love appeared in my dawn-sharpened sky. What love is not destructive? So ours, too, must rip lives apart. A thousand bleeding dreams. To your smooth, dark voice! Let the tide of anticipation, The anguish of endings, Those blood-swollen currents of delight, Pleasure inundates domestic pain, Lift us over the bar. With which we caress each other's skin. The telephone's the tongue Ah! My lips are open But now best left alone. The past is like a sculpture: Shaped in all the heat of life Cold, unyielding stone, Nor would my love determine who you'd be. If you loved me, you'd be there for me My whole life wouldn't be only for you, To help me do the things I want to do. My looks have made me shy, so please take this But love for you illuminates my soul. You're meant for some more noble destiny. I watch you from the sidelines in a dream My heart is happier than it might seem: That never can come true. Yet nonetheless, I shiver in the warmth of your caress. I may not be the mirror for your eyes, Gifted with a more than human grace, I can't believe you ever could love me. As it is meant: an unrequited kiss. I cannot know your heart or hear your cries, Your heart is just as lovely as your face. But fortune has been decent, on the whole. You hurt me so. What demon drew And looked at me. I wondered why You wrote your name upon her thigh You on to be so not like you? Of shade and dappled love, Are like woods on a warm spring day As I gaze from my sunlit doorway. When leaves have just unfolded And slender branches thick with sap Bend under the weight of songful birds. I look into your eyes and see A timeless world of sun and breezes, Your hazel green eyes My love for you is now my only home. After five months of unabated love, Do I recall my former life alone? Abysses open, no matter where I move; Soon, soon my body will consume its treasure. At night I play your body and your voice, My mind's already half insane with pleasure; Time, for both of us, must temper touch So love can once again be slow and free. My only fear's desiring you so much Our love is torn by miles, not by choice. That dream will overwhelm reality; And do the things I've fantasized for you: And put you everywhere I've wanted to. I want to love you all the hours we've missed, Soon, soon, my darling, I'll be coming home. But soon the hands and cries will be your own. Kiss you all the places my mind's kissed, Three children and twenty-five years later We've traveled several rocky roads together. Sometimes I didn't think we'd get this far. We're more a couple than we ever were. Long nights of easeful meditation are followed by doleful, inconsequential days. Eventually, we learn that love is as seasonal as potatoes. Long days of sunshine are followed by short, lusty nights. Even sex is squeezed by moon, sun, and stars into potato pancakes and candy canes. Nor do we know what tides pull on our kisses. I need you as the sun must have a rose I wish I had that moment back again I know I must have hurt you, caused you pain. Thus for my trespass you may trust me more. To dare the darkness, though within we bleed. The secrets of its long-forgotten story. To understand how much we are in need. More, I know that I have lost your trust. Sometimes we have to lose what we most cherish We play with life until we nearly perish To turn its empty radiance to glory, Or as a nation needs someone who knows I know my need of you more than before; To pulverize my carelessness and lust. Just as a child learns to its delight And sacrifice by far the greater treasure So you say "love" to get the rapture right, Destiny provides one's just deserts As those who seek but pleasure often do, Upon the altar where you worship you. Justice would demand you be the fool, But you are far more ignorant than cruel. I cannot think you know and just don't care. I guess you just don't know how much it hurts. And then, of course, you tire of your pleasure, That lying sets one fabulously free, Getting so the most you can from me. By turning out one just as would be fair. I didn't know he had his way. And found within a fair young maid Whom later he would marry. I only knew he stopped for tea A need whose hunger drives you near insane, There is no life without its share of pain, A state in which you must, but cannot be. Nor can you love and not feel agony, A family in a circle warm and loving: After long and futile waits for voices, Have their homes and wait upon your touch. A choice in darkness, both sides fiercely shoving: There is a dark and gloomy place where choices Less sweet? or more? than living lone and free? My heart is yours, whichever it might be! You must, alas!, sign on to such-and-such. I never felt so happily at home Glancing in through other people's doors. Your pleasure now is mine, as mine is yours. As I do now, so rich in what life brings. We started out as friends and now it's love. From comradeship to passionate intimacy, How beautiful to move so easily Flitted like a ghost among dead things, This turn was nothing I'd been thinking of, I never realized that my life alone Pure gain, with no rough edges to remove. I knew desire, but love was not for me Until I felt my heart from friendship move. No maybes or perhapses, consciously. A daughter, a daughter: Three without men. In a singles bar People there have lights on. In the peace of aloneness, Through unshaded windows Smothers the fear Washes dishes with his wife. On the top floor a mother, Next door an old couple And think about me, I look across the street. Of who will die first. A muscular young man A woman drinks beer I see them through curtains. The apartment is dark. I have said the same things. I watch here in darkness, And have nothing to say. And think about you. I like it that way. In the blue light of TV. I meet a woman Too many times Later on, in the languor of the married, Now piercing, now remote, but never ended. Towards you like bliss in gentle weather. Revel, then, serenely, as the night Easy hours, moonlit, open pages Life reveals few secrets so impassioned Do you, can you know how love has fashioned Each comfortably alone because together, Enfolds the meditative dust of light. Read peacefully, their dissonance suspended, Choice and chance as weather shapes the land? As a child's cry moves silently through stages, As those which long-term lovers understand. Sleep lies just offshore, its blanket carried But this I never knew. We ran like puppies through a field, When love was bright and blue. I used to doubt you cared for me That never, never will you love like that What more can someone in such pain want What happens when the girl you've always wanted Bitter blackness until death. Ay me! Again? The jewel of day is gone. You see By thoughts of her with someone else? By the thought Breaks up with you? Are you forever haunted Than death? So I have found my melody, My heart has found its harborage, You are my hearth, my home. And I have found my poem. My will has found its loam. All I've ever dreamed of, on the Net. For someone who's like no one else I've met: I love her as I've loved no one before. Through modems must our e-mailed passions move! Words and pictures, grainy and compressed? Will I ever get to touch her face, Tender, charming, bright, queen of my nights, A jaypeg love is truly for the birds. You'd have to wonder whether I'm repressed. But love it is, through all the bits and bytes, And though she's living in a distant place, Hold her in my arms and, perhaps, more? How can I fall in love with only words? Ay, me! No matter what, I'm still in love. Tree trunks in a clearing, nothing wearing, Nuts and bark, broad rivers thick with toil; Which brings to mind the muted light of caring. Yet holding high their single woven crown. Earth tones: roots, ground leafmeal, seeds, and soil; There is a beauty in the color brown I want you back now that you're gone. Bereft of joy, bereft of will. I stumble through my days of stone My heart's a pit no love can fill. Eventually, we learn that love is as seasonal as potatoes. Long days of sunshine are followed by short, lusty nights. Even sex is squeezed by moon, sun, and stars into potato pancakes and candy canes. Long nights of easeful meditation are followed by doleful, inconsequential days. Nor do we know what tides pull on our kisses. Beware the intimate Internet! Beware the chatrooms with closed doors Where naked names cruise midnight shores And fall in love before they've met. You left me, but you cannot leave my heart. But since my true intention is to steal The lovely you, you left behind with me. And then your icy words you will recall, Of me, my dearest friend and lover still. This I can do alone, and yet the real The things you've done that hurt and make me bleed. I'll tell you of the pain I feel, and all The you I loved, the real you isn't much. No matter where you go, you will be part Don't worry--I'll treat you tenderly: I hold you there, with or without your will. You lives and lies far beyond my touch. And comfort me, and give me what I need. I love you with all I am And all I'll ever be. You are my moon, my sun and stars, My earth, my sky, my sea. Not knowing where I am or what I'll say. I try a door and think of you instead, I must take note of other things than you And clear my head of smiles and grateful tears. Walking through a park I touch your face, I live in a perpetual embrace, It can't go on like this for years and years. The world's the dream, and you reality. Yet such talk seems fantasy to me: You're like music playing in my head Everywhere I go from day to day. Not caring if there's rain or bright sunshine. Hugging the sweet thought that you are mine. The cause must be, of course, our love is new; I used to be completely cruel and heartless, I used to feel an angry, bitter hunger, Not knowing why, nor looking much inside. Using girls, then tossing them aside. I didn't know he had his way. I only knew he stopped for tea Whom later he would marry. And found within a fair young maid And sails between the rocky heads Love finds little latitude That guard its proper berth. Once it leaves the sea I've learned through all the fights and separations Our back and forth is buried in the past. This is the third time we have tried this love, I need no space for rambling or release. And this will be the time that it will last. But now it is the rock on which I stand. I know it, and the knowledge brings me peace. Now will never end, as time will prove. Love me well, for I'm completely yours. All I am I put into your hands. Beyond all other dreams and speculations. That happiness depends on having you. The way is clear; I have no other doors. It took some time to see that this was true, Lavish with the joys of spring and fall. Seeing no redemption there at all. The summer is a desert between mountains I look across that bleak and lonely wasteland, Then, for days and weeks and months Your fear is not surprising. Fury, betrayals, recriminations. It's always ended badly: Because you also feel like such a fool. An agony worse than grief We'll find a way our wishes to combine. Our marriage isn't easy, but our love Marriage, as a choice, requires choices. Is still the force that shapes my daily life. You and our two children. All the rest I choose you with all my wounded heart: I want us to be happy, and will move Wherever I must be to be your wife. One must choose not once, but every day. Life offers us a hundred thousand voices, I'm yours, and I want you to be mine. Lies in the distance, charming, but apart From the circle of the ones with whom I'm blessed. Yet those we fail to hear fast faDe away. I want you, but I don't want you to know. I fear your presence like an undertow You anything of interest I contain. You are my love. I will not let you go. I fear the loss more than I trust the gain. You are my love. I will not let you go. You are my love. I will not let you go. Empty but for you, I cannot show That drags me out unready, trite, inane. Fate is oft the filament of passion, The unwilled will that wills the world we know. Illumined by the force of its fierce flow. Years break, yet love maintains the tides below. For love, far more than chance, may fortunes fashion, That we might be alone. Nowhere to bear my love away No sea to sail unknown, No place to put my paramour, No heart, no mind--just bone. And turn into a stone; I thought I must give up on life The desert wind quite suited me: Life reveals few secrets so impassioned Revel, then, serenely, as the night As those which long-term lovers understand. Do you, can you know how love has fashioned Now piercing, now remote, but never ended. Enfolds the meditative dust of light. As a child's cry moves silently through stages, Choice and chance as weather shapes the land? Later on, in the languor of the married, Easy hours, moonlit, open pages Sleep lies just offshore, its blanket carried Read peacefully, their dissonance suspended, Towards you like bliss in gentle weather. Each comfortably alone because together, And I have found my poem. My heart has found its harborage, So I have found my melody, You are my hearth, my home. My will has found its loam. Perhaps we are both fools to sacrifice, Yet in such love is where true beauty lies. I look at you and know life can be good. Our love must be a question, not an answer, But you are like a rainbow in my sky. You call me gorgeous, I don't wonder why. My husband cheats. I look the other way. And happiness shines through me, as it should. Stupid. Humiliation suits me. Each day For the children, of course. I myself am worthless, A distant light on hills we cannot see. You, too, bear a cross: Your friend has cancer, And you will not desert her. I agree. I steel myself for words each day more vicious. A single leap of hope must be allowed. If you don't want to see me, please don't hide Though you may not have asked for me to call, Not easily are shy songs sung out loud. Be gentle: What you're holding is my heart. Remember in your honesty my pride. The truth, yet tell it with some art. Yet now I wait alone outside your wall. And I find it a miracle to be. I hardly noticed you, nor did you me. When we first met you seemed a timid doe. Now you are a mother and my wife, I may not be the mirror for your eyes, But love for you illuminates my soul. Your heart is just as lovely as your face. My looks have made me shy, so please take this But fortune has been decent, on the whole. That never can come true. Yet nonetheless, I shiver in the warmth of your caress. I watch you from the sidelines in a dream As it is meant: an unrequited kiss. You're meant for some more noble destiny. I can't believe you ever could love me. Gifted with a more than human grace, My heart is happier than it might seem: I cannot know your heart or hear your cries, Or the fascination of forever? (For love Or the wilderness of blue-white witnesses Staring wordless back across the abyss? Of a night sky dark lit with diamonds? Is a fragment of forever lodged in the heart.) What makes stars romantic? Is it the beauty We will through love and time be unified. The world is a redaction of the dream. Loving you each day and night, each hour, So long that I of life with you despaired, But just as bushes planted side by side So intertwine one cannot tell they're two, That through these frozen years it might be spared. Our greatest pain deep longings shall redeem. So have I dreamed, though we have been apart Of course I must be me, as you are you, Loving till you flow into my tears, And I into the garden where you flower. Holding wounded hope within my heart I've dreamed of loving you for many years, The things you've done that hurt and make me bleed. I hold you there, with or without your will. But since my true intention is to steal You lives and lies far beyond my touch. This I can do alone, and yet the real And then your icy words you will recall, I'll tell you of the pain I feel, and all You left me, but you cannot leave my heart. Of me, my dearest friend and lover still. And comfort me, and give me what I need. Don't worry--I'll treat you tenderly:" - Statement Generated from source: poemsforfree.com/lovepo.html
Mark Beasley, 7.31.2008

Peter Fischli and David Weiss

2010-07-10T23:53:00.000-04:00

Peter Fischli and David Weiss

Work from Der Lauf der Dinge.

"An unambiguously CORRECT result of experiments exists; this is obtained when it works, when this construction collapses. Then again, there is a BEAUTIFUL which ranks above the CORRECT; this is obtained when it's a close shave or the construction collapses the way we want it to – slowly and intricately, that is, a beautiful collapse. The aesthetic layer on top of a function is like the butter on a sandwich – rather thin and smooth. The wrong result is obtained when things get going of their own accord, and the wrong result is obtained when they don't get going at all. The CORRECT range (which in terms of moral theology might also be called GOOD) is, in our view, incredibly narrow. Similarly, GOOD and EVIL are often very close, for example when the candle on the swing sets fire to the detonating fuse. Because they are nice and childish, the candle and the swing tend towards the good, whereas the detonating fuse is evil because you don't need it for harmless things. On the other hand, every object in our installation is good if it functions, because it then liberates its successor, gives it the chance of development. Not destructive in that sense." - Fischli/Weiss, text via Media Art Net

Yunior Mariño

2010-07-09T23:45:00.000-04:00

Yunior Mariño

Work from his/her oeuvre.

"The immensity of the sea, the sound, its utopic dimension and such mixture between the instant and the eternity. Yunior Mariño has built a language that moves around paintings photography and installations establishing a connection between the micro moment, the instant and the eternity, the nothingness and the absolute, recognizing in the sea and the sky a rhythmic structure where all the nature and the soul is melted and reproduced to infinity." - via Myto Gallery

Lindsay Lawson

2010-07-08T23:48:00.000-04:00

Lindsay Lawson

Work from Das Ding (and others).

"The thing in itself (das ding an sich) is an object independent of the senses. It is a thing without a viewer: tangible, but not perceivable. This video mimics the famous pottery scene from the movie Ghost when Sam (who is a ghost for most of the movie) helps Molly, but mostly flirts, as she throws clay into a vase while the song Unchained Melody plays in the background. Setting aside most of the plot, the movie mainly deals with the presence of absence. Sam is gone and yet he is not. The vase itself is an object illustrating this paradox. Its walls are carved out only to create a negative space (an absence) in which to put something, presumably flowers. It’s shape may be phallic, but it will always posses its yonic counterpart and since the object in Das Ding appears to be a glass-like material both of its genders can be seen at the same time. The shape of the vase develops over time without a visible hand forming it which implies that some ghost-like force is manipulating the clay or that the vase is simply forming itself." - Lindsay Lawson

Joachim Schmid

2010-07-07T23:55:00.002-04:00

Joachim Schmid

Work from O Campo. Also see his other works, he has a diverse and fascinating body of work.

"My new book O Campo, or in its translation The Field, is a photographic compilation of football fields in Brazilian cities. The images were taken via satellite and they show the rather oddly shaped football pitches that seem to be built wherever possible – the desire for playing the game has clearly surpassed and ignored the limitations of natural topography and FIFA’s laws of the game. According to the official rules and regulations (which are included in the book as an epilogue) you would not be allowed to play football on any of these fields. However, the careers of many of the world’s best football players began on these very same fields despite their askew angles, odd proportions, mis-shapen border lines and pitch markings. Studying the architectual contexts of these fields we get an idea about the social context where these players come from." - Joachim Schmid

via Sonic Blog.

Rick Silva

2010-07-06T23:11:00.011-04:00

Rick Silva

Work from his oeuvre.

Silva's trilogy (as presented here) is a sampling of his work that I feel addresses similar aesthetic and conceptual concerns while maintaining a dynamic and evolving approach in the discussion of place, technology, and perception placed within the context of a developing method of inquiry. The phrenetic pace of the introduction to Colorado (and Silva's oeuvre) is a calibration for the rest of the work, making the opening sequence a flawless rendition of the futurepast, a visual throwback to the future we were promised by Max Headroom and other visionaries.

The technologically specific dating of the work provides instant context, yet doesn't weigh down or forcibly date the work, and provides us with a foothold for consideration. The techno-nostalgia is a point of access to a work that otherwise seems to deny itself to the viewer (this is a theme in many of Silva's works). I am not arguing that we are not to understand these works, nor that they require an inordinate amount of time to appreciate, however, I also do not believe that the duration of any of these pieces lacks consideration. In a function very similar to the animated gif, the sinusoidal repetition of the videos encourages a trance-like state of perception where we mesmerized by the hypnotic repetition, jarred by the rapid-fire rotation of the world we had been immersed in, and thrown back into a locked-in gaze.

Massif, while keeping pace with Colorado, is a calmer piece. The video is comprised of over 17,000 unique variations, of what I believe is the Matterhorn, rapidly sequenced with the setting sun and base being grounding constants. Watching the piece in its entirety induces a state of meditation which led me of all places to Tatlin's Tower. It is in this second video (unless you watched A Rough Mix already) where technology and nature begin to compete, with technology generally intervening on, and eventually replacing (Krummholz Formation) all aspects of nature in the works. It is in this transformation that I understand Massif. I approach it as a metamorphosis from technological understandings of / interventions onto nature (Colorado) to a synthetic replacement of our relationships to place and our groundings in reality. Granted, this seems a little bit of a stretch, and while I can not articulate a better argument at the moment, this one feels adequate at the moment, but still incomplete.

The newest of the works, Krummholz Formation, is a walking meditation in the waiting room in a doctors office of a dystopian future imagined by George Orwell (a far less comforting futurepast). The rhythmically swaying trees are renderings from the video game engine Unity, although their artificial nature is only betrayed by their trunks on a few occasions. Again we encounter partial access to nature through technological means, as the trees sway in and out of the seemingly narrowly defined plane they are permitted to exist on, yet can only do so by passing through.

This theme echoes how the vast majority of video works are consumed, on the Internet or otherwise, particularly with the vast majority of readily accessible, highly referential new media works. Silva's works, however, seem to encourage participation rather than decoding. Do it.

Vincent Fournier

2010-07-05T20:04:00.002-04:00

Vincent Fournier

Work from Space Project.

"SPACE PROJECT is a photography series based on Fournier’s fascination with the Jules Verne novel “From the Earth to the Moon.” Fournier photographed observatories and astronaut training stations in some of the most desolate places in the world, including the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center of the Russian Federation, the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, and the Atacama Desert Observatories in Chile. His ghostly, composed photographs--mysterious, space suited men walking on a vast desert plain, a researcher quietly sitting in a blindingly white sterile environment, abandoned monitors blinking codes in a simulation room—have an otherworldly, unreal aesthetic. In these fascinating images, Fournier explores the paranoia and darkness of man’s attraction to the disconnect of space." - text via Clic Gallery

Angela Strassheim

2010-07-04T12:19:00.000-04:00

Angela Strassheim

Work from Evidence.

"Angela Strassheim conceptualized her most recent series of images after learning of a violent crime that involved a student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she was teaching at the time. Strassheim developed the project utilizing a forensic technique commonly reserved for crime scene investigation, which she learned while working on the field for the Miami Forensic Imaging Bureau. In this particular body of work, Strassheim created her pictures through the application of a specific chemical spray called "Blue Star" to the walls of rooms where violent, aggressive acts were committed.

Long after the struggles ended in these spaces, despite the cleaning, repainting and subsequent re-habitation of the rooms, the "Blue Star" solution is capable of activating the physical memory of blood through its contact with remaining proteins on the walls. Long exposures- from ten minutes to one hour- with minimal ambient night light pouring in from the crevices of windows and doors, capture the physical presence of blood as a lurid glow: a constellation of stars embedded in the walls.

Through a long and painstaking research process, Angela mapped out the exact locations where violent, often horrific crimes were perpetrated. She convinced new owners and tenants, some unaware of the violent history of their residences, to revisit the unnoticed, unseen past. Angela captures the tracing of a final struggle through the hard evidence of a violent moment, thereby revealing the silent yet omniscient memory of everyday living spaces. The physical result of her work is a series of luscious, large black and white prints, which attract the viewer like stills from a film noir with their eerie seduction and mysterious quality. Ultimately, these images are honest and true to the original space; they make visible, once again, the traces of violence and death that took place in those spaces in a forgotten past." - text via Marvelli Gallery.

Klea McKenna

2010-07-03T20:27:00.003-04:00

Klea McKenna

Work from Slow Burn.

"Klea McKenna describes her series Slow Burn as "an ongoing series of experiments" in which each image reveals or teaches her something that leads her to the next. This approach—photography as a heuristic process, in which the "eureka" moment of one image pushes us forward toward new discoveries with every step—is ideally the foundation of any artistic practice to some degree or another. It can be a risky, but it can also be incredibly rewarding, for both the viewer and the artist. McKeeena's unique prints are made with homemade cameras or without any recording device at all (paper airplanes made out of photographic materials!). The work has its points of intersection with other artists, including Walead Beshty and Miroslav Tichy, while also seeming to represent a personal means of grappling with the inherent capacities of photographic materials and processes. The resulting work has a certain amount of rawness and tension to it—a quality much appreciated by this particular juror.
In reviewing the artists who have submitted and making this selection, I'm keenly reminded of how savvy the photo community has become as a whole—how much well-executed, carefully constructed, good work there is out there. What I find myself looking for, then, is the work that stands apart for its willingness to try to push a little bit against the expectations of "good." Not work that is different for the sake of difference, but work that takes risks; that reveals deeply held beliefs and interests in how a photograph works—or doesn't." - Lesley A. Martin via Hey Hot Shot.

Vincent LaFrance

2010-07-02T22:42:00.000-04:00

Vincent LaFrance

Work from his oeuvre.

From an excerpt from an interview at Too Much Chocolate:

Radeq Brousil: Vincent, your works are filled with a certain type of irony and poetry. How would you describe your work to a person who has never seen your work before?

Vincent Lafrance: I am usually trying to avoid doing this. My work has gone in many directions and I hardly make sense of it; appart [sic] from it being indicative of my behaviour. I use art to filter my reality, it’s broad, it’s diversified. I have short and intense interest for things. But if I have to make an effort for you because you once invited me over in your family for easter I would say that I often use humor, visual gags and parody. My work also implies the vision itself, I use photography to underline aspects of my visual environment. I like watching. For me, seing [sic] is thinking. Somehow I am interested in perception, I create illusion and try to elaborate visual complexities. A lot of my pictures are about construction, like still life. I may be eclectic but I am also and deeply a traditionnaI [sic] photographer. I use film most of the time and print it directly on photo paper. I care about the surface. My discourse seems really inherent to the medium of photography, also because of the multiple reference to photography history. Now to end on something else, when I talk of my work to someone who doesnt know me, I usually try to speak about the present, about what I am doing now. It gives people a better sense of what you are interested in. It makes them believe that you are busy. We are attracted to busy people, we want to have a bit of their attention.

Oliver Laric

2010-07-01T23:19:00.002-04:00

Oliver Laric

Work from Icon (Utrecht).

"At the level of the image, the determinations of the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648), as in so many other incidents of iconoclastic 'image-breaking' leading up to the present day, were predicated on a clear-cut Manichean sense of difference. During this period, statues and images of a religious order were subjected to sustained physical attack. Those that did not square with the heterodox self-understanding of the Reformation (as an exemplary monotheistic motion) were deemed false - in other words 'idolatrous' and worthy of destruction.
Versions, Oliver Laric's second solo show at Seventeen, circulates around both historical and contemporary ideas relating to image hierarchies. Central to the exhibition is a suite of polyurethane sculptures. In collaboration with 3D modellers, Laric has translated a reformation damaged icon from St Martin's Cathedral, Utrecht, into a silicone mould from which a number of casts have been made. Each is identical in size and form, distinction coming only from their varied pigmentation. For Laric, these sculptures, their multiplicity, reflects a viable productive principle in iconoclasm. After the conceptual event of iconoclasm, after the physical inscription of that event as damage on the very surface of these icons, the formal hierarchy between the original and its modification is fundamentally undermined. Instead there is equipoise; no single truth, no original; no derivative; just versions...*
In related speculation framed by a documentary video installation that forms the second and final element of the exhibition (also titled 'Versions'), Laric suggests that in the contemporary age certain creative protocols are, in a more general sense, similarly challenging the hierarchy between 'auratic original' images and those determined to be derivative (and therefore of secondary importance).

Commencing with a digitally doctored image released by the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 2008, the documentary suggests a new mandate for image making, one which Laric identifies as finding its zenith in our networked internet age where bootlegs, copies and remixes increasingly take precedent over 'originals' in cultural production. Emphasising this plurality, Laric presents four equivalent 'versions' of the film in total. In each version, the same cycle of images is re-authored by a different narrator - respectively Momus, Guthrie Lonergan, Dani Admiss and Laric himself.

* That is, 'versions' amongst other possible 'versions'." - Paul Pieroni

Micah Schippa

2010-06-30T22:34:00.000-04:00

Micah Schippa

Work from his Tools@Hand.

Schippa's statement is among the shortest I have seen (I am interested in translation between analog & digital, hand and machine.). Following an ongoing trend of techno-kitsch revival in new media, Schippa presents us with something that is familiar but at the same time inaccessible and foreign. His works are an examination of our emotional relationship with technology, while also serving as an experiment with accessibility, nostalgia, and our willingness to interact with techno-referrential art emotionally. This is where I find these types of works to be most compelling. They function virally and viscerally, but the art as object, rather than reproduction, is antithetical in process to their function as reproduced artworks. These particular images raise conceptual issues that the woven pieces cannot. While the tapestries address the idea present in his statement, their reproductions address far larger and more compelling concepts.

David McCallum

2010-06-29T23:23:00.004-04:00

David McCallum

Work from Neighbourhoodie.

McCallum also has some rather interesting pieces that deal with the intersections between culture, technology and sound.

"The Neighbourhoodie is a hooded sweatshirt that augments the experience of game playing through an electronic infrastructure mounted in the garment. Neighbourhoodie explores the hoodie as a platform; what if the garment familiar to teenagers could actually enhance experiences? What modes of interaction are inherent to the garment?

The garment has a basic infrastructure of proximity sensing, speakers, and lights to augment game play. The proof-of-concept prototype is an augmented game of tag, where players are alerted to the presence of other players through unique sounds, and are given information about players' states in the game by sounds as well as lights mounted on the garment." - David McCallum

Genadii Berёzkin

2010-06-28T13:51:00.002-04:00

Genadii Berёzkin

Work from his/her ouevre.

Apart from the stunning combination of visual complexity, accessibility, and kitsch, I have a very difficult time articulating anything about this work. I am not alone in this, as I can find nothing written anywhere about Berëzkin that is of greater length than this post has already achieved. What I find most compelling about these works is the difficulty in placing them chronologically. Many of the pieces fit squarely in a contemporary new media / technology-referrential space while others seem to read as Dadaist collage. Berëzkin seems quiet fluent in contemporary visual culture and subtle cues that refer to a wealth of other works and artists. In that regard, this work is powerfully contemporary and very appropriate to Tumblr blogs and blog posts that have no text. The referential nature of the works makes them readily accessible, yet beyond the visual payoff, I am still not quite sure what they offer; however for self-reflexive works on the state of contemporary visual habits and trends, this is a remarkably powerful contradiction.

Visual Studies Workshops Registration Deadline

2010-06-28T13:51:00.001-04:00

The registration deadline for my course at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY is approaching this week (Friday).

Check out the course catalog here. All courses are run for Graduate or Undergraduate credit.

__________________________

Art and the Six–Million Dollar Man
July 26-July 30

This workshop will focus on processes and applications of technological reproduction through the use of cell–phones, image/data manipulation, and the animated GIF. The workshop will have both studio and seminar components, and we will discuss the theories behind, and implications of our works. Students will produce both web–based and print–based works and we will explore the internet as a venue for the presentation of contemporary art.

Michael Demers

2010-06-27T13:22:00.003-04:00

Michael Demers

Work from Date Paintings (You Tube).

"The conceptual artist On Kawara has produced an ongoing series of "date paintings" (the Today series), which consist entirely of the date on which the painting was executed in simple lettering set against a solid background. If the painting could not be completed on the day it was begun, it was destroyed.

Date Paintings (YouTube) differs in that the date which comprises the work is auditory instead of visual, comprised of a text-to-speech file read by the computer and uploaded to YouTube. Here, the "painting" becomes an ephemeral object, the memory of the read-aloud date replicating the memory of the destroyed paintings On Kawara could not finish on a given day..." - Michael Demers

Anna Krachey

2010-06-26T12:22:00.005-04:00

Anna Krachey

Work from Land/Landscape

“Maybe it's important to make a distinction between what gets called materialism and what real materialism might be. By materialistic we usually mean one who engages in craving, hoarding, collecting, accumulating with an eye to stockpiling wealth or status. There might be another kind of materialism that is simply a deep pleasure in materials, in the gleam of water as well as silver, the sparkle of dew as well as diamonds, an enthusiasm for the peonies that will crumple in a week as well as the painting of peonies that will last. This passion for the tangible might not be so possessive, since the pleasure is so widely available, much of it is ephemeral, and some of it is cheap, or free as clouds. Then too, the hoarding removes the objects- the Degas drawing, the diamond necklace- to the vault where they are suppressed from feeding anyone’s senses.” - (chosen by the artist) from “Walnut Veneer,” an excerpt from the book Inside Out, by Rebecca Solnit.

Ariel Schlesinger

2010-06-25T21:28:00.000-04:00

Ariel Schlesinger

Work from his oeuvre.

"For L’Angoisse de la page blanche (The Anguish of the White Page, 2007), two sheets of standard-size copy paper are pressed up against each other as they spin in circles on a low table. A homemade arcade game, Untitled (Football Players) (1999) is poetic play with fear and dread, child-like toying with the idea of death: when the viewer-player pushes down on two metal levers covered in duct tape, a high voltage transformer sends buzzing charges up and down the bodies of two metal footballers. The game’s apparently haphazard construction disguises a deliberate design, which is calculated down to details such as the decorative quality of plywood panels at its base and a strip of packing tape around two edges of its Plexiglass case. This is also the case in Untitled (Burned Turkmenistan Carpet III and IV) (2008), for which the seemingly casual act of burning two rolled-up oriental carpets creates a series of long, repeated lacerations that play off of the detailed geometric designs in the carpets’ intricate weaving.

As art historian Rudi Fuchs writes in the note to his lecture ‘Conflicts with Modernism or The Absence of Schwitters’,1 ‘in the end, art-making is a process of magic.’ Schlesinger calls attention to the magic nature of the artwork but purposefully reveals all of the secrets to his tricks. Two white wires taped to the gallery floor lead from a low platform, where Forever Young is displayed, to a wall socket, giving away the fact that the glowing ash is actually the end of an optic fiber. The two white pages of L’Angoisse de la page blanche perform their courtly dance on a table whose legs are fashioned from tip-less spray cans. The battered cans draw attention to the table’s underside where a small motor is revealed as the dynamo driving the paper’s animation. The flaps at the bottom of the cardboard box in Zu Erinnern und Zu Vergesse (The commemorable and the forgettable, 2008) are not tightly closed but leave gaps from which water should be leak, but oddly it doesn’t. This small detail provides a clue that inveigles its way into the mind of the attentive observer and betrays the illusion: the box’s bottom is not saturated but coated with water-resistant wax.

As phenomenologist Francois Cheng explains in Five Meditations on Beauty (2006), the beautiful is never a static way of being, ‘given once for always’ for ‘its ability to captivate lies in its revealing itself […] in its emergence.’2 In Schlesinger’s oeuvre, trauma and disaster are the spells that call objects forth from their quotidian hiding into the realm of the artist’s sorcery, a magic of constant revelation." - Emily Verla Bovino for Frieze Magazine

Andrew B. Myers

2010-06-24T13:54:00.000-04:00

Andrew B. Myers

Work from his oeuvre.

"Tell me about your influences and where you go for inspiration.

I’m very interested in contemporary art and design, almost exclusively, so most of my inspiration comes from what I see going on in recent years. Painting to me is an exciting world, especially the work I see coming out of it now. I admire (and am jealous to an effect) of the sheer control painters have over the imagery they produce, lacking a lot of the external variables that photographers deal with all the time. I guess I like taking this sensibility to my work, using these variables that photography has to offer but bringing a very tight element of control in terms of colour and composition. I’m not quite sure where I became so obsessed with washed out colours, sunlit shadows and negative space, but it must have something to do with how much I fetishized warm weather, the beach, and open areas during the summer in the remote area I come from, which I mostly remember as freezing and covered in several feet of snow." - excerpt from an interview with Heather Morton

Vanessa Billy

2010-06-23T12:43:00.001-04:00

Vanessa Billy

Work from her oeuvre.

Also, there is a review of a recent show at This is Tomorrow.

"To misquote Ecclesiastes, ‘The sun also rises, the sun goes down […] All art is meaningless and a striving after wind.’ Vanessa Billy’s Suns Neither Rise Nor Set (2008) comprises two convex glass discs that looked over her small exhibition ‘Flexible Values’, creating a new horizon on which these twin celestial bodies were halted. Glow (2008) was simply a layer of yellow pastel dusted over a section of the gallery’s white windowsill, but it radiated with the light of these new suns and bathed the show with subdued rays.

The spirit of Arte Povera has lately been reinvigorated, and Billy’s transient, mute poetry displayed, with its simple materials, an affinity with the earlier movement but also a further sense of dramatic irony. The two-part Fluids (2008) was a diminutive fountain-like entrance to what seemed to be a faded carnival; a thin stream of clear plastic arched between two steel green bases, set askew from its accompanying poster, which showed a spectrum of blue, purple and pink merged and diffused like colours refracted underwater. The sand from Dry Stamina (2008) was spread underneath, a wedge of sand that filled the step between the gallery’s two levels but had dispersed with time. At the rear the dozen red plastic misshapen arches of Support Brackets (2008) acted like a two-dimensional theatrical backdrop to a distant flock of seagulls. ‘Flexible Values’ set the spirit of Arte Povera loose in the faded grandiosity and elusive romanticism of a desolate seaside town, as though the artist’s collection of objects were the shorthand sketches of an abandoned proposal for Robert Smithson to design a Butlins holiday resort.

Similar in tone to the work of the Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri, each of Billy’s works casually maintains a discrete presence with a self-conscious sense of weight. As though they were theatrical props, Billy is fully aware of their temporary metaphorical value, setting us the task of casting about for connections before they are flung into the bin or washed into the sea. Hints of transformation began to emerge from the balance of materials used that suggested traditional methods of industrial conversion: sand and glass, paper and wood. In Supporters (2007), a low plywood plinth held up a sanded piece of cedar that resembled a smooth, sea-worn pebble, the wood’s age rings transformed into geological stripes. Billy quietly proposes a new elemental ecology in the weathered progression that flowed from the larger stone of Supporters to the smaller particles of Dry Stamina and on to the melted sand of Suns Neither Rise …. A similar metamorphosis took place in Four Times Weathered (2007), two square concrete blocks topped by a slight pyramid, each face holding a small, bunched-up tissue. The withered tissues seemed to bear marks of the pastels used in Fluids, ritually laid like seashells set out to dry, taking on evocative shapes in their cast-off abstraction; one of them even resembled a seahorse.

Billy set the gallery as a frontier for an encounter that shapes our environment, like the seafront. And like holiday resorts, galleries gather around this frontier, imbued with idealism and decorated with promises of escape. ‘Flexible Values’ set out a new stall along this coast, the ‘land’ of the exhibition shaped and transformed by a visual erosion, the artist’s deftly curated negative spaces between the works evoking an invisible sea of meanings in which the artist is happy to let us swim. But don’t expect a lifesaver: Billy’s seafront shares an escapism that can only lead back to ourselves. She readily acknowledges the futility of this striving after wind and revels in its physical sensations, letting explicit answers dance elusively on the constantly receding horizon." - Chris Fite-Wassilak for Frieze.

Christy Matson

2010-06-22T14:56:00.004-04:00

Christy Matson

Work from Soundw(e)ave.

"A number of artists have started using textiles and needlework to explore the relationship between computer culture and craft. Here on Rhizome, we've recently covered Ben Fino-Radin, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Cat Mazza, and Cody Trepte, among others employing "traditional media" in the service of a technological critique. Not to be left out of this group is Christy Matson, a Chicago-based artist who takes this investigation to even more self-reflexive heights. Matson's work may not look high tech, but it responds directly to media culture and is often made using a Jacquard Loom, a mechanical device that is important in the proto-history of computing. Many of the artist's projects involve building feedback loops between the sonic experiences of making and viewing her work. Recordings of the weaving process are algorithmically translated into binary yes/no, on/off, or true/false patterns and translated into images in the form of thread color choice, needle behavior, and other factors. The artist includes copper wires in these weavings to act as amplifiers or antennae for further sonic transmissions. See, for example, Movements, in which the viewer's hand is meant to rove as a sort of playhead on what is posited as a 4-channel audio installation. The same questions are raised in her work, Digital Synesthesia, which looks at similarities in the abilities (one might even say tendencies) of both the human brain and the computer to conflate sound and image. To her credit as a dedicated artist, these are issues Matson works to flesh out again and again, even exploiting the repetition of the line-by-line weaving process as an ironic take on the re-spinning of these narratives. When she explored synaesthesia in Soundw(e)ave (a piece whose title conveys her obvious love of word play), she wrote that "This transmutability [between images and sounds] of information in the digital world initially seems to be in opposition to the ways that humans experience the physical world," but is, in fact, quite natural. Speaking of the physical world, her weaving-together of cotton and rayon (or natural and artificial fibers) in Loomscapes seems perhaps her most visually compelling argument of the relationship between traditional media and digital production. Following from the long tradition of tapestries that depict battle scenes and other historical culture clashes, Matson's wall hangings pull landscape imagery from LucasArts' early-90s computer game, LOOM, to collage together images absent of figures, but instead foregrounding the game's beautiful backdrops. In a sense, the beauty and conceptual quandaries that make Matson's work so compelling are nicely summed up in her own words, written about her work, Either/Or: "[This] is a series of work that explores the grey areas that technically should not exist, but often do, in absolute systems." The piece creates what looks to the human eye like a band of grey, where thousands of black and white strings are loosely knotted together. Here, the seemingly hard differences between bodily and machine perception are made messy, but prove worth unraveling. - Marisa Olson for Rhizome.

Katie Shapiro

2010-06-21T22:39:00.003-04:00

Katie Shapiro

Work from Malibu Sandbags.

"“Public Access: extending 25 feet inland from daily high water line." -California Coastal Commission

In Malibu Sandbags I am exploring the cohabitation of nature and man. The sea level is rising and shortening our beaches. Beachfront houses are no exception. In their attempt to battle the inevitable, the wealthy homeowners of Malibu’s Broad Beach have erected sandbags to act as a barricade for their homes, a last chance to save their property. The sandbags serve as both protection and privatization of the homes from the public eye. This project is looking at how we divide ourselves into social classes as well as the natural evolution of our environment." - Katie Shapiro

Ron Jude

2010-06-20T02:41:00.000-04:00

Ron Jude

Work from Alpine Star.

"Photographer Ron Jude selected images from The Star News, a local newspaper in McCall, Idaho to sequence without text for this book. The images are reprinted using stochastic screening, a frequency modulation technique similar to conventional halftone printing that uses mathematical values to generate random density patterns. The printing method heightens awareness of the original source of the images, yet the visual language of notable people and events takes on a cryptic semiotic system when plucked from their news-worthy contexts. Blond twin toddlers in neck braces, a black bear's domestic appearance, and flooded riverbanks become signifiers of attention-worthy moments and together assemble to capture a micro-cultural survey pregnant with meaning." - via Printed Matter Books.

Alex Artz

2010-06-19T13:43:00.000-04:00

Alex Art z

Work from Ailurophilia.

While the statement is from her project Human-Animal, I find it applicable to the images above as well.

"I continually wondered how adaptable the human home is for other species, whether that species lives in its own bedroom or in a cage in the backyard. The animals in these pictures often occupy the home space as fixtures much like the trinkets and framed pictures that display the animal lover's identity. Various objects, including empty grocery store food packets, tchotchkes, stuffed animals, animal clothes, car decals, drawings, memorialized gravesites and photographs identify the human owners as animal-lovers, even when the object of their affection is not captured in the frame. As many of my photographs make clear, some human identities are carved through the creation of a familiar human-pet dynamic involving both affection and dominance, captivity and care. My photographs record this man-made symbiosis as it occurs in and around the American home." - Alex Artz

Judith Baumann

2010-06-18T12:06:00.000-04:00

Judith Baumann

Work from Travels with John.

"Travels with John delves into my fantasy life in which I travel across the country with John Baldessari, imagining our conversations on life, love and landscape. In addition to recreating myriad conversations between John and I, I have collected and reinterpreted snapshots of our travels together ranging from White Sands, New Mexico to Ruby Beach in Washington to Niagara Falls, Ontario. This series is the second in what I have dubbed "Art-Fan-Art," my homage to those figures in contemporary art that have inevitably influenced the way I approach art-making."

Debbie Grossman

2010-06-17T23:11:00.003-04:00

Debbie Grossman

Work from My Pie Town.

"In the spring of 1940, Russell Lee wrote to his boss at the Farm Security Administration, Roy Stryker, proposing to spend several weeks shooting Pie Town, New Mexico, a small settlement of homesteaders near the western edge of the state. Lee wanted to photograph there because he felt Pie Town represented a kind of hardy, small town community that was disappearing in America. His pictures of the town are tinged with his mythologizing of a difficult way of life and the land-conquering kind of patriotism that's a foundation of the American story. I share Lee's nostalgia. Seventy years later, I am drawn to a similar utopian ideal. I'm filled with a longing to connect with that time and the people in Lee’s images – I've had a lifelong obsession with frontier life. I fantasize about locating myself within those pictures and that time. So in an attempt to make the history I wish was real, I have made over Pie Town to mirror my fantasy.

In this work, I take a selection of Lee's beautifully-photographed body of images and re-imagine, revise, and reconstruct them using Photoshop. The archive I have created resembles Lee's with an important difference – in My Pie Town, the rag-tag community of homesteaders is populated exclusively by women.

In some of my revisions, I have taken male bodies and rendered them to look like masculine women; in others, I have taken pairs of women, shifted their distance and body language, and brought them closer to create a sense of intimacy. In some of the pictures I have created women so masculine, or so ambiguously gendered, that they may not, for some viewers, clearly read as one gender or the other. I’ve also left a few images untouched, allowing for another dimension of re-reading Lee's work.

Though the Pie Town pictures were never widely published as a group, the images have a sort of a cult following. Posted by the Library of Congress on the photo-sharing website Flickr, they attract endless notes and commentary. Paul Hendrickson wrote an article in 2005 for Smithsonian Magazine about returning to Pie Town; David Margolick wrote a similar piece in the New York Times in 1994. And in 2001, Joan Myers wrote a fascinating biography of Doris Caudill, called Pie Town Woman. I believe that part of what makes the pictures so seductive for contemporary viewers is their extreme level of detail. Lee was a very careful chronicler of the details of everyday life. There's also a casualness and an immediacy to Lee's style.

My/Lee's pictures also have the appeal as a body of work that slipped through history's cracks. Because they work so much better as a group or a picture story, and perhaps also because they were made at the tail end of the Depression, Lee's Pie Town images never become iconic symbols of the Depression itself the way that, say, certain images by Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange did. I, like Joan Myers, find Lee's Pie Town pictures particularly compelling because they seem so respectful of his female subjects. Of course, gender roles in Lee’s original pictures are fairly traditionally divided, and any hint of sexuality is sublimated, but I could not have made my female version of Pie Town if there hadn't been space and flexibility for my re-reading in Lee's nuanced photographs.

Because the images of Lee's time in Pie Town are available in high resolution form from the Library of Congress, I was able to get close to Lee's images on a pixel level. For me, working with photographs and editing them so closely in Photoshop is a kind of an intimate act. Zooming in and carving a feminine jaw out of a masculine one, or manipulating the touch of one woman's hand on another's shoulder is a way for me to access and merge my desire with figures which would have otherwise remained frozen in time. I've begun to think of Photoshop itself as my medium – I'm fascinated by the fact that it shares qualities with both photography and drawing. This work creates something that reads as a photograph, and is infinitely reproducible like a photograph, but at the same time depends heavily upon the intervention of my hand.

Particularly because my work takes as its starting point a body of images that is Americana, that was made to be a political tool to encourage pride in this country and its homesteading, agrarian roots, I enjoy imagining My Pie Town working as its own kind of (lighthearted) propaganda." - Debbie Grossman

Toril Johannessen

2010-06-16T13:25:00.000-04:00

Toril Johannessen

Work from Transcendental Physics.

"Toril Johannessen opens the spring season in NO.5. In her fascination with nature and the history of science she creates her visual works by way of methodical testing and an analytical attitude to the empirical and theoretical. The aesthetic grows up in a personal interpretation of the documentary where she also draws on metaphorical and mytholo¬gizing elements that are latent in the source material.

The exhibition in NO.5 consists of two works. One is a sculpture, which is absolutely the largest object one can possibly get into the gallery space in one piece, and thus circumscribes the volume and architectural framework of the exhibition. Unlike a ship in a bottle it is not hidden tricks that make the arrangement possible, but primarily a mapping of the physical conditions.

The second work is concerned with hypothetical points of contact between the German scientist Johann Zöllner (1834-1882) and the Canadian/US visual artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004). Inspired by the latter’s geometrical motifs, Johannessen plays on Zöllner’s discovery that parallel lines appear to be tilted when they are intersected by shorter lines at a particular angle (“Zöllner’s illusion”). A further meaning of the work can be read out of the fact that both Zöllner and Martin, through their methodical, scientific investigations, have explored various spiritual dimensions." - Bergen Kunsthall

Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio

2010-06-15T23:27:00.003-04:00

Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio

Work from Google Will Eat Itself.

"One of Google's main revenue generators is the "Adsense"* program: It places hundreds of thousands of little Google text-ads on websites around the world.

Now we have set up a vast amount of such Adsense-Accounts for our hidden Web-Sites. For each click we receive a micropaiment from Google. Google pays us monthly by cheque or bank-transfer to our Swiss e-banking account. Each time we collected enough money, we automatically buy the next Google share [NASDAQ: GOOG, todays value ~430.- USD] - we currently own 40/forty Google Shares.

Important: Google Will Eat Itself works by using a social phenomenon rather than depending on a purely technical method (for example a simple click-farm). Because of this social dimension empowered by technology, Google is not able to fight GWEI and it`s franchises by using their regular counter-fraud methods.

GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself is to show-case and unveil a total monopoly of information , a weakness of the new global advertisment system and the renaissance of the “new economic bubble" - reality is, Google is currently valued more than all Swiss Banks together (sic!)." - via gwei.org

Amir Zaki

2010-06-14T13:48:00.000-04:00

Amir Zaki

Work from Relic.

"With the advent of the digital age, deception in photography has never been easier, and Amir Zaki makes the best possible case for its artistic benefits. His brilliant and compelling portraits of retro-chic lifeguard towers in Southern California are the product of nearly as much image manipulation as actual documentation, and the result is that we see them with entirely fresh eyes.

Many photographers of the manmade landscape play it fairly straight, using careful composition, lighting, and large-format printing to lend drama to their matter-of-fact subject matter. Bernd and Hilda Becher, the German couple whose deadpan pictures of early industrial architecture gave rise to an entire school of photography, are entirely literal in their depictions, allowing their gritty subject matter to speak for itself without technical intervention. More recently, some of their followers have embraced various types of editorial alterations, choosing subtle techniques that are not always obvious in the final result.

Zaki, on the other hand, is much more upfront about using any and all available tools to bring to life his much more stylized version of reality. An earlier series put individual LA houses on a diet, distorting entire structures into impossibly skinny slivers, which were then printed in an extreme vertical format. In another set of images, Zaki replaced all the existing signage on older or abandoned commercial structures with an invented symbol system of highly suggestive, but completely mysterious pedigree – Mayan or Martian, perhaps. What was surprising was how weird such a simple substitution made his ordinary structures seem – are our cities really that odd?
The lifeguard towers in Zaki’s current exhibition aren’t so much odd as they are atmospheric: back-to-the-future cockpits for cultural time travel. They’re also virile and sexy in a very streamlined sixties way; seen from below like statues or monuments, they stand out against perfect California skies like symbols of progress achieved through order and vigilance, like the tractors and tanks in Soviet propaganda posters.

The show is much more impressive in person than online, with the high-focus clarity and elegance of the imagery greatly heightened by the huge scale of several of the prints. Two of the very best tower pictures in the exhibition have been printed in this large format, and they demonstrate what’s so striking about the series. Untitled (tower 30) is a portrait of a sky-blue guard tower against a sky-blue sky, the dominant monochrome only interrupted by the silvery sheen of the truncated safety rail on the tower’s deck. Unoccupied, shuttered, stripped of all identifying detail, the structure shares with the others in the show no visible connection to place – it could be anywhere. In its perfect, digitally amped-up color and smooth lines, it is control made seductive - unthreatening, cooly mechanical. Untitled (tower 42) is a skinnier, mustard-yellow version, with the sleek lines and dramatic angles of mid-century ocean liners, transcontinental trains, and pin-up girls.

It’s fascinating to compare pictures found online of actual California beach towers to the Zaki versions. Besides removing signage, fasteners, and any other interrupting blemishes, Zaki has also eliminated the access stairs, nearly all of the guard rails, and most of the supporting structure. Most crucially, his upward view exaggerates the size and height of the towers, which in reality are only ten feet or so above the beach. Zaki’s imposing viewpoint and monumental treatment also heightens the subliminal connection between the boxy, heavy-browed structures and a gigantic, robotic head; we imagine a race of protective (or oppressive) sentinels, rugged, implacable, and all-powerful." - Gary Falgan for artdish.com

Stefan Ruiz

2010-06-13T13:47:00.001-04:00

Stefan Ruiz

Work from People.

"People is a book about Stefan Ruiz’s view of the world and the fragility of the human condition. The kaleidoscope of portraits?well known celebrities and Stefan’s own family members are shot with the same humanistic voice?takes us into a journey around the world that reveals our complexity, misery and beauty. People features a selection of Stefan’s portrait and landscape photographs made between 1996 and 2006." - Stefan Ruiz

Aspen Mays

2010-06-12T14:09:00.000-04:00

Aspen Mays

Work from her oeuvre.

"Albert Einstein once said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” Recent SAIC graduate Aspen Mays puts that maxim to the test in her current exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (on view until February 28) and in the Cleve E. Carney Gallery at the Hyde Park Art Center (on view until April 25). In these exhibitions, Mays works as a dedicated scientist guided by a creativity and imagination that Einstein would have admired.

AT McA

Mays’ 12×12 exhibition features her meticulous and meditative “Every Leaf on a Tree” from 2009-2010. Spread over two walls of the gallery, this photographic installation is made up of a grid of 900 small photos of the individual leaves of a tree outside her studio. The total impression is that of an immersive, conceptual forest.

As the viewer walks through the gallery, her movements cause the photographs (which are affixed to the walls with long nails) to gently flutter, thus reminding the viewer of the forces of exertion and gravity. The beauty of the installation is in the precise capturing of an intimate moment with each individual leaf; beauty is palpable in Mays’s archiving of these dynamic, textured moments.

On the central wall of the gallery is “Every Book,” a piece that playfully considers notions of the archive, Einstein’s scientific revolution, and the concepts of light and gravity. 21 photographs comprise a grid that reveals a rainbow of color, constructed from the spines of hundreds of books meticulously placed on metal arcs that rest between two chairs. A closer look reveals that the books are all about Albert Einstein; in fact, the photographs document every book on Einstein that the artist could order from the Illinois Inter-Library Loan Service.

Again, the artist seems to be humorously pondering the artistic extensions of scientific revelations. “Every Book” is an imaginative composition that turns scientific history and abstract concepts into a harmonious, compelling image, and both works in the 12×12 eloquently reveal how our perception of the individual can alter our experience of the whole.
AT HPAC

Aspen Mays, “Boulder Desk,” Hyde Park Art Center Photo by Carrie McGath
Aspen Mays’s playful approach to science continues with her exhibition “From the Offices of Scientists” at the Hyde Park Art Center, where the artist takes a risk by leaving photography behind in favor of a sculptural installation. Here, Mays strives to construct the bureaucratic setting (complete with metal filing cabinets and yellow legal pads) where scientific “knowledge” is ostensibly born.

The exhibition opens with the striking “Boulder Desk” from 2010. Two cubicle walls are the only elements left standing after an apparent catastrophe: a desk has been crushed by a boulder (or meteor) that appears to have fallen right out of the sky. There is a humorous but sinister quality in this, a conspiratorial indication that perhaps this scientist discovered a truth that she shouldn’t have.

Indeed, the narrative of the entire installation hints at corruption, secrets and silly conspiratorial moments. Other objects, which the artist claims to have gleaned from her own visits to scientists’ offices, include a sign proclaiming, “If you find a meteor, bring it here and we will check to make sure”; a jar filled with black jelly beans entitled “Jellybean Universe”; and a dry-erase board covered with small marker points, one of which has been circled and labeled “Big Bang.”

The exhibition has its playful moments, but is less visually engaging than the 12×12 installation. Nonetheless, it is encouraging to see a young artist strike out in new directions and tackle new modes of working, quite like a scientist.

...

Mays’ talent seems to be in photography, when she has the ability to contain a moment within a frame, simplified and sustained like a piece of music. However, both exhibits are worth seeing as visually eloquent celebrations of the imagination." - Carrie McGath for f News magazine (excerpt).

Christoph Gielen

2010-06-11T16:25:00.002-04:00

Christoph Gielen

Work from his oeuvre.

"Christoph Gielen's photographs document urban development on three continents and over four decades and they raise universal questions about the social nature of our world. To expose the macro-structures of city planning, Gielen takes a long view. From high above in a helicopter, he focuses on housing developments, construction landscapes and traffic arteries. The distance imposes an aestheticizing process on the formal patterns in urban structures and ways of life, making them appear as blocks and wedges, cylinders, squares and curves. Yet at the same time, he reproduces residential culture in a different mode of seeing.

The early photography discourse, as well as the highpoint of photography theory, held a primary fascination with photography as a “visibility device”, capable of making visible the invisible. The camera could discern what was hidden to the human eye. The “optical unconscious” (Walter Benjamin) was to become perceptible; for many, photography was the medium that might promise the potential for communicating with the dead or seeing spirits. Gielen's work aims at awakening our own awareness of the spatial order underlying social structures. In this case, while photography may not be the means to raise the dead, it nonetheless becomes an optical device capable of revealing the fundamental structures of our societal ideology. One key feature of an ideology is the ability to present society as if it were natural and necessary and, indeed, many aspects of Gielen's work deal precisely with the relationship between nature and society.

The agenda of avant-garde photography was to reflect an unquestioned culture the so-called second nature in the light of a primary nature. Technology and nature, the environment and society, were systematically superimposed. This was an approach accompanied by an optimistic aesthetic avowal of faith in a technological civilisation. The cover of Albert Renger-Patzsch' Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful) was adorned by a vignette juxtaposing an electricity pylon with a tree mirroring the same structure." - Johan Frederik Hartle, Assistant Professor for Philosophy of Art, Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam

Jaap Drupsteen

2010-06-10T10:53:00.002-04:00

Jaap Drupsteen

Work from Hyster Pulsatu.

"Hyster Pulsatu is a theatrical dance performance that could never take place in a theatre. Thanks to the mixing table, the artist becomes a divine choreographer who can let dancers play in space, in rivalry with graphical image elements; who manipulates the space itself, moulding it to every wish and whim. He can split up a body and duplicate it, can zoom in on a body part, change people into dancing pillars or let them glide over he water. And while he is at it, he can stop or speed up the time, and can invent and colour to his heart's content.

In this video, all this happens with great but controlled enthusiasm for the possibilities of the new technology. Accompanied by pulsating dance rhythms, sometimes alternated with more melancholy music and song, the laws of the theatre and a good few laws of nature (such as gravity) are thrown overboard. This happens undisguisedly; no making believe it is 'real'. The result is a balanced mixture of dance, video art and television-technical inventions that is a precursor of the possibilities that the future has in store for us." - text via Catalogue Netherlands Media Art Institute.

Anthony Auerbach

2010-06-10T00:36:00.003-04:00

Anthony Auerbach

Work from The State of New York.

"The State of New York is an aerial survey of the whole State of New York from an altitude of seven feet. The survey records the surface of a giant copy of the Texaco road map which was inlaid in the terrazzo floor of the New York State Pavilion for the 1964–65 World’s Fair. The pavilion, designed by Philip Johnson and advertised as the ‘Tent of Tomorrow’, now stands derelict in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens. The archive of photographs forms the basis of a series of works which reflect on a map in the process of turning back into a landscape and on the material of history." - Anthony Auerbach

via i heart photograph

Zach Shipko

2010-06-08T18:40:00.000-04:00

Zach Shipko

Work from his oeuvre.

Shipko's work is more of an examination of internet culture and kitsch than anything else. In the same way that it is accessible to the casual viewer, it also relies on a thorough understanding (or at least an informed inundation) of internet culture and various memes. I am wondering if it is purposeful that there is nothing to be found written about his work, and I must admit that it was a different experience to see the internet through the art critical lens / diary of his miniature performances. For Shipko, the internet is a gallery, site of performance, and a laboratory as well as a venue for exhibition.

Gregory Krum

2010-06-07T23:29:00.004-04:00

Gregory Krum

Work from ...Practice...

____________________________

Three approaches to a fundamental concept:
– Devotion to an endeavor. Manifested as images from the climbers’ cemetery in Zermatt at the base of the Matterhorn, images of dust and sand whose form is stolen from pictures I love or react to, i.e. Vija Celmins or Thomas Struth. Portraits of houseplants made with a cell phone camera, and in the case of Cherifa Tree whose form is stolen from Brice Marden and whose content is stolen from the tree through which Jane Bowles’ lover, Cherifa, controlled her.

– Interiors that explore objects as containers of meaning, the meaning we place in them, and the extent to which all man-made objects are an act of communication.

– Devotional offerings...the daily practice. Here is to all the unprovable truths, bravely fueled solely by belief." - via Jen Bekman Projects

Sarah Pickering

2010-06-06T17:29:00.002-04:00

Sarah Pickering

Work from Explosion.

"...Finally, Pickering’s Explosion photographs (2004–present) are shot at sites where fake bombs are deployed for military personnel interested in buying pyrotechnics. Manufactured by some of the same companies that make explosives for action/adventure and war films, the bombs are built for use in military training exercises. Pickering captures the explosions as they are detonated in demonstrations, isolated in a benign landscape void of people and infrastructure. Made to imitate artillery, napalm, and land mines, these explosions are controlled, and like toys or fireworks, are much smaller in scale than their real-world counterparts. The pictures Pickering makes of them are alluring. The clouds of smoke, all in different shapes and colors, hover a few feet above the ground as if a magic trick has just occurred, capturing a fleeting moment that is mysterious and beautiful, and odd in its lack of context." - excerpt from an essay by Karen Irvine via MoCP.

Justin Shull

2010-06-05T23:45:00.003-04:00

Justin Shull

Work from Terrestrial Shrub Rover.

"“From the time of our birth, humans have felt a primordial urge to explore — to blaze new trails, map new lands, and answer profound questions about ourselves and our universe.” – NASA

In the spirit of NASA and its forthcoming 2020 lunar expeditions in preparation for colonizing the moon, the Terrestrial Shrub Rover presents the opportunity to explore terrestrial and social environments back on Earth from within a manned, foliage bedecked, solar electric powered rover. (also in development is an unmanned, remotely controlled, webcam version)" - Justin Shull

Jack Dingo Ryan

2010-06-04T20:49:00.004-04:00

Jack Dingo Ryan

Work from Scriabin's Mustache.

"Alexander Scriabin was a Russian composer whose life and eccentricities becomes a conceptual nexus for this collection of work. Killed by combing and rupturing a carbuncle nested in his flamboyant mustache, Scriabin’s life and musical oeuvre is an opportunity to construct and explore interests in conspiracies of form and idea. Sound, video, light, and sculptural works tamper with time and perception. Other works playfully examine Scriabin’s carbuncle, connecting it to meteor showers and marks of divinity like the stigmata. Scriabin’s so-called mystic tone sequence and his interest in Italian serialist composition become subject matter to explore sound structure and mathematical systems in fantastical realms. Dualities of perception, fractured qualia, romanticism that lingers in post-modernity and an impulse to see the extraordinary in the ordinary are some of the interests that color this work."

Artie Vierkant

2010-06-03T22:49:00.005-04:00

Artie Vierkant

Work from his oeuvre.

Shortest statement ever:

"His work concerns the degree to which digital media constitute fully tangible objects, actors which are both pliable and physical, structures to be broken into pieces and reconceived." - Artie Vierkant

Marco Rosichelli

2010-06-02T22:08:00.010-04:00

Marco Rosichelli

Work from Sculpture The Ride and Handle with Care.

"As an artist, I see myself relating to that idea of Peter Pan, a mischievous boy who can fly and refuses to grow up. In a post industrial society, the boundaries between youth and adult have blurred, and youthfulness has become an acceptable and revered character attribute, regardless of age. I make installations, videos, and art objects that are engaging, fun and playful, but that require thoughtfulness and reflection. The importance in my work often lies with choice. The choice I provide to the viewer, and how they respond. I am intrigued by rules, absurdity, humor, sarcasm, spectacle, play, mediation, institutions, and systems. These themes, when interwoven, combine to become the content of my work." - Marco Rosichelli

Özant Kamaci

2010-06-01T23:39:00.002-04:00

Özant Kamaci

Work from Pause / Pause M.

"In ‘pause’, the work depicts the juxtaposition of powerful machines which are symbols of advancement and technology against nature which is widely accepted as precious and untouched. The medium of photography provides a visual dichotomy of reality and illusion through the aesthetics of plane and tree and their spatial relationship. Planes behind trees as individual objects are familiar and common, but when combined and interrelated, the viewer moves to a new space to behold the unexpected. " - Özant Kamaci

Christine Rusche

2010-05-31T22:49:00.004-04:00

Christine Rusche

Work from Fictional Landscapes.

These images are a really interesting combination of Ulrich Görlich's 15 Landschaften and Gerhard Richter's Overpainted Photographs. There is something quintessentially German about the hand drawn intervention into the landscape that I find remarkably appealing. These works speak about ideas of landscape and development in a way that is simultaneously invasive yet quite striking.

David Axelbank

2010-05-30T23:37:00.003-04:00

David Axelbank

Work from the Lozenge Series.

"The idea of “Landscape” is dependent on the human viewpoint – it is a cultural and aesthetic construct versus the natural world. It could be argued that this moulding or shaping of space has as much to do with the framework for traditional landscape, as it has to do with semiotics.

Inspired by the use of the lozenge format in portraits by Holbein at Tate Britain, I began applying it to landscape photographs in 2006. There is an undeniably physical effect created when a scene is viewed through a diamond or rhombus shaped frame, which causes a heightened awareness of the act of seeing. Traditional landscape imagery, whether painting or drawing, is anchored by a horizontal baseline to frame the composition. This does not truly reflect how we see - rather it is an art historical convention. Our vertical line of sight, foveal vision, intersects with the extremities of our peripheral vision, horizontal perception, to create the lozenge shape.

In this series, I photographed quintessentially picturesque English landscapes, where the scale of topographical features is reinterpreted by the lozenge format. Tilting the camera 45 degrees on its horizontal-vertical axis produces this sensory shift. It is no coincidence that the most effective compositions include strong vertical and horizontal lines – trees for example, are a hugely important component of this series. Piet Mondrian explored a very similar concept with his distillation of the lines of nature in his theory of “neo-plasticism”. He aimed to create a balance between the horizontal and the vertical in a series of abstract lozenge shaped canvases - which evolved from abstraction of natural forms, most notably trees.

There is something almost primordial about this new geometry. The lozenge contradicts dominant art historical practises, yet resonates as an essential compositional form." - David Axelbank

via Hey Hot Shot

Greg Wasserstrom

2010-05-29T06:44:00.000-04:00

Greg Wasserstrom

Work from USA!USA! (The Doldrums)

From an interview with Liz Kuball:

Liz: I love your project The Doldrums. It feels really cohesive in its disjointedness to me, like there’s a madness with a method underneath. Is that intentional, or does it just come out that way? I tend to be worried about drawing connections between images, and you seem not to be burdened with any of that, and it works so well. I guess I’m curious how you do it, if that’s even answerable.

Greg: I’m really happy to hear you say Doldrums feels cohesive. Having lived through all the moments the series presents, it certainly feels cohesive to me, but I’ve shown it to a couple gallerists who didn’t agree. But I do feel that these images are inherently tied together and that they are part of an ongoing body of work. The series is about the last few months before I moved from D.C., so I added the subtitle “A Fractional Portrait of the Nation’s Capital.” I think that helps make sense of it for people who don’t see what I’m getting at at first (or second) glance.

At the same time though, I kind of don’t give a shit about traditional organizing principles. Not that there’s anything wrong with creating work in a more project-based way. If that was a process that came naturally to me, I would assuredly use it. But I don’t think like that. I just shoot, and then the art is in the editing. So, in a certain sense, they all are just a bunch of one-off snapshots thrown together. But they create a sort of nonlinear narrative about me and the space I inhabit. If that doesn’t appeal, I don’t blame you. My life isn’t exactly the most fascinating.

But I hope to make work that that’s both personal and socially revealing. Looking at my life and what’s going on around me always makes me think that it’s totally insane that we live in a system that can support kids like me. So I want to try and do things that are sort of self-conscious chronicles of this particular historic moment; something that’s immersed in it all, but always cognizant of the giant thundercloud that’s hanging over this entire period of history.

But even if you don’t buy that, I think that my way of seeing comes across loud and clear. It all serves as a chronicle of depression if nothing else. So one way or another, I think it’s the autobiographical nature of what I do and the inescapable point of view I bring to it that links my work together—at least in my eyes.

Will Rogan

2010-05-28T15:07:00.003-04:00

Will Rogan

Work from his oeuvre.

"At the foundation of Will Rogan’s practice is a modesty unique within the field of contemporary art. A consequence of this modesty is the multi-media nature of his oeuvre - exhibitions typically consisting of works executed in film, photography, sculpture and on paper with no apparent hierarchy or importance allotted to a specific media. In apparent contradiction to this abundance of material is the seeming ease with which Rogan creates without adding things to the world. Sharing both post-conceptualism’s sense of humor as well as, to some extent, a notion of classical conceptual dematerialization, Rogan primarily relies upon the everyday to provide material of wonder. Casually placed objects and signs are photographed with an eye focused on their inherent contextual strangeness, artists tools, particularly the camera, become unfamiliar when, self referentially, they focus back upon themselves in a related media and incongruous actions manage to retain their incongruity when orchestrated and documented by Rogan. An economy of means becomes an abundance in Rogan’s work as an engagement with the quotidian serves as the foundation for his practice." - text via Misako & Rosen.

OIivier Charlot

2010-05-27T10:36:00.005-04:00

Olivier Charlot

Work from Japanese Conjecture.

"My initial photographical approach began exclusively on events met in the street. Then my place of experiment moved from outdoor shooting to studio shooting. Nowadays it is important to me to compose my images, independently of happenstance. I can set up events in a process of photographing ideas, sustaining a capacity of conception and an aspect of subjective character. By using the language of photography of contemporary still-life, I fix ephemeral artistic acts. The medium of photography allows me to form a syntactic continuum.In a so-called atypical fusion, the objects, between each other, exchange, penetrate, shock and come very close to absurdity. I am interested in these modes and qualities of relation.In the series entitled japanese conjecture, I introduce objects, some borrowed to Japanese culture, others to childhood, thus operating a signs removal. These settings provide a complex of feelings, like a perfume or a sound set, in which an entity is revealed." - Olivier Charlot

Nicky Walsh

2010-05-26T06:20:00.001-04:00

Nicky Walsh

Work from her oeuvre.

"The notion of the generic, the all encompassing surface of something that seeks to include everyone and simultaneously refers to no one. This work became about objects that manifest the idea of the corporate environment and mass production. By stripping away all evidence of history, culture, identity, location, time and context, the usual indexes with which we construct meaning are taken away.

Consequently, images are paired down to their most fundamental elements, superfluous information is removed in search of purer forms and compositions creating images that take critical attention away from self expression to concentrate on materiality and functionality." - Nicky Walsh

via LOZ.

Xavier Delory

2010-05-25T06:27:00.001-04:00

Xavier Delory

Work from Habitat.

"Our countryside (in Belgium as well as in many other western countries) is monopolized by one specific type of house called 'clé sur porte' (turnkey) (def:Urban prefab cluster of similar forms implanted in the landscape without any effort of integration).

The cycle 'Habitat' throws a look at this type of 'architecture'. The concept of protection and stereotyped block is pushed to its extremes (similar to our withdrawl into ourselves and out formatted lives)." - Xavier Delory

Anne de Vries

2010-05-24T11:49:00.002-04:00

Anne de Vries

Work from his oeuvre.

"some thoughts about my work and interests

photography is not the same medium anymore as what it used to be. after you once pressed the button of your digital camera, you will need a computer instead of a dark room.

since the 90s digital photography became the mainstream mass medium of today. and an enormous overload of new photographs are exchanged over the internet everyday. if you work as an artist with the same medium you cannot avoid the question, why make more images if there are already so many? this question became central in my practice, through my work i try to find answers and formulate more questions.

when in the 00s digital photography got combined with the internet and mobile phone devices and the use of photography changed completely by which everything that is acknowledge as happening gets practically constantly mediated. we got to see how step by step the process of knowing becomes more and more collective and corporately extended to the whole of human society, and will turn into a huge contextualizing network.

next to this as an artist (working with photography but also other media like installation performance and video and animated gif) i intend create self aware images with their own meaning in which i generate and illustrate new ideas. these can be seen as a re-contextualizing network, using several media to question meaning, sometimes to replace or alter the stability of received historical or cultural facts. here i would like to quote arjan mulder from his book: - understanding media theory - he explains the following: - we do not use media out of a desire for direct contact with reality, or even a need for information. we seek surrender: we connect to media out of a desire for a direct experience of something that is not ourselves. we wish to experience ourselves as we are not. again and again, in different ways, with different media - (umt, pp. 67-68).

the idea of photography as a way - to experience the world as it is not, in different ways - is fascinating to me, transforming the known into an unknown unapproachable virtual reality that is able to contain an enormous power. based on capturing the world with a camera and secondary the endless possibilities that we find in digital image manipulation. why does this exist ? where is it used for ? how can this power tool be used to promote an artistic aim? in my work i am interested to involve an universe where freedom, naivety, wild fantasies, fetishism and detailed uncanny perversity collide with abstraction, semiotics, technology and slick technological perfection.

by re-contextualisatising i induce a shift in recognizable conventional codes of our visual culture. dealing in my photographs with the banalities of the real world while suggesting a clearly visual or hidden abstract alternate one. where balls entering a hole and exiting another, waves that remain motionless in a wild media ocean. where with simple methods semi naif or more complex scenario's are created and distorted again. constructing a scene that triggers, a layered reading functioning as a document of a self aware reality and a portal to the imagination." - Anne de Vries

AIDS-3D

2010-05-23T12:08:00.004-04:00

AIDS-3D (Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas)

Work from their oeuvre.

The top image is a collaboration with Anne De Vries and Helga Wretman.

"The artist statements written by Berlin-based American artists AIDS-3D read as simultaneously post-apocalyptic and utopian. They are primarily concerned with the unfulfilled promises of emergent technologies and the ways in which our daily lives revolve around these media. Alienation, self-preservation, reproduction (sexual and otherwise), and the construction of lifestyles are common themes in their work, which takes the form of performances, sculptures, and installations frequently employing lasers, electroluminescent cable, and relics from a recent past promoting the heights to which novelties of various origin will change the world. On September 20th, the duo will open the show “Digital Awakening” at Athens, Greece-based K44 Gallery, in which they will elaborate two radically different future scenarios, one in which Earth suffers “a disastrous energy crisis leading to war, famine and the breakdown of the global capitalist system” and an another where “humanity lives in a techno-utopia, where communication tools and futuristic technology fueled by alternative energy have allowed us to fully transcend into a scientifically maintained balance.” Considering the potential impact of current directions in the field of energy production, these fictional accounts may not be the work of utter fantasy." - Marisa Olson

Guillermo Faivovich

2010-05-22T10:41:00.003-04:00

Guillermo Faivovich

Work from Cubo12 and Rod.

"Based on the architect Clorindo Testa’s unrealized plans for the renovation of the premises on which the work takes place, FMV generated a permanent space consisting of 144 square meters of white paint on the exact site where the Centro de Artes Integradas at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella would have been located. "

_____________________

"By means of the installation of a system of walls, the exhibition space is modified so that it has two differently-lit rooms through which to circulate; in this space, an arrage of five photographic works unfold. The space and time of the exhibition appear to be the only connection between the works given the diversity of their themes, techniques, and processes as well as the years when they were produced."

both texts Guillermo Faivovich

Sam Falls

2010-05-21T06:43:00.000-04:00

Sam Falls

Work from his oeuvre.

"I work with photography because I see everything in front of me all the time, but the more I see the less I know what I want, you know? So I make pictures that try to resolve what might not be being seen, the underlying pattern of what I find interesting and understanding how this can be compounded. Each picture leads to the next, and usually there are formal connections, but not repetitive content - so it's non-serial. At first it was easy to photograph what I wanted to see, it was about isolation and highlighting already existing reality. The deeper I go though, the more of a challenge it becomes, the more abstract the images get, the more I manufacture, and basically the more I'm starting to create something from scratch where I mix what I know and what I want to figure out - this seems to output a new object that implicates the viewer too. So it's about me and it's about you, but it's not about me and you.

...

It changes all the time, but usually there is a very concentrated period of actual photographing followed by a lot of sitting and looking at the image and then another dense period of either re-doing it or moving things around. Like recently I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few times to photograph some paintings and sculptures I'd been thinking about and researching. I used my 4x5 and it was a bit taxing shooting like that in the museum light (no flash). When I got the photos back they looked great, but they also looked just like I thought they would, which was boring – they didn't fully do what I thought they would. Then it's like, what did I think they would do? and I have to sit with them and work that out and go further, flush it, then the actual work happens all through the night on the computer or by hand and re-photographing. When I wake up I see the image and it's usually like what? Oh, fuck yeah! I work in my studio basically 5 pm to 12 am everyday painting and drawing and looking at things around my place and on the Internet and end up photographing a couple of these things so by the weekend there's usually one or two prints being made." - from an interview with Fecal Face

Liddy Scheffknecht

2010-05-20T06:12:00.000-04:00

Liddy Scheffknecht

Work from scaffolding.

"All architectural elements except the scaffolding were removed from the photograph of a building under renovation. The result is an autonomous “drawing“, which suggests the form of the erased building. The scaffolding, normally a temporary urban structure, was retained whereas the building, a permanent urban structure, was eliminated." - Liddy Scheffknecht

Sarah Gerats

2010-05-19T06:20:00.000-04:00

Sarah Gerats

Work from her oeuvre.

There is shockingly little written about Sarah Gerats, though her work seems to pop up in quite a few places. Aesthetically, she fits easily in her native land (The Netherlands) and the great majority of her works follow the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of contemporary Dutch meta-photographic works. The two most easily accessible example are her series Her and the very soothing Meanwhile-Landscapes, both of which challenge the tradition of their genre. The self-portraits from Her employ the awkward pseudo-sexual aesthetic that seems to be a fashion throwback to the early 80's while addressing notions of gaze, reflexivity, and the role of artist as performer. Meanwhile-Landscapes deals with very similar conceptual concerns (to a degree) in the gentle flowing diptychs of serene landscapes. The works, much like Her, mirror (pun totally intended) the traditional role of the landscape photograph and allow the viewer to experience the landscape as a simulacrum of reality, moving the photograph simultaneously beyond mechanical reproduction while at the same time fixing reality in miniature.

Herbert Weber

2010-05-18T06:48:00.001-04:00

Herbert Weber

Work from his oeuvre.

"The Toggenburg photo artist Herbert Weber is fascinated by basic issues of the medium he works with. There is definitely some romance involved in his inquiring the truth of images, in spite of the photography’s long-known loss of authenticity... The prominently placed wire may be interpreted as the umbilical cord of photographic self- reflexion. It is reminiscent of the time in which the medium had a leading role in the presentation of reality. And it literally links the picture with its observer, the artist with his audience. With his mostly small-format black-and-white photographs Weber cultivates a role play in service of a pseudo-scientific research. His body is his instrument, his photography is the investigation’s object and goal at the same time. He climbs picturesque trees, wanders on snow-covered ridges, explores the grounds of an inoperative factory or shoots moving clouds in a new moon night—and, with his photographing and photographed body, creates a topography of his own expeditions; this activity’s decelerated and slow habitus is reminiscent of early 19th-century expeditions. And yet, Herbert Weber is a present time artist; with his change of perspective he raises the question of the subject’s construction and the ego’s relation to its own history time and again." Text by Christoph Doswald for Christinger de Mayo