John Petrenko Photography and Art Blog

Thursday 4 --- Altered

2010-05-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

Forest 70B. 2007. C-print. Kim Keever

West 35aa, Cprint. Kim Keever

"Though not well attended, the 1975 New Topographics exhibition became an art world phenomenon. “Everyone knew everything about it but no one had ever seen it,” said Eastman House curator Alison Nordstrom. “I think it gave [photographers] permission to be more experimental. It gave people permission to be less concerned with the beautiful and more concerned with the true.” Certainly, the photographers in the show took truth seriously. Images like Frank Gohlke’s Landscape, Los Angeles, in which a telephone pole and a bush are the image’s motionless protagonists, or Robert Adams’s serial images of modest tract homes, in which unassuming structures stand on otherwise rural landscapes, seemed to be precious scientific documents. Through their deference to the sprawling natural terrain, they also seemed to suggest that the land, not the man-made structures imposed on it, would eventually have the last say."

-Catherine Wagley

"This group of artists summarized a new attitude about photography with the use of ‘man-altered landscape’ as their subject. Rather than view the sublime and mythic aspects of the land, they produced landscapes that signified their scientific detachment and implied the contemporary issue of conservation. For these artists, ‘topographics’ referred to mapping and measurement, which they emphasized by focusing their cameras on the land being encroached upon by civilization."

-Sheryl Conkleton

bib:

Conkleton. Sheryl. New Topographics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape. http://www.henryart.org/exhibitions/past/195/1998

Wagley, Catherine. Landscape Revisited. Nov. 12th, 2009. http://blog.art21.org/2009/11/12/landscape-revisited/

Thursday 3 --- Land Art

2010-05-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

The relocation of art is not a new phenomenon. There have always been cases of aesthetic
objects passing from public places to private places, from sacred spaces to worldly spaces, from
more dispersed settings to more concentrated settings. Art has always had a nomadic je ne sais
quoi. In this to and fro movement the really decisive step was taken on the threshold of the
nineteenth century, when art was transferred from contexts of life – churches, squares or palatial buildings – to a specialized context such as a museum or an exhibition (the “salon”). It was there that art, responding, in a way, to the need for autonomy that had begun to permeate it a hundred years before, found what might appear to be its proper home: a place that houses it for what it is, or rather for what it becomes precisely because of being housed there. The museum or the exhibition stripped the work of art of its various functions and revealed its stylistic substance, and precisely by doing so they made it become a work “of art”.2 However, neither the museum nor the salon were closed settings: art soon began to circulate in the world again, and it did so with the status that it had acquired. The monument, no longer understood as a memorial but as an aesthetic presence, or the mural, no longer seen as the book of the people but as the product of a painter’s endeavour, or the design object, no longer considered as a sign of functionality and distinction but as the triumph of a form, provide a good example of the outflow of art from the museum. Art appeared to have been strengthened by the identity and prestige that it had acquired in the meantime, yet no less determined to continue with its wanderings.

-Francesco Casetti
Elsewhere. The relocation of art

-Richard B. Cathcart

Bib:

Francesco Casetti. Elsewhere. The relocation of art. In Valencia09/Confines, Valencia, INVAM, 2009, pp. 348-351

Thursday 2 --- Deconstruction or Decoration

2010-05-10T20:16:00.000-07:00

Donald Judd

"The reduction- and abstraction-based language of Constructivism was picked up by U.S. American Minimalist a la Donald Judd and Robert Morris, among others. The artistic direction also thoroughly understood itself as anti-middle class and struggled against the decorative nature of representational art. It is the decroative element that turned such art, in what was then already a fully feveloped art market, into an inexpensive product tthat quickly found home in living rooms and collections. "

-Raimar Strange

"Minimalism's cool aesthetic was good for conferring the impression of coolness on global business - Minimalism became "corporate design."

-Raimar Strange

ECOlogical?: Reflections on the Relationship between Art and Environmentalism

Sharjah Biennial 8: Still Life : Art, Ecology & the Politics of Change. [Sharjah, United Arab Emirates]: Sharjah Biennial, 2007. Print

thursday 1 --- Mapping & Cartography

2010-05-10T19:41:00.000-07:00

MATT MULLICAN |City As A Map (Of Ideas)

Mapping, Cartography and the Urban Sprawl.

"Beyond the physical extension or reconstruction of urban space, the map has both recorded and determined countless aspects of human life and citizenship."

-Denis Cosgrove

"The destruction of those towers on September 11th, 2001 presented perhaps history's greatest single challenge to urban mapping. Maps and plans of every system affected by the attack - transporation, utilities, communications, air quality - and new maps detailing its changing impacts were vital to the response mounted by the city's myriad public and private agencies."

-Denis Cosgrove

Bib:

Cosgrove, Denis. Carto-City: Mapping and Urban Space.

Möntmann, Nina, and Yilmaz Dziewior. Mapping a City. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004. Print.

Six Quotes

2010-05-02T12:47:00.000-07:00

"On the relationship of modern life to nature: the pitorial and poetic moment in landscape emerges where its elements freely combine, like nature and the gradual realisation of history which it initiated. [...] The more aburptly and violently an abstract theory is forced upon that which had been realized, the more mathmatical does it process, and so in turn, the more radically does it carry out the separation of each element in single categories that fulfil a specific aim and, consequently, all the more certainly does it destroy all physiognomy, all the appeal of individual life."

-Ernst Rudorff, in: Preußische Jahrbücher, Vol. 45, 1880.

"Who can define the moods of the wild places, the meaning of nature in domains beyond those of material use? Here are the worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and revelations of great art are equally difficult to define we can grasp them only in the depths of perceptive spirit."

-Ansel Adams, Yosemite Valley, 1960.

"The landscape as a limited detail of the world connotes, and continues to represent the centre of artistic interest. Therefore, what we are concerned with here has less to do with the question of limiting conditions of a regionally determined development of art than with the question as to those common themes, which determine the significance of landscape in art photography."

-Friedrich Grassegger, in the essay: "Landscape Photography from the Collection of the State Museum of Lower Austria

Grassegger, Friedrich, and Fritz Simak. Landschaft : Zwei Sammlungen : Fotografie Aus Drei Jahrhunderten = Landscape : Two Collections : Three Centuries of Photography. Wien: C. Brandstätter, 2007. Print."

"...global space bears the inscriptions and prescriptions of power, its effectiveness redounds upon the levels we have been discussing - the levels of architectural (monumental/building) and the urban. Where global space contrives to signify, thanks to those who inhabit it, and for them, it does so, even in the 'private' realm, only to the extent that those inhabitants accept, or have imposed upon them, what is 'public'."

-Lefebvre, Henri, and Donald Nicholson-Smith. The Production of Space. Malden: Blackwell, 2007. Print.

p. 228

"The photograph is the art of putting all that aside, standing between you and the world - whereby the absence of the world is present in every detail, augmented by every detail."

-Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 1994.

"Structures help to recognizes objects. [...] structures also become archipelago for aerial photography. [...] (it) creates to the full and shows a part of the larger whole, whereas, through abstraction and through pictorial detail [...] emphasizes the structures.

-Friedrich Grassegger, in the essay: "Landscape Photography from the Collection of the State Museum of Lower Austria

TED Lectures

2010-05-01T22:39:00.000-07:00

Robert Voit

2010-05-01T22:17:00.000-07:00

Estroil, S. Pedro, Portugal, 2006, 60 x 50 c print
Hundon, Haverville, Great Britain 2004, 60 x 50 c print
Scottsdale, Arizona, USA 2006. 60 x 50 c print
Mono Lake, California, 2006. 60 x 50 c print

What interests me in Robert Voit's photography is how he creates a typology of these monumental and totemic objects that intrude on the natural landscape throughout the world. These are cell phone towers that are created specifically for the environments that they inhabit and therefore are disguised to fit into their surroundings. Although, since they are cell towers, they completely sick out and easily spotted. It reminds me of Thomas Demand's created spaces where he purposely shows little clues that the environment is a fraud. With these objects, the people who build these keep the aesthetics of their surroundings, but you can still see that they're made of metal, have a satellite present in them, and have technology present throughout their frame. He studied at Dusseldorf and obviously continues that photography program's tradition of center weighted, typographic, and formalistic objectivity.

Gallery
Statement
Website

New Topographics

2010-04-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

Robert Adams. "From Lookout Mountain, at Buffalo Bill's Grave. Jefferson County, Colorado" 1970. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches.

"...in many of the photographic canvases of Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz square, instead emphasizes the domestic containment of the land. Further, landscape's traditional midline placement of the horizon for compositional balance between earth and sky is often repositioned by New Topographics photographers above or below midline, or is even absent, rendering the landscape cold and cluttered, unbalanced, or constrained rather than pristine and endless."

-Kelly Dennis

"while New Topographics photographers appear to be of western landscapes, trees, deserts, houses, roads, and construction, they are nonetheless about the aesthetic discourse of landscape photography, about "a man-made wilderness" (Ratliff, 1976, p. 86): that is, they are about the American myths of the west, suburban expansion, the American Dream, and the exploitation and destruction of natural resources."

-Kelly Dennis

Dennis, Kelly. "Landscape and the West: Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography." UNESCO Univsersity and Heritage 10th International Seminar (2005). Web. 7 Apr. 2010. .

Edgar Martins

2010-04-14T00:40:00.000-07:00

Untitled
Series: The Diminishing Present
C-Print
98 x 127 cm
2008

Untitled
Series: The Diminishing Present
C-Print
98 x 127 cm
2008

Untitled
Series: The Diminishing Present
C-Print
98 x 127 cm
2008

Untitled
Series: The Diminishing Present
C-Print
98 x 127 cm
2008

Edgar Martins "Topologies" is a very interesting body of work where he seems to explore the globe in seek of terrestrial descriptions that related to one another. I chose to focus on him because of the epic landscapes that he photographs, pristine, crisp, and clean. His work is very formal and very minimal (in a landscape sorta way) something that i admire in the work. I feel that this relates to my work very well, since I focus on the land and its markers and subtle (or obvious) descriptions and want to represented it similarly. Much of his work is small apertures and long exposures, a method that i have been using all along. He is from Portugal.

Quotes:

artists share a common interest in the exploration and observation of our culture's various contemporary topologies, including our expanding urban landscape, the rapidly growing and vast global Internet, the interface of pop culture and fine art, the mapping of land, and our relationship to space. They blend printmaking, drawing (by hand or on the computer), photography, and digital collage, in which images are found and electronically cut and pasted. This dialog between processes has been a vital part of art history and continues to be.

-Cara Forrler (Davidson Galleries Director)

Topologies" is Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins' first book with significant distribution taking selections from each of his major series of large-format photographs. The images, which abstain from any digital manipulation, were taken in Portugal and Iceland and focus on what may be the world's least photographic scenes: barren landscapes with no conventional subjects. Instead, he opts for cold, isolated locations. But despite the lack of people or things (the cover image is the single appearance of a human), there's an acutely unsettling notion underlying the shots that is both arresting and intrinsically beautiful.

-Doug Black

Gallery
Website
Interview

Guy Batey

2010-04-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

untitled, from the Melancholy of Objects series. 2008-2009. dimensions not specified.

untitled, from the Melancholy of Objects series. 2008-2009. dimensions not specified.

untitled, from the Melancholy of Objects series. 2008-2009. dimensions not specified.

Piano, from the Melancholy of Objects series. 2008-2009. dimensions not specified.

I chose to blog about Guy Batey becuase of how he creates portraits of found objects in the land/cityscape. The composition of the photographs are very inspiring to me, since much of my work revolves around the found object, that being a bike jump/ramp, trail markers, and other scars and manipulations in the land. I have felt that many of my photographs seem to do that, centralized the object and let the landscape fall into the periphery, to create a balance within the frame and a very centralized aesthetic.

I also like the sculptural and architectural space that is apparent in the work. These seem to be documents of abandonment, but also in a sense found sculptures. They're photographed in a centralized theme that puts the focus straight on the center object and creates spatial tensions within him images. The found nature and unaltered (from the photographers point of view) object creates a visual poetry of our space and remnants of human behavior.

Quotes:

"This is the world of the found object, and Guy's Flickr set begins with things----often trivial, humble objects--- and the way we apprehend them. This set of pictures of objects is more a phenomenological approach to things, than one that works within art history---eg., the object as an arsenal in the surrealist avant garde expressing the return of the repressed. The uncanny is present but it avoids collapsing things into fetishism or the return of the repressed desire as understood by psychoanalysis.

These found objects are humble, common objects that have been accidentally found and not deliberately planted."

The Melancholy of Objects is a series of portraits of
objects I've found in Southwark, south-east London. This
is my neighbourhood. I've lived here for years and walk
these streets almost every day. The streets are full of the
stuff of life - discarded, lost and forgotten. Some of the
objects talk to me. These photographs are my reply.

-Guy Batey

Website
Interview
No gallery representation

Galleries

2010-04-05T08:19:00.000-07:00

East Coast:

Sasha Wolf (NYC)

I chose this gallery because of its emphasis on post-documentary photography, figuring that it could fit well with my work. The work represented in the gallery is diverse and it seems that they have a focus on emerging artists out of graduate school. My photography could work into that gallery since my work explores the ideas of the landscape devoid of action and people re-contextualizing the space.

Pablo Lopez

statement + bio

Guido Castagnoli

Bio:

Guido Castagnoli was born in Turin, Italy in 1976. After receiving a degree in Advertising Graphics and Communication he began his professional career as an art director of a prominent advertising agency in Milan. His interest in photography began when he shot his first images using an old family-owned Leica. During the following years he left his position at the advertising firm to devote himself entirely to photography. His works have been exhibited in public and private institutions in U.S.A., Italy, Germany, England and Japan. Since 2001 he work as freelance photographer in advertising and editorial assignments.

Statement:

Provincial Japan.
Guido Castagnoli's photographic investigation of the urban landscape of small Japanese towns takes us far from the stereotypes associated with contemporary Japan. There is no frenzied megalopolis, no rapidly expanding techno-city. Nor are there signs of the kind of extreme minimalism often associated with Japanese culture. Instead we encounter an atmosphere of quiet and refined suspension amid the somewhat surrealistic landscape of the Shizuoka district.

Although the settings depicted in the photographs will likely be unfamiliar to American audiences, the subjects, the focus on space and structures, and the conspicuous absence of people are reminiscent of the work of photographers like Stephen Shore, Robert Adams and others from the New Topographic movement. Provincial Japan is a series about the Japanese vernacular landscape. It is all the more noteworthy in the context of an American audience as it references America's own kitsch and vernacular culture in ways that resonate.

Amado Gallery (NYC)

I chose Amador Gallery becuase its aesthetics with its artists, they share a complex range of documentary and landscape and its very democratic work. Although i feel that this gallery is stretch and isn't big on emerging artists, but it seems very well represented and it seems that it could offer a lot of money.

Mark Power

Bio:

As a child Mark Power discovered his father's home-made enlarger in the family attic, a contraption consisting of an upturned flowerpot, a domestic light bulb and a simple camera lens. His interest in photography probably began at this moment, although he later chose illustration - specialising in life drawing and painting - instead. He (accidentally) 'became a photographer' in 1983, and worked in the editorial and charity markets for nearly ten years, before he began teaching in 1992. This coincided with a shift towards long-term, self initiated projects which now sit comfortably alongside a number of large-scale commissions in the industrial sector.

To date Power has published four monographs: The Shipping Forecast, a poetic response to the esoteric language of daily maritime weather reports in 1996; Superstructure, a documentation of the construction of London's Millennium Dome in 2000; The Treasury Project, about the restoration of a nineteenth-century historical monument, in 2002: and 26 Different Endings (2007) which looks at those landscapes unlucky enough to fall just off the edge of the London A-Z (a map which could be said to define the boundaries of the British capital). Meanwhile, The Sound of Two Songs - Poland 2004-2008, and A-380, about the development of the worlds' largest passenger airplane, are both due to be published in 2008.

In 2007 he tried his hand at curating. Theatres of War featured the work of five artists whose work is concerned with contemporary conflict and surveillance. It opened at the Oskar Schindler factory in Krakow, Poland in May.

Mark Power joined Magnum Photos as a Nominee in 2002, became an Associate in 2005, and a full Member in 2007. Meanwhile, in his other life, he is Professor of photography at the University of Brighton, a city on England's south coast where he lives with his partner Jo and their children Chilli (b.1998) and Milligan (b.2002).

Boris Becker

Statement:

The artist Boris Becker is among the most important representatives of the German photographic scene. As a second-generation student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, he sets off with his camera in pursuit of motifs that are more structural in nature in terms of form and concentrates more on colour accents rather than reacting to the usual art historically motivated sign stimuli of urban or nature views, for example.
Since the mid-nineteen eighties, he has developed a wide spectrum of thematic complexes. His series of bunker photographs in which he produced an almost encyclopaedic compendium of German bunkers from the Second World War encompasses 700 images, forms the most comprehensive group. This was followed by photographs of apartment blocks and other architectonic constructions.
Alongside these works, Becker has also regularly taken photographs of landscapes. Becker’s most recent works include the group of photos entitled ‘Artefacts’ containing images of individual or accumulated objects as well as ‘Fakes’ with photographs of objects that were ‘faked’ to smuggle drugs, for example.

http://www.dumont-buchverlag.de/sixcms/detail.php?template=buchdetail_en&id=5136

West Coast:

G. Gibson Gallery
(Seattle)

I like that this gallery has a focus on the contemporary landscape and seems to offer emerging artists representation. I also like that it's not just photography too. There's a good representation of mixed media, painting, and sculpture. It's in Seattle as well, and that just seems cool and a city that takes its art seriously.

Laura McPhee

Laura McPhee’s stunning large-scale color photographs juxtapose idealized images of the land against the disarming reality of life in the twenty-first century. Boston-based photographer McPhee spent more than two years in a remote area of central Idaho capturing images that address Americans’ conflicting ideas about landscape and land use and our values and beliefs about our relationship to the natural world. For McPhee, this valley in Idaho is a microcosm of America and the dilemmas that communities and people nationwide face when dealing with land issues.

Generous support for this exhibition was provided by The Alturas Foundation, a family foundation representing four generations in the American West dedicated to visual arts and American culture. The Alturas Foundation is proud to have sponsored Laura McPhee as its initial artist-in-residence.

Eirik Johnson

Eirik Johnson is a photographer currently based in Boston, MA. His work has been exhibited at spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the George Eastman House in Rochester, and the Aperture Foundation in New York. He has received several awards including the Santa Fe Prize in 2005 and a William J. Fulbright Grant to Peru in 1999-2000. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the National Fulbright Foundation, and the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection. His first monograph, BORDERLANDS, was published by Twin Palms Publishers in 2005. Eirik Johnson is represented by Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco and G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle, WA. Johnson is an assistant professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art.

Robert Koch Gallery (San Fransisco)

The Robert Koch Gallery has a huge collection of many big names in photography and represents quiet a few bigger named artists of today including Brian Ulrich ,Edward Burtynsky, Joel Meyerowitz, and Jeff Brouws. I'm aiming high with this gallery since it represents many big photographers, but once my work develops more and becomes more polished, I feel that my work could be very versatile within the gallery system.

Joshua Lutz

Joshua Lutz's large-format photographs of urban sprawl and suburban portraiture capture intimate details of places and their inhabitants in a soft, moody palette. The subtle tension in Lutz's photographs between natural and man-made structures expands upon themes of Stephen Shore and the New Topographics. From an image of an airplane take-off framed by trees and a cell phone tower in his Meadowlands series to rows of wind turbines amid factories on a grassy plain in his new Am✡Dam series, Lutz's photographs offer new views of the post-suburban landscape, capturing on film the spirit of simultaneous progress and decay.

Mike Smith

Born 1951, Heidelberg, Germany.
U.S. Army. Vietnam 1970-71. Germany 1972. Rank E-5. Honorable discharge.
BFA, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, 1977.
MFA in Photography, Yale University, School of Art, New Haven, CT, 1981.
Professor of Photography, Department of Art and Design, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN, 1981-present.

International:

Bau-Xi Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art (Toronto)

I like that I chose an international gallery that isn't too far away. I've always had an affinity to our neighbor to the North. I've heard of many great photographers coming from Canada that seem to focus on similar issues of land use that I do. I also know that the Canadian Art Scene is doing fairly well, the Ontario School of Art and Design has a great reputation and Toronto just seems like a great place. It has a focus on emerging artists that focus on the lands around them too.

Toby Smith

Toby Smith graduated from London College of Communication in 2008 with an MA in Contemporary Photography. This was after being awarded the Nikon Discovery Award in 2008 for his seminal body of work, Light After Dark. For this series, Smith has visited every Power Station in England, shooting at night using large format film and exposures lasting many hours to produce compelling imagery of something perceived as crude when looked at in the hard light of day. Smith mixes his ongoing personal projects, including access to the nuclear sector, with reportage assignments where photography can both inform and inspire audiences to advocacy relating to the subject matter. He has recently completed an undercover investigation into the illegal timber trade of Madagascar published across Europe December 2009.

Smith has been published by The Guardian, Saturday Times, Sunday Times, Stern Magazine and other awards include silver medal at Royal Photographic Society 2008. Light After Dark was syndicated by Getty Reportage and went on to be nominated for the Prix Pictet 2009 and took 3 prizes at the PX3 awards 2009.

Eamon Mac Mahon

Since 2004, Toronto-based photographer Eamon Mac Mahon has spent up to three months of each year working in the wilderness of northwestern Canada and Alaska. These slow journeys via bush plane have allowed him to intimately photograph remote landlocked communities, and the vast areas of uninhabited land surrounding them. His work has appeared in various publications including the Walrus, National Geographic, W and New York Magazine, as well as exhibition spaces such as The Power Plant, The Detroit Institute of the Arts, the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston and Higher Pictures NYC. Mac Mahon’s photographs, on display for Contact, 2008 at Pearson International Airport, were described as “magnificent and mysterious” by Kate Taylor for the Globe and Mail. Mac Mahon also spends much of his time creating video projections for stage productions, short films and documentaries.

Fotogallerie Wein (Austria)

Lukas Schaller

Bio:
LUKAS SCHALLER - BIOGRAPHY

born 1973 in Lienz, Tyrol, Austria
lives and works in Vienna, Austria

1993-1997 Media and Communication Study, University of Vienna
1998 Schule für künstlerische Fotografie (Friedl Kubelka), Vienna
since 1999 Freelance Photographer

Shows/Residencys

1998 Architektur aus Tirol, Photographs, Galerie Museum, Bolzano
2000 Trentino/Südtirol/Tirol, Photographs, EXPO2000, Hannover
2001 Franzjosefshöhe, Photographs, Soho in Ottakring, Vienna
2002 PhoneHome, Photographs, Soho in Ottakring, Vienna
2003 Ganz Galtür unter einem Dach, Photographs, Alpinarium Galtür, Galtür
2003 AustriaWest, Video, Architekturtriennale Mailand, Milano
2004 de luxe at belle étage, Photographs, Vienna
2005 la cité manifeste à mulhouse, Video, Photographs, aut, Innsbruck
2005 Realitäten, Photographs, Fotogalerie Wien, Vienna
2006 Debut, Galerie Fotohof, Salzburg
2006 Stadt-Landschaften/Eingriffe, Dorottya Galeria, Budapest

2004 Residency in London
2005 Residency-Award, BKA/Arts Division of the Federal Chancellery Austria, Paris
(Photoatelier Paris

Eva Würdinger

Bio:

born 1975 in Vienna, Austria.
lives and works in Vienna and Dunedin

Education

2000-2005 MFA Photography and Visual Arts, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna - Prof. Eva Schlegel
1995-2002 MA Education and Science in Art, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna

Grants/Awards

2009 State Scholarship for Photography by Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture
2005 Residency for Photography in Rome by Austrian Federal Chancellery
2003 Residency for Visual Arts in Budapest by Municipality Vienna

GeoCaching

2010-04-01T04:59:00.000-07:00

quotes:

Andrew King is wrapping three original paintings in weatherproof packaging and stashing them in different places in the Ottawa Valley. To find them, and keep them for free, you’ll need a GPS, the Internet and an ability to solve puzzles.

On Feb. 2, the Cube Gallery is hosting an event entitled Canadiana. King will have seven pieces on display, three of which will contain clues to the GPS co-ordinates of the hidden paintings. “It will be kind of like The Da Vinci Code,” King said in an interview.

- Christine Huang

Spiritual geocaching is a project based on the idea that certain physical locations on this planet may hold spiritual significance. From Moses on the mountain top, to Jerusalem, and Mecca, many cultures have embraced the idea that certain locations may hold a spiritual value.

The concept of this project is that certain areas in the wild are extremely calming, and in this state of relaxation a person residing at this location will become more meditative and approach the spiritual. By using a combination of biofeedback and gps data, it may be possible to locate these locations and then post them on the internet so that others may enjoy the healing properties.

-Heather Clark
http://digitalarts.ucsd.edu/~wild/clark/

Analysis:

Well, I stumbled upon this activity through my research of of geopolitics and spatial relationships. It really seemed odd at first. But then I thought about it, and what I am currently doing is similar with my art. In GeoCaching, people go out into the world on...basically...treasure hunts. They need to be hooked up with a GPS phone or device and also to the geocaching website to be able to find coordinates to places where people have hidden "Treasure" in waterproof boxes (it seems they're usually ammo boxes or something along those line). It's a modern day treasure hunt for the tech people. Although it seems like i have been doing the same thing with my art, except the treasure to me are these bike trails and ramps that are hidden in the state parks, local parks, forest preserves, national forest, etc. I feel that this is an odd thing to blog about on my research page, but it seems to fit in quite nicely. My work is involved in mapping and specific places in America (to some degree, I still haven't fully realized what exactly it is or how to explain it). I go into primarily remote and isolated areas that are usually devoid of, let's just say most people, and i explore the terrain and the given paths. But before i get to these places I use a map and internet tools and forums to find these places. The directions on the internet are always vague and usually not that precise, so there's an element of the hunt and the journey that revolves around my work. So i go into these trails and hike. I hike for miles with a camera and tripod on my should in search of man altered terrain. The trail markers, the ramps, the remnants of people are my treasures. Just like in geocaching, people's little treasures are there somewhere. Like i said, i too feel this is an odd entry, but i feel that it's just crazy enough that it makes sense. Or maybe I'm just sleep deprived. But it seems like there's a place where my art making and this geocaching intersect like on a map.

Monumental

2010-03-31T07:19:00.000-07:00

Monumental

Definition:

–adjective
1.
resembling a monument; massive or imposing.
2.
exceptionally great, as in quantity, quality, extent, or degree: a monumental work.
3.
of historical or enduring significance: a monumental victory.
4.
Fine Arts. having the quality of being larger than life; of heroic scale.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/monumentality

Quote:

...contrasts with the iconic power of museum architecture and with the idea of of museum building as a civic monument. Detecting a global trend towards the fragmentary and contingent in some of the strongest sculpture being made today, they are presenting work that reflects the extreme delicacy and fragility of life in the twenty-first century. It is an uncertain time, at best, with threats of ranging from religious wars and terrorism to global warming and species extinction."

-Lisa Phillips. Toby Devan Lewis Director, New Museum of Contemporary Art.
From the Book "Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century"

Nate Lowman

The Never Ending Story, 2007. Gas pumps, gas pump side panels. 80 x 137 x 53in

Not Sorry, 2006. Bullet Resistant Glass, brushed stainless steel, stickers. 36 x 12 x 108.5in

From Exhibition "A Dog From Every County". Unable to find dimensions and Title.

I have chosen Nate Lowman because of his neo-appropriationist approach to installation and sculpture. It seems to blend anthropological remains in new media, street art, and American bumper stickers and critiques the new American culture. He recycles real imagery, and by real i mean objects in our society. I feel that it can relate to my art practice because when I go out and photograph these trails and parks, I tend to look at the ramps, the hand built carvings that surround the landscape, and areas of man made manipulation and create a portrait of that activity, framed in a way to balance the object and the landscape in the photograph. I appropriate the creative nature of the remnants and juxtapose them in a way to incite debate and discussion of the object in question and the natural space around it.

Review:

Like so many recent exhibitions (numbing swaths of the Whitney Biennial, portions of the New Museum’s “Unmonumental”) the Colen-Lowman outing resembles a disheveled rec room. The palette du jour in these shows is black-and-white, black-and-silver, monochrome, Day-Glo, or printer’s colors like magenta and cyan applied mechanically or in intentionally messy ways. Posters, gaffer’s tape, magazine pages, and found objects are placed about. Images are usually derived from newspapers, ads, or porn. Text and jokes often appear (à la Richard Prince); holes are often bashed in walls; Sheetrock and plywood are broken up and spray painted. Noland’s ideas about sculpture and Prince’s about appropriation are so prevalent that those artists ought to be drawing royalties.

Much of this work takes visual cues from the photographs that appeared in art magazines of the sixties and seventies, translating that smudgy halftone quality to three dimensions. These artists seem to want to crawl into the skins of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, whose work did intrusive things to the large and familiar, and a preapproved roster from the so-called “greatest generation.” It’s a cool school based on an older cool school, and it gains attention the way a child of a celebrity does. Many artists of this stripe went to art school and have apparently internalized the beliefs of their teachers, using strategies common when those instructors were young. They’re making art in ways that their teachers thought art should be made. This is an Oedipal-aesthetic feedback loop, a death wish. Some of this art is good. Most of it already looks very dated, or will soon.

- Jerry Saltz. Published Apr 21, 2008 . New York Magazine.

Aleksandra Mir

First Woman On the Moon. 2000. C-Print. 36 x 36in. On location Wijk ann Zee, Netherlands

First Woman On the Moon. 2000. Detail. On location Wijk ann Zee, Netherlands

First Woman On the Moon. 2000. Detail. On location Wijk ann Zee, Netherlands

First Woman On the Moon. 2000. Detail. On location Wijk ann Zee, Netherlands.

I chose to use Aleksandra Mir because of the monumental idea and concept that was put into action with this project. I am focusing only on this piece because it uses a few definitions of the concept of "Monumental". First, the size and scale and site of the project. Second, how she critiques and reinterprets the monumental nature of the historic event. And finally, it becomes a monument in time because it becomes part of the lost landscape and adds a historical presence to the monument. I also enjoy that it is Earth Art, my work, in a particular sense, embraces that. My photographs are of Earth art, but it's just because the sculptural implications of the objects that I photograph. They become relics in the land, carved from the Earth to make the space more intense and extreme. That aspect also leads us to have a sense of awe and respect too, but it is also a detriment to the land.

Review:

At first spec, it's hard to marry the rich intellectual promises of the press release with the sober museological test-site on view, to get over the is-that-it? response that the historical framing of sites and objects can induce. The ideas are still in evidence, of course, just purposely concealed within the politics of display. Keith Wilson's moon-boot-material yoga mats, placed here and there, set the tone and territory of Morton's constellational arrangement: 1960s spiritual, 1970s retail and twenty-first-century eco values collide in this remodelled object. Fanned out on the ground, they appear to have broken the fall of a TV set playing Aleksandra Mir's sublime film 'First Woman on the Moon' (1999), which follows the daylong transformation of a Dutch beach into a lunar landscape. The temporal nature of the endeavour brings to mind Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' (1970), while Mir's tenderly filmed cast of faux-1960s women, burly construction crews and passersby imbue her gender-political message with rich human as opposed to dry academic undertones. Snippets of space-mission audio and an eclectic score supplied by Hasselblad, the cameramaker contracted by NASA for the original landing and a sponsor of Mir's project as well, raise and lower the exhibition pulse as if at the behest of a coronary condition.

Naturally, very little is as it seems. Formally light works harbour expansive narratives; truth and fiction layered to form improbable theoretical structures. Carey Young, for example, stipulates that her 'Plato Contract' (2008), a boy's bedroom poster-cum-photowork of the moon's Plato crater, will only become art for the purchaser once installed on the moon. The distance between wag-the-dog plausibility and mad-as-a-box-of-frogs lunacy often appears too close to call. It's impossible to say at what point science bleeds into fiction during Karen Russo's docufictional video account of a male psychic describing a location ('the dark side of the moon') simply from a set of map coordinates. For while his Ancient Egypt-inspired vision appears the stuff of comic-book fantasy, 'remote viewing' is known to have been used as an experimental surveillance technique during the Cold War.

- Deceitful Moon. by Rebecca Geldard ArtReview, #35, London, October 2009.

Jussi Kivi

House of Enigmas

Hottentot House

Dwarf House

The Pavillon

Cave 1245 "the theatre", Kivikko , Helsinki, 2006, c-print

Wall in Vuosaari, November, 2006, c-print

Material from the Speleology Department: Floor plan:
Cave 1242, Kivikko, Helsinki, 2005, mixed media

What has interested me in Jussi Kivi is that he is interested in geography and art as an entity, but also his re-contextualizing of the landscape and historic monument that are his first four photographs that I present in my blog. The place is in the outskirts of Hamburg, near an old Jewish cemetery, but the objects he photographs is an old building from the Nazi era. It's in fact an old gun-powder mill the Nazis used, but in the styling of the old German romantic painters, he renames the site of the cause of so much death, into a romantic aesthetic. This project was part of the mapping project of Hamburg, where Artists and writers used artistic interpretations to map the land around them. The buildings are shot in a monumental way, the old historic sites become something else. That's something i am interested in, he doesn't mind when spaces of rural and untouched natural beauty begin to overlap with cultural objects. I agree, I do mind in an environmental way, but I think he also has a point in his view. But it also goes into the idea of creativity vs. destruction, another aspect in which my art is to explore.

Review:

“What most interests me is the landscape,” says the artist Jussi Kivi. He also makes hiking trips to experience it. It need not be untouched, national-romantic nature; it can be the borderlands between culture and nature – even a rubbish dump.

Kivi makes notes on his expeditions: he writes, draws and makes maps, photographs and videos. Some of these become artworks, for example, large photographic prints. Kivi himself compares them to old genre paintings. Although he seeks the aesthetic, they still have an awareness of contemporary art: a distance, irony, and politicality, which are also evident in Kivi’s book Kaunotaiteellinen eräretkeilyopas (trekking guide for art lovers, 2004).

-Otso Kantokorpi

Center For Land Use Interpretation

Mount Greylock Summit. Photograph. Dimensions and media Variable

Description: A granite tower was originally destined to be a lighthouse on the Charles River estuary in Boston, but was instead hauled up to the top of Mount Graylock, Massachusetts' highest peak (3,491 feet), in 1932 and dedicated as a war memorial. The 92-foot-tall tower has an observation deck and a glass sphere at the top containing six 1,500-watt searchlights, the most powerful light in the state at the time of construction. The tower is not the highest structure in the state, however. A 200 foot tall television transmission mast was built near the tower by General Electric in the early 1950's, and was later bought by a New York State network affiliate.

Plymouth Rock. Photograph. Dimensions and media Variable

Description: The rock is under an elaborate protective canopy next to the coast. One of the few caged boulders in the nation.

Although I have used CLUI before in my word project, and have referenced them on many occasions, I Feel that their archive of work and information is so great that I should be able to tap into its resources again for my research. This is another one of their projects, where they went around and photographed the Monuments that are in the Bay state, that being Massachusetts. They arouse interpretation through imaged based knowledge. Since I am focusing on the monument, I felt that opening it up to all interpretations of the word monument is acceptable. This being the most literal interpretation becuase they in fact are National Monuments preserved by the Government and sites of flocking tourists. I think that this is opening up dialogue about the ideas of "The Monument" in American culture. What about the monument attracts so many people to that specific site? Do people really get enjoyment by returning to a place where something of significance was built? What is the point of people flocking to them? I wonder about that. Have I ever been to a place where something culturally was built and possibly receive some sort of existential gratification from it? Maybe, i always felt that feeling from isolated nature and the experience of a city, rather than a monument or point of interest.

Review:

Land use and aesthetics

Sustainability and politics of land use are at the forefront for artists who look at how people use the landscape, and also at alternative modes of energy. Center for Land Use Interpretation’s (CLUI) mission is to better understand land and landscape usages through research, artist residencies and exhibitions. For Badlands, CLUI will present a project entitled Massachusetts Monuments: Images of Points of Interest in the Bay State, which uses photographs and text to take museum visitors on a virtual tour of land usage throughout Massachusetts. Visitors weave through a world of plants and paths, occasionally discovering small carved marble highways and cityscapes in Yutaka Sone’s indoor “jungles” -- ideal worlds where nature engulfs “progress.” Joseph Smolinski, on the other hand, provides a creative solution to the politics of the land use by creating a wind turbine made to look like an enormous pine tree – not unlike the cell phone tower “trees” that dot our highways – merging a facsimile of a natural environment with a renewable power source.

- Denise Markonish
Badlands curatorial statement

Tony Cragg

Clear Glass Stack. 1999. Glass. 2200 x 1300 x 1400mm

Constant Change

Minster. 1992. mechanisms, springs, disks, bolts. H. 285, 275, 260, 215 cm. base. 250 x 250cm

I chose Tony Cragg because of his monolithic interpretations of the tower and its spatial design and monumental aesthetics. His work involves the towering spires that are a staple of contemporary culture and city design. They have become an iconic symbol of our time and cities, but he also points out that these spires have been in place for ages. His work seems to point back to the very olden times such as the Aztecs or the Babylonians (Babylon and Nineveh). These objects become very open to interpretation and I like to see them as these minimalist sculptures that incorporate the past, present and future. This relates to my work by creating an object in space, the idea of stacking and manipulated throughout a landscape (since much of his work is very public) he plays with the notion of spatial relationships, something I feel my work does, but in a 2-D way.

Review:

Since the 1980s, British sculptor Tony Cragg has maintained a consistently high profile on the international stage. Cragg's works can be divided into various loose genuses within his practice, such as stacks, heaps and piles, fragments or early forms. He explains that his glass works of the late 1990s have their "roots in a much earlier activity in my history of making. They relate obviously, physically, to sedimentary works, to the collection of objects, to assemblage, to additive sculptur,, to stacking things.... they're very much to do with things accruing, having a construction underneath the whole thing, building it up." Clear Glass Stack is the most refined of his glass works, the one in which the idea is crystallised. It eschews the allusive connotations seen in other works of the same period and is concerned with the purity of the sculptural idea. Indeed writers have commented on Cragg's borrowings from minimalism and, as Kay Heymer explains, his pursuit of the 'sculptural idea, resembling a scientific experiment conducted until it yields no further answer to the current query". Cragg is not directive about the angle or approach that should be taken to his work, but emphasises that his work is concerned with engaging our visual rather than haptic sense. His works can be playfully humorous and he is intrigued by the visual paradoxes his works sometimes unexpectedly present.

Manfred Pernice

Plateau (study). 2004. Painted Particle Board. 26 x 47 x 16in

Plateau (Frau Saft), 2004. Painted particle board, ceramic sculpture, lamp
35 x 82 x 142 in

What I like about Manfred Pernice's work is that it takes cues from architectural forms found in public spaces such as phone booths, kiosks, street lamps, etc. He also uses very accessible materials and seems to be very much into the ready made to a degree. The monumental aspect comes from the object and its aesthetic and relationship to the space. Much of his work is based off of monumetal figures such as citadels and industrial towers as well. Since the work is based on man made utilitarian objects, but are created by an artist and very pedestal-esque in appearance, it becomes elevated in its viewership. His works play with scale and shape so they create a dialogue about the familiarization with architecture.

Review:

One immediate reason for the surge of interest in Pernice's work is its commentary on architecture, a cipher for any number of social and political issues in the New Berlin. But for all the architectural subtext, his works are thoroughly engaged with basic sculptural issues of form, assembly, and surface. His contribution to the Berlin Biennale - Tatlintower, 1998, a hulking construction of horizontally layered wooden boards that seems like an abstract riff on Chicago's Marina City, the combination apartment complex, office building, and aboveground parking lot that became an icon of '60s architecture - oscillates between an organic and technoid appearance. Pernice succeeds in fusing the social and political implications registered in his towering structure (here, a revisitation and reconsideration of utopian multifunctional architecture) with a genuinely sculptural sensibility. The lines of the horizontally layered slats circumscribe the volume of the sculpture and define a large area of surface tension. The "cumulative" arrangement of the slats and their relationship to the inner core of the structure thematize the inherently sculptural aspects of structural support and distribution of load. Pernice simultaneously reveals and conceals by allowing a view into the interior of the sculpture without, however, fully exposing the construction.

ArtForum, April, 1999 by Yilmaz Dziewior

Sam Durant

Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington DC, 2005. Medium densiy fiberboard, foam, enamel, acrylic, basswood, birch veneer, copper. 30 Monuments. Dimensions Variable.

Proposal for Monument at Altamont Raceway, Tracy, CA, 1999. Polyurethane foam, acrylic, wood, steel, speakers, CD Player, miscellaneous hardware. 69 x 74 x 100in

Sam Durant's work is very political in its presentation and its context. His sculpture Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions is very much about the idea of monumentality, He plays off of the obelisk, an object that throughout the ages acted as a monumental structure. The pieces were all based off of obelisks from throughout the USA. The work addresses architecture, civic design, and American Monuments.

Review:

Sam Durant's recent works have explored the memorialisations of otherness that mark quirky American spaces with their histories. Durant, who grew up in the vicinity of the mythic Plymouth Rock, site of the Pilgrims' landing in the New World, assembled the figures and props he bought from the museum into sculptural installations for his recent exhibition at Massachusetts College of Art. Defunct bodies made of a reddish-brown rubbery material come together in eerie and silly combinations. Mobilising the uncanny look of a haunted wax museum, Durant's project combines an antique-store's kitschy aura with deconstructed historiography, showing us the tattered banality of colonial logic. The fraying costumes, the dead eyes, the wear and tear of the decades that have passed since these objects were made: all of these contribute to a material mash-up of the 1600s, the 1960s and now. Durant successfully disperses the mystical ambience of these memorial objects, and consequently the superstitions they memorialise. Rather than materialising as a sturdy foundation for a national historical project, these broken-down myths in wax-figure form appear particularly flimsy. Durant's manipulation of these figures shows how malleable such asserted natural histories are, whether in the hands of hegemonic power or a clever Southern California artist.

- Malik Gaines
Sam Durant: Shaping History
Posted by ArtReview magazine on February 22, 2007 at 2:00pm

Eva Rothschild

High Times. 2005. Leather and Steel Support. 171 x 15.5 x 15.5in

Someone and Someone - 2009. Steel and paint.

Review:

Eva Rothschild has achieved international acclaim for her practice which involves both conceptual and socio-political ideas alongside traditional approaches to making sculpture. One of the most highly regarded artists of her generation, Rothschild presents new and recent work for her solo exhibition at the South London Gallery.

For more than ten years Rothschild has investigated concepts of form and materiality in sculptural works that use leather, wood, Perspex and, occasionally, surprising objects such as incense sticks and used tyres. Such materials often appear to transcend their physical limitations, hovering between representation, symbolism and actual form. By deliberately destabilising physical and visual characteristics in her work, Rothschild not only questions the aesthetics of art, in particular minimalism, but also those of belief in social liberation and spiritual movements.

- http://www.southlondongallery.org/docs/exh/exhibition.jsp?id=138
author not cited

Manfred Willmann

Manfred Willmann, Das Land (1981 - 1993) 27.5x27.5in. C-Print

Manfred Willmann, Oman, 1997 C-Print

Review:

The central theme of Manfred Willmann's photographic cycles "Das Land" (1981.-1993.), "Oman" (1997.) and "Japanese Food" (2000.), simultaneously shown in Zagreb, are registration, objectivity and visualization of aspects and manifestations of human relations, surroundings and immediate environment, all that encloses people in social and natural landscape where they dwell and act - in their most diversified and often absolutely ambivalent details. The excellent Willmann's cycle "Das Land", exhibited all around the world in the most prestigious museums (Museum of Modern Art in New York bought off the part of it), discloses the artist who, at least in this case, does not care for global and great themes, but is focused on just one social (rural) segment, where he moves with ease as its authentic connoisseur and where his eye, sensitive especially to the social aspect, recognizes the motley mosaic of sundry, social and private, often even very intimate details of rural community and villagers' socializing.
The cycle contains sixty photographs created without special preparations and laboratory editing and shows very intimate photographic entries of people and nature in Grossradl community in western, rural part of Steierland. The artist kept these entries for twelve years as a kind of subjective photographic diary that discloses not only the panorama, but the whole universe of different scenes that document the fullness of village life in the county. These expressive and suggestive, intimately charged photographs show particular landscape's spirituality and beauty, enhancing and shading it by the presence of local inhabitants. Blended with the environment, fitted into it by the artist's gesture, they seem to be grown together. "'Das Land' means the familiarity with this region, meeting the people and families that live there, their work, their homes, their friends", says Willmann. Instead of focusing on local historic sites and picturesquesness, like regional customs, insignia and attributes like folk costumes, folklore and similar phenomena, the artist, obviously already at home in the region and well accepted by the locals as a dear guest - avoiding to direct, frame or form into style - registrates small scenes of relaxed and spontaneous atmosphere, frivolous presence, numerous changes throughout the years, alterations of village life dictated by the change of seasons, as in landscape so in animal world, to create the rich and above all convincing mosaic of details that clearly, with unhidden sympathy, document the life - getting into the spheres of social life, like parties, celebrations, dances, but also into the most intimate ones (like a girl washing her feet) - emphasizing these people's ordinariness and modesty - everyday routine at households and farms - in a small, seemingly uninteresting environment that, as it seems, could be found anywhere. Willmann's photographs are sometimes naturalistically cruel - like the one showing a cat with bloodstained snout or the other one showing a pig's head in the cauldron full of bloody water or the photograph of a liver drying on the tree - but sometimes they are deliberately sentimental. "At the same time sentiment blends with roughness, life and death exist in the close touch of reality, peasant's coarse hands hold a small rabbit with lots of compassion and chopped off pig's head floats in bloody liquid in the plastic can", Vinko Srhoj wrote. Willmann exposes villager as a content man, decently registrating his feeling of boredom and resignation as a result of settled life that is carefully planned, from day to day, lived for centuries by established and bent ritual. Living its life, the community fights for its customs and resists the changes that come with contemporary civilization (and aggressively imposed globalization) that are, as the cycle shows, unavoidable. In any case, Willmann "felt" the spot where discrepancy between the world and ego is the thinnest.

-Ivica Zupan
http://www.g-mk.hr/programme/Manfred-Willmann:-Das-Land-,-Oman,-Japanese-Food,-three-photographic-cycles/114/

Francis Alys

When Faith Moves Mountains. (In collaboration with Cauhtemoc Medina and Rafael Ortega). 2002. Video Still. Dimensions Variable.

The Making of Lima. (In collaboration with Cauhtemoc Medina and Rafael Ortega), 2002. Video Still. Dimensions Variable.

Review:

"Sometimes making something leads to nothing, sometimes making nothing leads to something." The seemingly paradoxical logic of this statement, uttered by the artist himself, informs the work of Francis Alÿs. His works often begin as simple actions performed by himself or commissioned volunteers, which are recorded in photographs, film, and other means of documentation such as postcards. Many of his projects are generated during the artist’s “walks,” or paseos, in which he traverses city streets. In these works, Alÿs proposed witty updates to Baudelaire’s figure of the nineteenth-century flaneur. His first walk was The Collector (1991–92), in which he strolled through the streets of Mexico City pulling a small metal “dog” by a leash, its magnetic wheels collecting the city’s detritus in its wake. In Paradox of Praxis (1997), the artist pushed a large block of ice down the streets for hours until it was reduced to a mere puddle. For The Leak (1995), he roamed the streets of Ghent with a punctured can of paint, leaving a sort of Jackson Pollock-like breadcrumb trail back to a gallery space, where he finally mounted the empty paint can to the wall.

Alÿs's endeavors often exceed the dimensions of discrete objects. In 2002 a group of some five hundred volunteers armed with shovels formed a line at the end of a massive, 1,600-foot sand dune and began moving the sand about four inches from its original location. This epic project, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), was completed for the third Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima in a desolate landscape just outside the Peruvian capital. The work is neither a traditional sculpture nor an Earthwork, and nothing was added or built in the landscape. That the participants managed to move the dune only a small distance mattered less than the potential for mythmaking in their collective act; what was “made” then was a powerful allegory, a metaphor for human will, and an occasion for a story to be told and potentially passed on endlessly in the oral tradition. For Alÿs, the transitory nature of such an action is the stuff of contemporary myth.

-Guggenheim, author not specified.
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Francis%20Al%C3%BFs&page=1&f=People&cr=1

Environment

2010-03-25T05:38:00.000-07:00

J Henry Fair.
Heavy Metal Waste From Fertilizer Production. This is one of the top 10% most polluting factories in the USA. It is known to be a major emitter of lead, but the fertilizer industry in particular has been effective in pressuring the EPA to reduce the reporting requirements to which it is subject, making the clear picture of its emissions difficult.

Environment

"Population pressures, unsustainable practices, and consumption have led to severe pressures on our world. Much of the planet's land base is degraded by various forms of land use: overgrazing has degraded 680 million hectares worldwide, deforestation (580 million hectares), agricultural mismanagement (550 million hectares), fuel wood consumption (137 million hectares), and industry and urbanization (19.5 million hectares). Approximately 50% of our planet's land mass is occupied by forestry, agriculture, and livestock."

-Tensie Whelan. From the article People and the Planet. From the book Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape.

This is actually appalling, yet not that hard to grasp for me and probably many others. Industry and progression in technology and our technological and agricultural needs are putting tremendous stress on our planet and environment. The numbers are there and things aren't getting better. We currently have 6.5 Billion people living here, and within a decade it's sure to reach 7 Billion. That means more industry and more needs that will need to be manufactured and created with the current state of our lands. We must point out and create meaning and solutions to these problems that will only grow substantially.

"The redesign of our world will need artists to provide imagination, creativity and emotional connections - both to the mess we have created and to the possibilities we can create together."

-Tensie Whelan. From the article People and the Planet. From the book Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape.

What I feel is powerful about this quote is that it is a call to artists to change the world. To redesign what we know to be detrimental to our planet, our health, and the way we live our lives. We as artist have a responsibility, to create. But, as we create we need to allow ourselves to understand that we're all in this mess together, and as creatives, we need to analyze the situation and create something positive about the changing of our natural landscapes and urban territories. Especially photographers and people working in the realm of the visual arts. We have a gift that many don not. We can see things in a different light, so we need to act and become instrumental in our work and aim for a new tomorrow, today.

Artist Statement: Top Five Words

2010-03-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

Top Words:

1. Land

Def.: an area of ground with reference to its nature or composition

2. Terrain

Def.: a tract of land, esp. as considered with reference to its natural features, military advantages, etc.

3. Manipulation

Def.: to handle, manage, or use, esp. with skill, in some process of treatment or performance

4. Spatial (design)

Spatial Design is a relatively new discipline that crosses the boundaries of traditional design disciplines such as architecture, interior design, landscape architecture and landscape design as well as public art within the Public Realm.

It focuses upon the flow of space between interior and exterior environments both in the private and public realm. The emphasis of the discipline is upon working with people and space, particularly looking at the notion of place, also place identity

5. Landscape

Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including physical elements such as landforms, living elements of flora and fauna, abstract elements like lighting and weather conditions, and human elements like human activity and the built environment.

Top Verbs:

1. Exploiting

to use selfishly for one's own ends

2. Altered

to make different in some particular, as size, style, course, or the like; modify

3. Manufactured

to work up (material) into form for use

4. Conquering

to gain a victory over; surmount; master; overcome

5. Perpetuate

To prolong the existence of

Top Adjectives:

1. Formalist

In visual art, formalism is a concept that posits that everything necessary to comprehending a work of art is contained within the work of art. The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, is considered to be of secondary importance. Formalism is an approach to understanding art.

2. Natural

existing in or formed by nature

3. Monumental

resembling a monument; massive or imposing.

4. Remnant

remaining; leftover.

5. Sculptural

To change the shape or contour of, as by erosion.

Top Nouns:

1. Ramp

The use of land or created or manufactured object to be used in generally extreme sports.

2. Trail Marker

is the practice of marking paths in outdoor recreational areas with blazes, markings that follow each other at certain — though not necessarily exactly defined — distances and mark the direction of the trail.

3. Space

the unlimited or incalculably great three-dimensional realm or expanse in which all material objects are located and all events occur.

4. Land

(See top words)

5. Landscape

(See top words)

Pieter Hugo

2010-03-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

Mallam Mantari Lamal with Mainasara, Nigeria 2005. Digital C-Print. 117 cm x 115 cm

Abdullahi Mohammed with Gumu, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria 2007. Digital C-Print. 117 cm x 115 cm

Mallam Galadima Ahmadu with Jamis, Abuja, Nigeria 2007. Digital C-Print 117 cm x 115 cm

Alhaji Hassan with Ajasco, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria 2007. Digital C-Print. 117 cm x 115 cm

I chose Pieter Hugo because of how he came transform his subject and balance them within a frame. There's something haunting about Hugo's Hyena & Other Men series, I love the use of the unsaturated palette in what many people around the world view Africa as a very colorful/vibrant and diverse continent. Since I have been working within a square format for most of this semester, i felt that I needed some more inspiration from someone that uses it. To continue about the color, I also use that desaturated palette with much success, I feel that adding a coolness to the image in those sort of lush condition adds a nice juxtaposition to the concept and the imagery.

Quotes:

"In Abuja we found them living on the periphery of the city in a shantytown - a group of men, a little girl, three hyenas, four monkeys and a few rock pythons. It turned out that they were a group of itinerant minstrels, performers who used the animals to entertain crowds and sell traditional medicines. The animal handlers were all related to each other and were practising a tradition passed down from generation to generation. I spent eight days travelling with them."

-Pieter Hugo

"Pieter Hugo created the series The Hyena Men while traveling in Nigeria with a troupe of animal charmers and their collection of tenuously domesticated hyenas, monkeys and snakes. The portraits feature groupings of men and animals surrounded by the barren urban centers of northern Nigeria. Taken during quiet moments between the spectacles of street performances, the photographs depict a stillness that subverts the tense physicality of the animals and their trainers."

-Yossi Milo (press release)

BIOGRAPHY
Pieter Hugo was born in 1976 and grew up in Cape Town. He underwent a two-year residency in 2002-3 at Fabrica in Treviso, Italy. In 2009 he had solo exhibitions at Tinglado 2 in Tarragona, Spain, and the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, Australia, among other venues, and in 2008 at Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool and Ffotogallery in Penarth, Wales. Recent group exhibitions include Street & Studio: An urban history of photography at Tate Modern, London (2008); Make Art/Stop AIDS at the Fowler Museum, UCLA (2008); An Atlas of Events at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2007); the 27th São Paulo Bienal (2006); and Street: Behind the cliché at Witte de With, Rotterdam (2006). Hugo was included on ReGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow, 2005-2025 (Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, and Aperture, New York), an exhibition identifying 50 young photographers who will be considered great by 2025, accompanied by a book published by Thames & Hudson. He won first prize in the Portraits section of the 2006 World Press Photo competition, and was the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2007. In 2008 Hugo was the winner of the KLM Paul Huf Award and the Arles Discovery Award at the Rencontres d'Arles Photography Festival in France.

Biography is from the Michael Stevenson Gallery

Website
Interview/Review
Galleries

Joseph Smolinski

2010-03-08T05:28:00.000-08:00

Spinning Tree for Spent Oil. 2008. Watercolor and graphite on paper. 15 x 22in

Cemetery (2009), Ink, watercolor and graphite on paper, 26 x 40 inches

Still from Tree Turbine Study (Rest Stop). 2007. mixed media.

Temple. 2008. Graphite on Paper. 11 x 14in

Joseph Smolinski is from the midwest, he went to University of Wisconsin River Falls and he received his MFA at University of Connecticut.

What i like and want to take from his work is the environment aspect of the landscapes that he presents. Many of his artworks revolve around the idea of reusable energy and the landscape that it is depicted in. His illustrations show the blending of earth, science, and technology. He uses the idea of a "Frankentree" a tall deformed tree that has been inhibited with technological objects and features. The inspiration for this work was when he saw a cell tower that had been changed to take on the appearance of a tree, as if it would help rather than harm the natural beauty of the landscape. I feel that there's a hint of that in my work, whereas many of the ramps and trail markers that i photograph take on the natural aesthetic as to blend in with the region it's being photographed in. I still haven't determined how politically inclined, if at all, my work is going to be. I feel that there could be an element added to it to make it political and environmental, but I also feel that it could contaminate the work and that it really isn't about how destructive the manipulation of the landscape of these trails are, but rather about the shared aesthetics and architectural and sculptural elements that lay in wait in these landscapes.

Quotes:

"the project...is more about the human relationship to nature as spectacle. We tend to have more fixed ideas about what 'natural' means than we are willing to admit, and we seem to put natural and unnatural on opposite ends of a continuum. But I am trying to poke at the way that the spectacularly natural almost turns fake - it's like a loop coming full circle."

-Nina Katchadourian
Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape.

"The land itself is in question. Power and politics trail in landscape's wake, because land itself is never un-ideological - at least not once humans begin to take its measure....Cicero called it "second nature," nature transformed by the human hand."

-Ginger Strand. (Essay) At the Limits: Landschaft, Landscape, and the Land
Badlands new horizons in landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008. Print.

Website
Interview
Gallery

Idea

2010-03-05T10:31:00.000-08:00

Luck be a lady, Tonight

Is a random idea I came up with. possible eventual project, i just felt that i needed to write it down somewhere. The project Luck Be A Lady, Tonight is that a get a huge road map of America. Huge, the size of a wall. I then blindfold myself and throw a bunch of darts at the map. Marking the space that the darts hit, i will then map out a journey to pursue all of those landmarks. I will document and photograph the landscape/cityscape/socialscape/wastescape (etc.) of these places and create a cultural mapping of America through the chance of being hit with the darts. I use the terms "luck" and "chance" to embody the American dream, of hitting it big by chance and getting lucky to financial gain and wealth.

Goals for the Week

2010-03-04T19:38:00.001-08:00

My goals for this week are plain and simple...

-I must edit more of my photographs
-not get sick again
-Print, print, print, print, print!
-Prepare my defense for the review

Mapping a City (Article)

2010-03-04T05:44:00.000-08:00

Snapshot of Williamsburg, Va at a Freedom Park Bike Trail

Mapping

"As maps depict a representative space, its prevailing conditions and knowledge concerning space, and also incorporate an authorial standpoint as well as political, religious, cultural and facultative elements, the relationship of societal and spatial structures really is compelling."

-Nina Möntmann (in the article "Mapping. A Response to a Discourse.")

This is pointing out the potentials that lay in wait for mapping and art. I think that the author is trying to point out that the map is much, much more than just a map. It's a system of sustainability that can incorporate a vast amount of knowledge. Mapping is not just for roads anymore, it's for political, spatial, religious, and cultural uses. It is pushing for us to continue to blur the lines between the everyday road map and art. We need to further pursue the art of mapping in all genres of art.

"They [maps] generate the concepts of a social space open at its edges to subjective and subversive appropriations that reflect social realities and can create new ones. The strategy of mapping, in art as in other disciplines, thus has political potential that needs exploiting."

-Nina Möntmann (in the article "Mapping. A Response to a Discourse.")

This is a summation of the article pretty much in my opinion. Art and mapping have long been at opposing sides, reaching for different potentials, but as i feel mapping and art can be conjoined. The two need to be inter connected. Due to the prevent use of media and computer mapping these days and everyone's need to know exactly where they are at all times of the day, mapping is necessary to its and art's potential. The author is calling for us as artists to exploit the powerful nature of visual data, that being the map. It is political, ecological, geographic, and so many other things. Mapping is a cultural thing, it;s how the world became the world. Through mapping we have the ability to create visual meaning through data we collect and document the journeys that we lead.

Möntmann, Nina, and Yilmaz Dziewior. Mapping a City. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004. Print.

Frank Thiel

2010-03-01T05:01:00.000-08:00

Stadt 7/12 (Berlin). 1999. C-Print. h: 112.5 x w: 257.4 in / h: 285.8 x w: 653.8 cm

Stadt 10/06/A (Berlin). 2001. C-Print. framed: 71 x 107-7/8 inches (180.3 x 274 cm)

Stadt 5/20/C (Berlin). 2000. h: 190 x w: 175 cm / h: 74.8 x w: 68.9 in C-Print

Stadt 13/06 (Berlin). 2007. C-Print h: 97.2 x w: 71.6 in / h: 246.9 x w: 181.9 cm

Frank Thiel was born in 1966, around Berlin, in the town of Kleinmachow. He eventually moved to West Berlin in 1985. There he attended a college for training in Photography from 1987-1989. For many years now, Frank Thiel has been photographing and documenting Berlin, and its constant state of changing and flux. There in Berlin, ever since the fall of communism there has been constant reformation of the land and space that the city surrounds. The West's influence is great and development and growth have been key contributors to the success of Berlin after WW2. His work is described as a sort of architecture in transition. The formation of this new architecture allows a new political space to permeate throughout the city's structure. The photographs seem to point towards change, a rebuilding of life, a much more contemporary life. While pretty much all of his photographs are of Berlin, some of his other works are photographs of walls in abandoned industrial complexes. These walls become architectural spaces and seem to transcend photography into a realm of abstract expressionism. (Much like the work I had a year ago).

I chose to use his work for many reasons. I enjoy the presentation of space that he photographs. These spaces are familiar to him because of their proximity to Berlin and his familiarity to them. Though my work is not about familiarity, i feel that If i could keep up with the environments that i photograph, and really get a feel for them and a definite understanding of that space, i think that better photographs would naturally come to me. Although i do believe that upon entering a space for the first time, you may get better results, due to the viewer entering these spaces for the first time have a heightened sense of awareness and are more prone to responding quickly to new environments. When finding out about this artist, initially i was slightly saddened. I had though to myself, "Where was this guy a year ago?" This work would have tremendously helped to look at last year for my abandoned spaces project. Oh Well, C'est la vie.

Quotes:

"the new German capital's astonishing building frenzy in midstep -- fields of rebar awaiting concrete, huge networks of steel pipe, dense webs of scaffolding, and a giant, four-panel picture of Potsdammer Platz under construction, all under a bright gray sky."

"Social Sculpture. Under this title borrowed from Joseph Beuys, we gathered installations, photographic series and videos which critically dealt with themes related to various aspects of the "given" post-Communist realities, be they social economy, religion, race, nationalism, the "nouveuax riches" (new bourgeoisie) and the "nouveaux pauvres" (new poverty), consumerism and the impact of mass media."

Website
Gallery
Review

Land

2010-02-28T20:07:00.000-08:00

LAND
...And its use.

Definition:

an area of ground with reference to its nature or composition: arable land.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/land

I feel that "Land" is a topic that must be addressed due to the prevalence of what i am photographing in my practice. Land is the focal point of my studies, and its interpretation and use. My work becomes a document of a great and vast landscape that is in our modern day periphery, it's about the relation between the natural space that remains of our land and its mapping, use, structure, and its man made manipulation. I am focusing on the biking trails throughout our country, it's a vast collection of paths into the known and unknown. Many are built around state parks as a recreational activity and offer a juxtaposition of natural and altered beauty. The objects and spaces that I tend to photograph are primarily in heavily forested and relatively mountainous areas, away from the daily grinds of modern life. They suggest a sublimity, but also question the use of our "natural" space. The way I've been viewing these areas of land use is in a mainly neutral way, not condemning or justifying them in anyway, but rather documenting and allowing us to truly interpret the many uses of the land we've come to call our own. The photographs are devoid of people, allowing us to decipher the trails we create through our natural landscape.

"By blurring the lines between art and activism CLUI are able to draw to draw in diverse communities and get them to collectively think about the ways in which the land is being used and abused, stressing the cultural implications of such misuse."

-Denise Markonish
From the article "Manifest Destiny to Global Warming: A Pre-Apocalyptic View of Landscape" in the book "Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape"

Alexis Rockman (painter)

South (panel 1) 2008 Oil on gessoed paper 77 x 53 inches

South (panel 2) 2008 Oil on gessoed paper 77 x 53 inches

South. 2008. Oil on gessoed paper. 75 x 358 3/4 inches

Alexis Rockman is an artist living and working in New York City. He recieved his BFA from RISD and his MFA from School of Visual Arts.

I chose Alexis Rockman and his his work on Icebergs in Antarctica because I love the representation and attention to detail that is presented in the paintings. Rockman used some contacts of his to make this journey possible, he took a 12 days exploration to the Antarctic and primarily used photography as a note taking device, he really wanted to do something different with his art, and realized that these icebergs are rarely documented as an art form, and the artists previous to him only primarily did anthropological sketches. The idea for the panoramic and under and oversea viewpoint was his realization to create these pieces. These were ways of presentation that hadn't been used yet. Within these works he reveals to us a grandiose landscape that is under much scrutiny in modern times due to the principles of global warming. Even just a few days ago i had heard about huge blocks of ice ready to break off the barren continent. This work brings a visual depiction and awareness that is rarely seen by any; these works are to inform his viewers about the on going dialogue that is global human behavior/effect and the natural landscape and beauty that exists in our world.

Review:

Unlike the more illustrative paintings from earlier in his career (he once worked as a columnist and illustrator for Natural History magazine), this recent work makes you want to grope for words like "bravura" and "tour-de-force." But in emotional tenor, these paintings - referred to by the artist as his "weather series" - are almost impossible to tell apart.

Rockman has a reputation as an activist in the fight against environmental desecration: He made a huge splash in 2004 with a giant painting of New York as it might look (mostly submerged) a millennium from now. But in an interview published in the show's catalog, he expresses a desire to free himself from the burden of being labeled an artist-advocate. Now, he says, he's thinking much more about "painterly opportunities."

Rockman gives over the largest part of most of these works to descriptions of dra matic natural phenomena. The idiom recalls both the painterly vigor of Abstract Expressionism and the feeling for the sublime in J.M.W. Turner's late work. The virtuosic paint handling is constantly breaking free from mere description and taking on a life of its own. Thus the artist evokes the volatility of extreme natural phenomena, along with their potential for mind-cracking beauty.

-Sebastian Smee

From the Article "An inconvenient truth in Alexis Rockman's work" From the Boston Globe by Sebastian Smee . June 13, 2008

LAND, N55

Position: N 41° 53' 03,4" E 087° 46' 06,8". Area: 160 m2. Chicago, USA.

Position: N 44° 36' 03,2'' E 001° 15' 04,6''. Area: 1100 m2. Les Arques, France.

Position: N 43° 17' 48,1'' E 000° 22' 21''. Area: 400 m2. Pau, France.

Position: N 57° 20' 04,5" E 010° 30' 56,5". Area: 160 m2. Sæby, Denmark.

Cairn:
All parts of LAND are marked with a cairn (height 1 m). The cairns have a frame of stainless acid resistant steel and built-in tanks of PE-plastic. The tanks are equipped with a transparent lid of polycarbonate, tightened with rubber strips.
There is a manual and other equipment in the tanks. Apart from this, the configuration and size of the cairns will be modified according to the sites and their requirements.

What I am interested in about LAND is the ideas that are presented with their geographical locations and the use of mapping, cartography, property, communication and public use of the land. The primary point of LAND is "to create situations with a concrete and fundamental significance to daily life, which at the same time have aesthetic and ethical consequences." This allows LAND to allow people to use private space and make it public by the mere use of decision. This idea to me and I feel to others is a hard concept to grasp. The terminology that LAND uses at times can confuse, but I feel it's very to the point. The land that is selected and allowed to be used as a public space reveals questions of what cities, towns, countries use for private and public space. A Dialogue occurs when viewing said spaces and we the viewer can accept and examine these places.

Review:

N55 formed in 1996 when its six members chose to share their living space in Copenhagen. Their rst show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1996 consisted of “…a table and chairs, a pot plant, a jug of orange juice, their own manifesto and a photocopier which visitors were invited to use.” (Lock) Described by Lars Bang Larsen as “domestic Situationism,” N55’s projects consist of re-creations of items used in every-day life, such as living spaces, furniture, washing systems, and food cultivation systems re-worked from the viewpoint that humans share equal rights to property and the necessities for living. For every object N55 designs, they also write a manual describing in detail how to manufacture it, distributing the manuals free of charge from their website www.N55.dk. In addition to the manuals, N55 posts writings regarding their philosophies,
interviews they’ve had with other artists and critics and pieces of music to be played while reading the various manuals and discussions on this site.

In her article Systemic Inexhaustion, Nana Last explains how N55’s work extends beyond the reductive logic of earlier conceptual work by artists such as Sol LeWitt through their use of internet distribution. She states, “Dissemination of these ideas and distribution of the procedures for their construction are essential compo-nents of the work itself, so that information systems are as much a site of production, inquiry and life support as are the physical units that form the various modules of inhabitation.” (Lake 118-119) Through dissemina-tion, the works can be re-built, and also changed by builders, allowing the pieces to take on lives of their own.

-Katy Asher

Isabelle Hayeur

Au seuil de la nuit 2004 49" X 136" C-Print

Jour de nuit 2006 60" X 64" C-Print

Lot 2008 41" X 96" C-Print

Untitled Legacy 2007 30" X 169" C-Print

The Spaces that she examines are contemporary landscapes that have seen major and quick moving changes throughout the last few decades. The mobility of our culture (both physical and through media) and its affects on land have rapidly reconfigured the use of our territory. These spaces are in a constant state of changing in the Americas and the continuing political measures of capitalization continue the ever present segregation and use of private lands. I focused on her, because she is focused on the manipulated landscape and the ever changing ideas of the land. The use is also an important tool that she examines in her work. It also focuses on the degradation of the land in natural and rural areas as well, something that my work focuses on too.

A quote from Her artist Statement that I like the most:

"The strong contrasts found in these compositions and the struggles that light and shadow seem to be engaged in evoke the power relationships involved. In these Nuits , we can see the consequences of the crumbling of the founding values of our societies, and perhaps also the end of a certain “American dream.” They bring together a few viewpoints culled from these “territories of shadow.”"

Full Artist Statement

These images come from a series that begun in 2004 and is still in progress. The pieces produced to date take a fairly wide variety of forms, including panorama, architectural photography and indoor scenes. Their source is urban landscapes in Canada, the United States, Mexico and Argentina. They depict the changes that are occurring at the same time throughout the Americas in today's context of a global economy. These transformations are reshaping our territories and everyday life.

This investigation broaches many indissociable questions. Some of these issues relate to the growing economic disparities and social divisions; others refer to the relocation of the economy and to contemporary forms of urban segregation (like the creation of free trade zones or gated communities). They also tackle the degradation of natural and rural areas. These works thus define a certain current political horizon. They show us working-class neighbourhoods undergoing “gentrification,” business districts, poverty-stricken neighbourhoods, outcasts, run-down apartments and threatened natural areas. These disturbing landscapes reveal the results of State policies of disengagement and privatization of public institutions. We are gradually witnessing a change in the political scene, where multinationals are tending to become societies' key players, with their development strategies having an increasing effect on our daily lives. The metaphor of twilight is used to suggest the many losses stemming from this prospect. The strong contrasts found in these compositions and the struggles that light and shadow seem to be engaged in evoke the power relationships involved. In these Nuits , we can see the consequences of the crumbling of the founding values of our societies, and perhaps also the end of a certain “American dream.” They bring together a few viewpoints culled from these “territories of shadow.”

-Isabelle Hayeur

Anthony Goicolea

Anthony Goicolea | CORN FIELD | © 2002 | 22 x 78 | Ed. 1- 9 C-Print

Anthony Goicolea | SNOWSCAPE | © 2003 | 27 x 27 | Ed. 1- 30 C-Print

What I like about Goicolea's work in his landscape series is that there is no person present in these monumental images, yet there's obvious signs of human activities and presence. He recreates a narrative through past tense using props, staged sets, and theatrical implications in his photographs. Much of my work is without the presence of human life, but there is the presence of human activity. It can be seen in the built up ramps, tracks through the land, and the manipulation of the landscape. I am looking at his work about the developing of a narrative through these post active landscapes. Although my work isn't very narrative based, there's ideas and thoughts that i would like the viewer to pick up on. The use of the land and its manipulation is the primary focus though. But, the past history and action are all main players in the dialogue that is put in front of the viewers in my work and I would like to make more strides to help engage the viewer like Goicolea.

Artist Statement about Landscape Series:

While working on my "Multiple Self-Portrait Series," I became increasingly interested in the locations, sets, and installations I was constructing during production of my photographs. The uniform clad figures in the series evolved into autonomous universal stand-ins for the idea of adolescence and began to play a secondary role to the environments which inspired their actions and with in which they existed.

Influenced by the tradition of nature and the sublime in early and mid 19th century american landscape paintings, my series of landscape photographs treat their environments as hyper exaggerated frontiers in which remnants of past human interaction are evident through left over traces of people and their activities.

The scenarios often resemble what many of my previous sets and locations looked like after a full day of shooting. Many of the scenes are staged or constructed and then further altered through digital manipulation to create a world anchored in reality but predicated on fantasy, fairy-tales, fables, mythology and other narratives.

Although most of the images are devoid of actual human presence, there is a strong sense of humanity established through the wake of their aftermath or in the mimicked behavior of the animals portrayed in each photograph. In "Molting" a forest is rolled in toilet paper as three deer lay witness to the left over high school prank which emulates the hanging scraps of velvet shedding off their antlers. Two abandoned cars and stacks of suit cases filled with school uniforms clutter the foreground of a farming plantation at sunset in "Corn Field". The pastoral landscape displayed in "Cherry Island" is over run by a crowd of birds, ducks, and rabbits in a sicky-sweet, glaringly artificial, idyllic garden scene.

Distorted cinematic proportions play off the horizon line and lend a physical element to the construction of the photo. In "Snowscape," a 60 foot long scene forces the viewer to walk down the length of the photograph to read the image in its entirety. The scene melds three frozen and barren landscapes into one unified winter narrative punctuated with animal skins, snow balls, footprints, clothes-lines, and pee stains. "Poplar Trees" uses its elongated format to convey a passage of time as twilight sets in on the tree lined plane.

Within these landscapes, seemingly realistic environments provide physical evidence and visual proof of an ongoing past narrative. The photographs use the aesthetics and beauty inherent to nature and the sublime to create an exagerated pastoral scene which bares the imprint of time.

-Anthony Goicolea

http://www.anthonygoicolea.com/NewAnthonySite/pages/landstatement.html

Jakob Kolding

Untitled (Spaced Out?) (2001) Collage / Xerox copy 70 x 100 cm Unique

Untitled (2001) Print 90 x 90 cm

Untitled (Auckland) (2004) Poster 60 x 42 cm

What drew my eye to Jakob Kolding's work is how he propaganda like posters to create an urban landscape that reflects upon social order, social space, and land use. He uses a very soviet constructivist aesthetic to create these collages and uses the poster, a long lived propaganda tool, to represent his work. His collages are mixed with by the harsh framework of city control and planning, he is at the mixing desk of urban representation. Although they aren't by any means a traditional landscape, they are a social landscape. They include much of what today makes us contemporary, the use of advertising, mass production, economics, and visual literacy. This in essence is the entire concept of landscape, it reveals more information about a certain place due to the use of all of those descriptors.

Article

Can't get it to copy and paste so here's the PDF of Jakob Kolding in ArtForum

http://www.teamgal.com/production/689/JK-artforum07.pdf

Rula Halawani

The Wall 111, 2004. Series of 5 photographs Projected. Dimensions Variable

The Wall 56, 2004. Series of 5 photographs Projected. Dimensions Variable

The Wall 37, 2004. Series of 5 photographs Projected. Dimensions Variable

What has me interested in Rula Halawani's work is how she is using the landscape as a document for social change. The Wall Series is about the construction of a wall in Israel that they call a security wall, while many call it an apartheid wall. The wall is a 72.5 Kilometer long, 8 meter high concrete barrier that cuts through the land near the Qalandia checkpoint. These images are very cold and sterile, a bleak look into a country that is still ripe with territorial disputes and much infighting. her work highlights the way "in which art is capable of capturing the lived experience in an accidental, unplanned, non-monumental urban environment that is struggling for its place on a map, suggesting without explicitly representing the intricate routes of movement that animate a space, fill it with life, but leave no trace, only an empty, trembling scene of impossible closure (P.174)." (Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, from the book "Ideal City - Invisible Cities")

Review:

Halawani's series 'Irrational' presents us with wider vistas and panoramas that represent the transformation of landscape that has occurred with the building and expansion of Israeli settlements. In her photographs, Halawani imparts the sense of alienation in relation to the imposition on the landscape with road ways, settlements and the infrastructure for the Apartheid Wall. Taken on winter days while driving in her car, the photographs impart a sense of gloom, foreboding and oppression -- suggested both through the way she has captured the image and their perspective. The settlements always loom overhead, and through her photographs the sense of monumental change that one is unable to affect is suggested. Vis-a-vis the architecture of dominance the individual feels isolated and alienated in what was once a familiar landscape. Halawani's images are very much images of the 'everyday' landscape that Palestinian who are able to move from one location to another see. Settlements on the horizon have become a permanent feature of the Palestinian field of vision.

Halawani is constantly engaged in representing the everyday transformation that occurs on the ground in Palestine. The accumulation of these images are a testimony to the details that become the fabric of monumental historical change which is occurring in Palestine.

-Dr. Tina Sherwell

Full Article Here
http://www.arteeast.org/virtualgallery/apr05_halawani/arteeast-vg-halawani-3.html

Kendell Geers

Suburbia Installation View

From the Suburbia series, 1999. Cibachrome, 30.5 x 40.5 cm

From the Suburbia series, 1999. Cibachrome 40.5 x 30.5 cm

What drew me to Kendell Geers work is the similarity in the photographs that we take. I feel that there's a shared aesthetic between his body of work and mine. Conceptually though, I like the way he reveals this issue of security and private property in South Africa. These presentations the lengths of which people go to so they can protect their lands and homes from the unforeseen. These documents of security seem to be residual effects of apartheid and the segregation of the communities thereafter. He shows us a typology of these safety measures in South Africa and opens a dialogue up about how much safer those measures really make us.

Review (in part):

What is important about the tone and tenor of the questions that framed the Global Cities exhibition is that they were not didactic, and did not seem to shut down discussion and debate about global cities. The questions and statements, as well as the exhibition’s five themes – size, speed, form, density, and diversity – provided visual scaffolding for artists and architects to not only interpret these 10 cities, but also pose a number challenges for their futures.

The exhibition not only locates Johannesburg within a network of global cities, but also positions it within a research framework that is about reading cities through pattern and recognition. There were two photographic projects representing Johannesburg: Kendell Geers’ Suburbia (1999), and the above-mentioned Jo’burg (2004) by Guy Tillim. Through these two bodies of work, the exhibition offered a fairly alienating view of South Africa’s largest city. An Antipodean visitor to the exhibition said of Geers’ photographs of suburban security in South Africa: “It’s a different world that we can’t even begin to relate to.” But then, this is probably a comment that many visitors made about cities on the exhibition that were very different from their own.

The third issue worth considering in relation to research exhibitions is the changing face and identity of ongoing research exhibitions. When grappling with exhibitions that address themselves to a set of ongoing critical questions, there are at least two curatorial issues that need to be considered. The first is a possibility for exhibitions that can and should be pushed, and the second is a limitation in display that needs to be overcome.

-Rory Bester

http://www.citiesincrisis.com/pages/reviews_bester.html

The Center For Urban Pedagogy

The Cargo Chain, from the Making Policy Public Series. the Map highlights points in the North American transportation system that are vulnrable to activism by organized labor.

From Knoxville: Building Communities. Detail from The City without a Ghetto.

What I really like about this non profit community based organization is their development of information into a physical and visual language. Their Use of mapping in the areas of urban planning are also a great interest of mine. The group was formed by artists, designers, city planners, architects and community activists. They represent their questions, analyzes, and proposals for spatial politics of contemporary life. These maps are ofter fun and playful, very designed, they experiment with form and representation and are great tools for research with pedagogical potential.

Article

Part of CUP's Urban Investigations program, which asks basic questions about how cities work, Bodega Down Bronx delves into the politics and players of New York's network of bodegas. Under the direction of CUP teaching artist Jonathan Bogarín, and working with CUP staff Valeria Mogilevich and Rosten Woo, and intern Sarah Nelson Wright, the student filmmakers researched issues, visited sites, storyboarded scenes, produced props and sets, and conducted interviews. They took their video equipment and question lists to store owners, wholesalers, distributors, drivers, and customers young and old. They met with nutrition professors and diabetes counselors, and with U.S. congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, who sponsored H.R. 5952, the Bodegas as Catalysts for Healthy Living Act (which would have provided grants to bodega owners to install refrigerated cases to stock more perishable produce). Along the way they teased out the cause-and-effect of food cultures, the self-reinforcing cycles (and stereotypes) that have turned some urban neighborhoods into so-called food deserts. Do bodegas stock a lot of snack food because that's what their customers want, or do customers reach for the BBQ-flavored crisps because that's what's available at the bodega?

Like all CUP projects, Bodega Down Bronx is inspired by the conviction that cities and their complex systems and politics can be made legible and transparent — and more, that this transparency is vital for democratic society.

— Nancy Levinson

Full Article here
http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=12257

J. Henry Fair

75 x 50in C-Print 2009
At this fertilizer plant, the phosphate rock is processed with sulfuric acid to convert the phosphate into phosphoric acid, and again with ammonia to produce a diammonium phosphate, which is water soluble and thus available for uptake by roots. For every ton of phosphoric acid, five tons of phosphogypsum waste are produced, which, due to the presence of naturally occurring uranium and radium, is radioactive. Therefore it must be stored in “gyp stacks,” contaminating ground and surface water

75 x 50in C-Print 2009
Dragon shape in phosphate fertilizer mining waste

There comes a real enjoyment when viewing these photographs and also there's a feeling of disappointment. There grandiose aerial photographs are beautiful in the abstraction of the land, yet brutal in the use they depict. Many of his photographs are of industrial sites and complexes disrupting the landscape and creating havoc on the environment. His images depict fertilizer runoff, mining complexes, various chemicals being deposited into the landscape (both natural and man made), and a plethora of other ecological and environmental disasters covered up by corporations and industry. There's an obvious agenda to his work, although he is showing us these beautiful abstractions in the land, the colorful nature of these images are not natural, much is from all of the chemicals that are being deposited into the land. My work is much less environmental than his, but I feel that there are many similarities. I am showing these manipulated landscapes of nature and the paths that we create for recreation. There are many objects and obstacle that have been places into my landscapes and I depict them as a document, much like he does.

Artist Statement:

My work is a response to my vision of society.
I see our culture as being addicted to petroleum and the unsustainable consumption of other natural resources, which seems to portend a future of scarcity. My vision is of a different possibility, arrived at through careful husbandry of resources and adjustment of our desires and consumption patterns toward a future of health and plenty. To gear our civilization toward sustainability does not necessitate sacrifice today, as many naysayers would argue, but simply adjustment. There are many societies existing at present that have a standard of living at least as high as ours while consuming and polluting a fraction of what is the norm in the United States.
As an artist with a message, one asks oneself: how do I translate my message to my medium such that it will effect the change I want?
At first, I photographed “ugly” things; which is, in essence, throwing the issue in people’s faces. Over time, I began to photograph all these things with an eye to making them both beautiful and frightening simultaneously, a seemingly irreconcilable mission, but actually quite achievable given the subject matter.
These are all photographs of things i have found in my explorations.
Other than standard photographic adjustments of contrast, they are unmodified.

-J. Henry Fair

http://www.jhenryfair.com/aerial/statement.html

Melissa Brown

New Valdez Oil on Aluminum, 60″ x 120″, 2008

Pond Scum, Oil on Aluminum, 48″ x 48″, 2007

I chose Melissa Brown because of her depiction of land in her apocalyptic landscapes. Much of her work is inspired from sci fi fantasy movies and action thrillers. The painting are a testament to idea of being able to witness the demise of civilization. To be able to sit back and indulge in the psychedelic and surreal aspects over impending death. The idea that there are so many ways that the world can end, there are endless ways of depiction and the dialogue one gets were absorbing the image. I like that the paintings are at times where doom is apparent, yet it appears to be the calm before the storm, everything seems normal to just plain sight, but the landscape is changing. My photography in sorts is depicting an environmental encroachment of people into its space. Although I am just shooting as a document, i allow for the absorption of the image, what does the land tell you? What does the manipulation and use tell you? questions like these are things I would like people to get out of my photographs and analyze what they mean.

Review:

Curated by Denise Markonish

Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape ,
May 24, 2008 - April 12, 2009,  Building 4, First Floor
From the earliest renderings on cave walls, man has been compelled to depict the world around him. The tradition of portraying the landscape has threaded together movements as varied as the mid-19th century Hudson River School and the Earth Art of the 1960s and ‘70s. Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape, opening Sunday, May 25, 2008, at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, opens the next chapter in the landscape tradition, addressing contemporary ideas of exploration, population of the wilderness, land usage, environmental politics and the relativity of aesthetic beauty. Badlands comes at this critical time, an era when the world is more ecologically aware yet more desperately in need of solutions than ever before. The artists in this exhibition share this collective anxiety some turn to the past to see how their predecessors negotiated the terrain of the landscape while some propose entirely new ideas. While deeply aware of the legacy of the landscape, each of these artist reinvents the genre to produce works that look beyond vast beauty to address current environmental issues.

How disasters affect the land :
Another group of artists addresses both natural and man-made disasters and how they affect the land and its inhabitants. Leila Daw’s large-scale paintings deal with floods and volcanoes and how they impact both the landscape and civilization; in her work the constructed environment is always being wiped out as a lesson to the interlopers. Melissa Brown and J. Henry Fair deal more directly with the beauty of a declining landscape. Brown’s Anime-inspired paintings look like postcard images of national parks until closer examination reveals an oil slick on the surface of the water or a technicolor view of Niagara Falls. Fair’s unaltered aerial photographs seem to capture beautiful abstractions of the landscape, while, in truth, their “beauty” is actually the result of man-made chemical processes that are actively polluting the landscape.

http://www.melissabrown.tv/

Goals for Feb. 26 - Mar. 5th

2010-02-26T10:48:00.000-08:00

My goals for this week are going to be very simple and basically plans for survival.

This weekend I will go revisit Williamsburg, Va where my camera stopped working when the trails started getting good.

I am going to stay relatively local this weekend and Shoot the Buttermilk and Northbank Trails.

Possibly go to Dorey Park in Varina, Va

Must edit all of my photographs and find out where the direction of this project is really going to go.

Finalize Photographs for Midterm Review.

Prepare my questions and answers for the review as well.

Urban Territories

2010-02-24T19:20:00.000-08:00

(Snapshots of my Mapping)

Territories

"The development of the metropolis and the rise of photography went hand in hand and would remain closely linked. The modern city and its commercial activities found, through photography, the image that most effectively documented them and gave for to their values."

-Real Lussier

This quote was an eye opener for me, i never really thought of it like that. That there's this undeniable link to technology and the development of cities with photography. It is the source of documentation for the modern societies and now that it's so abundant that its becoming dependent on the use of photography as one of the only means of its validation and justification.

"It would seem that our own ear sanctions, more than ever before, the divide between the city as physical territory and the community of citizens. The principles of transparency, order and visibility in the Modernist conception of large cities have been replaced by fragmentation, dispersion, anarchic development and the alienation caused by the latest transformation of urban space."

-Real Lussier

This again is reiterating, in different words, the break down of our current landscapes in the urban areas of the world. How things are going to be looked at in this day and age. There's segregation happening around us in the form of capitalism and its use of classes. These disconnects are the focal points of many young photographers, who are seeing the in between moments of time and land that create these stories through photography to exhibit meaning into the dialogue.

Lussier, Real. Urban Territories. Geneva: Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2005. Print.

I chose an article from this book because of it's really good descriptions of the new examination of the landscape and its context. There's a cultural reexamination of our current post industrial landscape and this book is trying to organize the chaotic nature of the subject matter.

Six Quotes

2010-02-22T08:44:00.000-08:00

"By allowing us to really look at the landscape and see it as a social construct. The landscape in many ways is man-made; it is not like nature, though the two are entwined... artists exploit the sheer physical "beauty' of the natural world, and in doing so, allow us to question its validity and its place within our understanding of the landscape around us."

-Denise Markonish. Badlands new horizons in landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008. Print.

I thought this quote was a good barometer to explain the reason of the contemporary landscape and why it's a crucial aspect of art. When photographing beauty, one must remember that its validity is questioned and that its beauty can be in limitless. It also brings up the disconnect between the natural landscape and the man-made landscape and the dialogue that arises from this difference.

"The landscape genre can be seen as a kind of performance, an interaction between land and viewer that is rehearsed endlessly in the presence of the viewer. It may even draw the viewer in. This gives it a spiritual substance. It is an exchange - though not a monetary one - between human and natural. It may even be a kind of giving voice."

-Ginger Strand. (Essay) At the Limits: Landschaft, Landscape, and the Land
Badlands new horizons in landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008. Print.

What I take from this is that when a viewer approaches a landscape, there's an interaction that happens between themselves and the land that's presented. There's a presence that attracts viewers to the image and therefore a spiritual connection happens for the space shown.

"In connection with abstract space, a space which is also instrumental (i.e. manipulated by all kinds of 'authorities' of which it is the locus and milieu), a question arises whose full import will become apparent only later. It concerns the silence of the 'users' of this space."

-Lefebvre, Henri. Production of space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print.

It talks about space as a social construct; space and land have the ability to change our minds and thoughts on certain aspects of living in this world. The landscape is determined by different governing 'authorities' and why we are one to question that aspect of it to become instrumental in the approach. I also like the idea of silence in my photographs, the absence of life in a pristine, yet man manipulated, way.

"The activists depict both natural and man-made environmental disasters, while the pragmatists deal with sustainability, politics of land use, and alternative sources of energy. However, these two groups are inextricably linked; they look at the problems and offer an insight into possible solutions. Adopting both serious and ironic approaches...[They] ultimately take on the responsibility we have to the landscape while at the same time using art to open people's eyes to change."

-Denise Markonish. Badlands new horizons in landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008. Print.

This looks at the was that landscape can be used in a political term, whereas photographing a landscape can imply the questioning of ownership and capitalistic and destructive forces being inflicted upon it. Different approaches can be taken, and different meanings applied, but there's always an unavoidable link between the two (activist and pragmatist).

"To give voice to nature in our era is not just an aesthetic act: it's political and activist. The best new work today is pushing beyond the limits, engaging in a dialogue with both landscape and the land. It commits an imaginative act that both makes and is made by the world out there, as well as the I in here."

-Ginger Strand. (Essay) At the Limits: Landschaft, Landscape, and the Land

When dealing with landscapes one gives that space to the world. By revealing the land, we take a broader look at what the land actually is. It becomes open to interpretation of beauty and use.

Badlands new horizons in landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008. Print.

"To educate and inform the public about the function and form of the national landscape, a terrestrial system that has been altered to accommodate the complex demands of our society."

-CLUI

Thompson, Nato, and Independent Curators International. Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. New York: Melville House, 2008. Print.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation deals with a vast amount of visual knowledge of the contemporary landscape and its public, private, and government uses. We use lands in so many different functions and by photographing these sites and spaces we are able to open a dialogue about said space.

Bibliography:

Badlands new horizons in landscape. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008. Print.

Lefebvre, Henri. Production of space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print.

Thompson, Nato, and Independent Curators International. Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. New York: Melville House, 2008. Print.

Gregory Halpern

2010-02-21T23:00:00.000-08:00

All Images from "Omaha Sketchbook" Sizes Variable. Printed by J&L Books. Edition of 30

Gregory Halpern spent most of his life in Buffalo, New York and shoots most of his photographs there as a result. He received his Bachelor's from Harvard in History and Lit. and then earned his MFA from the California College of the Arts. The photographs I am covering are from his most recent book "Omaha Sketchbook". He has another book on the way about Buffalo, NY and currently lives and teaches in Rochester, NY.

Although his bio is rather limited in what I can find, his work seems to speak for itself. The photographs are a series of contact prints paired together in interesting juxtapositions featuring single photographs to diptychs and triptychs. Although the description of what this series is about remains vague and pretty much unspoken, I find that interesting. I enjoy trying to find meaning through the pairings and subjects that he's captured in this book. Much like my work (although mine has more explanation) he photographs the landscape and social scape of "Omaha". What I like about these is that they present a raw look into this place, its people, community, and its under belly. The conclusions that one must make to try and understand what it is is also interesting. It's a smaller community, relatively spacious in the development of homes, close to the countryside, possibly in the Midwest due to its architecture, and incorporating a rural aesthetic. There's a personal connection you can pick up by looking at these photographs, you can assume that the photographer is trustworthy, and is interested in revealing a story with little dialogue, only visual clues about the people and place. Subtle clues are something that I feel my work may need to incorporate, instead being so blunt.

Website
Gallery (none)
Interview (none) article on older works

Ted Lectures

2010-02-21T22:34:00.000-08:00

Edward Burtynsky on Manufactured Landscapes

I chose Edward Burtynsky's lecture because of the fact that he' one of the premier landscape photographers in the world, dealing with the earth being manipulated through machinery, capitalism, progress, and western ideology. By far one of my favorite photographers, I felt that hearing a lecture on his work could open up new avenues in which my work can progress through. His lecture begins dealing with his interest in the landscape and its transformative qualities from human consumption and manipulation. Being from Canada, he's used to great wide open landscapes untouched by civilization and human manufacturing. He began by exploring coal and rock mining areas of America and soon began to realize where the work was headed. Hillsides being carved for consumption, digging into the world's natural splendor to help drive the population seemed to fascinate Burtynsky. His work then entered a new realm when he traveled to China to photograph their blossoming industry and increasingly western mindset. He was shooting factories, ruins of cities, dams, places of commerce, recycling villages, and much more. It was as if the remnants of America moved here, the capitalistic growth that America had thrived on for years moved across the pacific into a growing economy. The tremendous production China was receiving from us in the west, our consumption is being fueled by China as we speak. Much of the work calls for awareness about the carbon footprint that we leave on this planet and the environmental repercussions of just about anything we do, from buying a cotton shirt, to throwing away an obsolete computer, disposing waste, and putting in new concrete at your house. Everything is tied to one another.

Ueli Gegenschatz Soars in a Wingsuit

I chose this to balance my research between the landscape and extreme sports. this was the only lecture to touch on extreme sports in the TED that I saw. It's about an extreme athelete names Ueil Gegenschatz, though relatively brief on his part due to his slightly broken English, it provides a good background into different aspects of extreme sports and odd sports to consider. Ueil Gegenschatz is a world class athlete that has done just about every stunt imaginable to man. From base jumping off of mountains, bridges, building, and even the Eiffel Tower. He's para-sailed down cliffs, jumped out of planes hundreds of times, off of moving vehicles, and even jumped off a hot air balloon over the Alps. He's pretty much done it all in the extreme sports. He goes into the background of why he does this and feels a need to push himself further and further and test the limits of the Earth and himself. He revels that a lot of his inspiration for doing what he does comes from childhood dreams of flight and realizing an unlimited potential when at that age. Another driving factor is having the mental capacity to be able to attempt these feats. There's an exhilarating rush and euphoria that comes with the jumps. Although he didn't say that much, his video reveals many more answers. You can understand that being human, we are born with inherent limitations to what we can and can't do, Ueil Gegenschatz, blurs the line of that. Realizing the human dream of flight and continually pushing himself to the max in order to prove that he is his only limitation.

Hank Willis Thomas

2010-02-21T21:46:00.000-08:00

What artwork/proposals did you present?
The work that i presented to Hank Willis Thomas was a combination of new and old work. By putting these two works together, there is a much more cohesive and stronger body of work, my series on the extreme landscape. Photographs of sites of extreme sports, void of humans, but the terrestrial descriptions of the manipulated land that envelopes the environment it inhabits.

What topics did you discuss? What was the nature of this discussion?
Some of the things that we discussed were the possibility of including non extreme sports like golf, baseball, basketball, etc. and see if i can pull a man made space and created space into cohesion. Portraits? Maybe, but focus on landscapes primarily. We talked a lot about the space as a social product in short.

What were the critical reactions/ suggestions to your ideas/artwork?
He felt that a good amount of the images were working and conveying what I wanted to say. He felt that there should be other landscapes represented as in other type of extreme sports. But, he felt that the basis of the project and the concept is definitely one that should be pursued and hasn't been represented much in the art/photography world other than magazine. But they tend to focus on the athlete rather than the landscape that they're in. He wants me to look into motocross and explore the idea of panoramic cameras. He also commented on the idea of portraits, that being that he didn't feel that they were necessary because they would lack complexity, if i could find a way to bring more depth to a portrait of people in their gear then do it, but don't rely on it when the landscapes are working the best.

What was a suggested plan of action?
Keep traveling and photographing the environments. pursue different sports, and possibly don't limit the photography to the extreme landscape, possibly looking into the landscape of sports in this country and their manipulation of land and space. Look into the idea of space being socially produced and how it's a social product.

What insights / new questions / ideas did you take from the meeting?
some new questions i have from this meeting were if i wanted to break into other sports and their manipulation of the landscape or just keep it under extreme sport landscapes? Look into the idea of landscapes being manipulated for our own amusements. Military Training Facilities a possibility? How do you produce backstory to a landscape?

How did this meeting affect how you will proceed with your project / proposal?
It will definitely give me new avenues to pursue towards or ponder upon. Looking into Loretta Lynn's Ranch in Tennessee about motocross and the landscape. I may look into skate parks are look at that as a manipulation of space and analyze the architectural and design elements of man made rather than man made in nature. PANORAMIC ARE A MUST!!!! Read "The Production of Space".

Goals for 2/19 - 2/26

2010-02-19T10:10:00.000-08:00

Goals again, here we go:

Go to Charlottesville, Va and photograph Panorama Farm (BMX Course)

Contact a motocross courses in Northern VA

Go back to North Carolina and Find Rocky Road Mountain Bike Course.

Go to High Point, NC and find the Bike part behind the elementary school.

Find more terrain parks in this part of the country

Financially figure out a way to go to Colorado

5-10 Prints for Heide on Tuesday

Research the psychology of adrenaline junkies and people who participate in extreme sports

and finish my research assignments for wednesday

Extreme

2010-02-18T04:48:00.000-08:00

"Adolescent males are the most likely subset of the population to partake in risky behaviors. This is because in adolescent males, the brain’s reward system develops long before the inhibitory system, which keeps impulsive, novelty-seeking behaviors in check. The inhibitory system doesn’t catch up with the rewards system until young men hit their early twenties. This leaves some young males who are genetically predisposed to high sensation-seeking susceptible to the lures of risky activities, like using drugs or jumping impulsively into a dangerous sport without thinking through the consequences first."

-Lindsey Konkel ("Extreme Psychology." Health Magazine, July, 2009.)

"One question guided Brymer’s interviews and analyses: “How is the extreme sport experience perceived by participants?” Certain themes emerged, such as courage and humility, which give rise to positive self-transformation. “At the end of the day I had an epiphany because I did not die, but really enjoyed it. A whole environment that I never knew existed was opened to me,” said a BASE jumper in his mid-forties, one of Brymer’s study subjects. “For me, it’s accepting that you’re mortal and that you’re very vulnerable,” said another one of Brymer’s BASE jumpers. The findings are published in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology."

-Lindsey Konkel ("Extreme Psychology." Health Magazine, July, 2009.)

“The fear is what keeps you focused.”

I wanted to get into the psychology of extreme sports, why do people do what they do? Why do they risk their own lives just for sport? This article was very informative about they ways and whys of people doing what they do, being extreme and why they do it. At first it begins to talk about the obvious stereotype, that being the average male teen, but they say that the adolescent slightly skew the readings, because when people are young, it is proven that they'll have a much greater chance of doing more risky activities and putting their lives in more jeopardy than that of a 4o year old. The article attempts to find why they want to do this, is it because these people have a gland in their brain that releses more dopamine than usual? Maybe. Some say that these people are like drug addicts or gamblers, that they can't experience the everyday without getting a kick from their own personal "highs." That is also a possibility. But people believe that it is something else, something inside of them drives them to be out their in the the elements struggling to survive against themselves and the forces of nature that they toy with. The research eventually wnet into the field and had started asking the extreme athletes themselves to describe what they were feeling at the time and why they were feeling it. There comes a moment of clarity, an epiphany. Where emotions get so high, they transcend so to speak. People also feel that they shouldn't be looked at as crazy, they feel that nothing they do is crazy it's just that they can do it, while the spectators can't therefore it becomes crazy to them. The extreme athletes don't want to get hurt, that's the last thing they want, they just have higher skill sets and therefore are able to do these things at much higher levels than the average person.

Ed Templeton

2010-02-15T06:02:00.000-08:00

Bam and Michelle. 1998. Gelatin Silver. variable size

Kids Kiss, England. Gelatin Silver. variable size

Liz Rice - RVCA parking lot. Gelatin Silver. variable size

Exhibition Detail

Ed Templeton is a prominent skateboarder, but is also becoming known as a prominent photographer, designer, and artist. Born in 1972 in Orange County, California. He started Skateboarding in 1985. In 1993, Ed founded his own skateboard company, Toy Machine, and begane making the graphics for the skateboards. Around this time he began growing an affinity for art, with each deck he would make. He is a self taught artist, his work reflects upon the ideas of street and urban culture in America, focusing on what he knows best, skateboarding and its periphery. He has been featured in the hit documentary film, "Beautiful Losers", (also a touring art exhibition and collected book) a film about contemporary artists dealing with their surrounding urban environments. He has shown his work world and nationwide and is becoming a known figure in the underground art scene. He's been featured in the Art Street Culture magazine Juxtapoz (who also produced an Art Exhibition in 2002 called "The Essential Disturbance", in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo), his book of photographs, "Teenage Smokers", in 2000 won $50,000 in the Search For Art competition in Italy.

I chose Ed Templeton to talk about because of his intimate look at his life and the people he's met through owning a company, skateboarding, touring, and basically just living life. He takes a very raw, uncut, journalistic approach using 35mm to increase the drama and add to the grittiness of what he does. He focuses on the urban, skate, and street culture of where he goes. I enjoy the aesthetic that he brings to the table, and the element of DIY and zine culture presented and inherit into his work. Although self taught (in which i have a few reservations) he seems to make and capture the most intimate of moments.

quotes:

"to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. Neither an environmental group nor an industry affiliated organization...integrates the many approaches to land use - the many perspectives of the landscape - into a single vision that illustrates the common ground in “land use” debates. At the very least, the Center attempts to emphasize the multiplicity of points of view regarding the utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources."
-Center for Land Use Interpretation

Interview
Official Website
No Official Gallery

Goals have changed due to weather

2010-02-13T15:51:00.000-08:00

Asheville, NC Trip to the Mellowdrome got snowed and iced out.

Instead, I will be going to North Central North Carolina to trails in Raleigh, Cary, Durham, Clayton, High Point, and maybe Roanoke Rapids. All the trails vary in technical expertise, but the majority of them are very advanced. Focusing on Mountain Biking (bikers) and the trails they ride on. Weather Permitting, but it seems it will be a nice time to go south tomorrow.

A list of North Carolina Trails

Weekly Goals 2/12

2010-02-12T08:27:00.001-08:00

This is my plan of attack for my studio practice:

-At least 10 prints (if not more) by Tuesday 2/16

-Make a decision between going to one of these two closest velodromes
---Valley Preferred Cycling Center in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania or Mellowdrome in Asheville, North Carolina

-Find Tall Bikers in RVA and Photograph them and try to ride one

-Buy tickets to RVA hand made bike show at convention center

-Drop the sports approach, only use information to inform bike culture work

-Walk down a mountain bike trail and talk to and photograph everyone on the trail (on a bike)

-Plan a trip to NYC (plan for funds, time of month, possible place to crash)

-Collage a bicycle out of 35mm photographs printed at a store

Fixed Gear Culture

2010-02-10T23:55:00.000-08:00

Dunc Gray Velodrome

(Bike) Messengers (and their impact on the bike scene)

When beginning this project of bike culture, the people I had in mind when photographing was the group who tending to be part of a culture that seemed to embrace a certain aesthetic of style and performance that touched on the ideas of vintage and street culture. The biggest trend in bikes today and beginning in the late 90s and early 2000s was this push towards a fixed gear bikes, my curiosity was touched and I began exploring why people were choosing this way of transport. It seems that fixed gear fascination began with bike messengers in New York City who made personal modifications to their bikes and stripped them of gears and brakes. The reason why, is still up to debate, but the notion still seems that the ideas originated with bike messengers who wanted to find more thrills (and in a sense more street credit) that went along with the cutthroat style of biking through the streets of NYC. Weaving through taxis, buses, cars, and almost anything the busy streets of NYC threw at them a select group of bike messengers removed brakes and left their modified bikes with only one gear to weave through the streets and simulate the hard-nosed and dangerous riding. Though people have been killed by biking without brakes in NYC (and I for one would probably end up as one of those demographics if i did the same) the trend didn't die down and in fact caught fire. Once people from other parts of the country caught news of the passionate bike culture of NYC, they brought that very passion to the streets that they ride on (San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.)
These bikes are generally DIY bikes where people make them themselves from old bikes that are generally heavy and vintage 1970s and 80s street bikes. This was about originality and the use of all the sense and responses in the body. People in NYC had to be on top of their game with little to no distractions to be able to pull of one gear and no brakes, thus adding to the attraction and badassness that people seem to embrace in our culture.

"In a millisecond, you panic and stiffen. The pedals then become a launch platform. Your confused brain finds itself flying over the handlebars while schoolchildren at the curb scream. You are now a fixed-gear bicyclist stripped of some portion of your skin and the entirety of your pride.

That's only starters. The real artists of the game—the strongest and most demented among them—jabber away merrily about "simplicity" and "getting down to the basics" and "connecting directly to the ride." Before long, they start stripping the brakes off their bikes, too."

""It's a way to bring yourself into tune with the pace of the urban setting. Bold notions and bold maneuvers define the excitement of living in a city," says Somerset Waters, an enthusiast and board member of the Los Angeles Bicycle Kitchen. "These are stripped-down, simpler machines. But they have the edge that goes with living in the city. They are Zen and 'The Art of War' at the same time."

One Gear, No Brakes
Published October 2nd, 2005 :: The LA Times Magaine
By John Balzar

This article provided a great backdrop to the whole fixed gear culture that has emerged in America. It tries to trace its origins and answers the question of why people have an urge to bike that way. It also highlights how it began to spread from the origins of bike messengers to the general public, and by that i mean the fair weather biker to simplify my description.

Global Biking Design

Brian Jungen

2010-02-09T01:24:00.000-08:00

Variant I, 2002. Nike Air Jordans. 52"x45"

Prototype for New Understanding #16, 2004. Nike Air Jordans and human hair. 22 1/2" x 12" x 18"

Prototype for New Understanding #23. 2005. Nike Air Jordans. 18 1/2" x 20 1/2: x 5 7/8"

Prototype for New Understanding #14. 2003. Nike Air Jordans and human hair. 25"x14"x12"

Brian Jungen is a Canadian born artist (Vancouver) and based out of Montreal, Canada. Born in 170, he graduated college in 1992 from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He is Swiss, Canadian, and Dunne-za First Nations (aboriginal Canadian). He draws much of his inspiration from his own cultural heritage. His work revolves around the ideas and concepts of "found art" and its manipulation into, but not complete transformations (i.e. not completely changing its meaning). He is most recognized for his work with Nike Air Jordan Shoes (Prototypes of New Understanding) and recreates the shoes into aboriginal masks that evoke certain cultural meanings and implying their corruptions as well. The color pallet that he chooses for these shoes in specific (Red and Black) are colors that are traditional colors of the First Nations people. While he creates these sculptures of capitalist artifacts, there's still a direct correlation with the ideals of the cultural artifact of his people. Jungen has been exhibited throughout Canada, has shown at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and the Tate Modern in London.

I have chosen to talk about Brian Jungen because of the influences of Heide in my studio practice. Although, I am uncertain about aspects of the work and the direction is could go in, I do feel she has a very valid point. She feels that my work throughout my graduate career has been good technically and visually, yet conceptually lacking and I've also been lacking on the vocal part of my presentation. She feels that it would be best to really figure out what it is that motivates me, and we found the top two, the first is Photography, I am wholeheartedly dedicated to this artistic medium and will continue to pursue it in all of my endeavors. And the second is sports. I have been a huge sports fan throughout my life and have extensive knowledge on many topics in the sports world both past and present. So I am experimenting with the ready made and ideas surrounding sports, the ready made, its idolization, and its cultural significance and repercussions in our society and its effects on people.

Quotes

"Jungen's masks don't really have that much in common with the sacred objects that they're riffing on. It's hard to imagine a Haida dancer, circa 1800, recognizing them as anything he could ever use. Instead, they seem only to satisfy crude Western cliches of what native art looks like and means." - Blake Copnik (Washington Post)

"The Nike mask sculptures seemed to articulate a paradoxical relationship between a consumerist artefact and an 'authentic' native artifact." - Brian Jungen

Gallery
Interview (audio)
Website (no official website)

6 Books

2010-02-08T04:48:00.000-08:00

Works Cited

Augaitis, Daina. Brian Jungen. Berkeley, CA: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005. Print.

Brian Jungen's book is proving to be a very handing thing to be carrying around. I truly have been getting inspired by his Air Jordan mask work. The attention to detail, the awe inspiring forms and faces that he creates out of this ready made material has been helping my creative intuition return to normal after a slow uninspired start. I have been working with sculptural ideas with my studio practice, everything from dissecting a skateboard, to the breaking down of bicycle parts into geometric forms and removing the parts from its original context, to possibly creating football, hockey, and baseball inspired forms and photographs. The sculptural ideas are to be photographed of course and presented as a print.

Bedford, Christopher. Mixed signals artists consider masculinity in sports. New York: Independent Curators International, 2009. Print.

This is a book that explores the ideas and concepts of sports, masculinity, ritual male behavior, and there's even a feminist critique of the male dominated sports and iconography that goes hand in hand with our Western culture and its impacts on global sporting events. The book covers many artists that deal with these issues and goes in depth about them, which then reveal certain aspects of the male dominated sports world and the homophobic and even homosexual tendencies in which modern day sports thrive upon.

Chua, Lawrence. Paul Pfeiffer. Actar; 1st edition. 2009. Print.

Paul Pfeiffer, Photographer and Video artist, has just recently come to my attention due to his upcoming lecture here at VCU, in which I will be attending. I like how he explores the Sports world and arena as a form of public theatre. His series "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" are taken from the National Basketball Association archives, where he then removes all insignia, corporate branding, other players, and team affiliation and has raised one nondescript player onto this pedestal of greatness and stardom and celebrity. He removes the context and narrative from the image (a thing that a photojournalist covering sports would never do) and relies on the kinetic bodies of these athletes untethered to the context of the game.

Herrera, Arturo. Arturo Herrera. Birmingham: Ikon, Distributed by Cornerhouse Publications, 2007. Print.

Painters are always a harder artist to find in relation to my work, but I really enjoy the works of Arturo Herrera. He at times can be very minimal like in his painting "Lomo" (2006), but also and mainly it seems relies on a sort of gestural approach to his paintings and collages and uses old news paper clippings as a backdrop for the vivid color scheme that is implemented into his work. At times his work reminds me of a mix of calligraphy, drawing, and almost juvenile line work. The mixed media pieces are my favorites by far for their bright colors, graffiti-esque style and at times almost propaganda looking aesthetic. That combination seems to be drawing my attention as of now for its blatant DIY aesthetic.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. Woman warrior memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Print.

I have selected this novel for a certain amount of reasons. First it has great attention to detail in its description of Kingston and Brave Orchid and their stories and tales of legend. I also enjoy the memory recall in this story, it's so vivid and passionate it really challenges me to delve into my past and my roots to try ad figure out what the common "vehicle" is in my art practice, which at times seems to allude me and my ability to expand on certain aspects of my work.

Marchand, Sandra Grant. Jerome Fortin. Geneva: Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal, 2007. Print.

Jerome Fortin is an artist I found on a whim, but his art is very interesting to me. He creates thousands of mini triangles from maps, graphic novels, comic books, and minimal color fields and spaces. The re-contextualizing of these images and creation of an entirely new and massive art piece. The scale, size, and detail of these images are motivating me to create and re-contextualize my own passions of sports in life, and I hopefully will.

Sports Related Art

2010-02-06T03:24:00.000-08:00

Matthew Barney. Cremaster 4, 1994. Digital-image production still. 35mm film.

Sports Related Art

Ready-Made

"Football players are simple folk. Whatever complexities, whatever dark politics of the human mind, the heart -- there are noted only within the chalked borders of the playing field. At times strange visions ripple across that turf; madness leaks out. But wherever else he goes, the football player travels the straightest of lines. His thoughts are wholesomely commonplace, his actions uncomplicated by history, enigma, holocaust or dream." -Don Delillo

Delillo, Don. End Zone. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Print.

"...variously re-presented athletic imagery, revealing that the male athlete is a far more ambiguous, polyvalent figure in our collective cultural imagination than may be commonly recognized." - Judith Olch Richards

Bedford, Christopher. Mixed signals artists consider masculinity in sports. New York: Independent Curators International, 2009. Print.

This book deals with the ideas of masculinity in sports and the gender roles our society present to athletes of all ages and the pressures and stigmas that go along with their right of passage through the hierarchy of sports and peer issues. The book deals with a number of topics and artists ranging from the homophobic and violent nature of sports and their cultural studies and identity politics that follow these topics.
My studio work this semester seems to be taking me on an odd journey investigating what it is I really truly understand and am passionate about, sports and photography. I am experimenting with the ready made of sports equipment, which can mean almost an unlimited amount of objects for the taking. My ideas involves either an installation of suspended sports equipment or the dissection of equipment separated and pinned on the wall suggesting an anthropological study of said object(s). I will also be exploring the ideas of iconography and idolization of sports stars and possibly professional stadiums.

Tim Hawkinson

2010-02-05T18:45:00.000-08:00

Feather Bike. Feathers.

Emoter. 2002. Altered Ink-Jet Print, Monitor, Stepladder & Mechanical Components. h: 49 x w: 17 x d: 16 in / h: 124.5 x w: 43.2 x d: 40.6 cm

Überorgan. Constructed from cheap, disposable/recyclable materials, nylon net, carboard, plasic bottles, our woven polyethylene Super Poly greenhouse covering, and various mechanical components. Over 14,000 square feet of Super Poly was required to make the Überorgan.

Tim Hawkinson is an American Born artist from San Francisco. Born in 1960, he attended San Jose State University for his undergraduate degree and continued his studies at UCLA and earned his MFA in 1989. His work is primarily Sculptural and his use of scales can rival just about anyone. His works range from the minuscule to stadium sized (Überorgan). His work is often about a few topics in general. The recreation of the self (almost self portraits), music (sound), the persistence of time, and the full engagement of materiality and process. His work has been exhibited Nation and worldwide including the "Venice Biennale (1999), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, (2000), the Power Plant in Toronto, Canada (2000), the Whitney Biennial (2002), and the 2003 Corcoran Biennial."

I am interested in Tim Hawkinson's work because I am feeling an artist urge to create a more interdisciplinary approach to my art/photography. My work in the past has been to find the perfect photograph, hunting with my eyes rather than my heart and head. By utilizing this ability to create with my own hands and creativity, I Feel that I can break through the artistic criticism of finding, rather than creating a photograph. With this approach and the ability to capitalize on this creative energy and willingness that I feel towards this idea, the conceptual growth of myself will be huge. That is my opinion on the matter.

Quotes

"As an object-maker, Hawkinson routinely employs a make-do-and-mend touch that, while not inherently unappealing, burdens his output with an arbitrary cuteness. His way with commonplace and organic materials is wide-ranging..." - Michael Wilson (Time Out New York)

"One after another of Mr. Hawkinson's sculptures either enlists his own body, or entails a machine that mimics what a human body could do, or is some cockeyed combination of the two." - MICHAEL KIMMELMAN (NY Times)

Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/art/75959/tim-hawkinson-at-pacewildenstein-art-review#ixzz0f2aIuX8n

Interview
Gallery
Website (no official website)

Alec Soth

2010-02-04T00:02:00.000-08:00

What artwork/proposals did you present?

The artwork that I showed Alec Soth the the photographs from my Bike Scene Topographies from last semester. But I also showed him the work that I had been attempting to create where I took apart bicycles and photographed single parts on a black white wall> I also showed him a dissected anthropological look at a skate board, which it seemed he liked the most out of any of the ready made work presented.

What topics did you discuss? What was the nature of this discussion?

The topics discussed were where the photographs could go from where they are. I felt that the photographs should go into a slightly more journalistic way with the use of hand written materials on the photographs as an experiment and to go out and shoot more people, and keep shooting as much as possible.

What were the critical reactions/ suggestions to your ideas/artwork?

A great suggestion from Alec was to re create the aesthetic of photographs of the DIY signage of "Jenny" and "Dig or Die" and make it into a book. Recreate with the electrical tape look with the white bordered and that punk rock look. He also suggested that I shoot some raw video with some of these environments or on a bike ride through some of these spaces or just video of the people that I am focusing on.

What was a suggested plan of action?

The suggested plan was to pretty much continue to follow my instincts in my photography and continue to build the body of work up. Possibly look into other veins of action, like the video or the ready made

What insights / new questions / ideas did you take from the meeting?
How did this meeting affect how you will proceed with your project / proposal?

The insights were the use of the DIY aesthetic with my work, and figuring out ways to incorporate those ideas into a working art piece. He also wanted the use of raw video to create more movement within my imagery. Idea = use that black electrical tape aesthetic with a book or some sort of ready made sign. It makes me want to get into the more nitty gritty of the culture and to reveal it through the photography.

Robert Adams

2009-11-23T00:04:00.000-08:00

Robert Adams is a photographer, who was born in 1937 in the industrial town of Orange, New Jersey. His photography came to prominence in the "New Topographics" photographic movement. He's received many fellowships and awards including the Guggenheim fellowship (x2), MacArthur fellowship, and Hasselblad Award.

He became interested in the New North American Landscape by looking at Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henery Jackson. He became included in the New Topographics in the 1970s and "Adams approach to photographing these landscapes was to take a stance of apparent neutrality, refraining from any obvious judgements of the subject matter. His images are titled as documents, to establish his neutral position."

I find that his work is very good to look at in relation to my work. His works are of the American West, primarily of landscapes and cityscapes. Much of his work deals with the progressively changing landscapes of these places and people's influence on land. Much of my work deals with this idea, of how the landscape can represent a type of people, without the use of people.

From the New Topographics

Galleries: Fraenkel Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery
Review
No official website

The Future in Relation to Topographies and Art

2009-11-18T22:57:00.000-08:00

Sarah Trigg, American, Lake Vostok with Two Olympias, 2007, Acrylic on panel, 60 x 40 inches

Future quote:

"Today, mostly what we see of the Earth's surface on a daily basis, and what we process subconsciously, is in the form of digitized imagery, not what we see in its true physical form. By pulling this disparate imagery of the Earth into one view, the paintings project the spiritual and physical tensions between technologized culture and the natural landscape." - Sarah Triggs

Article

What i got, and i feel was needed, was an outside curatorial perspective on work revolving around the notion of topographies and the contemporary landscape and the futures it forecasts for us. Although, my current work isn't as apocalyptic as what is described in this article, I feel that I have done work about this subject before, and since this curatorial review is critiquing the contemporary landscape as viewed by emerging artists my work seems to fit in with these artists. I do feel a lot of the same sentiments with this review of this show, and agree that a lot of emerging artists deal with this problem.

My work seems to deal with the landscape and its relatiship with the people that most frequent it. Although, it seems like i am tryig to define a subculture of people by their space and environs, I don't know if that is possible. I know that this work has been a narrative journey of myself and other people's tracks and residues through the culture and landscape that we inhabit, stumble upon, and share. The bike culture is just a device that allows for this project to exist, it's a common thread that envolopes my life and these topographies. Though, I do not know where I am heading, I know i'll get there and discover something amazing through this project and create something that is so unique and yet so common. Only time, engery, and money can tell where this contemporary landscpape eill take me.

Social/Cultural Landscape

2009-11-15T14:44:00.000-08:00

Social/Cultural Landscape

Cultural Landscapes' have been defined by the World Heritage Committee as distinct geographical areas or properties uniquely "..represent[ing] the combined work of nature and of man.." [1]. This concept has been adapted and developed within international heritage arenas (UNESCO) as part of an international effort to reconcile "..one of the most pervasive dualisms in Western thought - that of nature and culture" [2]

The World Heritage Committee has identified and adopted three categories of cultural landscape, ranging from (i) those landscapes most deliberately 'shaped' by people, through (ii) full range of 'combined' works, to (iii) those least evidently 'shaped' by people (yet highly valued). The three categories extracted from the Committee's Operational Guidelines, are as follows[3]:

(i) "a landscape designed and created intentionally by man";
(ii) an "organically evolved landscape" which may be a "relict (or fossil) landscape" or a "continuing landscape";
(iii) an "associative cultural landscape" which may be valued because of the "religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_landscape

"The 'in the field' of anthropology implies a certain relationship to uncharted territory, the wilderness where cultural materials happen. 'Fieldwork is earthbound - intimately involved in the natural and social landscape...Fieldwork would put theory to test; it would ground interpretation.' It is this connection to the field, the grounding in the social landscape, that intrigues me about the anthropological model - the notion that if you walk the streets and inhabit the city, a cognitive order will repair our traumatized experience of cities and the land they territorialize."

- Cornelia H. Butler
From the book "Flight Patterns"

I have chosen this word(s) because I feel that this is one of the more times that I can get specific about my art, in relation to other artists. I am investing the ideas of sub-cultural landscapes, not in any post-colonial terms, but in a specific scene in Contemporary American youth culture, that of the bikers. I feel that I can transcend the idea of a typology of these people and their environments, and create a more abstracted picture of the "scene" of America. By putting my work into a social/cultural landscape and attempting to describe a youth movement through their landscapes and environments, I allow the viewer to create a sub-cultural mapping within their minds, allowing them to create a subjective, but still culturally valid, viewpoint and portrait of this culture in their heads.

Paul Outerbridge

I chose Paul Outerbridge because he was one of the first American photographers to investigate social landscapes in relationship to topographies. He was originally from NYC and then made his eventual move to the west coast around the Laguna Beach, CA area. He photographs with very descriptive texture, formally composed images, and imply a topographic narrative. Much of this work was published after his death, but Outerbridge, from 1955-58, traveled throughout California, Mexico, and South America in search of describing the social landscape in which he explored. This series of photographs were suppoed to be published with accompanying essays that were published in U.S. Camera and other various travel magazines.

Mexico c. 1955 11x14 Digital Cibachrome Print

Mexico c. 1955 11x14 Digital Cibachrome Print

In the mid-1930s, legendary salesman Elmer Wheeler coined a catchy slogan—“Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle”—to promote what he believed to be advertising’s most effective strategy. Some years later, in an industry film now available on YouTube, he got even more specific. “The sizzle,” Wheeler explains in his rat-a-tat-tat pitchman’s delivery, “is the tang in the cheese, the crunch in the cracker, the whiff in the coffee.” As recent exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles Public Library confirmed, Paul Outerbridge’s sumptuous and sometimes strange photographs of cheese, crackers, coffee and even more exotic subjects still generate the heat Wheeler was advocating.

A photograph, Outerbridge wrote, “should do something to its beholder; either give a more complete appreciation of beauty, or, if nothing else, even a good mental kick in the pants.”1 Following through on both counts, Outerbridge produced some of the 20th century’s more sublime and outrageous pictures. His exquisite modernist images from the 1920s were featured in glamorous magazines, including Vanity Fair and Vogue. Shifting gears, Outerbridge spent the next decade mastering color photography, producing vivid commercial pictures for corporate clients, as well as, for more rarefied audiences, unsettling nudes that edged toward Surrealism and still seem otherworldly today.

Changing taste shaped responses to Outerbridge’s work, during and after his lifetime. He was a darling of the avant-garde in the ’20s and the highest paid photographer in New York in the ’30s, but a telling 1951 self-portrait that shows Outerbridge in a folding chair, awaiting customers in front of a modest rented booth at a local art fair in Laguna Beach, suggests his changing fortunes. Marcel Duchamp was so taken with Outerbridge’s emblematically modern Ide Collar ad in the November 1922 issue of Vanity Fair that he tore the page out and pinned it up on his studio wall in Paris. Half a century later, in the 1973 book Looking at Photographs, John Szarkowski dismissed Outerbridge’s equally iconic color works as little more than “commercial illustrations.” What is it that makes this work beguiling for some and problematic for others—particularly for curators charged with distilling neat art historical narratives from complex and contradictory material?

One reason—perhaps it’s the reason—we remain fascinated with Outerbridge’s photographs is that he was both an artist and a salesman. Boldly and without apology, he explored photography’s exalted and base natures. The work veers from black-and-white to color, cerebral to carnal, a photographic equivalent of Freud’s Madonna/whore complex. Outerbridge made pictures for art and for commerce. Some are subtle, others shameless. Many were reproduced widely; more than a few were censored and some, including the work in the library’s exhibition, had never even previously been printed. Any single photograph is just as likely to pay homage to classical ideals as it is to celebrate the eclectic. The power and pull of Outerbridge’s ouevre, the reason it grabs and holds our attention, is that it swings both ways.

It’s easy to love Outerbridge’s early and elegant black-and-white works, and to understand why the best of them fetch such extraordinary prices at auction. (Marmon Crankshaft, from 1923, brought $374,400 at Sotheby’s in 2006, well over its high estimate of $150,000.) At New York’s Clarence H. White School of Photography, where he enrolled in 1921, Outerbridge studied with Max Weber, who encouraged students to experiment with lighting, framing and odd vantage points, and to invest their images with the syncopated visual rhythms and brisk look of modernity. Planned out and even carefully diagrammed, images like Top Hat and Mufflers (1924) and H-O Box (1922) combine luxury and everyday objects alike with jazzy riffs on light and shadow. Consumerist longing and erotic desire bounce around within the borders of Outerbridge’s small and velvety platinum prints like water molecules in a pot that’s reached a boil. The physical production of these prints was just as thoughtfully calculated to seduce. Even when platinum and palladium emulsion materials became scarce in the years after World War I, Outerbridge insisted on using them to craft prints whose tonal depth and warmth trump the more meager materiality of conventional processes.

Early in his career, Outerbridge traveled between New York, where he befriended Alfred Stieglitz and became Edward Steichen’s biggest rival, and Paris, where he mingled with Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, Duchamp, Picasso, Picabia, Eugene O’Neill and Josephine Baker. In 1927, he opened and ran, if only for a short time, the most costly and elaborately outfitted photographic studio ever built in Paris. “The men who produce advertising art,” business writer Earnest Elmo Calkins noted in 1928, were “the men represented in the art exhibitions.”2 Outerbridge shuttled back and forth between two worlds, participating in the historic “Film und Foto” exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, exhibiting at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932 and billing record fees to clients in the depths of the Great Depression.

Changing times and diminished prosperity, however, triggered a shift in Outerbridge’s esthetic strategy. High-end glamour photography remained central to the marketing of movie stars in the 1930s, but became a much less effective method for selling tangible merchandise as the decade wore on. Sophisticated imagery like Outerbridge’s, which only recently had seemed so modern, began to look out of sync with the reduced circumstances of ordinary Americans’ lives. Understanding that “color appeals more to the senses than to the intellect,”3 Outerbridge shrewdly insured his marketability by making work that was more brightly hued and vibrant as the economy turned sour. In his custom-built, air-conditioned darkroom, he mastered the laborious process of making Carbro prints, whose idiosyncratic, saturated color palette didn’t replicate reality so much as pump it up. Throughout the 1930s, his riveting photographs of dining rooms, tabletop still lifes and displays of necessities like sandwiches and toilet paper—commissioned by clients that included House Beautiful, McCall’s and Scott Paper—attracted attention by offering up heightened visual experiences that bordered on the hyperreal.

The Coffee Drinkers (1940), a campy tableau staged for an A&P supermarket ad, presents a convivial moment: four men sharing a snack and cups of store-brand coffee, perhaps at the end of a long evening. But the studied camaraderie and metrosexual styling seem to suggest something else—that this kaffeeklatsch might just be the over-caffeinated prelude to an even longer night, once some neckties get loosened. Open-ended, sexualized narratives are closer to the surface and harder to ignore in the female nudes Outerbridge began shooting and printing obsessively in luxurious color. Difficult to make (each Carbro print took around nine hours to complete), the nudes proved equally challenging to publish and exhibit. In the 1930s, while the Hayes Code censored overt sexuality in Hollywood feature films, and Technicolor extravaganzas like The Wizard of Oz (1939) upped the ante on visual excitement, Outerbridge was masterminding his own reveries in photographs of women in high heels, garters, rubber swim caps, masks, top hats, kimonos and metal-clawed gloves. Hermetic, fetishized and heavily retouched, images like The Dutch Girl (1936), showing a partially nude young woman in a striking lace cap, are as artificial as they are exquisite, as voluptuous as they are ethereal. It was, and still is, hard not to stare.

Once Kodachrome and Kodacolor products became widely available in the 1940s, the market for pricey Carbro prints evaporated. Soon, the man whose color work stunned crowds when it premiered at the 1936 U.S. Camera Salon in New York, and who wrote the seminal “how-to” book, Photographing in Color, in 1940, found himself out of work. In 1943, Outerbridge moved to Hollywood, thinking there would be a job waiting for him at the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation. When that didn’t pan out, he relocated to Laguna Beach and opened a small portrait studio. In the decade or so before his death in 1958, the master of color photography ran a small women’s sportswear company with his second wife, wrote articles for photo magazines and shot 35mm Kodachrome slides that today look like harbingers of the color photography that followed (William Eggleston’s, for example), but appeared only sporadically in local publications.

Interest in Outerbridge revived in the 1970s after a Los Angeles photo dealer bought most of his extant prints, and the reproduction rights to them, from Outerbridge’s widow. The timing was right: a viable market for photography was percolating, and by mid-decade color photography—no longer a novelty, but an everyday reality for a new generation of baby-boomer photographers and artists—was finally beginning to attract attention, if not quite full acceptance, among the more conservative members of the art photography community. In America’s increasingly image-driven culture, and following Pop art’s appropriation of the vocabulary of mass media, the taint associated with color and commercial photography in the 1950s and ’60s began to fall away. You can see Outerbridge’s legacy in work as diverse as David Lynch’s lurid visuals in the film Blue Velvet, Thomas Demand’s meticulously fabricated tableaux and Loretta Lux’s sweetly hued but creepy portraits of children.

These days, with Outerbridge’s work scattered throughout private and museum collections around the world, exhibitions are rare. When they do occur, it’s a welcome opportunity to re-experience the work’s craftsmanship, audacity and impact. Seen in the midst of the 21st century’s first global economic crisis, these photographs from the worst boom-and-bust cycle of the last century still sizzle. The elegant early images and the more raucous color work that followed indicate how adept Outerbridge was at creating and reflecting desire. No wonder we can’t stop looking.

1 Paul Outerbridge, Photographing in Color, New York, Random House, 1940, p. 55.

2 Paul Martineau, Paul Outerbridge: Command Performance, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009, p. 5. 3 Outerbridge, p. 48.

"Paul Outerbridge: Command Performance," curated by Paul Martineau, was on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Mar. 31-Aug. 9, and was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. "Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs from Mexico and California, 1948-1955," curated by William A. Ewing, Graham Howe and Philip Prodger, appeared at the Los Angeles Public Library, Mar. 28-June 28.

Article from Art in America National Review http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/paul-outerbridge/

Anthony Hernandez

Anthony Hernandez's photographs of public spaces in urban Los Angeles, specifically, their public fishing areas, paint quite an interesting social landscape and topograpy through his banal landscapes. The juxtaposition of this harsh arid climate and these bodies of water seem to defy nature. The use of overexposure in the landscape to create an even more harsh looking reality. Many of the people he photographed in these locate watering holes actually fished for sustenance, to provide for their family. His work really focused on the humanization of urban topographies, blending people with their environs.

Public Fishing Areas: Marina Del Mar, 1979. Silver Gelatin Print 16x20

Public Fishing Areas: #34b Silver Gelatin Print 16x20

Jeff Wall on Anthony Hernandez

By Kevin Griffin 27 May 2009 COMMENTS(0) Culture Seen

Filed under: Kevin Griffin, Culture, Vancouver, Blog, Vancouver Sun, Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, The Vanouver Sun, photography, VAG, Jeff Wall, Anthony Hernandez, Kathleen Bartels, Andreas Gursky

I didn't mind waiting Tuesday morning. I was upstairs on the fourth floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery sitting on a wooden bench. Around me, sitting mostly on the floor on white styrofoam blocks, were the photographs of Anthony Hernandez waiting to be hung.

Beside me, were a pair of white gloves worn by conservationists and curators when they handle art. They'd just been hastily taken off by someone and were lying there by themselves: one was in a crumpled ball; the other was a ghostly memory of the hand that it recently covered.

Publicist Andrew Riley came back to explain the delay. Jeff Wall was on his way but had been delayed by running into Andreas Gursky who was overseeing the installation of his show on the third floor. With two of the world's leading photo artists in the world in the same building at the same time, an encounter was bound to happen. I stared again at the gloves wondering who had worn them.

A few minutes later, Wall arrived with Kathleen Bartels, the VAG's director. The two of them are co-curators of an exhibition of the photographs of Hernandez, a Los Angeles artist. I was there because Wall had, at the last moment, agreed to an interview about the exhibition. I said yes, since it was Wall, but my head was full of Gursky whose exhibition opens on the same day as Hernandez's. I didn't know a thing about Hernandez other than doing a quick Internet search which, it turned out, was largely useless since it covered mostly his recent work and not his earlier photographs. The result was that during the interview I was reduced to lots of head-nodding and "uh-huh" and similiar fillers. That was probably not so bad as Wall is someone who can start talking and continue until he's finished what he's got to say. Which is pretty much how the interview went.

I haven't finished transcribing the interview or translating it into a story. That will be appearing sometime next week in The Vancouver Sun. But here are a few highlights of what Wall said about Hernandez and his work.

"The exhibition traces his career up to about 1985. After that, he changes direction and is doing something other, and not that we're not interested in that, but what he did between 1965 and 1985 I think is kind of relevant and slightly unknown."

On Hernandez's photographs of people waiting at bus stops in Public Transit Areas:

"So this is a turn to doing photography differently and using equipment in a way that hadn't been used too much in the past. It gave a whole new view of the way the world tends to look. This was in the late '70s, so far this kind of move toward a new way of looking at the world, free of, or at least detached from these norms, this is quite an innovation."

On Hernandez's photographs of car repair shops in Automotive Landscapes:

"I think what makes Anthony's work interesting is not these subjects because everyone does these subjects. Robert Frank did them in the '50s. It is a new way of treating that subject with different equipment; therefore, a different outlook."

Anthony Hernandez is at the VAG from Saturday, May 30 to Monday, Sept. 7.

Article from: http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/cultureseen/archive/2009/05/27/jeff-wall-on-anthony-hernandez.aspx

CLUI (Center for Land Use Interpretation)

Now, what I really find interesting about the Center for Land Use Interpretation is that it isn't an artist or photographer, so to speak. But an organization that is "Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the world's lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived." They want to better understand what it is that humans do to their landscape, they want to understand why we interact with the land like we do. The CLUI is a research institution that has published and been exhibited worldwide. They exist to stimulate discussion on our landscape and how it's being used and appropriated throughout the present day times.

Desert Research Station, 2000. Mixed media installation. dimensions variable

Desert Research Station, 2000. Mixed media installation. dimensions variable

BIRDFOOT Where America's River Dissolves Into the Sea

Vacation: Dauphin Island

The Desert Research Station, in the desert near Barstow, California, was once a thriving educational nature station for biologists and local school groups. In recent years, however, it was abandoned and vandalized. Earlier this year, the CLUI adopted the DRS, and began a renovation of the facility. In November, 2000, the CLUI opened the doors of the DRS to the public once again.

Drawn from the research that the CLUI has been engaged in for years, an informative display about the California desert area is installed in the DRS. In addition, books, brochures and maps of the region are available at the DRS, making it a good point-of-origin to explore and examine the desert region. Visitors are welcome to browse, view videotapes about sites in the desert, talk with informed staff, or just relax in the cool dark interior. Outside, on the grounds of the DRS, relics of the site’s history as a scientific research facility are visible all over the grounds, from an artificial pond, to an active air sampling device. Remnants of a self-guided walking tour make for a fun and easy to follow interpretive enigma.

During this winter season, the DRS is staffed during regular hours, Friday through Sunday 11 - 4, until mid-February. The CLUI will lead two tours to the DRS and environs, on January 13, 2001 and February 3, 2001. To make a reservation for the tour, call the Museum of Contemporary Art at (213) 621-1767. The CLUI would like to thank MoCA for their assistance and support in making the DRS a reality.

http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/lotl/00f/00f2a.html

Here's another article about CLUI

The Houston oil infrastructure is well known as being ‘far out’. Local relief from Texas-sized boredom includes midnight marijuana-laced drives along the highways southeast of the city, where the world’s largest concentration of oil refineries, chemical plants and related shipping facilities loom and glimmer like an inexhaustible furnace. Sprawling for some 50 miles towards the Gulf of Mexico, this superlatively unnatural landscape is an obvious target for the documentary eye and peripatetic reach of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI).

Given that they have visited the region before in order to augment their database, it is surprising that, having been invited back for a year-long residency for which they established a field office on the banks of Buffalo Bayou/Houston Shipping Channel, CLUI’s take, as represented in the Blaffer Gallery’s ‘Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry’, left much to the imagination.

First encounters with the exhibition occurred, appropriately, outside the gallery, where an automobile-sized, orange UFO was squatted with scant explanation. The ringed, windowed spheroid was actually an oil-rig survival capsule; safety colouring, a pathetic propeller and manufacturer’s labelling betraying its purpose as a marine rescue vehicle. This initial confusion, really a CLUI-intended conflation of science fiction and fact, was amplified inside the gallery.

The Blaffer’s modest second-floor galleries were haunted by an eerie metallic din, bleeding from the soundtrack to Houston Petrochemical Corridor: From the East 610 Loop to the Highway 146 Bridge (all works 2008), a 12-minute ‘land-scan’ tracking the above-mentioned trip beloved of local stoners. Shot from a helicopter with a gyro-stabilized HD camera, the view slides, shifting rather than turning, over machine-megalopolises of cracking towers, pipes, and holding tanks, as well as shocks of swamp green. The footage is redolent of Werner Herzog’s 1992 film of the Kuwait oil fields, Lessons of Darkness. However CLUI’s airborne lens maintains an uncanny evenness that is otherworldly in itself, and ultimately produces a gaze both distant and cold.

This was echoed in Companies, a scatter of 40 framed, letter-sized photographs with corresponding wall texts. Together the images catalogue the Texas office facades and gated headquarters entries of ‘upstream’ (extraction) and ‘downstream’ (processing) industry players. The concrete, steel and glass corporate faces of Exxon Mobil, Goodyear, Halliburton and Boots & Coots are recorded not with the omniscient overviews offered by maps or aerial photos, but with first-hand, on-the-ground accounting. It is a human perspective, but again undeniably and self-consciously that of the alien visitor or scout.

‘Texas Petrochemicalscape: A Portrait Gallery of Selected Petrochemical Sites’ also apes the look of surveillance imaging. A line of 56 aerial photographs ring the gallery, starting with an image taken of Rhodia, Houston, at the entrance, then spanning the state’s strategic oil reserves, BP complexes, and Permian Basin pumpjacks, ending with Valero, El Paso. In the middle of the gallery is the centre of this Texan universe: not quite ‘TX Sweet Light Crude’, but 42 gallons of spent lubricating oil from the University of Houston ‘motor pool’ raised on a central plinth in a clear plastic barrel. It is a final science-fiction token: a slick, silent, black monolith.

Much is made – especially in the accompanying George H.W. Bush-endorsed catalogue – of the CLUI’s ‘objective’ lens, its directness and impartiality in documentation, its drive towards the denotative. CLUI’s appropriation of museological authority and the voice of the institutional expert regularly read more genuine than tongue-in-cheek, more interested in adopting approaches that fall just past the purview of natural history and the art world than offering ironic commentary on epistemology. But in ‘Texas Oil’, CLUI’s mission skews towards aesthticization, specifically a sci-fi sublime. This makes for a sharp-looking exhibition, but where exactly does it leave us?

Houston is ‘Space City’ and a CLUI wall text makes the valid point that the petrochemical industry, as a field of human endeavor and ingenuity, surpasses all interplanetary aims in scope and scale. A nod to the CLUI’s own Robert Smithson-esque roots, the science-fiction aspects of ‘Texas Oil’, like Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness, offers a way of grasping what Rod Serling called the ‘improbable made possible’. But where Herzog’s inversion of Kuwaiti oil fire fiction and fact affects a poignant absurdity, CLUI’s endeavor never quite delivers.

Save for income, employment, and historical stats accompanying Comanies, and a hallway of beguiling pipeline maps, the exhibition lacks didactic and encyclopedic resource materials, exerting its power instead as a set of astonishing images. For a subject premised on penetration, ‘Texas Oil’ skirts a surface-only read. Moreover, despite the promise of advertised bayou boat tours, the show itself remains physically, sensorially and politically clean. If CLUI won’t engage directly in critique, it need not lure us into further mystification; viewers already feel disempowered by an oil industry making record profits in 2008. If anything, it is precisely this lack of information, rather than spectacular image, by which ‘Texas Oil’ incites one to journey into the petrochemicalscape firsthand.

Kurt Mueller

Article from Frieze Magazine: http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/center_for_land_use_interpretation/

Miles Coolidge

Miles Coolidge's work is about where migrant workers live when the harvest season comes about in Mattawa, Washington which seems to be a very heavy into farming and cultivation of the land. I just google earth-ed where Mattawa, Wa was and when i clicked on the satellite view, understood much more about where he was photographing and what kind of communities exist around there. Much to my surprise and liking, there are tons of these circular fields, It really reminded me of some sort of crop circle, but through my knowledge of farming (basically, just being from the midwest) you can tell that there are many farms and/or orchards in which migrant workers would seem to come in and work. I actually have been to a place where migrant workers stay, albeit, i was trespassing in an Orchard in Southern Illinois, and it was run by Mennonites too. The housing units the Coolidge depicts are that of converted shipping containers and have been arranged in a way to provide a sort of social interaction between the worker's families, all being pointed towards a central axis with a commons area.

Near Mattawa. #8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. (14) C-Prints. 2000. 57 3/4 x 50in

Known for his panoramic photographs documenting the suburban landscape, Miles Coolidge transforms erstwhile banalities into insight-provoking curiosities. His straightforward, pared-down style produces clear but complex, and ultimately compelling, layers of meaning. Ancient History (2001), the centerpiece of his recent exhibition, consists of a grid of 160 ink-jet prints on paper that ran the length of the gallery's main wall. The images were scanned from old postcards depicting North American Indian mounds, ranging from the well-known Serpent Mound in Ohio to innocuous-looking hillocks in otherwise untransformed landscapes. The postcards are from the artist's own collection, and each print is three times the size of the original card. During the exhibition, additional copies of the noneditioned prints were stored in a perusable two-drawer file cabinet next to the installation. Available for sale at an inexpensive price, the multiples underscored the issues of mechanical reproduction and collectibility inherent in the postcard format.

Most of the postcards date from the first half of the 20th century and are of the popular hand-tinted type with scalloped edges. A mound's locale is typically identified in print on the face of the card. At the gallery, the arrangement of prints on the wall was roughly oriented to the site's geographic location on the U.S. map, with Ohio's numerous mounds occupying the central section, cards representing Minnesota on the left, and New York, Georgia and Florida on the right. Although each postcard is different, the more popular sites appear in more than one version, just as a tourist attraction today is commemorated on a variety of postcards.

Ancient History evokes a nostalgia for tourism before the era of Disneyland. Now known to have served as cemeteries, platforms for public buildings and other, more obscure purposes over a thousand years ago, mounds such as these were once viewed as mysterious earthworks, incorporating the extremes of nature and artifice. For tourists, they were awe-inspiring sights to be shared through postcards with friends and family back home. Still familiar to residents of the central U.S., mound culture is today scarcely known by people living on the coasts. Thrown into question in Coolidge's work is the exotic nature of the mounds, many of which are no longer preserved, much less visited.

Frances Colpitt "Miles Coolidge at Acme - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included". Art in America. FindArticles.com. 19 Nov, 2009. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_10_89/ai_79276198/

Christina Fernandez

The social landscape that Christina Fernandez is presenting is that of sweatshops in East Los Angeles. These photographs were originally accompanied by excerpts from narratives written by migrant workers and were part of an installation. What drew me to this work was at first the composition and visual aesthetic, but once i delve deeper into the narrative in which is being presented, i found out the topography, and social landscape of the pieces.

Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d: Coverstich, Eastern Los Angeles, Ca, 1996. C-Prints and Text 30x40in

Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d: Fashion International 1996. C-Print and Text 30x40in

The Project Series
Project 18: Christina Fernandez
Christina Fernandez
Artist Statement

Lavanderia started as a series of photographs of storefronts along César Chávez Boulevard and other main streets in East Los Angeles. I have always been interested in how the urban landscape speaks through the bits and pieces we leave behind in our day-to-day lives and through other agents of the neighborhood, their graffiti tag names emblazoned on walls and windows of buildings.

Buildings tell of the people who inhabit them and the social context in which they exist. In many ways they are a stage for the daily dramas of life—the mundane, the tragic, the ordinary. Buildings simultaneously conceal and reveal the labor within, the subject of my former work Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d. A series of eight photographs of sweatshop buildings in East Los Angeles, Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d was part of an installation that combined the images with text created from the narratives of women who had worked in garment factories.

Photographers have long been interested in labor, from Daguerre’s blurred shoeshine boy in his untitled 1839 photograph of Rue du Temple, to Lewis Hine’s documentation from 1908-1918 of underage workers in factories and mills for the National Child Labor Committee, to Dorothea Lange’s photographs illustrating the harsh Depression realities of rural America for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration, among others. In these instances, labor was clearly defined as the backbreaking work of the fields, factories, and docks.

The blur of labor, the anonymity of the laborer, the stillness of leisure—Lavanderia is a further investigation of these as well as something entirely new to my work: capturing the movement of people and the artificial light of night through photography. The painter Edward Hopper portrayed the strange light emanating from buildings at night and the emblematic lone figure waiting or contemplating. Hopper’s focus on the mundane details and the psychological tensions of everyday life is echoed in this new body of work.

The men, women, and children pictured in Lavanderia are subjected to the watchful eye of the photographer. The blur of their domestic labor—folding and sorting of clothes, controlling and keeping entertained the bored child—is transplanted to the public realm. The handprints of youngsters on windows illuminated by fluorescent lights are evidence that the washing of clothes is a family event. The etched and graffiti-marked windows are an obstacle to my perfect view. The short depth of field (the shallow range of focus due to a wide-open aperture) further obscures the sometimes lone figures, reinforcing their anonymity.

Lavanderia is rich with binaries—working and waiting, the beautiful but oppressive graffiti, obscured views through windows that are a kind of impenetrable membrane. Although the camera forces engagement between my subjects and myself, as I ask permission to photograph them, Lavanderia is less about connection than about our inability to bridge the spaces between subject and artist.

Article from Pomona College: http://www.pomona.edu/museum/exhibitions/archive/spring2003/fernandez/essay_fernandez.shtml

Zacharias Kunuk (Igloolik Isuma Productions)

What struck me as interesting with Zacharias Kunuk and his Igloolik Isuma Productions was that even though he says he creates documentaries, they're in actuality faux-documentaries. He remembers stories from his life and re-enact them with a cast and crew. He felt that this endeavor was valid, because as an Isuma (or Inuit), he had only seen one movie about his culture. So he no depicts their social landscape through film, and through narrative re-enactment, depicts the nomadic and harsh lifestyle in which they all live.

Film Still

Film Still

Nanugiurutiga
My First Polar Bear

Zacharias Kunuk on his film Atanarjuat, Cannes, filmmaking and Igloolik

In early June, Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk won the Caméra d'or for best first feature film at the Cannes Film Festival. He spoke to Ian Reid of the Canada Council later in the month from Igloolik, a day after returning from the spring hunt. Excerpts of the interview follow. Kunuk began the interview by describing his film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner).

Ian Reid is Acting Coordinator of the Aboriginal Arts Secretariat at the Canada Council. In the spring of 2000, he spent a week in Igloolik, visiting Zacaharias Kunuk's production company and the Tariagsuk Video Centre.

Z. Kunuk: Atanarjuat is an old story passed down from generation to generation. When I first heard it I was maybe 4 or 5…. A poor old man is cast out from the camp and he's dreaming that he would have sons who would make them rich and wealthy – more food on the table, more oil for the seal oil lamps so their house is warm, and new clothes from the animals they're catching. The son Atanarjuat was the Fast Runner and the son Amaqjuaq the Strong One. And… there was this beautiful young lady who was promised to Oki. But Oki became jealous of Atanarjuat and challenged him to a duel… a punching contest, that Atanarjuat wins with help from a good spirit… and he wins the girl. And from that day Oki wanted to see him dead, and one spring day he crashed their tent and started harpooning it from outside. And Atanarjuat escapes and runs naked on the ice. Everybody knew that story….

When we showed the film here in Igloolik, people… clapped and gave us a pat on the back…. And when we showed it [at Cannes] people clapped and that was OK. And the second showing that we had, people clapped and we had a standing ovation and they were shouting bravo. I thought maybe, maybe we have a chance to win…. And then they told me 'you won, you won the Caméra d'or.' And… my heart was pumping, everything was going so fast and the people, the house, the woman who was talking in French, I couldn't understand one word, and all of a sudden there it was. And my head is stumbling for a speech and they, they were already calling my name and I got up there and… I was speaking Inuktitut and the audience they started to laugh and maybe they thought that maybe that guy's going to go on forever. And I just translated my speech into English. And… I was suddenly in a room with Antonio Banderas and Jody Foster and Nick, Nick… what's his name?

Q. Nolte?
Z. Kunuk:
Yeah. And I'm in the same room with them and… I can't do anything for a minute. And I had a live TV interview and just before that I called home… 6 hours behind… and everybody went yelling in that house. And then… I was put on makeup and then put on TV. And it was so fast.

Q. What were your general impressions of the Cannes Festival?
Z. Kunuk:
Well, I have it all on tape. Getting dressed up was something that I don't usually do…. What I really notice when I'm wearing these power suits is that your neck is really tied down. And, I mean we only tie our heads up here to keep warm from the cold weather….

Q. How did you become interested in filmmaking?
Z. Kunuk:
In 1966 they were showing 16mm films here in Igloolik. And us kids we could go to the children's matinee, which cost a quarter…. And I [became] interested in still photography. I was experimenting with different types of cameras, 35mm cameras, and I was documenting Easter games events or hunting events. And then in 1980 I… bought myself a video camera, Sanyo Beta Max, colour…. In '79 there was the Inuit Project and then in '82 it became Inuit Broadcasting. And in '83… Paul Apak… hired me to work with him at [the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation]. I learned my technical skills from Paul…. In my eight years there I was cameraman, editor, soundman, everything [and] at the end, station manager. [Later] we got out and started this independent company [Igloolik Isuma Productions] and now we're doing great.

Q. What's the nature of your collaboration with your partner and Atanarjuat's photographer Norm Cohn?
Z. Kunuk:
Well I met Norman in 1985 and… I saw his videos and I liked them very much. His camera style is just like my camera style. When I'm shooting, the floor belongs to me. Whether I'm in church or… in a meeting, at a dance, the floor is my floor, I can move anywhere I want to. Probably I would jump right into the middle of the dance and videotape it from the inside and he does that too. My friends would set their lights and tripods and shoot the whole dance from one spot and work with the zoom. I didn't like that.… what's wrong with a shaky camera? It looks more real… more alive.

Q. What impact has the Canada Council for the Arts had on arts activities in Igloolik? (From its early days, Atanarjuat had the support of the Council's media arts program as well as its Millennium Arts Fund.)
Z. Kunuk:
Yeah, a lot of people get involved when we're doing a project. They understand Canada Council. You're the only department who seems to understand our language…. Probably this whole town knows about the Canada Council….

Q. Many of your productions have a documentary quality, which I think is a tribute to the wonderful way that you work with actors.
Z. Kunuk:
Well, here in Igloolik… we're working with families and documenting them. We would tell them what we want to do and they would create their own lines…. We've been working with these people for a long time and we've been training them so they are professionals, professional actors…. In the Inuit way you learn by watching…. The bottom line is that we're trying to show our culture the way it was, since it's been misunderstood a lot.… The only problem I ran into [is] … telling elders, 'Do it again. Take 2…. I mean, you don't talk to your elders like that, but when you're directing them you have to. But they understand that, so it's OK.

Q. What do you think the future of filmmaking in Nunavut might be?
Z. Kunuk:
Well, we're just… trailblazing…. We couldn't say it's the right way. We could just show them how we did it and they can, if they want to, choose different trails.

Q. What's your next project?
Z. Kunuk:
My next project is the early contact with the south… when they started trading. It's when the missionaries came and are preaching the gospel of … God, Jesus and what was going through their heads…. I want to recreate the misunderstanding … and go after true stories.… This summer we're into research. And I would like to get people involved…. That's the story I want to try to film next.

Excerpt from a Canada Council Article

Glen Wilson

Film Still from Desert Fishing, 2000

Film Still from Desert Fishing, 2000

Few other inSITE projects matched that degree of physical and psychic immersion. With close to half of inSITE's projects done in video--projected onto storefront windows, displayed on handheld screens or in viewing rooms at the event's information centers--passive spectatorship became the prevailing mode of experience. Investigating the nature and function of public space has been an implicit theme of inSITE through the years, but what emerged among this latest crop of artists as the primary site for engaging in public discourse was the placeless space of the screen. With so many projects framed in a viewfinder, and so many fewer than usual insinuated into the physical environment, inSITE's overall presence in the region--as well as the community dialogue surrounding it--felt far more diffused than in years past.

Gruner, from Mexico City, showed a video documentation of herself undergoing psychoanalysis in the backseat of a car as she crossed the border. In spite of its coy concept--crossing the geographic border while examining the borders with in the self--and its tantalizing promise of voyeurism, the resulting two-channel video is merely tedious, pocked with psychobabble and self-indulgently raw in form. Jonathan Hernandez, also based in Mexico City, shot a video of under age Americans heading south to drink and dance in Tijuana nightclubs. With roots in prohibition-era drinking and gambling excursions across the border, this current manifestation of pleasure-seeking on the "wild side" offers meaty potential for deeper study, but Hernandez's project is superficial, driven more by the beat of its soundtrack (by the Tijuana band, FUSSIBLE) than by thoughtful vision.

Several other artists shooting in film and video exhibited works of comparably little consequence. Lorna Simpson's Duet and Glen Wilson's Interstice 2001: The Nomad Project were both vacant, self-important efforts, strands of loosely knit scenes that satisfied neither as conventional narrative nor as visual spectacle. Jordan Crandall adopted heat-seeking and stealth cameras used for surveillance by the U.S. Border Patrol to make a series of short films shown on handheld cellular devices. Those imaging systems were devised specifically to reveal what the human eye normally cannot see, but Crandall's fragmentary clips of a woman on an operating table, golfers at night and the engine machinery inside a ship felt drab and familiar. Wholly indifferent, the images were outclassed in sophistication by the high-tech equipment used to record and screen them.

More revelatory in content was a two-part video installation by Dias and Riedweg, sited provocatively on the border, alongside a walkway for pedestrians crossing into Mexico. The videos, projected inside two stark, boxy structures resembling shipping containers, exposed oppositional aspects of border crossing: the groups of men who routinely leap the fence at night and head north, and the training of "Customs Canines" assigned to sniff out northbound contraband, from drugs to humans. Both the cool efficiency of the customs agents and the grittier desperation of the border crossers received relatively dispassionate treatment from the artists. Political underpinnings were left unstated, and the power of the piece rested on its privileged access to activities heard about but not commonly seen.

Author: Leah Ollman is a critic based in San Diego.

Excerpt From Article: Losing Ground: Public Art at the Border - inSITE program

Laurence Aberhart

Midway Beach, Gisborne, 13 June 1986 gelatin Silver print

Nature Morte (silence), Savage Club, Wanganui, 20 February 1986 Gelatin Silver Print

This major exhibition of New Zealand’s most eminent photographer brings together over 200 key works from the last four decades—among them his signature images of landscapes, facades, monuments, and interiors from New Zealand, Australia and further afield. Using a 100 year old view camera, Aberhart produces images which are steeped in the history not only of his subjects but also of his chosen medium. In recent years, Aberhart’s work has been acknowledged as a vital ingredient in the visual arts culture of this country. This exhibition underlines that significance while also asserting that Laurence Aberhart is a photographer of truly international significance.

Laurence Aberhart was born in Nelson in 1949. He travelled to America in 1988 as a Fulbright Fellow and in 1993 to France as the Möet & Chandon Fellow. In 1999 he was artist-in-residence at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. He has staged numerous solo exhibitions in New Zealand, Australia, Europe, America and Asia, including recently Laurence Aberhart: Selected Works, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2005); Laurence Aberhart: Photographs at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002); Ghostwriting: Photographs of Macau, Macau Museum of Art Macau (2001); All Gates Open: Photographs by Laurence Aberhart, Fisher Gallery, Auckland and touring. His work was included in Flight Patterns, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2000), and is shown regularly in group exhibitions. He is represented by Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland; Peter McLeavy Gallery, Wellington; McNamara Photography, Wanganui and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. He lives and works in Russell, Northland and travels extensively.

Exhibition curated by City Gallery Wellington’s Gregory O’Brien, working closely with the photographer and the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Justin Paton. The exhibition was developed in partnership with Dunedin Public Art Gallery. A major monograph will be published by Victoria University Press in partnership with City Gallery Wellington and Dunedin Public Art Gallery will be released on the same day as the exhibition opens in Wellington.

http://www.citygallery.org.nz/mainsite/laurence-aberhart.html

Mark Power

Rzeszow, 2004. C-Print dimensions variable

Gdansk, 2004. C-Print dimensions variable

Modern wounds stir ghost of Schindler

Haunting images of the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland hang in the empty factory in Krakow where Oskar Schindler rescued Jews from the horrors of Auschwitz

* Peter Conrad
* The Observer, Sunday 15 July 2007
* Article history

Photomonth 2007
Krakow, Poland

On a ptholed track straggling through the rusty industrial fringes of Krakow, Oskar Schindler's factory looks like a down-at-heel, dishonoured shrine. The paint has peeled from its Art Deco facade, and its bristling metal gate, through which Liam Neeson's limo swept in Schindler's List, is scratched and dented. Its streamlined curves, lucid skylights and bricks of shining cubic glass forlornly recall the idealism of the 1930s: architecture then was supposed to redeem mankind, constructing monuments to the white transparency of what Man Ray called 'the age of light'. But even for the Jewish workers Schindler protected, the factory, as Thomas Keneally puts it in his novel Schindler's Ark, was only a 'relative paradise'. After their shifts, Schindler's unpaid drudges returned to a concentration camp down the road, where they slept in barracks behind an electrified fence.

When Schindler acquired the site, it housed a bankrupt textile works. He installed metal-pressing machinery and converted it to the production of enamelled pots and pans, for use in the kitchens and military canteens of the Third Reich. After the war the Communist government nationalised the factory, which for another 50 years churned out spare parts for radios. Now it stands empty, except for two rooms that house relics of Schindler's tenure and a history of the Krakow ghetto, while pressure groups quarrel over its future. Promoters of tourism want it to house a museum of contemporary art but Jewish leaders insist a place sanctified by suffering should not display Warhol soup cans and Jeff Koons rabbits. Here, as elsewhere, westernisation has its own crass agenda: there are plans to build a hypermarket in the Katyn forest, where Soviet troops massacred Polish prisoners in 1940.

Last month the organisers of Krakow's Photomonth hired the premises and invited the British photographer Mark Power to install a series of exhibitions in the derelict sheds behind the front office. He called his project 'Theatres of War' and presented work by five colleagues preoccupied by conflict and art's attitude to it. The factory became a battlefield, echoing to the muffled thud of explosions.

Geert van Kesteren recreated the jittery chaos of Iraq on multiple screens with a soundtrack of garbled interviews, while Lisa Barnard documented the tragically tacky 'care packages' dispatched to American troops stationed abroad: how can soldiers who ask their families to send them Beanie Babies and whoopee cushions hope to understand the gangs of Islamic insurgents they are fighting? Christopher Stewart investigated the secrets of a so-called 'kill house', hidden somewhere in the emptiness of Arkansas, in which the American army trains specialists to search for combatants who have gone to ground in private homes. Luc Delahaye's panoramas of Baghdad or Kabul showed nature serenely re-absorbing our petty acts of destruction as drifting smoke is slowly erased from a bright, politically neutral sky. Watchtowers on hilltops in South Armagh are absurd mementos of a war that is, we hope, finally over: Donovan Wylie photographed them before their demolition, agreed in exchange for the IRA's surrender of its weapons.

Power, a member of the Magnum agency, is accustomed to working on a grandiose scale: two of his books document the redesign of the Treasury in Whitehall and the inflationary expansion of the Millennium Dome. In Krakow he was confronted by a random cluster of decommissioned sheds with oil-stained floors, pipes going nowhere on the ceilings, dust-clogged sinks with no water connected and a pervasive stink of chemicals and crumbled plaster. But he triumphantly justified the project's theatrical metaphor and turned those empty spaces into a succession of stages, with two excursions into darkened rooms that resembled cinemas.

An unforgiving glare shone through a skylight on Barnard's packages, sealed in those zip-lock plastic bags in which our toiletries are X-rayed at the airport. The cheap items posted out as souvenirs of home to befuddled, disoriented GIs are painfully eloquent. Will a marine on patrol in Baghdad really have time to apply Cool Tie, a moisturised neckerchief for use on sultry summer days? Packages of instant cocoa and marshmallows are a reminder that Americans believe in chocolate as a kind of god, capable of sweetly relieving all problems. For more persistent anxieties there are bags of Tension Tamer, a herbal tea. In adjacent rooms Delahaye's panoramas extended to encompass entire horizons. A dead Taliban fighter lies in a gutter surrounded by onlookers. Power, as he says in the Photomonth catalogue, is fond of epic photographs, which stand at a distance from their subject. Delahaye's version of epic is Homeric not Brechtian, as if he were looking down at the world from the vantage point of the gods: when the angle is wide enough, all human purposes come to seem futile.

Up a creaky, precarious staircase, in the suffocating attic of the same building, Stewart's exploration of the mysterious 'kill house' could have been the set for a Hitchcock film. The windows are blacked out and the only light comes from slats between the floorboards. A long gallery recedes in perspective towards a photograph of another staircase, perhaps curling up to a scaffold. A twisted metal bed with a gutted mattress hints at ways of interrogating detainees; a nail sticking out of a door left ajar whispers about cruel and unusual punishments. The design, as Stewart says, 'follows fear not function'. Across the way, van Kesteren's multimedia show occupied what might be a labyrinthine cinema, humming with the noise of invisible machinery and the detonation of special effects. Arab slogans unreel across the pitted brick walls, blood-red tabloid headlines silently shout on the screens. Spent cartridges litter the corner. Stumbling, you realise you are walking on sand, bogged down in an indoor desert. The uproar of shouting crowds and exploding cars reverberated through a partition into the annex where Wylie's watchtowers hung. Again the mise-en-scene made a sad geopolitical point: Northern Ireland may be pacified but Iraq goes on erupting, and in this congested setting there was no longer a continent to separate them.

After this tour of the sites where our world is splitting apart, a visit to the Schindler memorial above the factory's gates should be soothing. The walls have been painted battleship grey - mournful but not funereal. Solemnly meditative muzak, pastiching Bach, prescribes your mood. Schindler lived in the factory, abandoning his swanky requisitioned apartment in the centre of Krakow when the walling-up of the ghetto obstructed his journeys to and fro. A ledger open on his desk might be his accounts but is a visitors' book. A Scottish couple, a little too overcome by vicarious guilt, had recently testified that they toured the place 'with humiliation in our hearts'. The same page contained a scrawled caricature of a Hassidic Jew, complete with side curls, hook nose and a stigmatising Star of David. Similar figures, carved in wood, are sold as tourist trinkets in the Krakow market square, jostling on the shelves with angels to be strung on Christmas trees and cuddly lime-green gnomes. I remembered a conversation with a local official, whose identity I had better not reveal. I asked him about the Jewish population of Krakow. 'About 60,000 before the war,' he said, 'and maybe 3,000 now.' At the end of the sentence, a barely perceptible smile flickered on his lips.

Of those 60,000, 1,100 were spared, thanks to Schindler. His motives mixed humane compassion with economic self-interest; perhaps he also enjoyed the games of subterfuge he played with the Nazis, confident that he had protectors in the high command. In Krakow there is some irritation with the man's saintly legend. After all, he did not secure a reprieve for the rest of the ghetto, and the road to the airport in Krakow leads on to Oswiecim, better known as Auschwitz. Schindler's list was hardly an ark, which is what Keneally calls it. Noah's ark had room for paired representatives of all species; it preserved all life on earth, rather than whimsically choosing a few hundred specimens to be rescued. The Torah declares that to save one life ensures the salvation of the world. I'm no mystic, so to me that sounds like bad mathematics.

'Of course,' as Power concedes in his catalogue essay, 'photography can't change anything, not really.' In fact, art can make things worse, by telling emollient lies that treat the Holocaust as a victory for the human spirit, as the Schindler myth implicitly does.

But Power underestimates the impact of the work he assembled: a photograph - whether of a dead Taliban or of the sad consumerist trophies that keep up morale on the other side - can wound us, reawakening our human sensitivity. An aesthetic response sometimes ripens into a sense of moral responsibility. Shock and awe shouldn't belong exclusively to the Pentagon and its bombers.

article from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jul/15/poland.peterconrad

Peter Marlow

Nicosia International Airport, abandoned in 1974, and now part of the UN Buffer Zone

Nicosia

interview with john vink paris june 1999

I joined Magnum in 1980. I was attracted not only by its reputation as an organisation which stood up for the rights of photographers, but also by the fact that it seemed to me a place where you could be yourself.

It appeared that the photographers there were doing what they wanted, when much of the time I was doing what someone else wanted. They were a collection of violently different personalities, with very different styles of photography, but they all seemed to belong.

There was also something else very important for me, which was the comfort in the comradeship of other photographers: having somewhere to go where people were enthusiastic about photography, where nobody gave your work or your views a particularly easy time; the honesty could be hard to take at times.

As a young photographer, working for the French photo agency, Sygma, was a fantastic learning curve for me, and I am very grateful for it. But in the end there was something missing. You have to remember that Sygma was a very competitive organisation, with photographers pushing to get on the big news stories and, inevitably, having a contract meant making some compromises about the type of stories I covered. I suppose I'd had enough when a fellow photographer from the agency logged my film as his own, two years running, for an annual feature we worked on together. I could never understand why I never received any royalties from that job. My mission in life then was to become a famous war photographer. It didn't take me very long to realise that that wasn't really me, and I suppose the process of being part of Magnum helped me realise that: I discovered that what I was photographing wasn't really what I was seeing.

To me the best photography is photography in which what interests you in a subliminal way is somehow what you photograph. It wasn't necessary to go to a big war situation and photograph people with guns, dead people; it wasn't necessary just to photograph events.
The most important thing was to try somehow to connect with your own emotions.

I was finding that what fascinated me, for example, was being on a train journey, just looking out of the window and being mesmerised by the things passing by, not necessarily the things that were happening, but just the everyday space between events. I realised that this is what I should be looking for.

I also found that whenever I was taking pictures I was leaving the country. That was very frustrating, so towards the end of the Eighties I started photographing England in a more systematic way places close to home, places where nothing much was happening.

I've had in my mind 'non places' as a working title for this work, the places in between events, for me the most important thing was to try and identify with that feeling and convert it into a photograph.
The landscapes in England that I am doing at the moment really have their foundation in work that I did in Liverpool. I began photographing there in 1985 and spent the next six years putting together a book on the city. It was when Thatcherism was at its height, and Liverpool had no votes for Mrs Thatcher, so its people were somehow dislocated from the democratic process. There was a feeling that nobody cared about the city, especially the government of the day.

It's often been pointed out that there are no people in my pictures. But I really want the viewer to feel there's a person involved: the person may have just stepped out of the frame but they're very present. Their presence is also my presence and this is how I hope to communicate.

If someone was to ask me what the story was behind these pictures, it would be difficult for me to answer. In some ways I just go out with a camera and see what happens, and to me it's a little miracle that these moments come back on film. It's not intentional. I'm not necessarily looking for the things I photograph. I just wander, and take pictures, and somehow something comes back that has my own handwriting on it.

I obviously make the choices about where I'm going, but what happens in the photograph is something that is, in some respects, very uncontrollable.

I'm pleased with the fact that there is some common thread going through many of the pictures. I think with any photography, the most important thing is to wake up in the morning, want to get out of bed and take your camera and go and take pictures. The signature, the style, or the feel of the pictures is not an end in itself.

For me, just taking the pictures is probably not enough. What is enough is the feeling that after you've taken them, and you see the result, and the day after you look at the pictures or a week later you look at the pictures, and they are not quite what you wanted or expected, somehow you just feel better for it.

Interview from personal website: http://www.petermarlow.com/index1.html

Infrastructure

2009-11-12T19:40:00.000-08:00

Cyclists ride in the bike line across the Brooklyn Bridge during the evening commute August 25, 2009 in New York City. Recent improvements in biking infrastructure have led to a 35 percent increase in bicycle commuting in the center of the city between 2007 and 2008. The Department of Transportation recently announced the completion of a three-year project that created 200 miles of bike lanes throughout the city with more scheduled to open next year.

"Besides the environmental benefits of cycling itself (reducing fuel consumption, gasoline production impacts, air and water pollution, and greenhouse effects), let's also look at the environmental benefits of designing infrastructure for bikes.

Four main environmental benefits come to mind in this category: reduction of stormwater runoff, reduction of urban heat island effect, increased green space, and less building material."

When I read this article, I already knew that new infrastructure was needed for cities to thrive in the world's new attempt at becoming eco-friendly, but there were a few things that i didn't think of that the article talks about, like how bike infrastructure is much more efficient and eco-friendly than just regular pavement and vehicle centric infrastructure.

When making biking infrastructure, the amount of materials, labor, and pollution created vastly dwarfs the amount needed for things vehicle related. In California, bikers have created an event where they park in regular parking spaces to see the amount of room that's being wasted on just one car, the article says twelve bikes can fit into just one parking stall. I feel that it also brings up good points about the idea that we are overheating our cities in the summer with the amount of asphalt we use, it creates a black pavement where heat is absorbed rather than reflected. The absorption of heat from the sun heats the city up even more, creating a bigger need for air conditioning. Also, with the reduction in the size of the amount of pavement used for creating a bike path, it creates less run off, hardly any oil runoff, less heat built up, and creates more room for natural cooling mechanisms. By that I mean plants and trees that create shade and help convert CO-2 into oxygen.

People need to become aware of these possibilities and ideas that are being presented into this article. Another little tidbit that wasn't talked about in this article, is that with the creating of these modern day infrastructures, it creates green jobs and helps the labor/construction/union groups to stay in business and work.

Kessler, Lori. "Designing for Bikes: Environmental Benefits | Momentum - The Magazine For Self Propelled People!" Momentum - The Magazine For Self Propelled People! 1 Nov. 2008. Web. .

San Francisco in Essence

2009-11-05T19:01:00.000-08:00

Well, I don't feel that there is a necessity for a quote in this blog post, but I feel that i can rant on about my feelings towards what I feel they are describing in this article. Though, the article seems to be a very much Pro-San Francisco text, it brings up good points and ideas for other cities to latch on to and grow from.

Momentum is the magazine/internet source i got this from and they talk about all of the activism, events, community, and culture that surrounds the Bay area and its inhabitants that bike. They say of the 800,000 people living in the city that 120,000 of them say they ride a bike, and roughly 5% of them claim it being their primary mode of transportation. So that means at least 40,000 people ride a bike through the cities streets a day. The text also talks of how the city is and has always been a cultural hotbed ever since the 1950s and 60s when the beatniks and hippies arrived. They continue to say that since 1970, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC), became an advocacy group for bikers everywhere. They've fought for bike lanes and easier access to cross-transit for bikers, meaning that they got the city to allow bikes on their trains and regional transit systems, buses, and forced the city to create new infrastructure for bikers only.

The article is pretty upfront about its point though, it really seems that they want every city to be like San Francisco, and from what i've heard about it, I can't blame them it seems like an awesome place, but i digress. Cities and communities of bikers should learn from this city and understand that it takes a long time for cities to respond to demands for people that don't invest their money in vehicular transportation, but people still need to push on and fight for their rights to share the roads with cars, trucks, and buses. People must fight for a safe coexistence of bikers, pedestrians, and vehicular traffic. Bike Lanes are a must for safety (cough...cough...RICHMOND, VA). With a surging populous of people putting their car keys down and dusting off their old bikes and pedaling to work, cities must respond to the growing concerns of ecological disaster. The mayor's of any city must realize that being a vehicle centric society is causing our cities to become ugly, muggy, and full of pollution and traffic. If they realize that they can clean up their city by making biking and its infrastructure a priority, then in turn the city will clean up its act.

I don't think people realize the true beauty of the places they live, weather it's in a big metropolis, a college town, a rural village, or anything in between, until they bike through it on a warm sunny day.

Steele, Kristen. "San Francisco | Momentum - The Magazine For Self Propelled People!" Momentum - The Magazine For Self Propelled People! 1 Nov. 2008. Web. .

Chris Steele-Perkins

2009-11-02T08:05:00.000-08:00

Images are from the book "Euro Visions"

Chris Steele-Perkins has been a Magnum photographer since 1982. Most of his work revolves around 3rd world countries that are stricken with poverty, war, famine, and strife. But the series of work that I am focusing on of his is the series "Slovakia." In Slovakia, he embarks on a photographic journey through a country where he has little knowledge of and no sense of their language. He used a friend photographer from Slovakia, Andrej Ban, to be his guide and translator. He doesn't use title because he feels that when titles are used, they guide the photograph too much and don't let the images transform as much as they can. A quote from an interview in the book "Euro Visions" that I have taken a fancy for is this:

"Clearly Photographs describe everything and explain nothing. It is a strength because i like ambiguity in photographs, and sometimes when you put a caption on it, it starts to limit that ambiguity and pushes you down one direction. In situations where there are really big political or social issues at stake, like a war going on, the caption is essential. There is a real purpose to it. But when you step back from those situations, I like the idea that the photographs, their ambiguity or strangeness, or lack of immediate meaning can kind of come out. In books that I have done previously, my captions are pretty limited, minimal." P.150-51

His photographs are primarily landscapes, and I feel that this series is topographical in certain aspects. He is using the landscape of Slovakia to transform and communicate with a culture in which many have no idea. These landscapes describe the people, their hard working pedigree, how many of them are raised and how they make ends meet with their cultural situation.

This is something that I am aspiring towards and seeing if it is at all possible to describe a sub culture of people with just the use of landscape. I am creating a visual survey of a social landscape and trying to analyze the need for a current American Topographic tradition by focusing on the contemporary, rather than the past. Seeing if a culture can be described through landscape photography.

Review
Gallery
Website

New Initiative

2009-10-28T20:21:00.000-07:00

Bike Lot for Postal and Delivery Service

Converted bikes for taxi service

"Increases in train ridership, funding for better bike-train connections — looks good. Hopefully, the US will take a hint and create similar programs. With the increased ridership bicycle access can provide, this would help to fuel the US’ lagging train ridership."

Now, this quote seems vague and almost irrelevant to biking in which i am focusing on, but I do feel that there's at least a little amount, if not more, of eco-concern that is involved in my work. These articles, and many others, say that if a country wants to become more eco-friendly, their systems of transportation must work together, rather than compete for funds in an already tight global economy. England, and other European Union countries, have already realized this, that transportation services thrive upon each other. England has put 14 million pounds into a revamp of train and biking services. 14 mil. pounds! Granted the country is much smaller than our own, but we as a nation have PREACHED about how we want to become less dependent on oil! In my opinion, when the government bails out the auto industry with BILLIONS of dollars to try and help out the CEOs of vast empires of corporations, there seems to be a bit of a contradiction in their ways. This gets off topic, but General Motors and Chrysler are terminally wounded companies anyways, with really shitty cars! Ford really didn't need that much help they own so many other car companies that would would have survived. If America would have invested that money into public transportation, biking, trains, and the infrastructure that is required to maintain such things, then our outlook on becoming a GREEN nation would have been brighter. The transportation industries must network and help each other out, build upon one another. If America took some of that billions of dollars from the auto industy and put it into a new American Global Green Initiative (I just made that up too) then we (America) could try to look towards the future, rather than trying to fix the past.

Shahan, Zachary. "Bikes & Trains - New Initiative For England : Ecowordly." Web log post. EcoWorldy. 30 Sept. 2009. Web. .

http://ecoworldly.com/2009/09/30/bikes-trains-new-initiative-for-england/
http://ecoworldly.com/2009/10/25/7-berlin-germany-great-bicycle-city-photo-tour/

Jim Goldberg

2009-10-26T05:27:00.000-07:00

Jim Goldberg is a photographer that is currently with the prestigious Magnum Photographers group. His photographic works are a new form of documentary, the work is much more corrupted than, say, a photojournalist. The photography of his that i have chosen to focus on is his series named "Raised By Wolves." A project where he followed teenagers and adolescents in the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. This series was shot from 1987-1993 where he interviewed and photographed the teens, their social workers, and the police that wrangle these youths up. By photographing all of these aspects and people, he find a very developed and diverse subject matter that really works with how he presents these images, in a book. That's another reason that I have chosen to talk about him, I feel that possibly my current works is going to be best suited in a book format, possibly not as a traditional book, but maybe an accordion style book (i.e. Ed Ruscha's Gas Station book).

I hope that I can really follow and understand how Jim Goldberg photographs and how he looks at imagery. I want to take as much as i can from him. This book is presented as almost a scrapbook of ideas, photos, film stills, and handwritten texts that help convey the legitimacy of this series. At this book's roots, it is a compassionate tale of the lives of adolescent, displaced and misunderstood youths of urban America. It involves their drug lives, love lives, survival, violence, exploitation, and their pursuit of happiness.

All Photographs have variable dimensions and are from the Series "Raised By Wolves" 1987-1993.

Review

Gallery
Website

Topographies

2009-10-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

Topography

Definition:

noun, plural -phies.
1. the detailed mapping or charting of the features of a relatively small area, district, or locality.
2. the detailed description, esp. by means of surveying, of particular localities, as cities, towns, or estates.
3. the relief features or surface configuration of an area.
4. the features, relations, or configuration of a structural entity.
5. a schema of a structural entity, as of the mind, a field of study, or society, reflecting a division into distinct areas having a specific relation or a specific position relative to one another.

n. pl. to·pog·ra·phies

1.
Detailed, precise description of a place or region.

2.
Graphic representation of the surface features of a place or region on a map, indicating their relative positions and elevations.

3.
A description or an analysis of a structured entity, showing the relations among its components: In the topography of the economy, several depressed areas are revealed.

4.
a.
The surface features of a place or region.

b.
The surface features of an object: The topography of a crystal.

5.
The surveying of the features of a place or region.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/topography

I have chosen the word topographies, due to its reference to visual language in photographic and artist measures. Although, it primarily is used in reference to describing the mapping and plotting out the landscape of specific regions and places, the way artists have commandeered the term to focus on how they see the visual landscape of certain specific schema of a group or place really makes me wonder about my own photographic language and how i can expand on what I already know.

Tim Johnson

The Sun. 1994. Acrylic on Canvas. 60 x 96 inches.

Phoenix Hall. 2004. Acrylic on Linen. 76 x 100cm

Julie Ewington and Wayne Tunnicliffe

Tim Johnson is a fascinating Sydney painter who is making a significant contribution to Australian art.

His visionary search for connections between cultures is based in dialogue and respect.

Tim Johnson traces connections that are not limited to the earthly realm. Since the late 1970s spiritual beings have cohabited with living people in his universethe Buddha, Bodhisattvas, Aboriginal artists, Native Americans, Tibetan monks, Vietnamese farmers, extra-terrestrials and Christian figures emerge from fields of dots or float across shimmering colour.

A major retrospective of his work, Painting Ideas: Tim Johnson, is about to go on a tourorganised by the Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales and will feature key Johnson works from 1970 to the present. It focuses on the humanist project underlying Johnson's engagement with Aboriginal culture, belief in collaboration and his search for spiritual meaning.

Johnson began as a painter but soon turned to experimentation and by the mid-1970s developed a form of conceptual painting, that looked beyond European and American art and which was influenced by travels through India, Nepal and South East Asia. Back in Australia, an interest in music and involvement in the punk music scene further fuelled Johnson's cultural eclecticism.

In 1980 Johnson visited Aboriginal artists at Papunya, and he is now best known for his influential and at times controversial paintings of Aboriginal artists and collaborative works made with leading painters such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. He was given permission to use non-sacred motifs, which have since appeared in many of his paintings, contributing to a sense of space and time which links disparate elements into a harmonious field.

In the 1980s, however, appropriation became controversial and Johnson's eclecticism incited debate about whether artists using Aboriginal motifs were engaged in naïve theft or more meaningful engagements. The issue is complex, but because of his unique artistic vocabulary, his collaboration and his work to promote Aboriginal desert art, Johnson is often viewed as an artist who respectfully engages with Aboriginal culture.

His interests spread wider than Australia, to Buddhism and Asian art. He saw similarities between the art of cultural forms and Aboriginal art, which led to magnificent multi-layered canvases, such as Yuelamu (Queensland Art Galley), where a plethora of events, moments and places occur simultaneously.

The visionary nature of Tim Johnson's art suggests that disparate strands of earthly life, otherworldly manifestations and spiritual imaginings make sense as part of a greater whole. This is a truly generous vision.

The Painting Ideas: Tim Johnson exhibition is supported by the Australian Government's Contemporary Touring Initiative.

The exhibition tours to the Art Gallery of New South Wales 13 March - 17 May 2009;

Queensland Art Gallery 13 June - 11 October 2009; and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne 11 November 2009 - 14 February 2010.

The co-authors of this article are Julie Ewington, head of Australian art, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art and Wayne Tunnicliffe, senior curator of contemporary art, Art Gallery of NSW.

http://www.arts.gov.au/publications/arts_news/artbeat/artbeat_previous_editions/artbeat_summer_2009/the_art_of_tim_johnson

Lee Mullican

Space. 1951. Oil on Canvas.

Section from the Burlap Plain. 1951. 40 x 50 inches. Oil on Canvas

For over fifty years, Los Angeles-based artist Lee Mullican (1919–1998) created paintings and drawings of great beauty and almost shamanistic power. Drawing on interests and influences including Native American art, Surrealism, Byzantine icons, Paleolithic figures, Zen Buddhism, and Hinduism, Mullican created abstractions that engage the eye, the mind, and the heart. As the artist himself put it, he sought to conjure “invented worlds” through his art.

Born in Oklahoma, Mullican first became interested in art as a child and subsequently studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. During a wartime stint in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Mullican served as a topographical draftsman, working with aerial photographs which, with their dense patterning of vegetation, roads, and rivers, would have an enormous impact on his paintings. In 1957 Mullican moved to San Francisco and showed with the Dynaton Group, which included artists Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford. Five years later, Mullican relocated to Southern California, where he taught at a number of schools, becoming a pillar of the Los Angeles art community and mentor to a host of younger artists. His painting evolved over the five decades of his career but continued to reflect the same concerns as his work of the 1950s. Ultimately, Mullican forged a unique style and place for himself as an artist. Eschewing the grandeur and heroicism of the Abstract Expressionists, he chose a quieter, more personal and introspective vocabulary to investigate both his inner world and the cosmos.

Lee Mullican: An Abundant Harvest of Sun presents approximately 70 paintings and works on paper as well as several sculptures. Although he has been acknowledged as an exemplar of “the postwar opening of the American mind,” this is the first major presentation in over twenty-five years and his first-ever solo museum show on the East Coast. Lee Mullican is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by curator Carol Eliel, Amy Gerstler, and Lari Pittman. The exhibition is made possible in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Herta and Paul Amir Art Foundation, and The Judith Rothschild Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Pasadena Art Alliance. The presentation of Lee Mullican at the Grey Art Gallery is made possible in part by the Abby Weed Grey Trust. Public programs are supported by the Grey’s Inter/National Council.

http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/exhibits/mullican/mullicanhome.html

Caryl Davis

Past Pants (#15). 1994. C-print, mounted on aluminum. 9.25 x 14 in.

Dramatic Locale. 2005. terrazzo paving area and a porcelain enamel steel panel. dimensions variable

Flight Patterns was an exhibition I organized for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. On view at the museum from November 12, 2000, through February 11, 2001, the exhibition featured work by twenty-three artists from the Pacific region on the theme of the topographic landscape. The artists were Lawrence Aberhart, Doug Aitken, Miles Coolidge, Caryl Davis, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Christina Fernandez, Simryn Gill, Rodney Graham, Anthony Hernandez, Gavin Hipkins, Igloolik Isuma Productions, Tim Johnson, Rachel Khedoori, Roy Kiyooka, David Lamelas, Simon Leung, Tracey Moffatt, Lee Mullican, Paul Outerbridge, Michael Parekowhai, Allan Sekula, Yuk King Tan, and Glen Wilson. The exhibition originated as an investigation of current manifestations of the North American topographic tradition in photography. Seeking to identify artists who had been influenced by the reductive, black-and-white pictures of 1970s photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Henry Wessel, and others, but whose curren t reworkings included a renewed attention to social subtext and issues of cultural identity, the exhibition was always conceived of as primarily comprising photographic works, film, and video.

When the scope of the project expanded from its focus on West Coast artists to include those working in regions and geographies with a parallel history of landscape-based representation, it evolved to include painting and installation. Similarly, while the bulk of the material presented was new or recent work from the 1990s, the exhibition included three generations of artists and several historical referents that became critical to the project's thesis. Previously unpublished travel photographs taken in 1955 by the California modernist photographer Paul Outerbridge, for example, established Outerbridge as a precursor of topographic photography in his flattened abstractions of construction sites around the Tijuana border region. The presence of his luminous dye transfer pictures in the show, digitally produced for exhibition, also invoked the themes of travel and movement, as well as the translucent light of the California region. In the absence of a topographic photography tradition in New Zealand, the phot ographer Lawrence Aberhart speaks of inventing this kind of austere formal language for himself in his postcolonial representations of the landscape. His luminescent black-and-white pictures of Maori meeting houses, masonic lodges, and striking vistas that belie the contested land's history span thirty years and comprise a timeless portrait of New Zealand's bicultural present. Anthony Hernandez's 1979-83 series of black-and-white photographs titled Public Fishing Areas posits the social in what are otherwise extremely spare, documentary pictures of the always bizarre convergence of the natural and artificial landscape in the Los Angeles region. One of three such bodies of work influenced by the banality of the new topographic subject, Hernandez flatly portrays public spaces of transition and rest, creating a social document of Los Angeles's less glamorous masses.

While Flight Patterns was by no means comprehensively international, of particular importance to the Los Angeles audience was the exhibition's curatorial reorientation toward the Pacific and away from the dominant EuroAmerican perspective prevalent in so many large-scale contemporary exhibitions and biennials. Originally titled On the Edge, a reference to the idea of the Edge City, but also a nod to Mike Davis's heavily encumbered, noirish read of Los Angeles in his now highly influential book City of Quartz, the exhibition was also influenced by my own preoccupation with the idea of westward expansion as read through the geography of an exhibition and its intensely local or regionally based concerns. By focusing on the thematic of representations of the land, its relationship to cultural identity, and its spatialization in relationship to urbanism, and our physical experience of dystopic cities such as Los Angeles, the exhibition was intended to be "international" or perhaps have implications toward the glo bal, but cohere around pictures with an extremely specific agenda.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-27088223_ITM

Doug Aitken

Blow Debris. 2000. Video Installation. Dimensions Variable

Blow Debris. 2000. Video Installation. Dimensions Variable

Aitken’s style of art lingers in a realm between popular culture and media art. He has taken the liberty of incorporating video into much of his work, revealing a wealth of intensities. “There is no linear narrative in Aitken’s videos; the story line is disjointed both in terms of the films’ structure and sequence of images, as well as in their prism-like projection.” Grosenick, pg.20

Atkins is not only a videographer, but a photographer as well. He creates photographs influenced by epic road movies, as well as photographs manipulated through the use of a computer. Atkins’ photographs “kaleidoscopically fragment their motifs, thus attempting to translate the principle of his video projections into a single flat surface.” Grosenick, pg. 20

“He belongs to a generation of artist that enriched the presentation of the medium of video. Aitken’s work questions nature and civilization as well as people and their relationship to time and space. Obsessed with the idea of present time, Aitken refers to his films and installations as being pure communication. In the process, he utilizes the vocabulary of Hollywood and advertising films. Alongside his freelance activities as artist and photographer, Doug Aitken is also known for his video clips, completed for artists such as Iggy Pop and Fatboy Slim.” -Media Art Net

http://artobserved.com/artists/doug-aitken/

Yuk King Tan

Yuk King Tan is one of New Zealand’s best-known young contemporary artists. Exhibiting for the first time in Vietnam in a solo exhibition, she explores perennial human needs and desires in the context of the urgent economic development of industrial cities, through video, photography and a series of ‘drawings’.

The multi-layered works presented in Shelter are created in an extraordinary and unique way. Photographs are first printed onto the paper, which is then ‘smoked’ with candles to create a dark cloudy background – as if an inversion of the tonality of Chinese ‘mountains and mist’ painting or an upset in the cosmology. This surface is then etched back, and exquisite images of human figures, bridges or factories are drawn or painted on. With titles such as Boomtown and Ghosts of Tent City, the artist’s work creates a poignant portrayal of humankind’s desire to forge ahead economically, but at the same time questions the human and environmental costs of this desire. Tan states: “As I make the works I think about diverse ideas about society and social order, cities and the needs of civilization….also city plans and architectural diagrams. Like the dramas of a master-city builder who by day plans the future of a city and by night has hallucinations about its past and present.”

Nevertheless, Tan’s engagement with these issues is by no means geographically specific. Her commentary is quite relevant in the Vietnamese context of rapid economic development which occurs often at the cost of human health and environmental degradation.

Also featured in the exhibition is a video work, I am the light of the world, in which Tan uses firecrackers to create images – a technique that is her signature. Firecrackers are attached to the wall, outlining a portrait of New Zealand missionaries active in China in the 1920s, and are then lit. The image bursts and crackles apart for the next 5 minutes. Shelter has been curated by a little blah blah (albb) – an initiative by two HCMC-based visual artists, Sue Hajdu and Motoko Uda. albb functions as a platform for contemporary art through the organization and curation of a range of art activities such as exhibitions and events. Please visit http://albbsaigon.blogspot.com for more information.

http://www.diacritic.org/blog/archives/2006/11/shelter_by_yuk.htm

Jan Kempenaer

" Spomenik #1" , 2006 , color photograph on alu , 101 cm X 124 cm

"Spomenik #13" , 2007 , color photograph on alu , 101 cm X 124 cm

Jan Kempenaers and the Picturesque
Steven Jacobs

Jan Kempenaers is most known for his large-scale, panoramic and detailed images of industrial and urbanized landscapes in Europe and Japan. Fascinated by today's hybrid landscape in which the differences between center and periphery, city and country, and culture and nature are no longer clearly defined, Kempenaers evokes in several ways the notion of the picturesque, which originated in the eighteenth century. In the aesthetics of the picturesque, the severe geometry of the French garden was exchanged for a predilection for the whimsicalness of natural landscapes contaminated by human interventions and cultural remnants. Furthermore, in the picturesque, nature was approached indirectly, through pictures. On the one hand, nature was perceived as if it was a picture and, on the other, landscapes were carefully created and staged in situ. With his fascination for a particularly soft lighting and non-descript places where nature and city intersect, Kempenaers associates himself with the picturesque's predilection for the pictorial framings of hybrid landscapes.

In a series of more recent works, Kempenaers elaborated on the theme of the picturesque more explicitly by focusing on natural scenery in Scotland, Nordic areas such as Iceland, and the American West - regions that have played an important part in the development of the Romantic imagination of nature in the nineteenth century. In Two Ruins (2006), for instance, the natural and the artificial seem to answer to the same organic laws. Buildings look like plants; they are as irregular and capricious as the green meadows. However, this harmonic unity is transected by two cables, which introduce geometrical order into the image but also emphasize its surface quality. As in his posturban landscapes, Kempenaers demonstrates that photographing natural scenery is always dependent on an act of framing. This is also explicitly the case in stage set-like space of Dead End (2006), which combines contemporary traffic infrastructures with a kind of "grotto" - a prominent icon of the picturesque, and in View (2004), which evokes Romantic landscape painting by its confrontation of small human dorsal figures with the endless vastness of nature. Kempenaers' images of natural scenery, however, are not the result of Romantic nostalgia. They stipulate that natural landscapes are turned into codified spectacles. Strikingly, pictures such as View, Gap (2005), and Niest Point (2006) do not evoke the utopia of a virgin nature. The photographer, after all, arrives at a spot that has already been framed before him. Kempenaers visualizes places that include an entire tourist infrastructure, which marks viewpoints and framings. In this perspective as well, Kempenaers' pictures answer to the logic of the picturesque, which constantly reverses the relation between a picture and its referrent. Kempenaers demonstrates that the contemporary natural landscape has been colonized and domesticized on a global scale thanks to the world-wide proliferation of images, from artworks to all kinds of mediated landscape images in cinema, television, tourism, and so forth.

A second series of photographs focuses on monuments, which have always played an important part in the aesthetics of the picturesque as well. In the context of his "Spomenik: The End of History" project, Kempenaers has photographed monuments erected by the communist regime of former Yugoslavia. Paying attention to their careful integration in the landscape, he demonstrates that landscapes are turned into sites of memory. Commemorating the common traumatic experiences during the Second World War and the partisan battles, these monuments were intended to provide the people of Yugoslavia with a common history and identity that would be productive in its future evolution. However, in the late twentieth century, these landscapes were torn by nationalist and ethnic violence and their monuments are now neglected. The idea of progress has been buried under the weight of history and the monuments, which were once machines of sightseeing and (photographic) image production, have become obsolete and invisible. Notwithstanding their futurist designs and their space age associations, these monuments have become modernist variations of the Romantic ruin - another preeminent icon of the picturesque. The entire Spomenik project will be exhibited in the Braem pavilion of the Antwerp Middelheim Museum at the end of 2007.

http://www.psfk.com/2009/05/the-photography-of-jan-kempenaers.html

Michel Campeau

Untitled, from the series Darkroom 2005–2006. Pigment Print on Paper

Untitled, from the series Darkroom 2005–2006. Pigment Print on Paper

When I multiply 24 by 52, I get a total of 1,248. When I then multiply 1,248 by 21, I get a total of 26,208. That tally of 26,208 is a close estimate of how many hours I have spent in a darkroom over the course of my career. Having spent an average of 24 hours per week printing jobs for money and printing my personal work means that if that was a prison sentence served out under the amber glow of a safelight, then it would last 2.99 years with no time off for good behavior. That number does not include how many hours I spend each year teaching others how to print. That might be what I call my “community service” after parole.

I have loved printmaking since I was first introduced to the process in high school. It wasn’t the magic of watching the image appear in the developer tray that grabbed me like most photographers mention while waxing nostalgic. For me, darkrooms have always been places that served practical solutions for a different set of problems. First and foremost, the darkroom I set up as a teenager in a hidden storage closet in my parent’s house served as a pretense for me and my girlfriend to spend a lot of time in the dark without the chance for sudden interruption. Secondly, during and after four years of art school, darkrooms served as a way for me to make a living without having to work more than two or three days a week. And last in priority, darkrooms allowed me to see what my own photographs looked like.

To many it is sad that these spaces are disappearing due to the advances in digital imaging. For the photographer Michel Campeau, I suspect his new book Darkroom from Nazraeli Press and the JGS Foundation serves as a kind of lament to their extinction.

His photographs show the wild and often desperate improvisations that spring from the minds of photographers when constructing or “improving” a work space. Jury rigged fans, safelights and enlargers of all sorts are exposed to the white light of Campeau’s strobes - their brightness exposing all of the flaws that are normally hidden under the amber safelights. Funny thing about darkrooms is that in the white light there is something so cold and almost nauseating about them that miraculously disappears once the safelights take over. This book may be a funeral dirge for a dying craft but the tone generally would cause most to be thankful to sell the entire kit on eBay.

Campeau’s still-lifes describe how darkrooms are often personal spaces and how they become lived in and cluttered with talismans; a taro card, an old test print, notations penciled right onto the wall. (I remember reading a story about Garry Winogrand moving his darkroom and upon unpacking the enlarger he decorated it with several items including an old bow-tie and a string of rosary beads. When asked if these additions helped he simply replied, They can’t hurt).

The book progresses along until the pipes become so corroded and the walls are so filthy with fixer that we no longer want to enter. Or perhaps this is what the next tenant has to look forward to cleaning up. Campeau ends the book with an unappealingly stained work shirt hanging against a field of the darkness that signals all have gone home to the Macintosh to slide arrows along histograms.

This is the first in a series of ten books that are being selected for publication by the British photographer Martin Parr. For starting with a requiem, I hope he has more life affirming subjects ahead.

I love this book but then again I am a printer, and just the first few images bring back a flood of memories: Printing in Helen Buttfield’s ancient darkroom at 212 East 14th street (right above the old Irving Klaw Studio where Betty Page was often photographed) and using GAF paper that had expired in 1968, the same year I was born. Daydreaming and pouring the fixer into the film tank before the developer and clearing 8 rolls of Gilles Peress’s film (from a New Yorker assignment). Printing and chain smoking through the night at Brian Young’s Phototechnika full of self pity and weeping over a recent break-up with a girlfriend. Finding out my cat had used one of my 16X20 trays as a litter box. Improvising a darkroom in my tenement apartment’s bathroom and dropping a 50mm Schneider lens into the toilet. Printing a long afternoon of 11X14’s only to realize afterwards that the client wanted 16X20’s. Watching my teacher Sid Kaplan light up a cigarette in the darkroom, sending all of us students diving to close our paper boxes. Watching my 90 dollar Kodak Type 1 Process Thermometer fall in slow motion to the floor. Traveling 45 minutes to my darkroom, setting up to print and having the last enlarger bulb blow out right when I turn on the focus light. Having my exhaust fan fall out of my window and wind up shattering my downstairs neighbor’s window.

My Gra-Lab timer counting down: 5, 4, 3, 2.…

http://5b4.blogspot.com/2008/01/darkroom-by-michel-campeau.html

Jan Banning

Left:Bureaucracy, Bolivia. Rodolfo Villca Flores, supervisor of market and waste department, Betanzos.
Right: Indian bureaucracy. Patna. Sushma Prasad, assistent-clerk at the Cabinet Secretary of Bihar.

Sushma Prasad is an assistant clerk to the Cabinet Secretary of the State of Bihar, India. Her desk is relatively neat, but behind her is a chaotic pile of irretrievable facts buried in hundreds of tattered paper files. Prasad is one of fifty civil servants Jan Banning photographed in Bolivia, France, Yemen, Russia, Liberia, India, China, and Texas. They engage us as individuals, but Banning has titled his series of color portraits after the system in which his subjects labor: Bureaucratics. Whether sitting behind a card table in Liberia or a marble-topped desk in Russia, this array of mostly appointed officials are, according to essayist Will Tinnemans, each a "small clog in the gigantic machinery of the state." Those whose needs have brought them into these offices will find that the person behind the desk may or may not be able or willing to help them.

Compare Banning's project with Paul Shambroom's series Meetings, panoramic images of small town city councils and school boards shot in a variety of American locales. Shambroon's diverse groups are often amusing, but we accept them as decision-makers, a demonstration of democracy at the grassroots level. On the other hand, we assume that Banning's subjects are largely in the business of saying "No." Banning's subjects can be both harder to take seriously and more intimidating, perhaps because we know so little of their actual situations, but perhaps also because they are so familiar. You are not likely to find yourself before Alham Abdulwaze Nuzeli of the Ministry of Tithing and Alms in Al-Mahwit, Yemen, but her portrait will bring to mind all your own encounters with bureaucracy, beginning with the ladies who ran the elementary school lunch line to that Department of Sanitation Code Enforcement officer who just would not listen to reason.

http://www.photoeye.com/magazine/reviews/2009/10_06_Bureaucratics.cfm

Do Ho Suh

Fallen Star. 2008-09. 131 x 145 x 120 inches. Mixed Media Installation

Floor. 1997-2000. 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 x 3 1/8 inches. PVC Figures, glass, plates, phenolic sheets, polyurethane resin. 40 parts.

“Seoul Home/L.A. Home”—
Korea & Displacement
ART:21: What was your training in art in Korea like? What did you study?

SUH: It was a traditional painting technique that I learned there.
Basically ink on rice paper. Mostly black and white, with a very flexible brush. For the first through the second year of college you train how to use your brush well and how to grind your ink well. Very ritual kinds of things. And then once you get comfortable with the brush, in other words, once you reach the point where you can have a really good-quality line, then you can actually paint or draw what you want. So it was a rather boring process. And there were many different classes for example, like calligraphy. I’m really bad at that and I’m probably worse than you. But I was able to sort of get around it. It was senior year, I think, when I was able to do something I wanted. More creative stuff. Teachers didn’t allow us to really explore many different things. That’s something that I really regret. We never had a crit, and it was only one direction—from teacher to the students. There was no exchange or dialogue between the teacher and student. If the teacher says something then you just have to follow that.

So it was very awkward and at the same time interesting when I first came to the United States. One thing was my English, but at the same time I wasn’t really trained to express my feelings or thoughts on art. I was not trained to do that at all. So it took me an entire semester to just say, "I like this work" or "I don’t like this work." And then, gradually, I started to learn how to talk about my art. And ironically, I had never talked about my art in Korean before. Even though my English is not good, I think I feel more comfortable actually talking about my work in English than in Korean. That’s something that I find interesting. So when I give a lecture in Korea, for example, I realize myself actually translating my thoughts in English into Korean. So yeah, it’s a funny thing.

ART:21: Is language the only thing that's been a real challenge for you?

SUH: When I go back to Korea, Seoul is a very crowded city and on the street people bump into each other. And somebody could just hit your shoulder and that’s normal. So nobody complains about it. But I realize that’s different here. And when I go back to Korea, when somebody touches my body I get really annoyed. So I think since I've spent eleven years here in the States, my perception of this personal space, this dimension, has changed. So that’s something that I found quite interesting.

ART:21: And that's related to your evolving work "Seoul Home/L.A. Home..."

SUH: I would say the Korean House project started from this need to fulfill a certain desire when I graduated from RISD. I was in New York for a year before I went to grad school. I was living on 113th Street, near Columbia. And my apartment building was right across the street from the fire station. And it was really, really noisy and I couldn’t sleep well. And I was thinking when it was my last time to have a really good sleep. And that was in a small room back in Korea. And I wanted to bring the house somehow to my New York apartment. So that’s where everything started. So I started to think about the materials and the practicality of that project or the possibility of the project. And the choice of fabric came very naturally. Literally, I was going to install that fabric Korean house in my New York apartment, but apparently my apartment was much smaller so I couldn’t really do it. But it turned out to be a project later. I did do a test because it was a fairly large project for me to tackle at that time. I did the test in my small studio in New York in muslin cloth. And it worked. But I didn’t have time and money to actually do the Korean House project until 1999.

ART:21: What was that experience in your studio about?

SUH: The experience was about transporting space from one place to the other. A way of dealing with cultural displacement. And I don’t really get homesick, but I’ve noticed that I have this longing for this particular space and I want to recreate that space or bring that space wherever I go. So the choice of the material, which was fabric, was for many reasons. I had to make something that’s light and transportable. So something that you can fold and put in a suitcase and bring with you all the time.

That’s actually what happened when I first made that piece, the Korean House project. I brought that piece in my suitcase—two suitcases—to L.A. where I showed that piece for the first time, at the L.A. Korean Culture Center. It was about challenging this notion of site specificity because the piece was made inside the house. Everything was made in that space, so it was a site specific installation. But once you take that piece down from its own site and display and transport it in a different place, this idea of the site specific becomes highly questionable and reputable. And that’s what I was really interested in, because in my mind I think this notion home is something that you can infinitely repeat.

ART:21: What do you mean by that?

SUH: I mean at some point in your life you have to leave your home. And whenever you go back it’s just not the same home anymore. I think home is something that you carry along with your life. That’s what I mean by it’s something that you can repeat over and over again. I just dealt with that issue visually. In a physically minimum way, it’s this light fabric thing that can recreate this ambiance of a space. I didn’t want to sit down and cry for home. I wanted to more actively deal with these issues of longing. I decided not to be sad about it. I just want to go with it. I just want to carry that with me, you know, all the time.

I think the process of making the Korean project has a really important meaning to it because in order to make that piece you have to measure every inch of the space. And you really get to know the space and you often find little marks that you did when you were a kid and that brings all the memories of your childhood. And when you go through that process, this space becomes part of you and you really feel like you know it. It’s in you and you can actually leave home without any kind of attachments. Does that make sense? I mean, I would say it’s one way of dealing with homesickness.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other day: "It seems like it’s a lot of sacrifice for you, that you have to deal with the cultural barrier, language, you know, it’s a kind of constant thing. And at the same time, you have this homesickness." She asked me whether I have homesickness or not. I told her that I don’t have that much homesickness, but if there’s something I miss it’s probably my parents’ house in Korea and my mom’s home cooking. So I decided to learn her recipe, everything, and just practice that recipe with her every time I go back to Korea and then make those recipes mine. And then it becomes my recipe so I don’t really have to miss that because I can make that. And then I decided to make this into some kind of project. I want to make my mom’s cookbook. It’s a very simple thing, but in a way it’s kind of the same project as my Korean House project, but in a different kind of form.

ART:21: And where is home now?

SUH: It’s really a tough question, actually. Like I said before, once you leave home then it’s not the same anymore. I mean, you miss certain things, but whenever you go back it doesn’t meet your expectation because you change and things change over there too. Intrinsically this awkwardness and unfamiliarity, being in different cultures, will remain with me for the rest of my life. But I found every time I come back to New York, I feel like certain things are very comfortable because I’m surrounded by more strangers than in Seoul. Somehow that makes me more comfortable so I can relax more here. I’m telling my friends now that "Oh, New York feels like my home now." Just because of that. So you too can have more quiet time here.

ART:21: Do you think of yourself as an international voyager?

SUH: Well at least I have means to travel. At least I can say I’m living in this era that these means to travel are available. So if I want, I can go back to my home, to my parents' place. It’s not that much of a problem I think. But I wouldn’t say that I’m an international voyager or whatever, not yet I don’t think. But I spend a lot of time on the airplane. And I’m not in one place. Just in between, definitely, that’s how I feel.

ART:21: What prompted you to move to the United States?

SUH: Once my fortune teller told me that I have five horses. Five horses in my fortune, in my life. That means that I travel a lot. I’m destined to leave home and live somewhere else and travel to many places...that’s a story. It’s something that I realized fairly recently, but I think I also wanted to leave home because of my father. He was a successful painter, very successful. I think I was doing really well back there too, but I think somehow I felt that his fame overshadowed me and I wanted to do my own things without any kind of attachment to my family background or my father. So I think that was probably the main reason, but I wasn’t really sure. I didn’t really realize that in Korea, but now I think it was probably the main drive to come here. Like whatever I do, people always connect me to my father and you know this is through village kid and so on and so forth. I think more independently here because whatever I do here, if I fail it’s all my fault. I kind of like that idea. And if I make it, then that means I started from scratch all by myself and I think that’s more meaningful than doing something in Korea. So I think that’s it. And I had other reasons to come, but that was more related to my first marriage. My ex-wife was Korean but born in the States and she was studying here, so it was a pretty natural way to come. Right after we married I came here.

ART:21: Can you talk about the process of making the Korean House project?

SUH: The "Seoul Home/L.A. Home" project is actually the first kind of project that I've collaborated on with so many people. And not just numbers of people, but also people from different fields. My mom helped me to find right fabric. She introduced me to many different fabric manufacturers. So for that piece the fabric was custom-made. I couldn't find the right color, so we produced for that specific color. And also , she knows a lot of seam dressers, old ladies, national treasures. It's kind of an awkward term. I'm just translating literally. In Korea we call people who keep traditional techniques and craftmanship alive national treasures. And those old ladies helped me to make small ornaments on the pieces. And they taught me how to sew certain seams. I mean it's hard to see the difference, but there are many different kinds of sewing. And my main assistant, he studied industrial design at college and he worked with me together at the planning stage. So there were a lot of people involved, always. I do something always totally different each time. And for example, those seam dressers, they only make traditional dresses and had never done these things like this. So at the beginning it was kind of difficult to explain the scope of project. But they catch things so fastly, catch up so fast. And they really got into the project. And I see that all the time, because it's something that they don't do normally so I think they found it interesting. I like that when it happens.

ART:21: What is the signifigance of the color of the piece?

SUH: The color of "Seoul Home/L.A. Home" is a kind of light jade color, or celadon color. I just picked the color from the ceiling wallpaper in the traditional Korean house. In the traditional house you hang white papers on the wall. And on the ceiling you have this sky blue or jade colored wallpaper. It symbolizes the sky or universe. That house is for the scholar, so when they study in that room the color allows them to think about the universe or a bigger space, things like that. So I used that color for my piece.

ART:21: The scholar's house was the original model for the piece? What was it like visiting that original house?

SUH: Yes, my parent's house was modeled after this civilian style scholar's house which was built in a palace complex in the early 19th Century. And my house project, "Seoul Home/L.A. Home," is the replica of the interior of my parent's house.

I was walking with my mom and that was my first visit since my parents and me and my brother first visited that palace complex in the early seventies. So we're talking about changes. And because it was a very memorable experience for me, we went there to measure the original house in the palace complex with a couple of engineers and architects. We took the entire day to measure it and my mom and I talked about this wild pear tree in the garden. And it was there in seventies and still it was there and so we talked about that. And I told her that the house looked much smaller than I thought. Because I was little, so everything looked probably bigger. And most of the time I was upset because the house wasn't maintained well enough. My mom is involved with renovating that palace complex and she has to face a lot of obstacles. Mostly bureaucratic problems and things like that. And we talked about that. And because my parent's house was just part of that complex, so much smaller, just one section of the house was the master's quarter. So it was interesting to see that segment in the larger context.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/suh/clip1.html

Bahc Yiso

We Are Happy. 2004. Billboard. dimensions vary

Your Bright Future. 2002/2009. Electric Lamps, wood, wires, dimensions vary.

Yiso Bahc was born in 1957 in Busan, Korea, and lives and works
in Seoul. He holds a B.F.A. in painting from Hong-ik University in Seoul, and an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute, New York. Previously known as MoBahc, he has exhibited his work throughout Asia and the Americas, including solo shows at the Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul (1995) and the Bronx Museum, New York (1990). His work was included in the 1998 Taipei Biennial, the 1997 Kwang-ju Biennial and the 1994 Havana Biennial. His work was also included in the exhibition Defrost at the Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998. In 2001 he will participate in the Yokohama Triennial.

Through architectural installation and sculpture, Yiso Bahc is interested in quietly disturbing our perceptions and judgements. With subtle imagery and spatial manipulation, his work questions the complexities of culture and nature, public and private, virtual and real.

Yiso Bahc was selected for ArtPace’s International Artist-in-Residence Program by Sun Jung Kim, Chief Curator of Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. Bahc is in residence with New York-based Yangah Ham and San Antonio-based Dario Robleto.

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about the project

Yiso Bahc’s project at ArtPace continues the artist’s interest in space and dislocation. In the gallery, Bahc removed a large portion of the newly built wall and placed it on the floor, leaving its rough details—wooden beams and drywall—intact. Bahc then projects live video images from cameras installed on ArtPace’s roof onto the floor-bound wall or “screen.” Multiple projectors create an inverted collage of San Antonio’s horizon and the seemingly endless Texas sky. Bahc deftly shifts perspective so viewers seem to look out as they actually peer down and remain inside.

A second piece presents a more imaginary landscape. Updating the icon of a message in a bottle, the artist has launched into the Gulf of Mexico a bottle containing a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking device. The GPS, sealed within a modest, plastic bottle, transmits a signal of its precise location as it floats in the sea. Bahc charts a route of an unpredictable, aimless journey by marking the gallery’s wall. The viewer imagines an experience “at sea” and without bearings. The piece is both finite and endless: when the battery in the device dies, the bottle will disappear from our mapping knowledge but not from the earth. With the drifting bottle, Bahc seems to question the limits of our knowledge about existence, future, and fate.

In both pieces, real-time and surveillance are placed in the context of nature, creating a poetic meditation. With the projected sky, the viewer searches, waits for action to appear. Conversely, with the bottle floating in the sea, the sculpture is the action; although it is powerless in its direction, dependent on the current to chart its course. Quiet and open-ended, Bahc’s work reflects on ideas of passage—the flow of time and crossings of boundaries.

http://www.artpace.org/aboutTheExhibition.php?axid=95&sort=artist