Wild Things' Forts

        This past Tuesday I wrote a lesson plan about forts (for my cultural/developmental art ed class) so when I saw these I knew I absolutely had to post them. I'm not 100% on the concept of the project, which is supposedly Where the Wild Things Are inspired (all this extra nonsense is starting to be overload and taking away from the actual movie a little for me, but I guess it's to be expected with such an adored story). Anyway, the project seems to have been inspired by a similar project Kelly Burgess did, where she asked people to build forts and fill them with what they love, then photographed them.
        The project itself is a collaboration between the "booooooom" arts blog, and "We Love You So", Spike Jonze and Co.'s blog. (And because of their involvement the prize for the winner of the project was a "bus shelter sized" Where the Wild Things Are poster! not bad...) Basically booooooom told their readers to build forts and send them a picture.
        I won't get too into depth regarding what I think fort-building is about visually and artistically, since I just basically wrote a paper on it, but I will say that the seemingly universal desire to create these spaces is very interesting... Not surprisingly my favorites were the ones with really beautiful lighting, but all of the different fabrics and materials used are really great. Looking through the eight pages (!) of forts really made me want to make one of my own. I might have to in these coming winter months.

Forts 1, Forts 2, Forts 3, Forts 4, Forts 5, Forts 6, Forts 7, Forts 8
booooooom blog
We love you so blog
Kelly Burgess' website




images: booooooom.com

MPH Art Salon

        I've been (and will be for the next few weeks) really busy because of midterms, and since I don't really have the time to dedicate to writing up an artist today; shameless self-promotion! In all seriousness though, this show is for a really good cause. The Michael Peter Hayes Art Salon is currently having a show of ATCs (artist trading cards), and the participating artists got to decide if they would donate 50 or 100% of the proceeds for their pieces (set at $50 each) to the National Cancer Center.
        As someone who has had people very close to me both overcome as well as pass away from cancer, it is something that has had a heavy effect on my life, and I know that a growing number of people are affected in some way by it. Being a part of this show was my way to honor these people, as well as contribute to fighting cancer and promoting cancer awareness (my pieces are all 100% contributions). The four trading cards that I created are, albeit in a quiet way and personal way, in conversation with the effects of cancer on the way I live my life.
        If you live nearby Locust Valley, NY, you should definitely check out the show, which is open until November 27th. The artists involved are highly talented and some even have pieces in museum collections.

Exhibit page (the first card (with the owls) is one of mine!)
general info on what ATCs are

And here's the gallery info if you'd like to go:

MPH Art Salon
169 Forest Avenue, Locust Valley, NY 11560
516.671.5011
www.mphsalon.com

(click to enlarge poster)

images: ATC poster, c. mph salon and respective artists
first image, "heart", c. daylynn richards

Beverly Semmes

        Beverly Semmes (a graduate of SMFA) gave a lecture at the MFA yesterday. Her work is often described as, and certainly appears to be, very feminist, so I was surprised and interested to hear that this was not her foremost concern, or even something that she had originally considered. Semmes described how one of her earlier pieces had been written up as a "pool of menstrual blood", and how she had been surprised and embarrassed, thinking that she had simply been making landscapes.
        It is impossible in contextualizing Semmes' work to ignore the feminist connotations of what she has created, intended or not. She works in female garments, placed together with empty vessels (either clay or glass, both of which are made by coiling). In order to understand where Semmes is really coming from though, it is important to look back at where she is stemming from.
        Out of grad school Semmes and her boyfriend (now husband) moved to a psychiatric hospital - where he worked and they were offered free housing. There Semmes became consumed by the hospital's extremely well manicured garden. She began to making garments which reflected the space, and making super-8 films of friends wearing the garments and walking around the garden (second image). It is here that Semmes identity as an artist began to become more apparent. She described the way no one could quite do it the way she wanted. People moved too fast, looked back at the camera, overacted. It was obvious that even if she could not express it at the time, she had a clear intentionality for these pieces. She described it as something like the "marking" or "claiming" of space.
        This continued into her other pieces. By using scale, color, and once even smell, Semmes has a complete control over space. She chooses colors which she describes as both beautiful and nauseating, sometimes with a goal of "color contamination", where nothing is safe from the color, reflecting off of walls, clothes and skin of observers. She plays with this even further in pieces where the garment is the same color as the walls, making it not only difficult to locate but almost claiming the entire room as her art. She ups the scale in every one of her pieces, making dresses that are unwearably huge and with oddly pushed proportions.
        One of her more interesting pieces (in my opinion) was a small room, with orange curtains surrounding it, a couple of red pots, and a large circle of tan bandaids stuck to the floor in the middle of the room. Semmes states that although it cannot be taken too literally (which would leave no place for the pots) she thinks that the bandaids were in some ways standing in for skin, and the curtains one of her dresses. This places the viewer in an undefined space, between skin and fabric, something I thought was really cool, and goes along with her interest in marking or claiming space.
        She showed and discussed work than I can describe here (I unfortunately was unable to find pictures of most of this work, including much of what I was so interested in), but some other things she showed included giant fluorescent yellow "poops" with a guard dressed in the same yellow, a sea of pink fabric (the guard again dressed in the same color, and often chosen to be an older woman), video and images of Semmes watching her feet (an exploration, she says, of the self-absorption involved in being an artist), and a collaboration with a dance studio - something which she again like her early super-8 films, disliked her lack of control over, and ended up making new work in response to this.
        If you ever get an opportunity to see her work, I could not advise more that you do so. It is difficult to find too many images of her work on the web, and that aside her work is of an extremely experiential nature, and I have a feeling that photos only begin to scratch the surface.

Semmes' website
70min conversation lecture with Semmes and Glenn Adamson at the PA ICA




images: various sources including beverlysemmesstudio.com

Shin Murayama

        I happened upon Shin Murayama's series Valhalla (first two images), on I Don't Like Mondays, an online boutique for young rising designers. The series is not only really cool, but 50% of the proceeds go to Designers Against Aids. Valhalla consists of four masks, each with their own meaning (described in an interview) and made from what seems to be recycled materials. They feature beautiful stitching and a clear awareness of texture and material.
        Murayama, (who is 32) has worked professionally in the fashion industry since 2004, though he is unsure whether his work lies on the "arts" or "fashion" side of things (though if you ask me these worlds can coexist, and certainly do in his work), and in his interview with I Don't Like Mondays says, "I still don't know if I am an artist yet."
        Looking at his work I would say absolutely yes, but I think whether one defines themselves as an artist or not is entirely personal. Check out his work and be the judge for yourself.

I Don't Like Mondays Murayama feature
I Don't Like Mondays Myrayama interview
Vogue Hommes Japan feature
Designers Against Aids




images: idontlikemondays.us

Karl Baden

        This past Thursday I went to another photographer's lecture at my school with less than high expectations and came away with a fresh view on things.
        I went to the lecture (Boston area photographer Karl Baden) only knowing of Everyday, which he began in 1987, and consists of straight on neutral images of Baden's face, taken once a day for what is coming up on 23 years. (I haven't seen the project in person, and had only seen documentation of it as it was presented in the Howard Yezerski Gallery in 2007 - as small photographs arranged chronologically on three walls of a room). An interesting concept, but I was unsure what made it too different from all the (horrendous) time lapse photo a day nonsense everyone is doing of themselves on youtube these days.
        As it turned out, not only is Baden's body of work much more expansive than this (not a surprise, I was not expecting that this had been his only project) but the different ways Everyday have been presented were also particularly interesting and made a good argument for the ability of photography to be entirely transformed by the way it's presented.
        Baden started the project based on his interest in incremental change, specifically the way that if you look at the pictures one by one in order change is hardly noticeable, but if you look at the first and the last it's entirely in your face. He has made an effort to show the series of photographs differently each time, and the setup has ranged from simply being installed on a wall (such as at the Yezerski Gallery, where they were available individually for sale for I forget, something like $10), to buttons of just his eye for each election year, to all shrunken down to barely thumbnail size and featured on a single piece of paper, to two time lapsed pieces shown together - of the same video length but increasing by different increments of time - one by day and one by month. He has also made a special piece, covering a year in the 1990's when he was diagnosed with and overcame prostate cancer. The piece is a ~15minute time lapse of the year's worth of faces, with audio from conversations with doctors and family members. The piece is a particularly strong look into the effects of cancer, which are so infrequently seen by those who are not personally effected by it. Comparable to Hannah Wilke's self portraits of her deterioration from Lymphoma (a major difference being that she passed away from it, in 1993), Baden's work is particularly strong because you are confronted with extremely personal dialog, while being looked directly in the eye by Baden's thinning face.
        His other and earlier work also displays a heavy interest in time and the ability to occupy more than one space in one time, (or visa versa) as well as a much more humorous edge. He began with street photography and self-portraits while traveling the across US in his twenties, which he then described as "self-images"- because he believed they were not self-reflective, something he now laughs about acknowledging that they couldn't have been more so. The images are both awkward and funny, featuring things such as his open fist around his stubbled chin against a sunset, and employed a great deal of double exposing (all of his great strange work was done pre-photoshop, and usually in camera, though in a later project also by cutting up prints and inserting himself into other photographs). This evolved to using sheets of paper to plan out entire roles of film so that the contact sheet would create a surrealistic mutant composed entirely of Baden's body parts. He also created collages, scratched and burned negatives and used selective toning (later abandoning such projects that were non-replicable, something he believes is an important part of photography). Though much of his work is humorous, he notes that it is always "about photography".
        Other projects he presented included images created by printing pieces of the negatives that are next to one another on the film (something that is done more frequently now, but he did not know of anyone doing at the time, and used to explore the idea of two spaces existing in one time), the documentation of his wife's pregnancy and his daughter's babyhood (culminating in a book with simultaneously humorous and yet very serious pages from his diary at the time), and a project where he inserted himself into pictures that have ended up with particular weight in photo history.
        An all around interesting man... I really liked the way he thinks.

All of the Everyday shots
Baden's Yezerski Gallery page
Boston.com write-up of the 2007 show at the Yezerski Gallery
Covering Photography Baden's web project, "a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design."




images: various sources, c. Karl Baden

Peter Callesen

        I entered into Peter Callesen's world through his performance piece Palace of Dreams, which consisted of a white castle floating in the middle of a lake, to which the viewer would be rowed out to (by Callesen), left alone in the castle for half an hours, then picked up and rowed back to shore. The piece is very representative of Callesen's work, which in its playful nature examines greater concepts, existing simultaneously in reality and a strange dream-like state.
        A post could be written for each of the mediums Callesen works in, which is not to say that his work is not cohesive, because it certainly is, rather that his body of work is so large and the attention paid to each section of what he does is such that it seems silly to try and tackle all of Callesen in one shot. Because of this, I will keep it relatively brief and can only plead that you check out his website for a more comprehensive taste.
        In subject matter, it is easy to see why I am attracted to Callesen's work, he repeatedly goes back to my three favorite things; birds, skeletons and houses. His work is executed so perfectly that one wonders if he is possibly insane. In particular his papercuts, which are absolutely breathtaking, have such a degree of perfection and minute detail that it seems both obsessive and unreal.
        In his artist statements Callesen refers to fairy tales, and the magic and in some ways tragic implications of papercut - something that is reflected in many of his pieces, through delicate images of death and decay. One of his installations (untitled, last image shown here) requires the viewer to "bend down to level of a child" to enter. It is clear that Callesen is playing with connections to childhood, and perhaps childhood interpretations of the world.
        Callesen is also a performance, installation, and 2d artist and sculptor.

Callesen's website (lots of images, various writing pieces done on Callesen, artist statements, current exhibitions, etc etc)




images: petercallesen.com

Joyce McDaniel

        Last week Joyce McDaniel came into GASP (the gallery where I work) to drop off her submission for Bag It!, our gala silent auction this Friday, and I was reminded of how much I absolutely love her work. McDaniel teaches at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and I took a course with her in the fall of last year. The class, which was an introduction to welding, had three teachers, and they started the course by each giving a short presentation on their own work, something that was unique (to my personal experience) at the school, and something that I thought was really important and exciting.
        I immediately fell for McDaniel's work, which juxtaposes delicate dress form and handmade paper with steel into the absolutely most amazing and tactile sculptures. The pieces seem directly representative of McDaniel herself, who is not an imposing person (her small stature belies the strength of her work) and is very sweet, but is also an extremely strong and inspiring woman. Her pieces speak powerfully about identity, femininity, and communication, and truly read as visual texts.
        My favorite series of hers makes reference to Virginia Woolf, who McDaniel feels a particular connection to,
        "Virginia Woolf queried what it means to be female; what it means to bear burdens of subordination, accommodation, patterns of lower expectations, rage, even quiet despair. Her life, work and death have struck a resonant cord within me. She chose to own her own death by filling her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse. In my attempt to understand that event, I created a series of work paying sculptural homage to her. This piece is part of a series of work dedicated to Virginia Woolf."
(statement specifically in reference to Monday or Tuesday, last piece shown here)
        McDaniel captures Woolf in a poetic way that can only be explained as a visual equivalent to Woolf's own writing. One can sense the exact "quiet despair" and weight she has described. McDaniel's decision to include the soft round rocks in these pieces makes them particularly strong. Anyone familiar with Woolf's story will read it in the pieces, and visually it is a stunning choice.

McDaniel's website




images: joycemcdanielart.com

La Castiglione & Pierre-Louis Pierson

        We just learned about this woman in my early photography history course, and I absolutely HAD to write about her. Virginia Oldoini, Countess di Castiglione, or as she was better known, La Castiglione, was possibly the original badass. Considered to be the most beautiful woman of her time (1837-1899), La Castiglione was also rumored to have been an Italian or Russian (or both!) spy. She had a two year affair with Napoleon III, which lead to a separation from her arranged marriage to Count Francesco Verasis di Castiglione, and her entrance into the European elite.
        In 1856 La Castiglione began a forty year collaboration with Pierre-Louis Pierson, a French court photographer. She posed not only in her extravagant gowns (which she was well known for), but in various costumes, taking on narrative roles, and later painting on the prints with gouache. She also photographed various uncovered parts of her body, including her feet and legs, which was absolutely unheard of and extremely racy at the time.
        If you are at all familiar with contemporary photography, you will note that she would seem to be the predecessor to a slew of female self-portraitists (though La Castiglione was not controlling the camera herself, she was clearly entirely in control of all other aspects), including Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman. So cool.

2000 MET exhibit "La Divine Comtesse"
"La Divine Comtesse" (book from the MET show) on googlebooks (lots of pictures!)




images: metmuseum.org

Joan Fontcuberta & Pere Formiguera

        If I constructed a list of past exhibitions that I wish I could have seen first hand, Joan Fontcuberta & Pere Formiguera's Fauna (1987) would possibly be at the very top of the list.
        Fauna, also referred to as Secret Fauna and Dr. Ameisenhaufen's Fauna, originally released as a "serious" piece of journalism and later turned exhibition, was set up as the "long lost" zoological findings of "Dr. Ameisenhaufen", a German who had "mysteriously disappeared" in 1955. The exhibition included a collection of photographs of strange animals (both in the field and in laboratories), field notes (in German and English), sketches, x-rays, tapes of the animal's sounds, dissected and reconstructed stuffed specimen, letters and diaries, and a film with people talking about Ameisenhaufen's life.
        Everything in and about the exhibition was fake. Fontcuberta made the images, and Fomiguera wrote the accompanying text. (Ameisenhaufen and Fomiguera both translate to "anthill", and Ameisenhaufen's assistant Hans von Kubert bears a striking oral similarity to Joan Fontcuberta.) The photographs, which are really just too fantastic to believe in the first place, were created through photocollage as well as by dissembling taxidermy and creating new frankenstein creatures. Fomiguera perfects the scientific jargon to pull things together in a way that is just over the top enough to make the viewer question if it's for real.
        I believe that the project was brilliant. The playfulness and humor is perfect, and it was executed, as I mentioned, to just the right degree. In her September 1988 review of the show for the New York Times, Roberta Smith questions if it's truly "art". It is always risky to try and pin down what "can" and "can't" be labeled art, and she acknowledges this, then continues on as though she is some sort of hero by confronting such a frequently danced around question. Though she does call the exhibition wonderful, and attempts to back up her argument with references to other controversial pieces and stating whether she considers them to be "art" or "something else" I have to say that I think she is pretty off on this one. I'll keep it brief because I could write a whole essay in response to hers, but she says in reference to Fauna as well as works by Mapplethorpe and Hockney, "...all this work seemed to reside in a kind of esthetic no man's land between art and something else, a something else that was in some ways more beautiful, skillful and accessible and, above all, more instantly consumable than actual art" - suggesting that art has to be on some sort of high, inaccessible level in order to be considered art. I think that this is crap, and that Fauna is a perfect example of art that doesn't need to be picked apart and ambled over in order to be appreciated.
        The duo, as well as museums and galleries that displayed the project, also received criticism because of its "deceptive" nature. Though after a moment of serious examination it is clearly a spoof, people felt as though it called the "authority of the photograph into question", and wrote it off (much like Smith) as a "literary hoax" vs. a piece of art. This seems even more silly to me than the last issue, because though in the 80's there was not photoshop and images were not being manipulated as frequently as they are now, photographs have been altered since their invention in the 1800s. It seems absolutely ludicrous to me that people were up in arms about this, when things such as spirit photography have been engineered into reality since the accidental realization of double exposures. If it does not immediately occur to you that you should second guess a scientific study involving photographs of winged monkeys then you should be worried about yourself, not the authenticity of photography. It is this authenticity that photography is so frequently inherently given that Fontcuberta and Formiguera were attempting to playfully call attention to.
        Anyway, I think it is most undoubtedly art (because what good is art if it's a. only accessible to the high and elite, and b. it can't occasionally make you think AND laugh?) and that it's a great piece. There exists a book of the entire "study", but it would seem that it's somewhat hard to come across. Hopefully some day I'll get to see a copy. Until then, try a google search! (If anyone can find a good link with the images feel free to post it, I couldn't find one).

Fontcuberta's (extremely sparse) website
September 1988 NYTimes article
July 1988 NYTimes article, also by Smith





images: various sources, c. Joan Fontcuberta & Pere Formiguera

Hitoshi Nomura

        We looked at Hitoshi Nomura's Moon Score (above) in my contemporary photo history class last year. While visually it is not the sort of thing that would typically grab my attention, conceptually the project is quite cool, and while clearing out the many image files on my laptop a few nights ago, I cam across it once again and was inspired to look up the rest of Nomura's body of work.
        In Moon Score (1975-1979), Nomura photographed the moon on film marked with five lines (like staff paper). The project was supposedly inspired by Nomura spotting the moon moving behind telephone wires. In an early exhibition of the piece, visitors began to hum the "score", and later exhibitions featured a CD with a string quartet or chorus performing the score.
        His early work, which could be likened in concept to the work of earthworks artists such as Andy Goldsworthy, discussed "invisible concepts, such as ‘gravity’ or ‘time'", using for example cardboard towers, which were left to such effects, and documented over time. This brand of thinking moved Nomura to begin looking to the skies, as well as the earth (specifically fossils), and his Moon Score came out of this observation of the patterns of the sun and moon across the sky.
        His work, which takes on photographic and sculptural forms (often incorporating both), both displays the natural beauty of these processes of motion and time, but explores the concepts and their relation to humanity as well.
        In May - July of this past year, Nomura (who is 64, boasting a 40 year career) had a retrospective at the National Art Center, Tokyo. Their write-up on it is quite good, however unfortunately it has no images of the exhibition or his work.

NATC Retrospective page
Review of the retrospective from the Japan Times
Some nice images of Nomura's work (be sure to click "see more artworks by this artist" as well)




images: artcourtgallery.com
source of Moon Score image unknown, but c. Hitoshi Nomura

Dinah Hayt & Matthieu Pabiot

        Another shorter post... I've become really interested in men's fashion spreads lately. This has a lot of influences, ranging from my love of the androgynous representations and fashion to the fact that I myself rarely photograph men. This spread in particular grabbed my attention (I realized later that it is reminiscent of The Compagnia della Fortezza's costumes for "Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization" which I wrote about in July, I think it may be the ears that are making me think of it).
        "The Play-Boys" was styled by Matthieu Pabiot and shot by Dinah Hayt for the October issue of 160g magazine (which just launched last month). I will add that it doesn't hurt that Mecca (the tattooed model, who is signed to Nathalie Models) has a really beautiful face, but the shoot is just really visually appetizing. The styling is expert, I love the mix of feminine and masculine pieces (the paired leather bra, wool blazer, and suede bicycle shorts are brilliant).
        I'm really intrigued by the handling of men in fashion. I think androgyny is beautiful. The images just got me thinking.

"The Play-Boys"
160g magazine




images: 160grams.com

Angélica Vis

        I happened across this first image by Angélica Vis while blog-wandering, and found my way to her flickr (and subsequently her blog and website). Though Vis' work as a whole is not particularly my personal favorite, she has some really, truly beautiful series mixed in.
        I absolutely fell in love with her photographs with jars (which seems to be a theme she is working out throughout her work), so I had to post a few. There is a good variety in the images, but my favorites are the ones where the jars are being held (in some there is no human presence) because there is something deeply personal and narrative about them this way. She is definitely on to a good thing here.

Vis' flickr
Vis' blog
Vis' website (this actually has the least images and is not in English - Vis is from the Netherlands - so I would actually recommend looking at one of the other two sources)



images: http://www.angelicavis.nl/blog/

Susanna Majuri

        Susanna Majuri's photographic work, which focuses mainly on the concept of water, is absolutely otherworldly. She manages to capture strange moments, freezing time in a way that makes you more than typically conscious of what the camera accomplishes. Majuri's artist statement, overly poetic as it may be, definitely gives an apt description of her work.
        The image that attracted me to Majuri's work is the second one I have posted (Saviour, 2008), at first because it was such a strong image, then because I was curious about how she created it. Many of her images seem to be constructed in this manner (including the third image I've posted; Kaksoset (Gemini), 2009), and to be honest I am still not sure (I'm thinking anything from some talented constructions involving reflection to some serious photo manipulation but again, I really have no idea). Her strength comes from her ability to set up these odd scenarios, with a beautiful eye for color and texture, and to then capture (and freeze) the brief moments when everything comes together just perfectly. Her out of water images are equally strong (Kasvi (The Plant), 2004 being one of my favorite of her photographs overall - it's the last one I've posted), and still all reference water through color, typically in the dress of the model.
        Another thing that intrigued me about her work was the way the model's face is almost never visible; we see tangled hair, the backs of heads or features blurred by the water's surface. Whether this is intended to create a subtle entry point into the photograph, to shift focus from the young female models to the image as a whole, or to stand in for deeper subjects involving identity, it is successful on all counts.

        Majuri has created a series of beautiful and surreal images, that (for me at least) really pull the viewer in and make her want to know the whole story, then start to imagine it. Majuri says, “I want to show that one can find the fantastic from nearby. Fiction blends into our life. The imaginary is in fact actual.” I would say she is successful.

Majuri's Helsinki School page the Helsinki School is a group of photographers and videographers who have a relationship with the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland, which is where Majuri has her MA in Photography.
Adler Gallery this is the gallery that represents her, there is no direct link so you will have to click "artists" at the top of the page, then her name.

both pages have (slightly different varieties of) really nice quality images of her photography.





images: helsinkischool.fi

Unknown

        Short post today! I'm taking a history of photography course that focuses on the early part of photo history, and today we looked at some memento mori (memorial photographs) and spirit photography, which got me thinking and sent me on a winding google search when I got home.
        Along the way (on a really cool website, "A Collection of Collections") I stumbled across this series of six images and just thought they were really interesting and visually striking. (The curators of the website imagine the photos are from the 1920s-30s). The people appear to be partaking in "paranormal" activities, and I'm wondering what the intended use of the images was. They are clearly constructed images, as you can see from the image where the faint figure of a man (most likely presented as a "spirit photograph") is just visible to the left. This would have been done in the darkroom, and with (I imagine) the specific intentionality of proving this medium's abilities to communicate with the dead.
        It's interesting now with the tricks of the darkroom and photoshop exposed to consider that there was a time when photographs were considered objective and "true". Anyway, I just thought I would share these/let them marinate. They were just too odd to ignore.

Full set of images



images: brightbytes.com