Terri Timely (Ian Kibbey and Corey Creasey)

        Putting together this post required an unprecedented amount of unnecessary sleuthing on my part, caused by the deceptive name Terri Timely (which is two people and neither of their names are Terry). The confusion started while watching St. Vincent's music video for Actor Out of Work which is in some placed credited to "Terri Timely", and in others to "Ian Kibbey and Corey Creasey". It only got worse when one source listed Actor Out of Work to "Ian Kibbey and Corey Creasey" and in the same breath credited another St. Vincent video, Marrow to "Terri Timely". Then the Terri Timely website had both videos, and the "about" section was blank, with only a picture of two young men!

        Fortunately the issue has been resolved, and I give you Terri Timely; directing duo Ian Kibbey and Corey Creasey.

        As I sort of mentioned, I happened upon these artists while watching music videos of St. Vincent. Marrow, in particular, is very peculiarly shot, and fits better with the music (both in mood and in the actual rhythm of the filming) than maybe any other music video I've seen. I was immediately pulled in, and had to see more. As it turned out I had seen more of their work already (including the now confirmed to be them video for Actor Out of Work) (which is amazingly bizarre and slightly uncomfortable), and the video for Joanna Newsom's The Sprout and the Bean, which shares with Marrow interesting and fitting camera movements.
        I've been working my way through their online library and what interests me most about their music videos is just what I described about Marrow (my personal fave) and The Sprout and the Bean; a perfect combination of the feel of the music and their own aesthetic, edited to the beat of the music (Modest Mouse's Invisible and Bobby Birdman's I Will Come Again are also good examples). There are also a couple videos that meander and cycle through sets really beautifully. And their compositions are always beautiful.

        Their short films reflect that a lot of the weirdness that occurs in their music videos are not only the product of having chosen somewhat strange musicians, rather that Terri Timely are probably even weirder on their own (this is a good thing). Their sense of a visual beat is also reflected in their short films, which are impeccably timed. Many of the short films are also HILARIOUS (I couldn't even tell you which are my favorites, and I don't want to ruin them for you by saying why anyway). If you're going to watch anything of theirs I'd head to the short films section first, but it's all amazing.

Terri Timely website
2006 interview with the two of them




images: territimely.com (stills from various videos)

Steve Hollinger

        Sorry this is late, I'm not sure what was going on but Blogger was NOT letting me post it! Last month I went to the south end for Boston's first fridays and while in the Walker Contemporary gallery one artist's work caught my eye, Steve Hollinger.
        His works are basically alive. There isn't really another way to word it. The couple of his pieces on display were like a small window into some weird 19th century laboratory. Responding to temperature and light, many of Hollinger's works are physically active. The pieces that I saw twirled around in strange vials of water and light (first image), or twitched in a way that was so bizarrely lifelike (his "pods") you probably could have told me they were something alien and I would've been willing to buy it. Another piece had vials of polariod emulsion catching light (last image).
        As someone who is very much into sci-fi, and obviously very much into anything visually pleasing, his works were particularly attracting, as they invoke a sort of eerie feeling of both past and future, while also being really stunning. If you can't see his work in person, you should at least watch the video I've linked here, which shows his pieces doing their thing.

Video of some of Hollinger's works in action
Hollinger's website
Walker Contemporary site




images: stevehollinger.com

The Door (Juanita Wilson, Tim Fleming)

        I've been trying to watch some of the shorts and animations that were nominated for Oscars earlier this month, and one that caught my eye was The Door, which was written and directed by Juanita Wilson. The short, which is just shy of seventeen minutes, is based on the "MONOLOGUE ABOUT A WHOLE LIFE WRITTEN DOWN ON DOORS, the testimony of Nikolai Fomich Kalugin", by Svetlana Alexievich, which follows the attested story of a man in post-Chernobyl Pripyat and Kiev.

        As a college photography student who is interested in abandoned spaces, I have on more than one occasion been shown work by photographers who have gone into Pripyat (Robert Polidori being one). Though the photographs are always hauntingly beautiful and extremely sad, they still lack the full story, only representing the general sense of loss and sadness that is present in many photographs of abandoned (for whatever reason) spaces. They, in my opinion, therefor do not effectively convey the absolute devastation the Chernobyl disaster left behind.
        Pripyat is an intriguing place, I have always been entranced by the present-day photographs of the famous ferris-wheel and the whole post-apocalyptic quiet it exudes. The problem is that the photographs are admittedly romanticized, and looking at them often makes me more interested in exploring than considering the disaster that occurred there (and I won't enter certain abandoned spaces such as mental hospitals out of respect of the horrors people had to endure there, so distracting me from who inhabited the space is not easy). The Door manages to strip the space of this romanticism while maintaining a level of beauty. It makes the personal connection that the photographs lack.

        Every frame of The Door could be a photograph. The filming (director of photography: Tim Fleming) is perfect, as is the color palette. The short opens with an unexplained action, a man stealing a door; and evolves into a story of loss and tradition. Just as nothing about the door is without deeper meaning, the short reveals the way in which nothing after Chernobyl was innocuous.
        A faculty member at my school and well-known artist once told me that "nostalgia is just memory without pain". While I can not fully agree with this statement (particularly in the context in which it was given), watching this film gave me an insight into what she was trying to say. The photographs are beautiful and nostalgic. They show the literal surface of Pripyat. The Door gives a truer (as it is not only based off a testimonial but structured in the same way as a memory) understanding of Pripyat and the memories that are trapped within it. As Toni Morrison would put it, the "rememories".
        The Door may be a short, but in the seventeen minutes they have accomplished everything about a place which other mediums and artists have been trying to capture for years.

The entire film as well as more information are available here.
*be warned that parts of it are not easy to watch, but it is definitely worth it.




images: screenshots from The Door.

iamamiwhoami

        Back for good and for real. I was originally intending to write a post on one of the many artists I've bookmarked over my absence, but because it is currently very late in the evening (or rather early in the morning) and I've been animating all day and have therefore lost my mind, I'll leave you with something a little more cryptic, which I stumbled upon today.

        A YouTube user by the name of "iamamiwhoami", has been periodically posting one-odd minute videos which I can not make heads or tails of, but am absolutely fully drawn to. I'm guessing that the channel belongs to the girl in every video (so I'll refer to the artist as she for now), but I am not claiming to know this as the whole thing is currently some sort of big secret. Quite a few commenters have theories as to who the girl is, but none of them are people that I'm familiar with, so I will not go there. (Her most recent video, posted two weeks ago, which jumps from one to almost five minutes in length, suggests that she is a musician.) This is the video that I first encountered, and is actually my least favorite, although it is still extremely intriguing, a little terrifying, and somehow beautiful.
        The video reminds me of a dream I might have if I had a cold and went to bed with some Sudafed having just watched the scene with the hand-eyed monster in Pan's Labyrinth. Creepy and wonderful. I thought at first that the stretching/bending of some of the shots might bother me (it often reads more as just "effect" than actually adding anything), but I came away less concerned about it and more involved in the general bizarreness of it all (her long eyelashes around hauntingly blue eyes, the strange men looking on), it has some really beautiful moments.
        I was more interested however, in the six shorter uploads, which seem to be pieces to one big puzzle, although they don't fit quite exactly. You'll have to watch them yourselves, as it is difficult to put my finger on what exactly draws me to them, but they are really beautifully filmed, and the editing goes well with the sound/music.
        I'm also really interested in the way the work is being released (in little snippets, and anonymously), and think that it's almost equally as conceptually important as the work itself, but that is a whole other discussion and I am way too exhausted for it. In any case, watch the videos, they're wonderfully bizarre.

iamamiwhoami's youtube channel




images: screen shots of iamamiwhoami's recent videos

Marc Johns

        While this blog is first and foremost a way for me to organize all the artists that I find inspiring, I couldn't help but include Marc Johns. (Not to put down his work, because I love it, I just haven't found any artists to write about lately that I'm really connected to or as inspired by as I have in the past). If you ever have bad days (I imagine you occasionally do), then those will be the days to look at his work. Johns' tiny illustrations are extremely minimalist (and in this very charming), but in their simpleness he packs a lot of humor and cleverness. Many of the illustrations are accompanied by small bits of text, which are equally short and sweet, and obvious the the most clever ways.
        His simple drawing style is something that I can relate to, but his sense of humor is something that is definitely unique to Johns. Many of his illustrations are also terribly strange (and by terribly I obviously mean brilliantly), another nod to his unique brain.
        Like I said, not too much to say, but if you're ever feeling sour here are a few places to check out some more of his work! :

Johns' website
Johns' flickr
Serious Drawings Book, which you can not buy (sold out) but there's a preview of a bunch of the pages, and it's really cool the way his sense of humor is apparent even in the setup/organization of the book..




images: flickr.com/photos/marcjohns

Andrew Gibbs

        While the rest of his work that I could find online seems less finished/realized than his video Florian (to CocoRosie's Houses off of 2007's The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn), I think it is absolutely worth posting this one piece by animator Andrew Gibbs.
        The video initially grabbed me with its style and because it appears to have been made using a technique that I'm currently learning, but as I watched I became more impressed with the seamless way the audio and video have been integrated. I would venture to say that if I were not so familiar with CocoRosie's music that I would have been unsure which came first, the animation or the sounds. He also effectively draws attention to some of the subtler/more unusual sounds within CocoRosie's compositions by giving them a visual cue, which made me really appreciate the way they were playing off one another, rather than only giving the song a storyline.
        It is also full of really beautifully strange moments (when the soldier uses thread from his coat to try and save a drowning woman, waves being represented as small hands, the way the beginning is tied back in at the very end). Definitely worth a watch.

Florian on youtube
Gibbs' Vimeo



images: screen grabs from Florian

Marilyn Manson

Marilyn Manson 1969-

        Sorry for the few days absence, I needed to collect my mind as I gear up for the start of a new semester.
        I was on Marilyn Manson's website trying to find clips of his film project Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll (which to my utter sadness still has no official set release date, though imdb says this year), and stumbled upon his paintings, which I had probably not looked at since my freshman year of high school. While some of them are inarguably pretty vulgar (to be expected), his painting style is absolutely beautiful and strange.
       Manson's paintings are done with watercolor, and sometimes absinthe, which he discovered accidentally, "I was drinking as I was painting and put my brush in the wrong one. It makes a nice stain, so I figured I didn't want to waste it." It sounds sort of over the top, but it's very him, and the images are still really cool, regardless of whatever associations you may have with the man behind them.

-Manson's website (artwork section)
*note: There are some paintings on his website that feature nazi imagery. Though Manson is a known shock-artist and most of his work is a little controversial, usually in a way I can appreciate, I just feel the need to say that I am NOT in support of these specific pieces.
-Some of his work is also on MTV's website with comments by Manson




images: marilynmanson.com

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman 1958-1981

        I've held off on writing about Francesca Woodman because she's probably my favorite photographer, and I've already written about her a good deal in essays, so my thoughts on her are numerous and somewhat non-linear. But at its base this blog is for tracking and organizing my inspirations, so I think it's time that I added her to the list.
        I was told my freshman year in college during a critique to look at her work. Somehow she had not been on my radar before then. I immediately fell in love with her highly poetic self-portraits. I scoured the internet for images, and read quite a few essays on her. Eventually I broke down and bought this book by Chris Townsend, which has 250 of her photographs (I bought it at the MFA bookstore for MUCH less, I'm not sure why it's so expensive on Amazon). I could pour over it a million times and still find a new photograph that I think is the most beautiful.
        Not only did Woodman have a natural eye for composition and make incredibly intelligent photographs (she references art history, literature), but her work made me for the first time consider photography as performance. Woodman was putting herself on display, not just her body but everything that was inside her, as she was working it out (her work was made from ages 13-22, when she died). Her haunting work explores the space between childhood and adulthood, femininity, sex, invisibility, reality, life, death.

The best online gallery I could find of her images is here.




images: heenan.net/woodman

Dan Estabrook

        As promised in my brass tea news years resolution; a contemporary male artist I had not previously heard of. Admittedly the tip came from yesterday's Morbid Anatomy snippet, but having just completed an early photo history course, this was just too much to pass up.
        Dan Estabrook uses only 19th century processes to create his intimate and surreal photographs. He is "working [my] way backwords through photo history to learn how to draw again".
        He got into photography through magazines for punk-rock and skateboarding culture, went on to do his undergrad at Harvard and MFA at UNI Urbana-Champaign, and now lives/works in Brooklyn. (His professor at Harvard was internationally known alternative process photographer Christopher James - who I've been dying to work with since high school, but he now works at the Art Institute of Boston where I'd be locked into only photography, something I'm unwilling to corner myself into).
        Estabrook says that he wants to "marry the image-making with the process so much so that they can't be separated", that is, to make images that don't depend on the method to be interesting, but that only make sense printed in their historic method. His methods are certainly difficult to overpower, whether or not the viewer has knowledge of the specific process, they are all recognizable as early photographic techniques, and with that comes a certain level of intrigue. There are plenty of artists using these techniques, he notes, and that he does not want to be one whose images only interest is that they were made a certain way.
        In my opinion they are successful in this, for not only would his images and compositions be interesting in another media (though admittedly possibly less-so), but what he is really driving at, his themes, are those which have transcended time and affected people always; love, life, sex, death. By using various early processes and placing them in a modern context he is immediately speaking about this.

        If you're really interested and want to know more about what actually drives his work, there's a $40 documentary dvd on him, which you can purchase here (there's also a good 5min preview you can watch, from which I got the quotes I've used here).


Estabrook's site
short bio on Estabrook




images: pathetica.net/artwork

Amy Cutler

        I was first attracted to Amy Cutler's illustrations because of the weird space they seem to occupy between nonsense and some sort of strange ritual. I wasn't quite sure what to make of them. I was interested.
        I stumbled across her when finding images for my post a little while back on Nikki S. Lee, whose work is carried by the Leslie Tonkonow gallery; which represents Amy Cutler. Her gouache illustrations are charming, but at the same time there is something unsettling about them. They are slightly off. Women performing mundane tasks (tasks that are particularly associated with females) are offset by slight peculiarities in the scene. (The perfect subtleness of the strangeness in her scenes can especially be seen in the first image, it took me a while to notice the women behind the trees.) The stark white absence of background leaves a large hole in the narrative which makes it clear the whole story is not being told. It makes them appear deceptively simple. They are nonetheless definitely narratives, however cryptic, or pieces of them at the very least.

Cutler at Tonkonow




images: various sources, c. Amy Cutler

Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith 1954-

        I meant to write about Kiki Smith around the time of SMFA's InsideOut sale (as she had a piece in it; Born last image - one of her many depictions of the red riding hood tale) but somehow I managed not to do so.
        Kiki Smith is one of those artists where I've had an impossible time choosing images to put up here. This is not only because I love her work so much (definitely one of the artists I aspire to be like), but also because she works across so many mediums that it's absolutely impossible to give any kind of window into the breadth of her work. Nevertheless, I have chosen some of my favorites, and tried to give a small taste of what she's about.
        Smith has said that she strongly identifies with her gender, and it is definitely clear in her work, which re-contextualizes and reconstructs stories, myths, and histories; through her female eye. The two sites I've included here have way more information about her than I could possibly share or even summarize, so I suggest you take a look at one or both.

-awesome MoMA interactive site from their 2003 show Kiki Smith: Prints, Books & Things with lots of her work and lots of info.
-Art:21 on Kiki Smith (in the "Stories" episode)






images: pbs.org & moma.org

Ashley Vick

        This past fall I went to the SoWa Open Market and happened upon the jewelry of Ashley Vick, who operates under the names Filomena Demarco Jewelry and Filomena's House. She is a grad of MassArt (bfa in metals), and her work is gorgeous.
        Particularly stand-out are her rings, which are hand carved (or hand formed) in wax and cast in sterling silver, so each is unique. I couldn't help myself, and ended up with her heart ring (first image far right) for christmas. I am definitely a collector of rings, I'm never without at least five, but this one has not left my hand since I got it a couple weeks ago. The shape is so feminine and natural, and you can really sense the hand-made aspect of it. It's clear that a lot of her goes into her rings. It really makes me feel good to wear it, which was particularly interesting to me after reading a statement on one of her sites, which reads;
"Vick remembers piling on her mother's jewelry with a more-is-better approach, and how beautiful it made her feel to wear it ... She thinks about how much jewelry went unworn and how it was locked away for safekeeping. The memory of this has shaped her relationship to jewelry. Vick believes it should be worn, and that the value of how good it feels to wear it is in fact more valuable than the object itself."
        Her intentions definitely shine through in her work.
        I found my way to her personal website (the one for all her metalwork not just her jewelry), and was entranced once again, particularly by an earlier piece of hers, a chunky cuff, which again displays her ability to effectively use natural forms, as it could be anything from an otherworldy worm to a root system.

Filomena Demarco Jewelry
Vick's Etsy
Vick's website




images: etsy.com/shop/FILOMENAsHouse & ashleyvick.com

José Guadalupe Posada

José Guadalupe Posada 1852-1913

        I was feeling really uninspired today, so I wasn't sure what to write about. I looked to my bookshelf for inspiration, and seeing my Images of Death in Mexican Prints book (which is amazing), thought I might write a quick one about Posada.
        If you've seen images relating to Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) you've probably seen one or two reproductions of his prints, one of the most famous being the etching La Catrina (1st image). Though his images of Día de los Muertos are often what are most frequently associated with him today, he actually started out as a political cartoonist (then commercial and advertising, but his illustrations continued to always have some sort of satyrical or political edge). Even La Catrina, which is now so iconic, was intended as a criticism of the upper class.

Online collection of some of his prints





images: artoftheprint.com