knifeandkey

[knifeandkey]

Big Bang Press is a small independent publisher located in the US and UK, representing emerging talent from the fan writing community.

I'm backing this Kickstarter! you should too <3 I wish I didn't have to wait until next year for Savage Creatures, but I'm sure it'll be worth it : ). 

[knifeandkey]

Kelly Sears!! After getting to hear the artist in class today and view some of her video works, I was super inspired! (wish it weren't so late in the semester, though:( ). This particular video, "In The Drift", was my favorite. It's fascinating to try and find the seams of fact and fiction within each of them, though. Sears uses appropriated images & video to deftly blend historical documentary style narrative with nontraditional animation, creating eerie artifacts that feel as real as the they pretend to be. Her videos are story-like and thoughtful, leaving just enough room for the imagination to personalize the tale.

"Kelly Sears is an animator and filmmaker living in Los Angeles, CA. She received a B.A. from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. Her collage animation media practice draws from genres such as experimental film, documentary, essay films, recycled cinema and critical fiction. She uses appropriated imagery from Post WW2 America, reworking discarded magazines, books, orphaned films and other ephemera, to investigate contemporary political narratives of power that include manifest destiny, expansionist doctrines, occupation, and surveillance. She uses a combination of analog and digital animation, video processing and sound design to intervene with the source images. Her work has screened at museums, galleries and film festivals, such as MOMA, The Hammer Museum, LACMA, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Machine Project, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Light Industry, Sundance Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Black Maria Film Festival. She has been awarded residencies from Yaddo, The Core Program/Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Galveston Artist Residency. Currently she teaches Video Art at Scripps College." (Quote via KellySears.com)

P.S. The bio somehow managed to miss mentioning that Kelly Sears is super awesome, so I felt like it had to be added.

[knifeandkey]

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman's oeuvre, in a word, is haunting. While beautiful and evocative, her photographs (many self-portraits or simply utilizing her own body) have a sense of quiet drama and sadness to them. Knowing of her tragic suicide, it's impossible not to search for some hint of her troubles within her images, but they're ephemeral and hard to grasp concretely. Woodman was an innovator with the camera, using long exposures to create many of her images as well as mirrors and environmental elements.

"Born in 1958 into a family of artists, Woodman began photographing at the age of 13. By the time she enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1975, she was already an accomplished artist with a remarkably mature and focused approach to her work. During her time at RISD, she spent a year in Rome, which proved an enormously fertile source of inspiration. After completing her degree, she moved to New York, where she made several large-scale personal projects and experimented with fashion photography. In 1981, at the age of 22, she committed suicide. Woodman’s untimely death is underscored by the startlingly compelling, complex, and artistically resolved body of work she produced during her short lifetime. Spanning the breadth of Woodman’s oeuvre, this presentation includes more than 120 vintage photographs, ranging from her earliest student experiments to her late, large-scale blueprint studies of caryatid-like figures for the ambitious Temple project (1980). The exhibition includes two of her artist books, which were an important form of expression, particularly at the end of her career. Woodman also experimented with moving images; six of her recently discovered and rarely seen short videos are presented in the exhibition."  (Quote via http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/past/exhibit/4432)

[knifeandkey]

Barbara Kruger

An old favorite of mine, the work Barbara Kruger is known for goes for the jugular. Utilizing a stark uniform red/black/white color scheme, Kruger's appropriated images are labeled incisively. Her juxtaposition of carefully chosen imagery and sharp, witty statements have an inherently political bent as she explores gender and identity issues. Her work makes the viewer think, but even if immediately turned aside, her messages stick. Graphic, pointed, and memorable.

"American conceptual/pop artist Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945 and left there in 1964 to attend Syracuse University. Early on she developed an interest in graphic design, poetry, writing and attended poetry readings.

After studying for a year at Syracuse she moved to New York where she began attending Parsons School of Design in 1965. She studied with fellow artists/photographers Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, who introduced Kruger to other photographers and fashion/magazine sub-cultures. After a year at Parsons, Kruger again left school and worked at Condé Nast Publications in 1966. Not long after she started to work at Mademoiselle magazine as an entry-level designer, she was promoted to head designer a year later.

Later still she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at “House and Garden”, “Aperture,” and did magazine layouts, book jacket designs, and freelance picture editing for other publications. Her decade of background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. Like Andy Warhol, Kruger was heavily influenced by her years working as a graphic designer." (quote via http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/feminist/Barbara-Kruger.html)

[knifeandkey]

Gillian Wearing

What I find most fascinating about Gillian Wearing is her exploration of identity, particularly via the past. Her use of masks to create self/family portraits brings up many questions about family, about the relations we're born into, about social relations. She also photographs herself wearing famous photographer's masks- such as Warhol and Diane Arbus. One that stood out was herself as Robert Mapplethorpe, recreating the striking image of Mapplethorpe clutching a skull-topped cane.

"Gillian Wearing was born in 1963 in Birmingham, England. After settling in London in 1983, she studied at the Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmiths College, University of London, earning a BFA in 1990. City Racing in London hosted her first solo exhibition in 1993. In her photographs and videos, Wearing records the confessions and interactions of ordinary people she befriends through chance encounters. Her work explores the differences between public and private life, the individual and society, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and fiction and fact. She has described her method as “editing life” and has acknowledged as influences Michael Apted’s ongoing series of documentaries Seven Up, begun in 1964, and Franc Roddam and Paul Watson’s The Family (1974), a popular British television program. In its candor and psychological intensity, Wearing’s work extends the traditions of photographic portraiture initiated by August Sander, Walker Evans, and Diane Arbus. Likewise, her oeuvre may be understood as an art-world harbinger of reality television." (Quote via http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/bios/866)

[knifeandkey]

Gregory Crewdson

American photographer Gregory Crewdson's photographs bring to mind the movie set. His dramatic tableau vivants are some of my favorites; he manages to imbue his images with a fantastic depth that draws the viewer to question the scenario and try to figure out the mystery, the narrative behind the images. His photographs brings to mind Spielberg and thoroughly American suburbia. I find his work strange, wonderful, and full of unspoken stories.

"Gregory Crewdson received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1985 and an MFA in photography from Yale in 1988. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe and is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York City. He is Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at the Yale University School of Art." (Quote via http://www.gagosian.com/artists/gregory-crewdson)

[knifeandkey]

Rineke Dijkstra

The transitionary qualities of Dijkstra's works are extraordinary; she goes out of her way to photograph subjects at the cusp of change, creating series that range from beachgoers to newly inducted soldiers to a singular young woman from childhood to motherhood. Her intent focus on transitionary stages finds a home in each image. What catches my attention is Dijkstra's laser-like focus; no matter what her physical subject, she finds the similarities and qualities of the image that relate to liminal states.

"Photographer and video artist Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b.1959) was born in Sittard, the Netherlands, and attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1981 until 1986. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1984 at Amsterdam’s Gallery de Moor. Dijkstra worked as a professional portrait photographer until the 1990s, when she began incorporating her own artistic style into portraiture. One of her first major series, Beaches (1992–1996), comprised of portraits of adolescents in bathing suits, expanded her audience to the international level. Dijkstra uses a wide array of models for her photographs, including club-goers, school children, soldiers, and young mothers with their newborn babies." (Quote via http://www.artnet.com/artists/Rineke-Dijkstra/)

[knifeandkey]

Exhibition Review: Monograph

Monograph is a survey of more than three decades of James Welling's work. What I was most impressed by is his consistent, persistent creativity. Welling's interest in the medium of photography is displayed clearly in his exploration of just what photography itself could do uniquely, particularly in his use of the photogram. I found his early works most intriguing, the Los Angeles photographs and the connecticut photographs. I found a certain innate relation to them that I didn't find in many of his other works, such as the survey of railroads and his playful gelatin series. I was left with a sense of the dedication Welling has to photography, and reminded of the ever flexible boundaries of the medium itself.

[knifeandkey]

Exhibition Review: On Pleasure Bent

I went to go see Mark Leckey's show at the Hammer museum. It was small, and seemed to serve primarily as a vehicle to preview for his next video (of the same title). The exhibition also included a trailer for this. The show was vibrant and quite loudly sexual, albeit in a very, very masculine fashion. Each element of the show seemed to serve as a sort of self-portrait, though the short video "Pearl Vision" is the only one specifically billed as such. His work dwells on desire, repeatedly bringing to the forefront the feminine form (whether directly or by insinuation). Overall, I felt that the exhibition was succinct, and that the video work was well made. In reference to his interest in video, several of the exhibition pieces were in the form of oversized cardboard standees, such as those seen in cinemas for advertising. 

[knifeandkey]

James Casebere

James Casebere creates unique worlds in miniature. In the last two examples, small structures are created and then flooded; the sense of desolation is palpable. His works possess a silence, a certain quiet that nonetheless asserts itself on the viewer. An element that draws me into his images is the not-quite-perfection of his replications; they aren't exactly real, but they create their own reality into which they bring the viewer.

"For the last thirty years Casebere has consistently devised increasingly complex models and photographed them in his studio. Based solidly on an understanding of architecture as well as art historical and cinematic sources, Casebere's abandoned spaces are hauntingly evocative.  His table-sized constructions are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms. Starting with Sonsbeek ’86, in Arnhem, Holland and ending around 1991 Casebere also made large scale sculpture installations.

Early bodies of work focused on images of the suburban home. He followed this with both photographs and sculptural installations dealing with the myth of the American West.  In the early 1990s, Casebere turned his attention to the development of different cultural institutions during the enlightenment, and their representation as architectural types. With his photographs of prisons in particular, he critically addressed contemporary attitudes and approaches to incarceration, as well as metaphorically pointing to relationships of social control, and social structure in the broader society." (quote via JamesCasebere.net)

[knifeandkey]

Uta Barth

Barth's images recall the act of seeing, and more intimately, the feeling of a specific moment. Barth's imagery converges on the point between the camera lens and the biological lens of the eye. In stilling the fleeting nature of these moments (of the light and the way it delineates and illustrates the world around us), Barth gives the viewer time to revel in the beauty of the everyday.

"Uta Barth is an artist whose evocative, abstract photographs explore the nature of vision and the difference between how a human sees reality and how a camera records it. In contrast to documentary and confessional modes of photography, Barth intentionally depicts mundane or incidental objects in nondescript surroundings in order to focus attention on the fundamental act of looking and the process of perception." (quote via http://www.macfound.org/fellows/859/)

[knifeandkey]

Roger Ballen

What attracts me to Roger Ballen is his use of space; he creates flatness out of dimensionality, and creates images with a distinctly graphic sense of design. There's a surreal beauty to his work, a hint of otherworldliness in the flat forms and twisting wires. He uses markmaking, whether literal or through repeated use of wires, to add interest and help halt the depth of the images. This flatness forces the viewer to focus on the details of the image (such as the man's face in the third photograph).

"I have been shooting black and white film for nearly fifty years now. I believe I am part of the last generation that will grow up with this media. Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey. If an artist is one who spends his life trying to define his being, I guess I would have to call myself an artist."    (introductory quote via RogerBallen.com)

[knifeandkey]

Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell's work lives most vibrantly at the point of juxtaposition. He forges fascinating new relationships between objects, creating a visual dialogue for the viewer to share in. His work possesses a uniquely photographic quality that plays out consistently through his oeuvre; as an artist, he constantly plays with the boundaries of photography as a discipline and finds new manners of expression. Many of his photographs are created using a camera obscura he created, a hallmark of his work.

"Morell was born in Cuba in 1948. At age 13 he fled to the U.S. with his family, where they settled in New York City. When asked how he initially became interested in photography, he goes back to his days at Bowdoin College in Maine. “I wanted to study engineering, physics and math,” he recalls, “but I didn’t do so well with those subjects.” In 1969, he took a photography course from John McKee, an instructor he describes as amazing. “It was like a light went on,” says Morell. “Photography was such a clear medium for me, and I knew right away that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.” Prior to taking McKee’s class, he didn’t view the arts as being “in the cards” for him." (quote via The Photographer's Forum)

[knifeandkey]

Open My Glade: Pipilotti Rist Open My Glade serves as a pointed look at the nature of advertisement. Played every hour in a busy New York block, the screen displaying the video perched high over the passersby as Pipilotti vies for their attention, straining and stretching against the glass in an odd almost satiric feeling version of an advertisement. To me it speaks of the strenuous lengths advertisers will go to to reach their wanted demographics, and the strange desperation of that.

[knifeandkey]

Paul Pfeiffer & evidence of erasure

Paul Pfeiffer's work reminds the viewer of the impermanence of self, and the frail nature of mortality. I see this as particularly evident in his video of a erased man working in a soup kitchen; the line files by, the soup is dispensed, but the body and (almost more importantly?) the face of the giver is invisible. This also seems to reference to the particularlyi biblical dea that no amount of good deeds would be worth anything to the individual in the end.  The imperfect erasure of his technique leaves a strange, shimmering shadow of the figure behind, but with nothing to identify them by. The video loop of the basketball trophy also shows this idea in another way, though focusing on the triumphant victory as leaving no focus on anything but the glittering token, the physical proof of it. I was unable to find any of his videos online to post a link to, but if I find a useable copy i'll post it here to illustrate my thoughts.

[knifeandkey]

I attended Paris Photo! I had never been to a large photographic exhibition before, and found the experience to be both enjoyable and enlightening. I appreciated the chance to both see works I had only seen in print and online as well as be exposed to a myriad of new artists.  A few of my favorite parts of the Paris Photo experience: -Seeing Chris Marker's La Jetee with great video quality and sound (I've only seen it via Youtube before). It adds a whole new dimension to the work to see it projected and to just sit and let the sounds of the narrative  envelop you. -Miles Aldridge's work. Talk about presentation! The photographs were matted in bright neon colors, perfectly suited to their photographs. Looking past the enjoyable spectacle, though, these images were some of the ones that gathered my attention the most throughout the show. Unfortunately, I don't have the individual names of his works. I also bought my first book of photographs, Natsumi Hayashi's Today's Levitation. Overall, I left Paris Photo LA feeling renewed, refreshed, and ready to push on forward with my own work and aspire to greater heights.

[knifeandkey]

My thoughts on the music collaboration project/workshop:

I really enjoyed the experience, and the collaborative aspect of it (as well as our second project). While somewhat stressful, it was odd yet gratifying to hear an audio representation of my visual creation. The visiting artist, Quintan Ana Wikswo, I found to be very clear and well-spoken, intelligent and opinionated. I'll be keeping her Field Guide for future reference. It was very interesting to hear an overview of the collaboration field and experiences therein, considering that I primarily work solo. However, that may not always be possible with future projects, so I appreciated the overview of the process and troubles one could set upon.I thought the comments about incompatibility being, in some ways, more interesting than working with someone who is entirely compatible with our thoughts and viewpoints- it's a thought that initially sounds backwards, but there's truth to it. The spark of different opinions could drive a project forward. Driving through opposition to create interest, to create a project that is more than the sum of its parts.

I was intrigued by Wikswo's poetry, and the global nature of her work. She pursues humanitarian interests, doing projects on German internment camps and holocaust museums. Social justice - or the injustices of the past- seem to be an important part of her focus, and I'm interested in learning more about her work.