Apple is hosting a new contest for student photographers. Its called the Insomnia Photo Festival and it will take place this Friday on April 27th at 5pm. A photography assignment will be posted at http://www.apple.com/education/insomnia/ to be completed and submitted within 24 hours.
Plot Outline In 2027, in a chaotic world in which humans can no longer procreate, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea, where her child’s birth may help scientists save the future of humankind.
Children of Men is a 2006 Academy Award-nominated apocalyptic science fiction film directed by Alfonso Cuarón and distributed and co-produced by Universal Pictures. Loosely adapted from P.D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men, the cast includes Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Caine. The film was a co-production between companies based in the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. Released on September 22, 2006 in the UK and on December 25 in the US, Children of Men was nominated for three Oscars at the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in 2007.
The film is set in a dystopian 2027, in which two decades of global infertility have left the entire human race with less than a century before extinction. The resulting widespread societal collapse has led to terrorism, environmental destruction, and the creation of millions of refugees. In Britain, where the film is set, the government is creating a new social order based on the persecution of illegal immigrants. Humanity’s best apparent hope lies with the secretive Human Project, a group working to save the human species. When a pregnant West African refugee named Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) surfaces, civil servant Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is persuaded to transport her to a rendezvous with the Human Project, while at the same time keeping her safe from Britain’s oppressive crackdown on immigrants. (wikipedia)
Yesterday we watched Children of Men – any comments for this film? Any comments of the film in relation to the readings?
The photo labs will be closed on Friday 4/20 at 4pm. All of the BFAs [your lab monitors] are involved in the receptions at east hall that go from 5-8pm. There is an Alternative Process Show, a BFA Photo Show and a video loop on projection in East Hall on Friday night.
Also, the labs will close for the semester on 4/22 – Clean up begins on 4/23.
Dick Keaveny
Gallery Talk
Richmond Center for Visual Arts
Netzorg/Kerr Gallery
5:30 pm
Thursday
April 19, 2007
Artist Talk
Thursday April 19th, 11 am in 2303 Sangren
Wendy Babcox is a British born multi-media artist whose work examines language and spectacle through a variety of ploys. Babcox resides in Tampa, Florida where she is an Assistant professor of photography at the University of South Florida. She also taught at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Babcox received her MFA from the University of Florida in 2000 and her BFA from the University of Colorado in 1999. She has been awarded numerous teaching and research grants from both the University of South Florida and Western Michigan University.
Babcox has exhibited and performed extensively both nationally and internationally, including the Quay School of Art Gallery (Wanganue, New Zealand), The Kitchen (NY, NY), the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI), and the International Center of Bethlehem.
Image Credit:
Loretta Lux, Isabella, 2001. Silver dye bleach print (Ilfochrome), mounted on aluminum, A.P. 2/3, edition of 7, 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee and the Harriett Ames Charitable Trust. 2004.79. © Loretta Lux
http://www.lorettalux.de/
Featuring works drawn from the Guggenheim museum’s permanent collection, Family Pictures explores the representation of families and children in contemporary photography and video. Since its inception in the mid-19th century, photography has always been used to represent the bonds of family, whether through portraiture or documents of important milestones like weddings. In these images, fleeting moments of childhood are captured and preserved, and the family unit is fixed for posterity.
Many contemporary artists create portraits of children—often their own—in works that expand on photography’s vernacular tradition as well as the representation of youth in the history of art. Other artists look to harness the power of childhood memory in adult life through fictionalized renditions of past traumatic events; in order to plumb psychological truths, these artists portray a more revealing image of family dynamics and the emotional tone of childhood.
Family Pictures includes both documentary-style and more clearly staged or manipulated work by 16 artists: Janine Antoni, Patty Chang, Gregory Crewdson, Rineke Dijkstra, Nathalie Djurberg, Anna Gaskell, Nan Goldin, Loretta Lux, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tracey Moffatt, Catherine Opie, Collier Schorr, Thomas Struth, Hellen van Meene, and Gillian Wearing. A version of this exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue, was presented at the Galleria Gottardo in Lugano, Switzerland in 2005; in New York, Family Pictures includes additional artists and recent acquisitions.
http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/familypictures/index.html
from The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic
Meaning of Their Dreams
Cibachrome Prints
1998–2006
http://www.yossimilogallery.com/artists/ales_sang/?show=1#title
In conjunction with the 4/6 Art Hop 5-8pm, the students from the spring video class will present video from this semester at East Hall. There will be 3 projectors and 2 tvs through out the building.
Image Credit: Jenna Caschera, Focus, video still, 2007
Image Credit: Ben Van Sickle, Obstruction, video still, 2007
Christopher DiCicco | Shuichi Owen-Murakami
“Sonic Vigil,” a sound installation
Friday through April 20; 5 to 7 p.m. Fridays, 10 to 11 a.m. and 5 to 7 p.m. Saturdays
The Smartshop, 516 E. North St., Kalamazoo
An opening reception will be held Friday from 6 to 11 p.m. with a bluegrass band opening the event and an 8 p.m. group viewing.
We wanted to create the experience of peace through our work. Sonic Vigil accomplishes the same thing that we experienced while listening to falling water at Shuichi’s pond, while also referencing the danger we sense with the pace of contemporary life. Today we are bombarded, and overwhelmed by mediated sensory information. We wanted to create a piece that explores a moment of repose to notice our state of mind. The piece dictates to a large extent how it must be experienced. The room is dark, aside from the illumination of the work, and the sound is so subtle that it necessitates slowing down, quieting and calming ourselves, breathing air.
We hope that Sonic Vigil’s sound creates the likeness of the first throes of spring, the light and warmth of the sun returning, flowers blooming, birds singing. It’s an overwhelming sensation which creates an image of remembering what peace feels like, the awareness of authentic being relieved from the cares of what our contemporary lifestyle offers us.
Projections
A major survey of projection-based works in Canada, 1964-2007
8 April – June 17, 2007
David Askevold, Rebecca Belmore, Geneviève Cadieux, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Ian Carr-Harris, Christine Davis, Stan Douglas, Murray Favro, Wyn Geleynse, Rodney Graham, David Hoffos, Nestor Krüger, Mark Lewis, Kelly Mark, John Massey, Nathalie Melikian, Judy Radul, Gar Smith, Michael Snow, Jana Sterbak, Robert Wiens, Krzysztof Wodiczko
The exhibition brings together for the first time the particularly rich area of experimentation with slide, film, and video projection that characterizes over four decades of contemporary art in Canada. For most of the artists presented in the exhibition, projection has been a major aspect and a defining concern over many years, such as for Michael Snow and Murray Favro; it may even constitute an artist’s entire practice, such as for Stan Douglas or David Hoffos. In other instances, projection is part of a larger body of work in diverse media ranging from sculpture to sound and photography, such as it is for Geneviève Cadieux, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Jana Sterbak, Rebecca Belmore, and Robert Wiens, among others. Some of the works presented in this exhibition are internationally recognized as seminal in the history of contemporary art, and most will be shown in Toronto for the first time, including works by David Askevold, Ian Carr-Harris, Nestor Krüger, Jana Sterbak, and newly commissioned works by Nathalie Melikian and Kelly Mark. Together these works encapsulate a history that exemplifies and provides insight into why projection has become such an important and prevalent medium.
In this exhibition, projection is both a medium and a subject. Realized in the form of sculpture, slide-dissolves, 16mm film, and video, the works exploit both the experiential and the metaphoric potential of projection as an analog for seeing, imagining, dreaming, and knowing. Some works underplay and others exceed the synchronized, integrated, or immersive effects of the most dominant manifestation of projection in contemporary culture: cinema. If cinema haunts the exhibition, its powers are suspended and its effects disentangled. Instead of presenting a strict chronology, the exhibition focuses attention on particular cinematic forms as they are taken apart to emphasize the conceptual implications of their components, which are reflected in the structure of the exhibition. At the University of Toronto Art Centre, some works focus our attention exclusively on the experience of light, reflection, and illumination. Others point to the paradoxical nature of the screen, where a text or image is cast to show the colouring or shaping of a variously receptive and resistant surface that takes part in constructing perception. Works presented at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery more explicitly inhabit the forms of cinema. They newly engage and playfully dissociate the relationships between voice and image, the camera’s eye and the viewer’s body, and the construction of cinematic spectacle. Finally, works presented at the Blackwood Gallery and the Doris McCarthy Gallery share the projection of travels and journeys into recorded and therefore virtual space, while irreverently undermining the illusions and utopian dimensions of this projected place.
In earlier works the emphasis is on isolating and parsing specific experiential effects, whereas in more recent works a flowering of new cinematic and spatial re-configurations demonstrates our entanglement in mediation. In all cases, however, the artist’s interest is in the way projection allows us to look at how the world is seen – however distorted, strangely re-cognized, or poignantly observed. Projection in contemporary art in Canada serves less as a means to tell a story than as a means of thinking through ideas about seeing and knowing, and of experimenting with the conceptual, psychological, and political dimensions of the relationship between the two – which is where the history of this work joins the analyses of mediation that have themselves been a powerful force in the intellectual legacy in this country.
Image Credit: Giuseppe Gabellone, Untitled, 1999. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
MCA EXPOSED: Defining Moments in Photography, 1967-2007
February 24 – July 29, 2007
One of the defining characteristics of art-making during the second half of the twentieth century was the acceptance of photography on par with traditional media such as painting and sculpture. By examining the function of photographs within a larger cultural and social context, artists began to explore photography in ways that diverged greatly from its documentary tradition. They employed several strategies: questioning the truth of images in mass media, playing with meanings by juxtaposing text and image, manipulating the photographic process and greatly enlarging the scale of printed photographs, using photography to make conceptual work, and embracing new digital technologies. The proliferation of photographs as fine art has coincided with the history of the MCA, from roughly 1967 to the present.
MCA EXPOSED: Defining Moments Photography, 1967-2007, which will occupy the entire fourth floor, leads up to the MCA’s Fortieth Anniversary Celebration and features not only the artistic evolution of a particular medium, but also the MCA Collection’s unique strength in conceptual photography.
The work of more than fifty artists will be featured in the exhibition, ranging from Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills to Christian Boltanski’s major installation Les Enfants de Dijon to commissions such as Beat Streuli’s Chicago ‘99, which will be installed on the museum’s facade. The exhibition includes works by both established and up-and-coming artists, including some who have been featured in our UBS 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work series. This exhibition is curated by Assistant Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm.
Western Michigan University will officially open the new Richmond Center for Visual Arts (RCVA) with a celebration from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 12th. The dedication ceremony at 2:00 p.m. features welcoming remarks from WMU President Diether Haenicke and lead donors Jim W. and Lois I. Richmond among others. Tours of the fabulous new facility and information about RCVA programs, the WMU College of Fine Arts, and the School of Art will be highlighted throughout the afternoon.
This exciting new venue will be a major cultural asset to WMU, southwest Michigan, and the entire the Midwest United States. The center is comprised of spectacular gallery spaces for rotating exhibitions, a gallery for WMU’s permanent collection, and a dedicated student and alumni exhibition space. The RCVA’s calendar of year-round events will also include a lecture series, outdoor sculptures, videos, and performance art and is designed to enhance learning about and enjoyment of modern and contemporary art.
Photography & Intermedia 