Monthly Archives: September 2013
Lisa M. Robinson | Snowbound
© Lisa M. Robinson
For the past five years, I have been making photographs in the snow and ice. I am interested in metaphor, and have sought to comprehend our human place in this world.
On the surface, these images are quite beautiful. They appear elegantly simple and accessible, evoking, perhaps, the silent tranquility that one might feel after a fresh snowfall. Beneath the surface, however, there is a subtle tension. Like fine haiku, each image quietly references another season, a time of life or activity that has already passed, and may come again. Throughout the series run the leitmotifs of poles and ropes and a palette of man-made color. The relationship between the human and the natural world becomes more tightly intertwined as the series progresses, and the cycles of life and death and transformation fold inward.
This interest in time passage and life cycles becomes distilled in explorations of water itself. Ice, snow, fog and water embody the liminal states of a primary element. At times, the multiple forms exist simultaneously. It is as though the thing itself possesses its own counterpoint- and transformation is a constant condition, despite seeming moments of stillness.
Tom Chambers
I initially sketch a concept or idea which I have for an image. Then, I photograph each piece of the photomontage using a Nikon D700 or a medium format film camera, generally a Mamiya Pro TL or a Fuji Rangefinder. The greatest challenge is in making sure the light intensity and direction are similar in each of these shots.
The process of creating a photomontage may take a month or more, depending upon how quickly I am able to get all the shots and sort through them, selecting the ones which work best together. “Pieces” of the final image may include the landscape or background, often shot in sections, as well as the sky, a human figure, an animal, or another object. The processed film is scanned at a high resolution, approximately 80 megabytes per frame. Then, I use Photoshop software with a Macintosh computer to combine each “piece”, thus creating the final image. Lastly, the photomontage is printed with archival pigment inks on cotton rag paper.
Monogrenade
Rives: The 4 a.m. mystery
Poet Rives does 8 minutes of lyrical origami, folding history into a series of coincidences surrounding that most surreal of hours, 4 o’clock in the morning.
Jim Kazanjian
I am interested in a kind of “entropic” image, an image that has the capacity to defamiliarize itself. My current work is an attempt to unravel the photograph and play with established notions of time, space, and the understanding of what gives things context. Through fragmentation and recomposition of the photographic space, the non-linear nature of reading the image is folded in on itself. The structure of the photograph is unwound and reshuffled. This reshaping becomes an iterative process that spurs the generation of something altogether different. Something ineffable. Jim Kazanjian
NastyNasty – Seconds
Stop Motion Start Skating: Billy Marks
POETIC COSMOS OF THE BREATH
The name Tomas Saraceno should be known since his utopic installation ‘Cloud Cities’ last year. With his work the argentine artist goes beyond the traditional conceptions of place, time, gravity and our familiar notions of architecture. Saraceno is an artist and architect whos visions for cities floating in the air has led him to create a series of experimental structures such as balloons or inflatable modular platforms that can be inhabited and exploit natural energies. Any of his objects is an invitation to think about alternative knowledge, about emotions and the interaction with others. They invite you to participate like ‘Poetic Cosmos of the Breath’, an experimental solar dome, which was part of ‘The Arts Catalyst’s’ 2nd International Artists Airshow. At dawn, crowds formed around a giant and colorful, circular foil, pinned to the ground at the edges with sand bags. Throughout the morning, the artist and his team gradually filled the foil with air and visitors could walk through this stunning colored wonderland, which is just magical, unique and full of positive energy. A witness to the event said, ‘Slowly we helped the giant fill with air and grow as the sun came up…the material spectacularly colourful as the sun reflected off it.’
http://www.ignant.de/2012/09/06/poetic-cosmos-of-the-breath/
Christopher Rauschenberg
The Marché aux Puces at Saint-Ouen, an inch or two outside the city limits of Paris, is said to be the greatest flea market in the world. It is a museum of antiques, a P.T. Barnum sideshow, a life size dollhouse, a fever dream. This series is a salute to the dealers of Saint-Ouen, who have created this stream-of-consciousness dream world in search of commerce but in search of poetry too. These photographs of this dream world, taken in November 2008 and May 2009, somehow tell me things that I had an inkling of and that I hope to someday almost know. “Marché aux Puces” has been exhibited at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Espaço Cultural Contemporâneo in Brasilia and the Museu Afro Brasil in Sao Paulo. From there it is going to the Griffin Museum in Winchester MA and Michael Mazzeo Gallery in New York. I will return to Paris and Saint-Ouen in November 2010.
Full Turn ECAL/Benjamin Muzzin
Tutors: Alain Bellet, Gael Hugo, Christophe Guignard
ECAL / University of Art and Design, Lausanne Switzerland
Bachelor Media & Interaction Design
Music : “Murder!” by Montgomery Clunk (myspace.com/monteebeats)
ecal.ch + vimeo.com/channels/ecalmid
With this project I wanted to explore the notion of the third dimension, with the desire to try to get out of the usual frame of a flat screen. For this, my work mainly consisted in exploring and experimenting a different device for displaying images, trying to give animations volume in space. The resulting machine works with the rotation of two screens placed back to back, creating a three-dimensional animated sequence that can be seen at 360 degrees. Due to the persistence of vision, the shapes that appear on the screen turn into kinetic light sculptures.
Gulp.
Hyang Cho
SIX TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION
2008, found book, transparent tape
SIX TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION is initiated from the book Six Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allen Poe, containing The Gold-Bug, The Oblong Box, The Mystery of Marie Roget, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Pit and the Pendulum.
SIX TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION consists of six roles of tapes and the book. All the sentences of each story were peeled off from the book with the rolls of transparent tape and rolled back from the first sentence to the last sentence. As a result, six stories are locked in between space of the six rolled transparent tapes and the book becomes empty with the trace of the stories remaining.
Mark Lyon
Dr. Wilk D.D.S., Exam Room 1, Instrument Tray, 2010
The series, Landscapes for the People, looks at the use of romanticized wallpaper landscape photographs found in everyday environments. These wall sized photographic murals seem to serve a psychological function, given their potentially intimidating or banal locations, like dental rooms and laundromats. These landscape murals allow the viewer an alternate mindset to nerve racking procedures or the mundane activities of everyday life. Wallpaper scenes depict grandiose views of snowcapped mountains, woodland streams, daisy fields, seascapes, and tropical beaches. These are, perhaps, the places we would rather be. They act to heighten our own daydreams with an idyllic panoramic view that envelops our line of sight. Elements of wear, installation approach, printing process, and wall fixtures allow the viewer insight into the photographic facade. The wallpaper can be seen in numerous conditions of wear. The power of the sun, and fluorescents, leave a mark of time through a draining of color. Seams of the paneled murals create a fracturing of the landscape. The seams fold, bend, tear and are taped back together. In other instances, the texture of the underlying wall reveals itself onto the surface of the landscape. The curious pairing of landscape and objects encourages the viewer into a closer inspection of their true relationship. This inspection discloses the actual location and purpose of such spaces. But, even after the truth of these photographs is revealed, we may find that our own daydreams allow this pairing to feel authentic. Photographs from Landscapes for the People use the peculiar relationship between found images and operative items. The resulting photographs of these locations document the strange play of the functional environment and the idealized psychological landscape.
Brant Bjork by Mark Rutledge
MJLM Productions
Recycle. Help the girl in your trash can.
Tamas Dezso
Night Watchman (Budapest, Hungary, 2009)
The map of Hungary and Romania is speckled with capsules of time. During the political transformation twenty years ago, as the two countries experienced change, they simply forgot about certain places – streets, blocks of flats, vacant sites and whole districts, villages became self-defined enclosures, where today a certain out-dated, awkward, longed-to-be-forgotten Eastern Europeanness still lingers. There are places which seem to be at one with other parts of the city in a single space, but their co-existence in time is only apparent; places which decompose in accordance with their own specific chronology, determined by their past, such that what remains would then either be silently reconquered by nature or enveloped by the lifestyles of tomorrow’s generations. Of the inhabitants, who have never fully integrated with majority society, soon only traces will remain, until they, too, disappear in the course of time. Having experienced the influence of Soviet power, felt directly in everyday life until the political changes as a child, and having comprehended and interpreted its intellectual and social after-effects as an adult, I decided to record the hidden realities which are essential in order to understand the two countries as they hover on the borderline between the eastern and western worlds. I do not observe these mini-universes with the aim of mapping entirety, but rather wish to condense certain arbitrarily chosen details into embodiments of an obsolete existence. The photographic series begun in 2009 examines the typically transitional period and the symbolic characters and locations of post-communist space.
Tomas Mankovsky
Marcel Duchamp Talks with Martin Friedman about the Readymade
TateShots: Kurt Schwitters’s Portraits
Double Vision – 3OH!3 Music Video
Meet 500 years of British Art – Room: 1960
Address Is Approximate
Alwar Balasubramaniam: Art of substance and absence
Alwar Balasubramaniam’s work aches to express the overlooked, the invisible, the inexpressible. Quiet white sculptural forms, hung on a wall, unlock philosophical questions as one watches the light pass over them. What is their form, and what is their shadow? What are those mysterious white hands reaching for, around the corner and through the wall?
Trained in painting and printmaking, Balasubramaniam has been experimenting with a range of materials (fiberglass, wax, gold) to create sculptural works that bring forth his ideas and his search process. His work is often very tactile, very physical, but it symbolizes an exploration of big questions: what defines the self? what confines us? how do light and shadow shape our view of the world?
Evan Grant
Still cymatic images, each one formed with a specific frequency in water then played at 24fps.
Photography & Intermedia 