Contemporary Art Truck: Photography

Showing posts with label Photography. Show all posts

#OccupyWallStreet

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Iconic Brooklyn bridge. This is just after I climbed the fence to the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge to have a better view

I had no idea that everyone left of the road would be arrested, around 500 people

The first person to be arrested.

Police shoving us away from the side of the bridge. This made me think a lot about public space. When does an action become political? When does public space become no longer public? If this had been tourists photographing the manhattan skyline, there would be no pushing involved.

Cuffed with zip ties and waiting.

This is a shot of the accredited journalists photographing the event. they had one area where they were allowed to be. Apparently a Huffpost reporter was arrested.

Detained protesters being bused to jail in a NYC public bus. Thanks MTA. You are always late when I need you for work.

Officer Rudolph lost his cool and began shoving onlookers. Nobody was arrested, maybe because we were on public space and complying with the police.

...and to draw a bright white line with light

Last week, I had the wonderful privilege of seeing Uta Barth's newest photography series at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been my favorite photographer for some time, but this was the first opportunity I had to see her work in person. I was blown away by the crispness of her images, the streams of light that sometimes looked like washes of bright color, and the quiet meditative sensation of losing myself in her work.

In her newest series, "...and to draw a bright white line with light," Barth photographed the action of pulling her curtains to create undulating light forms that stream across the 15 large panels, hung slightly below the standard gallery height of 60". After staring at each of the images, my eyes slipped out of focus and saw the images not as window blinds and sunshine, but as rich texture that faded in and out of my view, and light that cascaded in the form of pure white streaks, rich against its darker shadows. If it weren't for the guard's nervous tapping on the door handle, I could have stayed in that room all day, with only the subtle humming of the lights and air conditioning, and the pure sensation of seeing light and texture in its most beautiful and elegant form.

- Jessica

Lorena Turner

Rubik's Cubes, 2008. Some really beautiful photographs by Lorena Turner:

It is not expected that as consumers we be concerned with the actual production of the items we purchase. In fact it makes us more effective consumers to maintain a perspective that is abstracted from that process. When we buy the basic goods we use on a daily basis, there is an assumption they are clean, untainted, absent of a history. Made in China asks us to reconsider that.

For this project, items made and packaged in China were purchased in US department stores and bodegas. They remained in their original packaging until they were dusted for fingerprints and then photographed under black lights. This process allowed for the evidence of another's touch, quite possibly the person involved in constructing and packaging the item, to be revealed.
Made in China highlights the human factor and invisible history in each object's production, and forces us to reconsider the relationship those who are leaving their fingerprints on each item may have with it.

Made in China is not intended to comment on the scale or absurdity of our consumptive practices, but to remind us that we are only one factor in that equation.

For more on this project, watch Michael Itkoff, Editor of Daylight Magazine, talk about it here.

Also, a review of the July 2011 exhibit in The Architect's News:
Made in China with a human touch

Be sure to check the rest of her work out. Here

Thanks Ira

JR and Inside Out

JR, known for his huge portraits pasted all over the world has started this collaborative project. Replacing the faces of rulers and famous people with portraits of you and me. more and more

MEGAPOST: New interpretations of the photograph

While photography seems to be a concrete medium with dependable kinds of outcomes, many artists today are exploring the possibilities of the camera through radical materials and manipulations, and sometimes without using a camera at all. Contemporary photography is anything but consistent, and every bit as exciting, unpredictable, and challenging as any other medium.

Johan Berggren prints his images on non-traditional surfaces. Above, Shelf R-S, printed on cardboard, and Untitled #2 (Burn Out series) printed on a silk scarf. Like modernist painters who abandoned the traditional canvas, Berggren alters the surface of his print as if to ask, "When is a photograph no longer a photograph?" I especially love the silk scarf because it's so unassuming and looks like something you could find in a nice boutique. But your association with the scarf would surely change once you saw it in a gallery setting and understood that the original image was a photograph.

Another photographer who recalls modernist and post-modernist painting is Pia Howell. She uses a cameraless process that is still mind-boggling to me: in the darkroom, she filters raw colored light through stencils and patterns to create these images directly on the paper. These look nothing like photographs, and yet they're made in the tradition of the photogram, which was one of the earliest cameraless methods of creating photographs in the darkroom. These genre-bending images also remind me of work by painter Tauba Auerbach.

Although motion-blurred portraits are not necessarily a novel idea, the process behind this series absolutely is. Vanessa Ban and Andrea Fam collaborated on this series, This is not the Body; this is an image of the Body, in which they turned the power of the photographer over to their subjects. The nude subject is left alone with the camera for 25 seconds, during which time they are allowed to alter the manipulation with the movement of their own bodies, and can do so independently of the photographer's wishes or expectations. The photographers, then, are the ones who are treated with a surprise at the end of the project.

- Jessica

Steve Lambert

Steve Lambert has both poignant social criticism and aesthetically engaging art, a rare mix. He now is asking for your help to create this capitalism truck, which we here at contemporary art truck fully appreciate, more at his website here and hyperallergic here.

You Are Still Alive

Photography books online

Books online is a new website that showcases photographs by contemporary artists in an online book format that lets you flip through the pages like a real book. The best part? The books are completely free for your viewing pleasure.

Paul Paper, "Blur is Beautiful"

Jennilee Marigomen, "Change of Course"

Ali Bosworth, "Atlantic"

- Jessica

Risking Death for Photography and Wikileaks

photo by Adam Dean
an article at the Guardian about war photography here. (warning: some really disturbing photos...)
In terms of cultural relevance and commitment to the human race, are these photographers more important than any artist? I don't think we need artists risking their lives, but if artists are proposing alternatives to capitalism, confronting tyranny, promoting socialism, like many social practice/relational aesthetic artists claim, wouldn't they be better servicing society by being photo journalists, politicians, or social workers? just thinking online here.

Must read article by Ben Davis about an interview between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange over at artinfo here.

How does the internet change your life? It makes you live in the present tense. Joanne McNeil at Rhizome, here.

Also: Check out these incredible tattoos by Amanda Wachob. I am really impressed by the abstract ones. thanks Lenny

Organization

The incomparable Jacques Tati.
http://secretforts.blogspot.com/2010/03/liconique-quiet-charm-of-jacques-tati.html

Things Organized Neatly, a blog depicting, you guessed it, organized things. here

Reminds me of Tom Sachs' 10 Bullets video rule #8: Always be Knolling.
watch that hilarious video here. (jump to around the 15min area to see knolling section)

Long exposure airplanes

This is slightly gimmicky, but beautiful and fascinating nonetheless: long exposure shots of airplanes flying into and out of San Francisco International Airport, shot by Terence Chang.

See more images here.

- Jessica

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall, After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, more at booooooom

Tim Knowles

Mk3 Postal Project, where Tim Knowles mailed this box/drawing machine through the postal service, documenting the passage. Pretty awesome.

Nightwalk, Knole Park, Sevenoaks, long exposure of of artist walking in night.

Definitely check out Knowles website here. I found his work by watching the Camille Utterback & Erica Sadun lecture at Rhizome, where artists and technologists gave lectures on their collaborations, here

Time Lapse of Manhattan

Mindrelic - Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

Drowned photographs

Lately, I've noticed a theme of photographers "drowning" their images in bodies of water that are relevant to the concept or the content of the image itself. I've done similar things in my own work, so I'm really interested in how these photographers tie together practice with concept.

The series "Drowned" by photographer Seba Kurtis explores the humanitarian issues in the Canary Islands. His website says, "Thousands of Africans have reached the Canary Islands in recent years, thousands more are believed to have drowned or died of thirst or exposure in the attempt. I drowned the boxes with the sheets of film off the shores of the same ocean that they crossed."

Some of the images look nearly untouched, while others have been erased of most information, leaving an empty color field in the aftermath of the drowning.

Find more images from this series and others at Seba Kurtis' website.

- Jessica

Luhring Augustine

I'm sick today, so instead of getting out of bed, I plan on going through art books all day looking at pretty things.

I'll tell you what I find.

Firstly, I grabbed the Luhring Augustine 25year anniversary catalog, which they were handing out for free in the fall. Here are some of the amazing artists in the catalog.