Daniel Arsham

Work from Three Dimension

“Straddling the line between art, architecture and performance, Daniel Arsham has worked with Merce Cunningham, Hedi Slimane, Bob Wilson and Jonah Bokaer. He makes architecture do things it’s not supposed to do, mining everyday experience for opportunities to confuse and confound our expectations of space and form. Simple yet paradoxical gestures dominate his sculptural work: a façade that appears to billow in the wind, a white cube eroded on all sides like a glacier, a figure wrapped up in the surface of a wall. Structural experiment, historical inquiry, and satirical wit all combine with consummate technical skill in Arsham’s ongoing interrogation of the real and the imagined.” – Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin

Brian Khek

Work from his oeuvre.

“Interpreting our relationship with information as a visual spectrum of didactic signifiers, the images in my work subjugate and expand physical experiences simultaneously. The fixed image inherently rephrases an experience. Documentation of this work is not interchangeable with the original object. It instead behaves as a different language through the physical displacement of the viewer as a result of the apparatus.” – via i heart photograph

Ishac Bertran

Work from Generative Photography.

“The picture above (top) has been generated projecting white vertical rectangles, from left to right, at 25fps, to a projection screen. A camera, set to long exposure, captured the projection in 5 seconds. The rectangles aren’t homogeneous due to the rendering and the asynchrony between the frame rate of the video signal and the refresh rate of the projector.

The light grey rectangles have been in projected (and thus, exposed) double time than the dark grey ones. The brightest stripe has probably been projected three times the dark grey ones, and there is a rectangle that hasn’t been projected.

I’ve been doing some experiments using Processing to generate different patterns and sequences, a projector, and a camera pointing to the projection screen. Some of them are using a technique called procedural light painting, some other combining slit-scan with projected patterns. I’m also very interested in the low repeatability of some of these experiments, like the picture above, due to the noise introduced by the asynchrony of generation, communication and output means. Maybe we can call it Generative Photography.

The following pictures are generated projecting a vertical lines, one after the other, and then the same with horizontal lines (25 fps). Lines have 3-pixel stroke, and move 4 pixels each time, creating a double exposure every two lines. Plus the error introduced by the asynchrony.” – Ishac Bertran

Absalon

Work from oeuvre

“Absalon engages himself with spaces in systematic and successive ways. By taking questions around essential human activities and basic forms such as the rectangular, the square, the triangle and the circle as his starting points, he begins by emptying out the encountered spaces before restructuring and refilling them with the help of simple forms. These test assemblies, further developed later on by means of objects, drawings, photographs and films, come to a full circle in Absalon’s Cellules: individualized, ascetic living units for contemplation based on the measurements of the artist’s own body. Reduced to a vocabulary of strictly geometrical forms these pieces convey a sense of absolute abstraction, yet without alluding to utopian ideas. Instead, they open up heterotopic spaces, which Absalon had planned to publicly position in six large cities in order to confront his physical existence with the corpus of society: ‘They are not meant to posit any solutions in terms of isolation. They have been made for living the social.’ (Absalon)” – KW Institute for Contemporary Art

Corinne Vionnet

Work from Photo Opportunities.

“For most, to sightsee is to photograph. Embarking on treasure hunts to tourist destinations renowned for monuments of grandeur, we pursue the extraordinary. Framing sites of mass tourism in our viewfinders, we create photographic souvenirs that are integral to the touristic experience. These products, coined “photograph-trophies”i by Susan Sontag, separate our leisurely pleasures from the real everyday experiences of work and life, validating that we had fun on vacation and were in exotic locales where exists the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, or Niagara Falls.

Conducting online keyword searches for monuments, Swiss/French artist Corinne Vionnet culled thousands of tourists’ snapshots for her series Photo Opportunities. Working with several hundred photographs of a single monument, the artist weaves together small sections of the appropriated images to create each layered, ethereal structure. Famed landmarks appear to float gently in a dream-like haze of blue sky. Each construction espouses the “touristic gaze”i, its distorted visual referent functions as a device for memory transport by funneling many experiences into one familiar locale.

What is remarkable about Vionnet’s findings is the consistency in online iterations of the travelers’ gaze. It makes one wonder, how do we determine the optimum spot to photograph landmarks? Maybe we stand at the gateway to the Taj Mahal to render its architectural façade in perfect symmetry, or we stand where we can frame all four American presidents in equal scale at Mount Rushmore. Perhaps we instinctively choose how to photograph known monuments as we are socially conditioned to take pictures we have seen before – images popularized through film, television, postcards, and the Internet.

Not so long ago, people would often organize their tourist snapshots into travelogues. Today, the travelogue is less likely to be a tangible album found in our homes than it is an online directory of digital images. When placed in the public realm, the travel souvenirs become anonymous products of tourism, searchable by the keywords ascribed to them by their makers. These meeting points, as Vionnet describes the sourced snapshots, may be inspiration for your next photo opportunity.” – Madeline Yale

Thomas Bayrle

Work from his oeuvre.

“There is an obsessive and darkly visionary quality about much of Bayrle’s work but, crucially, there is also plenty of wry humour and pleasure in the absurd and the idiotic. Contrary to the visually pluralistic tendencies of other artists with mixed allegiances to Pop and Conceptual art as well as media critique, his work seems to have remained doggedly consistent for decades. Ever-present are his engagement with advertising and comparisons between mass iconography and systems in the East and West including religion, technology and sex. In his books, collages, paintings, graphics, drawings, computer animations, sculptures, films and videos, he has accomplished what many aspire to achieve but few actually do: to articulate a unique and transfixing visual language.” – Dominic Eichler

Gregory Polony

Work from his oeuvre (mostly Debut, his ongoing show at Herrmann Germann in Zürich)

“The exhibition focuses on how we approach and interpret sculpture. Extending across various media, and partly site-specific, Gregory Polony’s work draws on a reduced palette of materials, including found objects, cement, wooden boards, and lashing belts.

His conceptual approach to sculpture is also shaped by intuitive and surprising moments, which he integrates into his works by means of drawings and photographs.
While the photographs show an interpretive perspective, the drawings describe a fictitious state in Polony’s works. «On the surface, the drawings are simple, quick, and efficient. While the ideas for them exist beforehand, their representation by means of a pen and the human hand are beyond control. Such uncontrollability and spontaneity enable surprise, and thereby open up new fields.»
Polony’s work centres on the art establishment and, unlike purely conceptual approaches, seeks to render it visible. His ‹in situ› work invites observers to integrate its surroundings and to develop a stance towards it. The context of presentation thereby functions as a starting point integral to the work.

What constitutes the quality of a work of art? Polony adopts a critical stance towards both his work and art. «Implementation is most important, irrespective of the context in which a particular work emerges or is shown. The point at which a work finalises itself and is mounted is a unique moment, one which also lapses immediately. The thought ‹done, next one› is forever present.»
How a work can be incorporated into and further developed in new settings after its publication and contextualisation is an essential aspect of Polony’s working method.” – Tomas Germann

Tara Downs

Work from Material Test for The STATE

“Material Test introduces images of film gels, cellophane, mirrored Mylar that have gradually dissolved their material base, becoming molten shapes and forms that undulate through foreground and background. French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud in his text Postproduction considers that “precariousness is at the center of a formal universe in which nothing is durable, everything is movement: the trajectory between two places is favored in relation to the place itself”. The particularities of the path between these two ‘places’ – the original material and the image as transformed state – becomes open to curiosity and consideration.” – STATE

Hugh Scott-Douglas

Work from Moire Paintings.

“Scott-Douglas makes work that refers to production itself, to its consumption and to its container, using visual cues gleaned from minimalism and op art. The central dialectic of the work springs from the tension between the need for a rigid authority figure, on the one hand, and the very possibility of establishing such an authority, given that it is so easily subverted by its own parts. This tension arises when, in each work, the authority is embedded in a severed partnership – half medium, half author. However, through Scott-Douglas’s process-oriented methodology, one of the partners is elected over the other. In each case there is an emphasis on transparency and a push towards a paradoxical state of “non-denial denial”. In Scott-Douglas’s treatment formalism is detourned to allow the medium to execute its own mutiny. Experimentation and process become central themes that allow some works to be successful and others to fail; this produces a formalism that is equally in tension – working both towards and against a static form.” – Clint Roenisch Gallery.

JD Walsh

Work from Slow Fade / Double Waltz.

“Walsh is an artist who navigates smoothly between mediums while leaving a trail of great works. He’s a kind of mad scientist mixing up a fresh pop brew of interactivity, projection, appropriation, music, origami, and installation. Whether he’s playing a search engine or a guitar (clearly, his avatar is John Cage), Walsh is happy to reach into the chaos and “tune in meaning.” Underground and busy, last year he made one of my favorite videos, Untitled RPG. This year, he unplugged with stunning silk-screen constructions exhibited in the back room of a Brooklyn bodega. But his most widely unknown accomplishment of late is “Tune Up,” an infectious and demented jingle for NYC dermatologist Dr. Zizmor. I can’t get it out of my head.” – Tony Oursler

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Double Waltz:

First, I select two texts. These could be taken from anywhere, and could be any type of text: interviews, stories, manuals, etc. Custom written software is made to weave these two texts together, one word at a time, in groups of three. The pace has a certain rhythm. The cadence is in a 3/4 time signature, like a waltz.

The computer can choose certian things: the word, the font, the shade of grey, the background color. The video is designed to never repeat. – JD Walsh