Below is a text from Montage: Unmonumental Online at the New Museum.
“…“Montage: Unmonumental Online” will feature works by an international group of fourteen emerging and midcareer artists who appropriate diverse material from the Web to create new Internet-based montage. Cutting and pasting, breaking apart and re-assembling, ripping and remixing, the participating artists extend the radical practice of collage to the Internet, demonstrating how previously tried techniques can engender rich, new artistic practices. Their works incorporate varied formal elements: digital images, sound, video, or code, and also recite fictions and fantasies found online.” – New Museum
“…deceptively intimate works of Epaminonda: collages, escoriating and beautiful. They collectively form a kind of liminal space through the imagery of a past – the mid 20th Century – yet they don’t address a period in time, perhaps so that it might be the past, again. They are composed of images or pages taken from French magazines from the 1950’s or the found images of monuments: churches and memorials from the city of Berlin, itself an archive. The monuments touch upon Bataille’s iconoclasism in relation to the edifice of architecture, “to loosen this arché from its resolution, turning it into a mere beginning which is never more than the semblance of an inauguration.”v There’s a question as to what is at stake in approaching time in the image, in this instance as the monument loses hold of its iconic nature – the time which gave it its fullness, the ‘subject’ of the image no longer the monument itself but perhaps, what Roger Caillois, speaks of as the psychasthenic experience, “an attraction by space’ or in the case of darkness an “assimilation to space”vi: the fear of losing our distinction between ourselves and our environment. Collages produced from images of people clustered in and by domestic interiors are domesticity and time-scape combined that undermine, but cannot be released from, a semblance of place. For Elaine Scarry such rooms have a potential far past their claim to harbour and protect, “While the room is a magnification of the body, it is simultaneously a miniaturisation of the world, of civilisation….”” – Denise Robinson
“The void diaries series was produced over the course of one year by photographing the space just beyond my second floor bedroom window. Made with a simple amateur point and shoot camera, the screen becomes a scrim and the point of focus fluctuates between the screen and the landscape. These images were made over the course of my last year in Memphis, during torrential downpours, days when it was impossible to work outside. The result is a diaristic account of the seasons, a melancholy meditation on place.” – Martina Shenal
“My artistic practice stems from my interest in the influence of the Internet on my generation. The Internet is a central method of contemporary communication, reflecting humanity and all of its cultures, interests, and visions. I look to discover new aspects of humanity and to see the new forms that human interaction is taking online. My process begins with searching through the Internet, appropriating existing photos, text, and videos that connect to ideas about people’s interactions online. This mirrors the very process of the Internet, the accessibility of sampling other work and the new creation that comes from recombination. Internet users often take images from others to combine and recontextualize them to create new meanings. In my work this process comes full circle, recombining what I have found to reflect the nature of the Internet itself.
I often use abstraction in the work by blurring or pixilating the image. This extends the conceptual practice of appropriation in new ways; the image remains familiar but a clear reference is removed. Without concrete details, the artwork is focused on generalities, illustrating the similarities between many images used in community-based sites. The individuality is removed and patterns are now recognizable. In the blurred works distance is also obscured, and it seems that one is too close to focus or too far away to see detail. This reflects the digital world where everyone is accessible but never physically present. In much of my art, I use comments and images that refer to the virtual world and online culture. I bring together overly dramatic statements, pop culture references, and comments on technology in the work. I take the viewer into the world of the Internet, while removing the original context. Statements that are taken lightly online resonate differently when printed out and incorporated into a formal framework…” – Blake Shell
“Weights & Measures is a non-linear exploration of social relationships with the natural world. Like a pendulum, our disconnect from nature swings from points of certainty to points of ambiguity on a daily basis. In this project, I regularly stage objects or situations to investigate notions of scenery, wilderness, and the still-life. Through these observations and interventions, I work to reveal, fictionalize and question “nature” as a geographic locale, as a romantic ideal, and as a socio-political construct. As much as I am inspired by phenomena of the natural world and find great value in being outside, I focus on the observation that our everyday relationship with nature is predominantly one of mediation, physical distance and cognizant remove.
A constant in this work is my exploration of the ways in which a photograph can be extended beyond a flat surface and mutate between different modes of cultural connotation. I consciously blend color and black and white photographs of various sizes with other media to reflect my process of questioning how empiricism, mediation and cognition combine to define a person’s experiences in the world. In this work, I am interested in qualifying my varied experiences in the natural environment as a set of relations between disparate cognitive and sensory events–where my perceptions eclipse the ground under my feet.” – Peter Happel Christian
“There is an immediacy in Fremderman’s work that brings to the fore a brash youthfulness that demands the spotlight and your full attention. She knows how to play on your desires while simultaneously captivating your gaze like a road-side car crash rubber-necker.
The intimate relations that Fremderman is working with can be seen most succinctly in her Untitled series of facial manipulations. Eyes go missing to reveal emptiness, even a void of soul. While the pixelated (one could almost say ‘.gif-fy’) photo manipulation that she uses to cut and crop her images should not be in any way new to us, it somehow has a more profound effect on the resulting product than if it were done painstakingly over hours in Photoshop.
A young, playful, yet forthwith feeling is what comes from an extended look at her portfolio and although the techniques used are nothing new (and should not stir one’s emotions so), a very cutting visual memory is taken from her work. I think it safe to say that coming away from Bea Fremderman’s pieces justifies that old Moseley maxim; “sincerity and simplicity are the twin starts of impressiveness.” – [ˆ]Land
“…the artist continues to sublimate the rigid constraints of conventional landscape photography, contextualizing his imagery according to the constant tension between its specificity and theatricality.
Often using elevated perspectives as a starting point, Maier-Aichen reconfigures elements of the landscape into a new kind of formalism. Incorporating the hidden beauty in the utilitarian model of pioneer photographs with the gestural beauty of natural line and separation, the in-camera framing and effected montage of his subjects become symbiotic. An untitled image taken near Andermatt in the Swiss Alps imagines a plow as a paintbrush, tearing into the negative space of the snow covered alpine pass. The antiquated notion of photography as document ebbs into larger notions questioning rationalism versus romanticism, and how machines relate to nature. In an image such as “Salton Seas (I)”, the dry, topographic efficacy of the vantage point gives way to an almost cubist study of form as layers of earth are shown to ripple in and out of themselves.
The work also examines the relationship and friction between the surroundings of the artist’s dual residencies in Germany and California. Maier-Aichen’s California landscapes spill over with immediate gratification, the artist’s subtle interventions often difficult to fully discern. Contrarily, the European vista of “Der Watzmann”, a photograph referencing Caspar David Friedrich’s most iconic painting, is sent into a world where the colors of the sky are spun into a vacillating color gradient with echoes of Jack Goldstein’s airbrush paintings radiating through the polar fields of light. The suggestion of a certain stoicism in the German aesthetic, even as it extends to the natural world, lends itself to a kind of maximalist imagination that might seem superfluous amidst the undaunted grandeur of California’s panoramas. The ways in which one’s natural surroundings can equate to an overarching manner of thought is, by extension, the cause of progress, movements and history. By tinkering with and reshaping these environments from the inside out, Maier-Aichen raises some of the most elemental questions about the world we inhabit.” – 303 Gallery
“John Stezaker’s work re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Through his elegant juxtapositions, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings.
In his Marriage series, Stezaker focuses on the concept of portraiture, both as art historical genre and public identity. Using publicity shots of classic film stars, Stezaker splices and overlaps famous faces, creating hybrid ‘icons’ that dissociate the familiar to create sensations of the uncanny. Coupling male and female identity into unified characters, Stezaker points to a disjointed harmony, where the irreconciliation of difference both complements and detracts from the whole. In his correlated images, personalities (and our idealisations of them) become ancillary and empty, rendered abject through their magnified flaws and struggle for visual dominance.
In using stylistic images from Hollywood’s golden era, Stezaker both temporally and conceptually engages with his interest in Surrealism. Placed in contemporary context, his portraits retain their aura of glamour, whilst simultaneously operating as exotic ‘artefacts’ of an obsolete culture. Similar to the photos of ‘primitivism’ published in George Bataille’s Documents, Stezaker’s portraits celebrate the grotesque, rendering the romance with modernism equally compelling and perverse.” – Saatchi Gallery
Crista Dix at Wallspace has organized a print auction to benefit Doctors Without Borders and the people of Haiti. I have a print in the auction, along with some other great work. Please consider giving your support.
[Just as we start a new year, filled with optimism and hope for a better year, a devastating earthquake in Haiti brings tragedy and pain. This impoverished nation needs our help. The gallery and its artists want to do our part. We are supporting Doctors Without Borders, and 100% of the prints go to supporting that organization.
Thank you for helping us make a difference in peoples lives.] – Wallspace
There is a fantastic lecture on this work @ Coventry University by Joanna Zylinska.
“I do not want to give these images explanations : descriptions by the finder about how and where they were found, or guesses as to what stories they might or might not tell. I want them to keep the silence of the fleamarkets in Europe and America. Only at a certain point did I realise I was making a collection, and nothing is more worrying to the collector than the prospect of “Closure” ; the realisation that there will be a “final version” and a potential end to the collection. I have stopped going to fleamarkets for fear of finding an image that “should have been in the book”, or have distractedly turned my attention to collecting postcards : postcard that show frozen fountains or four-leaf clovers, or have seagulls in them, or have been scribbled on by someone. But now I have resolved to believe that there is no, and can never be, a final version to this collection ; that FLOH exists in the continuum and will one day, I hope, return, ownerless and silent to its origins in the fleamarket.” – Tacita Dean
