“…Letha is very interested in the intersections between the natural world and architecture, specifically points in which these two areas are merged. Many of her previous artworks incorporates photography of the landscape with sculptural materials, or video work in which interior architecture is explored alongside images from the vast wilderness of the American West. “I see furniture as an intersection between architecture and the human form”, she explains “and I am interested particularly in modernist furniture both as objects of design, and of desire. I was drawn to Poul Henningsen’s Artichoke Lamp both as a beautiful object, but also because it directly draws from nature in its construction, the layering of its ‘leaves’ and the quality of light created by these reflections. For me the notion of light is related so much to the outdoors and natural environment, and how artificial light can re-create this. I also was interested in the fact that Henningsen created the lamp in an attempt to replicate candlelight by diffusing the light through refraction. His designs’ merging of beauty and mathematical concerns really struck me”…” – Lighting Academy
“Murmur Study is an installation that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook’s status update. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal — often emotional — expression should give us pause.
This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below.
The printed thermal receipt paper is then reused in future projects and exhibitions or recycled.”
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“Hello World! is a large-scale audio visual installation comprised of thousands of unique video diaries gathered from the internet. The project is a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard.
On one hand, new media technologies like YouTube have enabled new speakers at an alarming rate. On the other hand, no new technologies have emerged that allow us to listen to all of these new public speakers. Each video consists of a single lone individual speaking candidly to a (potentially massive) imagined audience from a private space such as a bedroom, kitchen, or dorm room. The multi-channel sound composition glides between individuals and the group, allowing viewers to listen in on unique speakers or become immersed in the cacophony. Viewers are encouraged to dwell in the space.”
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“Email became an integral part of my life in 1998. Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past. I am interested in revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family. This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one. Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait. My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in my email archive. The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line. My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself.” – Christopher Baker
“Kate MccGwire’s work asks questions about the very nature of beauty. She’s intrigued by the possibility of envisaging beauty as something more complex than merely what delights the senses: beauty can be about a problem; it can be something that repels you or makes you question the status quo. The idea that it is a cultural phenomenon, susceptible to argument through the creative process, fascinates her.
Much of Kate’s work references Freud’s ‘Unheimliche’ (the uncanny, or, literally, the ‘unhomely’); the idea, to quote Freud, of ‘a place where the familiar can somehow excite fear’. It also embraces artistic notions of the Abject.
She will take an everyday thing or idea that is intrinsically discomfiting and, by re-framing it, entice the viewer into re-examining their preconceptions and prejudices – cultural, historical, personal – about the everyday. The viewer’s response is visceral, the impact immediate, the ideas triggered resonating in their mind somewhere beyond rational interpretation.
Organic patterns, forms and materials have an instinctive draw; work may look determinedly abstract to the naked eye, but by using a spiral or circle, or a familiar material, the viewer’s gaze is lured inward, as if into a ‘field of attraction’, only to be repulsed or even menaced by the associations that unfold once ‘inside’. At the same time the scale and delicacy of the work reinforce the potential for awe and beauty in the unconventional.
Intrinsic to her method is the collecting and sorting of materials from hundreds of different sources over a period of months, even years. In turn, pieces evolve intuitively as if out of the subconscious, the language evocative rather than purely illustrative. As the work takes shape, a new, playful reality emerges, so that the object itself becomes a sort of prism, refracting the layers of meaning and cultural associations buried within, the quantity of materials used sometimes deliberately overwhelming, as if charged with a power and ambition beyond the reach they possess when seen in isolation.” – Kate MccGwire
“In Okinawa, the precipitous cliffs that fall hundreds of feet to the ocean below are called banta.
For years I have carried with me a vivid memory of the first time I stood atop these cliffs—a memory of beauty in the endless blue expanse of sea and sky intensified by the fearsome height and history that met my downward gaze.
Five years later this memory drove me to revisit and descend those very cliffs. Standing at its feet for the first time I felt in the cliff’s full visceral weight something so powerful that I was initially unable to take even a single photograph. The shadows seeping from the cliff’s surface, the white craters riddling the cliff’s coral limestone, and the charred black caves were stark reminders of all that these cliffs had witnessed.
I returned to my studio after six months of researching and exploring the South Pacific Theater with thousands of image files of the cliffs to piece together. As I re-shaped and re-experienced the original digital images, these cliffs became a metaphor for Okinawa’s history as well as digitally-manipulated, hyper-real vision of my experience standing between fear and beauty on Okinawa’s banta.” – Osamu James Nakagawa
“Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.
These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.” – Edward Burtynsky
While not necessarily representitive of his oeuvre, http://virtualhiker.wordpress.com, is a fascinating foray into the contemporary experience of place and nature as dictated/informed by Google and GPS. The work is still very much in progress as Rutkauskas’ Wanderer residency at the Banff Centre continues, so I highly recommend following the work as it develops so you can get a peek into his process. In many ways, the work is, as it suggests, a virtual hike, but I think that these images offer only a glimpse of what is developing into an extremely interesting practice.
“Spam is a daily annoyance, but in these words that came to my inbox, I found something accidentally poetic. I was struck by the sheer possibility suggested by these messages. Taken out of the context for which they were intended, and re-inserted into another kind of economy (that of the gallery) the words become something hopeful and quite beautiful.” – Rachel Perry Welty
“With a sharp eye for the aesthetic possibilities of everyday refuse, Welty uses familiar materials in startling ways. Her drawings, made from used fruit stickers she obsessively collects, slices and arranges into zany geometric abstractions, combine Minimalist aesthetics with Pop humor. The abstract spiraling shapes suggest both the circuitous journey produce makes from point of origin to consumer and the endless cycle of daily food consumption. As she states: “We shop, eat, sleep and then get up and do it all over again.” Welty sees the stickers as visual remnants rich with information – economic, political, geographic and social. In the wall sculpture Daily Bread, Welty organized seven years of bread tags collected in the kitchen drawer into a pastel grid to form a calendar of her family’s bread consumption.
Throughout her career, Welty has used various forms of communication as both material and subject matter. The video Karaoke Wrong Number features the artist expertly lip-synching wrong number messages left inadvertently on her answering machine over a two year period. With performances both funny and poignant, Welty conjures a variety of personalities and touches upon issues of privacy, identity, expectation and assumption. For her Spam Message wall sculptures, Welty uses a single sheet of aluminum foil, crushed and formed by hand into words, to immortalize the accidental bits of poetry sent through cyberspace by strangers to unknown recipients. About the piece You May Already Be a Winner, Welty comments, “I was struck by the sheer possibility suggested by these words. Taken out of context… the words become something hopeful and beautiful.””- Yancey Richardson Gallery
“The very title and alliteration of Starker Staat( Strong state) evoke ominous associations from national security to other things. This series of photographs, taken in Cologne in 2003 and first exhibited at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart that same year, presents a cinematographic sequence that reinforces these alarming associations visually. The artist, Bettina Pousttchi, photographed street scenes with police intervention—probably road blocks and police controls. Then she edited these photographs on the computer such that the black-and-white photographs, which suddenly seem as vague as they do dramatic, allude to the aesthetic of surveillance cameras and their horizontal strips, which have long been familiar to us from banks, parking garages, and supermarkets as well as from Hollywood films and nightly news broadcasts. Because this group of works is always presented as a series, as a kind of horizontal (film) strip, rather than as individual photographs, cinematic chains of associations develop in the viewer’s head, recalling photographs of terrorist actions as well as filmed bank robberies or hijacking scenes. As an imaginary scenario, Starker Staatpermits an open reading, on the one hand, but, on the other, this reading always revolves around a semantic core that, as already noted, the title conjures up. It is also interesting to think of the subject of sur- veillance as a metaphor for being captured in images in the first place. Films such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and in a sense Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Upas well, have done precisely this. And the cinematographic sequence of Bettina Pousttchi’s Starker Staatreminds us that “the camera’s too revealing gaze,” as Susan Sontag called it, never grows tired, that it can still squint into the most remote corners and boast of its omnipotent presence. Last but not least, the fact that the artist edits her photographs on the computer to evoke the sense of surveillance introduces another aspect into the artistic game — namely, that of the cooperation of (electronic) digital technology and (chemical) photography. It is precisely the combination of computer and photo/film/ video that can make a strategy of surveillance more effective today than ever before.never grows tired, that it can still squint into the most remote corners and boast of its omnipotent presence. Last but not least, the fact that the artist edits her photographs on the computer to evoke the sense of surveillance introduces another aspect into the artistic game — namely, that of the cooperation of (electronic) digital technology and (chemical) photography. It is precisely the combination of computer and photo/film/ video that can make a strategy of surveillance more effective today than ever before.” – Raimar Stange
“Known for his video and photography manipulations of monumental news imagery, including the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and the Tiananmen Square protests, Josh Azzarella is a whiz at altering and erasing history. The artist’s latest project, which was two years in the making, takes on something nearly as significant in pop culture, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Stripping it of its song and all signs of life — bar the ticket booth attendant at the cinema — Azzarella’s interpretation of the classic offers a landscape that ripe for new fantasies.
There are no zombies, no lovers, no screams, and no dance numbers in Azzarella’s Untitled #100 (Fantasia). The artist has, however, left the fog, which rolls through the haunting scenes like a ghostly curse. Viewable online at the humorously titled www.thefunkof40000years.com, which references Vincent Price’s “Thriller” rap, Azzarella’s video retains the spooky visual atmosphere of John Landis’ film scenery. Those woods, cemetery, vacant industrial streets, and abandoned old house are set to a new ambient music soundtrack that poetically heightens the tension of looking at an emptied icon. Azzarella may have taken the thrill out of “Thriller,” but he leaves us with a new playground for the mind.
Catch the video before the copyright police seize it or collectors grab up all of the available copies; rumors have it that David Lachapelle has already purchased one of the five editions and that Kanye West is considering one, as well.” – Paul Laster for FlavorWire
“I have been trying out different kinds of medias. I usually don´t work within one specific media but uses those which fit my ideas. It can be painting, sculpture, installation, photo, video, sound, etc. I think art has the potential to stimulate people to experience the world in new and deeper ways than is normally done in ordinary life. I don´t think art is interesting in itself. What really is interesting is life itself and the strange world we live in. Everything that exists is a mystery because we can not really understand what it is. This makes everything beautiful and interesting in themselves.
I have had two main problems with making art. They may seem very banal. The first problem is a problem of choice: How can we, when making art, make choices? For instance, how can we use a particular colour while painting, or choose one idea out of the endless other possibilities? It seems so meaningless to make art if everything is relative and there is no actual deep reason for doing it. I guess the question is actually: Can art be meaningful? And more fundamental: Is there any meaning in life at all? I really belive there is, but it has been difficult to find a logical solution to this problem.
The other problem is: If the world is fantastic and interesting in itself. Then, how can an artist make something that can be interesting compared to this? I don´t like making images because images makes one forget about the mystical aspects of the world. The image become an reduction and a distraction from the real. You see the image, and both forget about yourself and the world. As I said it can seem very banal, but it has actually been something that has made it difficult for me to make art works.
In the last exhibition I had in the student gallery called 21:25, I found the only logical thing to do was working with the mentioned problems. What became the solution and preparation for the show, was emptying the gallery and be in a process of randomly making dots with a pencil on the biggest wall. It was absolutely beautiful to come to the gallery the first day and start making dots on the blank wall. For three days I was doing this. The feeling about it went in cycles. Sometimes it felt meaningful making dots. Other times it seemed meaningless and boring. The end result became very beautiful, I think. When entering the gallery space, people couldn´t see anything exept the room itself. But when getting closer to the dotted wall I found it having a surprising effect. It was not possible to have full overview of all the dots. When moving along the wall, some came into view while others slipped away. It reminded me of looking at the sky full of stars, or other organic structures that is rich and complex, without any readable signs. I found it very interesting also because the dots were real and existing in themselves as just dots. There was no illusion. You could see the whole process. It was simple and clear. Solid ground.” – Jørund Aase
