“Over the past decade Anne Collier has forged a rigorous body of works that engage in a unique dialogue with contemporary photography. Collier produces tight, sparely formalized compositions often using a technique of re-photography. Using an approach that can be compared to artists like John Baldessari, Sherry Levine and Louise Lawler, Collier’s work addresses questions of biography and self-portraiture. Her interest in mass market and pop culture imagery from the 1970s is expressed in carefully staged found photographs, and she has used diverse sources ranging from advertisements and posters, to art magazines and 70s vinyl LP covers. Her biting, dryly humorous compositions—some subtly self-reflexive—frame recurrent tensions of power and gender. In Woman With a Camera (2006), for example, Collier photographs and reframes a pair of promotional posters for the 1978 movie thriller Eyes of Laura Mars starring Faye Dunaway. Dunaway is seen looking through and over a camera, a cipher for the photographer artist, but also posed from within the film narrative inhabiting the viewpoint of the story’s antagonist. Here, Collier proposes questions that are fundamental to contemporary photography while foregrounding a renewed currency to debates about subjectivity and representation.” – text from Presentation House Gallery
“My work explores the personal and public reconciliation process and how these experiences may be manifested within the experience of art. I am interested in contemplating the accumulated historical weight that each of us inherits in society and that, to a certain extent, defines our identities. At the same time, I am also concerned with the accumulation of our own personal histories and how we negotiate with these experiences in our lives as they weave from past to present.
As a Japanese man born after World War II, I live with the inherited responsibility of the attacks on Pearl Harbor as well as the atrocities that preceded and followed this event. The historical weight of responsibility for these events has been diminished by generations before me, leaving my generation and those that follow to contend with this history. Mirroring the history of the war, I too have accumulated events in my personal life that are characterized by guilt, regret and remorse. I am very conscious of the personal and communal burden, and I attempt to address it in a way that recognizes these issues and also brings a degree of levity and communal activity as well. I hope that my work may make these burdens visible as well as help disperse this cultural weight into our collective and personal histories.
The gesture of bowing, an apology in Japanese culture, is at the heart of my recent “Pedestal for Apology” series. This simple gesture, raised to an iconic level, is meant to frame ideas of humility and forgiveness for whoever takes the opportunity to perform this act, and also whoever witnesses others performing this act. Perceiving this simple gesture of apology is complicated by its very public situation, which may be seen as equally ridiculous or irreverent. By introducing levity into a very sober situation, I hope to diffuse and humanize the burden of this engagement.”
I was initially drawn in by Duit’s work about (my assumption here) wind / wind power in the Netherlands, and I was in the mood for some slightly more traditional photography today. His statement is short because Duit is not a fan of large written statements / concepts.
“In The Netherlands there is no exotic wildlife, mountains or fast-flowing rivers. The concept behind this project is to explore man-made-enviroments that are constructed as an alternative for the nature which isn’t present and how these enviroments are used.”
Much of Beck’s work makes reference to stereoscopic vision, both literally and conceptually, in a way that makes one consider her work as a metacritique of artistic interpretation. I am a huge fan of this work, and I am thrilled to have come across it, and I think Robert Adams would love this work.
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New Developments: Modeled after turn-of-the-century stereocards, this series of debossed Iris prints documents the interior and exterior spaces of the growing suburbs southeast of Denver, Colorado.
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Space Available: At first glance, this sculpture appears to be the silhouetted framework of an actual billboard. In fact, the piece is flat. Cut from a perspectival drawing and built like a theatrical stage set, it creates a disorienting illusion that flattens out as one passes by. While fairly large, the piece is nonetheless a subtle addition to the industrialist-mansion-turned-art-center; it nags at the peripheral vision of the passerby, who tries to remember if it had been there previously, who may see it simply as a naked billboard, and not as a residual industrial object descended atop a formal 17th-Century Carolean-inspired building. A companion piece invites viewers to take a souvenir postcard of a blank billboard, both inviting them to dream into its empty advertising space and memorializing their visit to the exterior site, turning a peripheral, non-event into one to remember.
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There: In this portfolio of aquatint etchings, lightposts, signs, billboards and street furniture become stark silhouettes, signalling the absence of their context. Isolated, they suggest a familiar if unspecified place, or even props for an empty stage set.
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Tree Islands: Whether evidence of nature’s struggle against a growing asphalt sea or a developer’s attempt to prevent a driver’s dizzying fear of wide-open spaces, the islands of trees growing in parking lots accumulate in this body of work into discreetly parceled urban forests particularly in a series of graphite and cut drawings on paper. In other pieces, graphite hand cut drawings on mylyar that float directly on the wall, or in laser-etched prints, they appear isolated in solitary moments of focus – the cracks in their cement barriers, the awkwardness of untrimmed growth revealing a hidden pressure on expectations of the neat controlled world of the parking lot.
I know that everyone is (or at least should be) aware of Thomas Ruff, but I was thinking about his work all day yesterday and I really wanted to post his jpegs work today, and as soon as I can afford it, I am going to buy the book.
“With his new body of work entitled Jpeg at David Zwirner, Thomas Ruff continues his engagement with the production of images in the Internet age. Named after the compression files for Internet images that Ruff mines from the web, the ongoing series explores how these online pictures are perceived by the public. He locates the ambiguous place these images hold in our pixilated collective memory, when photographic details are lost and historical content is disregarded in their incessant reproduction.
Ruff’s enlarged jpegs focus on common types of landscapes. They depict scenes of war, picturesque mountain streams, outer space, and cityscapes, many of which are affected by natural or man-made disasters. In Jpeg bi01 (2007), a mushroom cloud threatens an idyllic seascape, signaling the aftermath of an explosion. Yet the horror of the event is abstracted and sanitized in its enormous reproduction. The action becomes stilted, and its whereabouts unknown, the billowing smoke blending in with the cloudy sky.
Like Ruff’s Nudes series, the jpegs complicate photography’s relationship with painting. Here he flirts with the idea of the sublime in nature, and indeed there is a compelling dynamic between nineteenth century European landscape painting and the noticeable pixels of Ruff’s enormous prints. The geometrically precise grid of pixels becomes the digital age’s answer to Seurat’s free-hand Pointilism; the overall composition is only obvious when the viewer steps away from the picture. But with Ruff, even when you step back to make sense of the image, there is a feeling of alienation. The subtle tonal shifts mesmerize, but the absence of an identifiable content leaves the viewer cold (the titles don’t provide answers either, they are acronyms, and are often difficult to interpret.)
As Roland Barthes once wrote, a photograph is a “message without a code.” Without language or context, these are not landscapes we can possess or wholly comprehend—they are transient in form and content. When isolated and enlarged— whether a natural disaster, a waterfall, or a terrorist attack—all appear as banal as an image of a pastoral landscape. This is the impact of the jpeg format. It behaves as a kind of equalizer for Ruff. The works in this show may present a distorted “reality,” but Ruff has continually shown in his work that a photograph does not simply depict truth or reality, but isolates and aestheticizes it.” – Dmitry Komis for NY Arts
Work from A Thousand Windows. I was drawn in by some of his out of focus portraiture, and I found this work about voyeurism and webcam culture.
“I saw this one where a couple was just sleeping. The lights were on and they were sleeping.No sound though, you couldn’t hear him snore. One hundred and sixty-seven viewers,watching them sleep. Maybe if I wait long enough they’ll start having sex. A friend saw. “I couldn’t have this, I wouldn’t leave the house,” she said. A thousand windows and each have their own story. In another, a man in a garter belt and panty hose stood in front of his television. I couldn’t see what was playing, it was distorted in the darkness of the background. It’s the depths that get me. The distance, male and female, planes of focus. Separation. Another, the girl in the back undresses, coolly, and without much effort or excitement rubs her breasts. Fifteen more viewers. The man turns; maybe it’s his encouraging words or her impatience, only time will tell. Sixty more then, they’re in the triple digits now. Playing to hundreds of homes. They’re active participants, exhibitionists and voyeurs, feeding off each other. What makes us so curious about what goes on in others homes, yet so shocked to see it? Why do the lives of others seem much more interesting than our own? If a camera watched you who would look through from the other side? How would they view you? This work presents life seen only by those who choose to seek, or desire to be sought. Set up by the subjects themselves, cameras broadcast the alluring, the boring, the playful, the disturbing, the demure, and the insatiable. I’ve chosen to show you only pieces of the whole, moments frozen. If we can ponder the instant does it become more real? It is up to you to decide right or wrong, to be turned on or mortified, curious or condemning. They are playing for you. ”
“The photo series Twilight Switch (2006) is Swiss artist duo Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs’ witty riff on the tradition of documenting the road trip. Inspired by numerous books, songs and movies, the series specifically focuses on the vast landscape of the continental United States. With referencing the work of master photographers Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, all of whom documented their travels across the country, Onorato & Krebs adopt a more whimsical approach toward this American tradition of being on the road.
According to the artists Twilight Switch is:
…about comparing the America we see with our own eyes with the mystical Land we have seen through the eyes of others. It’s about traveling a country we already know without ever having been there. The expectation is not to prove ourselves wrong. Every visual temptation we encounter is linked to a memory. The visual output of the last 50 years is so strong we feel unable to take pictures without notorious repetition. It’s like trying to write a love song knowing that every great love song has already been written.
What was surprising was the feeling of being totally lost. And the loneliness of the great wide open. In the end, what led to the series of pictures was not the knowledge of what has been done before. It was the feeling we carried while moving forward. The irrational fear of being stalked by a certain pattern of streets, landscapes, and consumerist architecture.
After returning to New York, Nico Krebs wrote an email to a friend on the West Coast:
After an endless drive we finally arrived to New York last night. The road keeps going inside my head, but I will probably be cured in a couple of days. It was really quite an amazing time. 4 days of 8-hour driving passing 100 trillion Golden Arches, Super 8 Motels, Burger Kings, Pizzahuts, Wal-Marts, Steak’n’Shakes, and all these screaming roadside temptations. America, the endless strip mall. And even all the big cities we passed looked the same from the Interstate and we kept asking ourselves if we were trapped in the Twilight Zone, driving the same 600 miles each day…” – Elna Svenle, New York, June 2005
“For the project ‘Template of a sleeping city’ I was walking through nightly cityscapes and suburbs. The sketch-photographs I took while walking were dominated by circles, squares and rectangles; a completely abstract image showed up. These images can be seen everywhere; the night brushes away many characteristics of specific locations. What remains is a framework of views and places that applies to any location; a template of a sleeping city. “
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Artist’s statement:
“I’m searching for archetypical images of modern city spaces. Places that everyone recognizes instantly. The suburbs with blocks of flats, shopping malls with similar shops everywhere, parks with perfectly cut rows of trees and bushes. Places without many specific characteristics, the so called non-places, places which are spread around the world like building blocks. But also places that are part of everyone’s existence: the park out of your childhood, the view from the bedroomwindow, the parking space at the supermarket.
From my own observations and images from the internet and computergames, I create sketches which I then develop into paper sculptures. Eventually these sculptures are photographed. By means of photography I create a frame within which I can layer nuances of realism.
I like to work with paper and cardboard because of the simplicity of the material. A white piece of paper almost stands as a symbol for empty or blank. When creating the scenes I don’t hide seams, cuts and gluespots, for these are aspects that contribute to the experience of the cityscapes as a quickly build scenery, often destined to exist only briefly.
Squares, rectangles, circles are my working area from which I build my sculptures. I want to limit myself to the most simple forms. Details as windows, doors, curtains are hardly present. Only the basis remains. The paper sculptures can be seen as models without paint or decoration, a characterless blankness, with still a strong resemblance to the living world. “
Work from his massive and thouroughly engaging website. Keller’s work is a collection of pieces interventions into reality that serve to recontextualize objects, images, and media. Also see his blog.
Tantamount: “Photographs of mountains are computationally altered to flatten the mountain’s elevations, while an ocean horizon is altered to mimic the mountain’s original topography.”
Insecurity Envelopes: “Insecurity Envelopes are a series of laser-cut envelopes that I am developing based on the patterns printed inside security envelopes.”
Paul van den Hout’s work, Pixelation, addresses the visual codes of the pixelated image.
“The pixel (and pixelation) is a part of our visual code, and a pixelated image has two functions, one denying the viewer access to the complete image, and the other protecting them from it. Pixelated images represent parts of reality that we are either cannot see, or do not wish to see. The pixelated image itself becomes a hyperbole of reality: and in the end the pixelated icon becomes a stereotype or archetype.
The first pixelated piece I made was the triptych “Mediascapes”. The tryptich represents three general landscapes of major armed conflicts: World War I, the Vietnam War and the `gulf War. Each landscape is constructed of 10 overlayed images collected from contemporary public media and reduced to one hundred coloured squares each.”
