Lucy Raven

Stills from “China Town”

“China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to “be wired” and in turn, to be connected, in today’s global economic system, the video follows the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire—in this case, the literal digging of a hole to China—and the generation of waste and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct.” – Lucy Raven

China Town is currently on view through October 7th as part of Image Employment at MoMA PS1, New York.

Jennifer Jupiter Stratford (and various collaborators).

Work from Telefantasy Studios.

“Jennifer Juniper Stratford is a multidimensional artist based in Los Angeles. Growing up in Hollywood, she became obsessed with the dreamlike realm of cinema while simultaneously coming to grips with the industry’s grubby realities.
Her work explores this influence through photography, journalism, filmmaking, and video art. Stratford’s work has been shown internationally -notably at MoMA, Cinemarfa, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, The New Beverly Cinema, and the Spectacle Theater New York.
In 2004 she opened Telefantasy Studios, a workshop for the creation of B-movies, practical special effects, and experiments in video. The studio makes use of cast-off and obsolete television studio equipment, analog mixers, and video synthesizers which are often mixed with modern computers in search of making new discoveries in the potential of media.” – Jennifer Juniper Stratford

Talia Chetrit

Work from her exhibition at Leslie Fritz.

“Talia Chetrit’s current exhibition at Leslie Fritz, her third solo show with the gallery, originates in the artist’s revisiting old contact sheets from the first rolls of film she shot as a thirteen-year-old in the mid-1990s. They were intimate, direct portraits of the subjects most immediately available to her: her own family in and around their home. Chetrit re-cropped and re-edited these old images, and returned to photograph her family again for the most recent work in the exhibition, mixing these two moments in this installation. In these images, we see her mother, father, brother, and the photographer herself, pictured today and as they appeared some eighteen years ago.

With these works, we find the artist rethinking her own amateur photography, revisiting a moment when taking pictures seemed to exist outside of any context of historical or professional knowledge. Her chosen subjects were expedient, of course, but photographing her family, and especially her mother – whose winsome visage appears several times – inevitably engaged dynamics beyond the merely formal. Whatever the intimacy of these images, for the young Chetrit photography offered a means to simultaneously be with and stand apart from the family – to see it through the distancing perspective of the camera lens.

The comparison of pictures of the same individuals separated by almost two decades materializes that gap in time, reminding us of the photographic image’s status as witness to what has been. Chetrit has remarked on the moodiness of this series, yet the pathos of these works does not really stem from the tragedy of the passage of time.

It seems rather to derive from Chetrit’s ongoing exploration of concealment, of what remains hidden even within a technology devoted to the visible. Closer examination of the photographs reveals patterns of occluded gazes, masked looks, and blocked faces, through which the kinship of this exhibition with the artist’s previous work, such as the Hand series (2012), becomes evident. What is new, however, and what defines these new photographs as so remarkable an achievement is that it is no longer simply a matter of physical concealment and its attendant erotics that Chetrit has taken up, but the alternating forms of emotional concealment and exposure characterizing the family romance itself.” -Thomas McDonough

via Contemporary Art Daily.

Ott Metusala and Erki Närep

Work from Take it from here @ Konstanet

“Far more people see art on screens than in museums. The gallery is no longer the primary exhibition space – the Internet is. Consequently more and more exhibits are carried out not in a physical form, but instead posted on websites as two-dimensional images. So what happens to a physical medium when it is not used for its main function – to present media? In one perspective, galleries (i.e. the medium) become useless and incomplete, having no purpose at all. On the other hand, the medium can be seen as the message or even art itself. Usually, mediums are designed and illustrated to provoke a certain emotion or create a certain background for media. Therefore, the medium becomes a part of the whole conception and still holds the emotion or characteristics of the existed or removed media.

A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect – a light bulb enables people to create spaces during night time that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. A light bulb is a medium without any content. A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.

Empty frames and pedestals in a room may not have a deeper meaning without any media. However, the mere existence of frames and pedestals creates an environment for an art gallery, just like the light bulb. It instantly gives the understanding that the medium exists for a certain reason – to present something. Medium without the media becomes a part of an environment – the gallery – and therefore, becomes something totally different. For instance, if you take an mp3-player, plug in the headphones and put them in your ears without turning the player on, headphones become a part of your appearance, having no actual purpose at all. Without any defined purpose, a medium becomes the purpose – the media or the message itself.

Since digital images are supplanting exhibition space, galleries have become a metaphor—not a physical necessity but a necessary intermediation. Artwork does not require installation within a physical space, and a gallery does not require art objects. Instead, art objects require the transitive value that the gallery implies and galleries need the creative value that the artwork implies.”

LIA

Work from Black & White.

“The Austrian artist LIA – one of the early pioneers of Software and Net Art – has been creating digital art, installations and sound works since 1995. Her works combine various traditions of drawing and painting with the aesthetic of digital images and algorithms. They are characterized by a minimalist quality, and by an affinity with conceptual art.

In the five works that LIA created for the teletext art festival she uses the single pixel as basic building blocks. The images play on the one hand with the idea of algorithms, by varying the distances between lines and pixels following algorithmically defined patterns; and on the other hand with the intense contrast between black and white elements demanded by the limitations of the technology. In four of the five works the teletext “flash” command is used to provide a hierarchical order of the elements without using animation as such. A clear boundary is formed between the permanent (static) and impermanent (dynamic) elements; this boundary appears and disappears as the blinking effect plays out. If the entire image were always visible, ie if there was no blink effect, the dynamic elements would be lost amongst the static elements.” – via TELETEXT

Rachel Harrison

Work from her oeuvre.

“Rachel Harrison (born 1966, New York) is a sculptor based in New York. Harrison’s work has been seen in many exhibitions including: ‘Posh Floored as Ali G Tackles Beck’ at Arndt & Partner [1] in Berlin, ‘Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles (55 km) an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch (76 mm) sphere?’ at Arena Gallery [2] in Brooklyn, ‘Sleeping Waters’ in Chantal Crousel in Paris and ‘24 Seven’ at Galerie Klaus Peter Goebel in Stuttgart.” – Wikipedia 

Milton Melvin Croissant III

Work from Presenter Mode

“Displays are an inescapable touchstone of contemporary society. They are the inward and outward eye of the User. Within the context of an Institution, the Display is revered as a necessary point of contact between humans- paramount to the transmission of ideas. However the Display has meaning in the absence of input. Consider the human-less function of the Display. It is an act of silent meditation: a golden ratio that is both void and charged, absorbing and emanating. Within an operating system, “presenter mode“ is a mechanism to remove human influence/personalization from a Display, to provide a clean plane for the dedicated function. Presenter Mode lays bare the display to highlight its essentialism, void of User.” –Milton Melvin Croissant III

Roxy Paine

Work from Apparatus at Kavi Gupta.

“Roxy Paine’s work has challenged the perception of visual language and how it affects the understanding of our environments since the genesis of his career in the early nineties. Focusing on objects and their fabrication, Paine strives to evoke a desire to understand how meaning can transcend through time, using our conventional relationships with the visual as an anchor for the exploration of truth. Paine’s contemplative work has ventured into two distinct, yet related, avenues of artistic production. Highly acclaimed for his synthetic replicas of organic forms such as fungi and trees, intricately executed with impressive mastery and ingenuity, and his computer-driven machines programed to auto-produce works of art, Paine presents a complex arena where the balance between what we know to be true and what we can learn from a deeper contemplative observation is considered. A truth dependent on our willingness to accept the beauty in the imperfections within nature and language itself, a balance in paradoxical poetics.

With Apparatus, Roxy Paine introduces a new chapter in his work, a series of large scale dioramas. Inspired by spaces and environments designed to be activated via human interaction, a fast-food restaurant and a control room, the dioramas present spaces and objects which are hand carved from birch and maple wood and formed from steel, encased and frozen in time, void of human presence, making their inherent function obsolete. Rooted in the Greek language, diorama translates to “through that which is seen”, a definition that has evolved throughout time as dioramas became conventionally known as physical windowed and encased rooms used as educational tools. Paine transforms the environments on display by using the diorama’s traditional experience as a tool to create a contemplative experience where what we see behind the glass transitions between being real and being a mere shell of something real. These dioramas are not intended to be specific or accurate replicas, but merely gestures of their real life inspirations. As Paine himself states; “they are translations from one visual language to another”. The environments ask the viewer’s to consider their pre-conceived knowledge of the mechanics and functions of a fast food restaurant and that of a control room, as well as open up to the possibility of how this knowledge can, and will, change through time and context.

Japanese culture has a term known as Wabi-Sabi, the idea of art and architecture addressing how the natural change and uniqueness of objects helps us connect to the world and how we can transcend significance and meaning with inevitable change and time. Paine has constantly innovated ways that address impervious knowledge and challenged it with almost impossible transformations, taking into consideration the concepts behind Wabi-Sabi to find a balance in the inevitable changing nature of the world. Though human language relies heavily on social convention and learning, Paine strives to push the boundaries of that process. Paine’s dioramas, along with his previous bodies of work, serve as reminders of the knowledge and enlightenment that comes from actual, real, experience with our natural and fabricated worlds.” –  Emanuel Aguilar

Photo Credit: Joseph Rynkiewicz, courtesy of Kavi Gupta CHICAGO | BERLIN

Joachim Schmid

Work from Meetings on Holiday.

“Schmid’s use of extended series reflects his concern with photography as an encompassing, culturally dispersed and ubiquitous social and aesthetic discourse that runs throughout the public and private spheres of modern life. Yet the fundamental richness of Schmid’s photographic raw material – along with the sardonic wit he so often displays – derails any attempt to read his work as pure anthropology or social science. His artistic preoccupations reflect a close observation of photographic history and a fascination with photographic images themselves in all their alternately bizarre and conventionalized aspects.[3]” – Wikipedia

Masood Kamandy

Work from Materialism.

“These photographs are an exploration of materialism and still-life. Materialism’s meaning is multifold. It is a branch of philosophy in which everything is only matter and energy. It can imply consumerism, and many of the objects I photograph are things one will immediately recognize from any drugstore. It is also a reference to the photographic object, or the transition that an object must go through to become a photograph.

Materialism is always inherently in flux in the medium of photography. Objects are changed in the process through a translation effect. The picture is anchored in the real world, but the photograph carries with it a new set of meanings as well. It amplifies. It distorts. It selects. I see photography as a series of steps from the moment the object is selected to the final image. Those steps are my entry points. The basis of my photographic methodology lies in intervention and material transformation whether it’s analog (as in constructing a physical assemblage to photograph), or digital (as in writing a computer program to modify the image). These photographs are my way of exploring materialism’s expansive meaning.” – Masood Kamandy