Monday, August 27, 2012

Mitch Epstein

Mitch Epstein’s career recalls that of photographers from earlier decades, the era before academia became an artist’s primary means of support and commercial art galleries the ultimate goal for displaying work. Like his teacher, Garry Winogrand, Epstein has concentrated his efforts on a series of ambitious, independent projects that are subsequently published as books.

All of Epstein’s work expresses a belief that a photographer can engage with issues beyond self-reflexive ones. In the summer of 2009, I sat down with Epstein in his New York apartment, where he lives with his wife and daughter, and where the main topic of conversation was American Power, Epstein’s forthcoming book of photographs dealing with energy production and consumption—the politics of fueling America.
source: bombsite

sikkemajenkinsco

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Aman Mojadidi

In the West, art rarely has such high stakes or such power;
in Kabul, Aman Mojadidi arguably has more influence as an artist than he did as a development worker. The stakes are high in his work – it’s one of the few times that being an artist garners this level of attention to political issues.

Working as an artist lets him say things that are far more complex than are otherwise permitted in a zone of conflict. This isn’t to say there aren’t genuine dangers involved. Speech isn’t exactly free in Kabul, but under the cover of ‘art’ he can blend in activism and produce provocative work that gets to the heart of the issues in Afghanistan. It’s rare that art involves real risk; for me, that is one of the key roles of art but one that few artists take.
source: blog.frieze - Jennifer Kabat june 20, 2011

TED - jun 2012
A sense of humor about Afghanistan? Artist Aman Mojadidi shows how

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Antonio Martinez - Near the Egress 2009

Antonio Martinez spent a lot of time at a traveling circus, shooting dozens of rolls of 35mm black-and-white film. Then he made over 800 modern dryplate tintypes from the negatives, and then scanned them digitally, and then sequenced them artfully to produce this experimental stop-motion video.

The effect is like a dream or a very distant memory. I love the random chemical colors and smears and light leaks created during the tintype process. And the moody soundtrack seems perfectly in-sync with every flash and flutter and gracefully stuttering movement.

Martinez said he created this video to serve as a desired childhood memory of the circus, but through the mind of an adult.

The project began in 2005 and was completed in early 2009 with the help of sound designer, Ramah (Malebranche) Jihan, and assistant, Sarah (Lathrop) Midkiff. The video has been exhibited to rave reviews in over 23 video art and film festivals so far.
source: lensculture

blueskygallery

Near the Egress 2009 (05:37)
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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Joni Sternbach - SurfLand

Joni Sternbach has dedicated much of the past six years making portraits of surfers and their community employing the archaic, elaborate and fascinating wet-plate collodion process commonly known as tintype. Redolent of the Civil War era when the process was first developed, the images are ghostly and vibrant, ancient and modern, sturdy yet precious. Produced directly on the plates themselves, they are unique objects, adding to the aura of rarity they exude. Her subjects pose with their boards, taking on a totemic, primal tool-like quality, as if their lives are supremely reliant on them.
via: nyartbeat

edwardcella

Momenta (Created with Bruce Milne) (01:29)
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Monday, July 9, 2012

Exilentia Exiff

There is exilentia exiff.
Exiff is an animal, that wants to become God.
That makes him suffer. Exilentia is just an idea of a woman.
That makes exiff feel better. „exilentia exiff” is human. It is a human project.

The EXILENTIA EXIFF IS ABNORMAL
and that means, that she tries not to follow the conventional social rules /norms/ . She just examines some of them in historical and cultural context. Norms change in some societies sometimes very rapidly and sometimes very slowly and what may be seen as normal in one culture, may be seen as abnormal in another. Exilentia is fascinated by norms connected with gender and age. Why a young female naked body is acceptable and a picture of an old woman in a sexual pose violates the standards of society? Why does such a picture cause social discomfort? What is a human being nowadays? What is self-dignity?
source:lapetitemortgallery

borderlinebiennale.tv

bagger: la-demeure-du-chaos 2008

Borderline Biennale 2011 | Exilentia Exiff | Teaser 002 (0:30)
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Friday, June 29, 2012

Martin John Callanan - Grounds

“Civilisation has evolved a mass of organizations and sub-systems human created that exist to service, preserve, operate and progress society.

One cannot stand outside this system to observe and comment. As a citizen I must engage. Identifying the offices, wanting to know what happens within and why.

Permission is sought, often after lengthy negotiation, to visit buildings closed to the public. Buildings that are fundamental to, if not somewhat discrete from, the everyday. Once granted, permission includes lists of restrictions on what can and cannot be photographed. Omissions habitually include: personnel, security devices, computer terminals, doors, and views from windows. Consequently, the resulting photographs are generally of the entrance hall floors of such buildings as parliaments, government offices and the world headquarters of international banks.”
Martin John Callanan (source: filemagazine)

Martin John Callanan (notes)

Grounds (Berliner Mauer) 2009

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Ailbhe Ni Bhriain

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s practice takes the Irish landscape as its ground, but, through intervention with pictorial space, creates a new ground - one in which the dimensions of time and place are out-of-joint. The current work focuses on composite and constructed digital imagery; an impossible intersection of realities, in which the truth associated with photography and video is revealed as construct and transformed into painterly illusion.

However impossible these constructed realities may be, there is an inherent familiarity to the scenes presented. The seamless assemblage of images creates a plausible, if surreal, setting. A Galway Hooker sailing atop a field of wheat or fish swimming through a deserted house, incite a sense of nostalgia, rather than that of the incredulous. A suggestion of screens, props and the possibility of an audience points to the image’s origin as mediation. In conjuring a displaced-present, the work looks to question our relationship to place and the recorded image.
source: galwayartscentre

Great Good Places IV (09:28)
no permission to embed -> vimeo