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Interview with Farrah Karapetian | Ken Weingart Art & Photography Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 14:56:00 +0000

By Ken Weingart on November 18, 2015

Farrah Karapetian is a renowned Los Angeles based conceptual artist who creates stunning imagery through photograms or “cameraless” photography. She studied as an undergraduate at Yale University and received her MFA at UCLA. She just concluded an exhibition at Danziger Gallery in New York City and looks forward to her second exhibition at Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles in January 2016.

When did you first think of becoming an artist?

It’s true. The majority of my practice involves cameraless photographs – or “photograms” – and the making of sculptural negatives en route to their exposure. My sculptural negatives are three-dimensional objects the bodies of which operate according to the logic of light. I am not at all interested in the cameraless photograph as such, however; my practice is not driven by anachronism. I am interested in how images exist in the world, and a lot of my cameraless work examines existing photographs and reimagines the way that they circulate. Cameralessness makes that process of reimagining more physical and present and drawn out for me than do other photographic processes. In a sense, however, you could say that if I am influenced to make a cameraless photograph from a photograph I’ve seen circulating online, that cameraless photograph originates from a photograph taken with someone’s camera.

Read full interview here

You are known for creating “cameraless” art. Does any of the work originate from a camera?

It’s true. The majority of my practice involves cameraless photographs – or “photograms” – and the making of sculptural negatives en route to their exposure. My sculptural negatives are three-dimensional objects the bodies of which operate according to the logic of light. I am not at all interested in the cameraless photograph as such, however; my practice is not driven by anachronism. I am interested in how images exist in the world, and a lot of my cameraless work examines existing photographs and reimagines the way that they circulate. Cameralessness makes that process of reimagining more physical and present and drawn out for me than do other photographic processes. In a sense, however, you could say that if I am influenced to make a cameraless photograph from a photograph I’ve seen circulating online, that cameraless photograph originates from a photograph taken with someone’s camera.

Beyond Muscle Memory: An Interview with Farrah Karapetian | Georgia Review

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 14:45:00 +0000

By The Georgia Review On November 4, 2015 · In Interviews

Artist Farrah Karapetian’s oeuvre intensely engages the art of photogramming as she locates emotional weight in the physical making of her often politically rooted subject material. In the case of Muscle Memory, featured in our Fall 2015 issue, Karapetian’s focus, as indicated, is the muscle memory of U.S. Armed Forces veterans and their relationships to their weapons. With clear resin, the artist created three casts each of the veterans’ typical sidearm (P226 Sig Sauer) and rifle (H&K416), produced multiple photograms from those, and then orchestrated the veterans into military postures, where they would remain stock-still with their prop weapons while 1:1 scale images were rendered behind them.
In this interview, Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries Director Katie Geha—who worked with Karapetian during her recent artist-in-residence stint at the Dodd—engages Karapetian in an in-depth discussion of the physical and philosophical practices that go into making her photograms.

(To view the Muscle Memory portfolio and to read managing editor

Jenny Gropp’s introduction to the project, head here.)

*****
Katie Geha: How do you choose the objects that you work with?

Farrah Karapetian: I don’t, or at least if I choose to work with an object, the identity and nature of that object are choices inherited primarily from the people or places that move me.
In the case of the body of work I call Accessory to Protest, the eight objects I worked with were listed on page four of a flyer distributed in Egypt before the protests that ostensibly brought down Hosni Mubarak in 2013. They were described as the accessories one might need in order to perform the act of protest, among them a “sweatshirt or leather jacket with a hood” that “helps shield your face from tear gas” and “spray paint so that if the authorities attack us, we can spray paint the visors of their helmets and the windshields of the armored trucks, blocking their vision and hindering their movement.” I was fascinated with this list and this document in general, which seemed like already a false artifact of the Arab Spring even as protests continued. How can one really instruct a populace in the art of civil disobedience, even with a checklist of accessories?
I remade the document itself as a photogram at life size so that it might be experienced more phenomenologically, text and all. A potent part of that process was remaking the objects—banal, every one of them—as clear sculptures to be used as negatives that would conduct light and therefore translate volume onto the photographic picture plane. Remaking the objects as negatives is a mimetic act and a first step of intentional encounter with the subject. It is also the first photographic act, insofar as the objects are remade according to the logic of light and truth.

Photography is of course understood to be the province of truth, even when staged: what was staged was, in the end, actually there at some time. I disagree, though, that truth is the endgame of the photograph or that a photograph should be understood as so tightly tied to its referent. If a product of my process is a photogram of a sneaker, that photogram was made by placing a clear resin cast of a sneaker onto photographic paper and exposing that sneaker; that clear resin sneaker is a cast of a real American sneaker; that real sneaker is a guess at the kind of sneaker that is drawn on the flyer; that depiction on the flyer is a mass-produced print; the drawing in the mass-produced print was presumably made by a person; that drawing was motivated by the idea of a real sneaker—or even an actual one; and presumably, somewhere down that rabbit hole, an organizer of Egyptian protests did indeed wear a sneaker and find it helpful. So where in that sequence of representations is my photogram? Very far from the referent, and that distance refigures the notion of truth.

For each body of work I make, the sculptural negatives I use come from a similar place of election because of how they pertain to the body of the subject that interests me, whether it is the H&K 416 (rifle) and P226 Sig Sauer (sidearm) of the veterans I worked with in 2013 for my Muscle Memory project, or my father’s drum set, which I remade in skeletal steel and glass in 2015. These objects are all already like sculptures: elected and pastiched by their users to suit them, triggers for those users’ own muscle memories, and now triggers as well for me.

KG: So you chose these objects as indices of the person or persons who used them, but you seem to very much be invested in the process of re-presentation. You could just as easily photograph the sneaker, but instead you remake the sneaker (in effect creating a sculpture) to then create a photogram, which inherently displays the process of making. You often choose to depict a variety of banal objects that are clearly objects in the photogram, yet there is also a sense of transcendence in the photograms you produce—or, at the very least, a sense of transformation. The result of this remaking does not seem to be another banal thing. How do the process and banality relate to one another, or do they? How important is transcendence?

FK: I can promise process; I can’t promise transformation and transcendence, although they are what I am looking for in the work and what I hope you experience as a viewer. When I say that, I think I’m using the word “transcendence” in light of Kant rather than of some spiritual or romantic philosophy: maybe an artwork can play a role in the way we encounter and constitute objects; maybe it can help us see them as objects at all. It is difficult to see things and people and spaces and events when we interact with them every day, especially because of the multiplicity of stages upon which our politics play out. As 21st century citizens, we encounter the politics of self, family, workplace, city, nation-state, and globe every day, sometimes before we even leave the house. This is especially true because the documentary photograph, which used to be reserved for specific sites of viewership, comes at us through multiple devices that are always on our person. The influx can render each of us immune to complexity, gravity, and certainly any kind of sustained relationship to the subject.

So, what I do with a subject needs to surprise me; I need to have a chance to interact with it and let it evolve. Photographing a sneaker would be acquisitive, rather than participatory. In essence, I rejected documentary photography a long time ago, not because I don’t like it, but because it purports to be so truthful and is always not. I remember a photograph of my mother that I made as an undergraduate that everyone in my class, including my professor, Gregory Crewdson, loved. She was sitting at a restaurant near an open window. She is overweight, and I caught a moment at which her face communicated despondence. Outside the window, a young, thin couple walked by arm in arm. The narrative constructed for my classmates of loneliness and jealousy was utterly untrue of my mother’s actual condition, but true within the network of juxtapositions inside the photograph. I hated that. There are a million ways, as an artist, that I could have tried to address my resistance to that problem. I developed a process that is a-factual but that strives to be responsible to the logic of its source material.

I follow the lead of that source material, trying to adhere to its form, its scale, its posture, its positioning, and its palette, because each of these contributes to how the source material actually purports to function in the real world. This has translated not only into issues of scale and into the process of casting itself, which is quite photographic, but into the way I display my sculptural negatives in the gallery by oftentimes borrowing from the display conventions appropriate to the original source object. I showed the resin guns for Muscle Memory in a vitrine not unlike those I had just seen at the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts’ armory, and I bought real cymbal and drum stands, and a real kick pedal, for my drum set. I think I even left the bar codes on the latter. The point of showing those negatives alongside the photograms is essentially a) to make the viewers more literate, to enable them to look back and forth from the picture to the thing and consider the processes through which the photograms were made, and b) to reinsert the objects into the world and test them against our instincts for reality. Do you want to play the drum set, even though it has no skins and even though its cymbals are made of glass? The objects have come out of a protracted period of alteration, but have also remained at their core what they are. I try not to influence them as much as to pay attention to them, and I trust such attention to them influences me as I let go of the objects’ identity and begin to improvise and riff with their shapes and shadows on paper.

It’s not always just with respect to objects that this happens, of course, unless images and memories are objects. For a few years leading up to the work I did on Accessory to Protest, I was working mainly from mediatic imagery. I would see a picture in the news and think, “I can do that. Photography can do that.” What I mean is that what was depicted in the news photograph could actually be reenacted by photographic processes, because of the way paper and light behave. So, for example, when a freeway in Northern California slid off its armature in 2007 because of a fire, I saw pictorial space sliding through real space, much as a large piece of photographic paper slides out of its chemical bath. I remade that scenario in a piece called Freeway Collapse. I had been thinking a lot about the difference between real space and depicted space, and this was a chance to test that boundary. I made work for the next few years with this difference in mind, which meant that a lot of what I made involved both an architectural structure and a picture, oftentimes combined so as to be comparable.

This process made me think about ways that pictures are actually part of the real landscape, and I began thinking about relief sculpture, such as exists in ancient Greek and Roman architecture. What kinds of images did they find important enough to put on public buildings, and how did the subjects of those relief sculptures become so naturally integrated into the shape of the architectural frames? When I saw an image of riot police in Kyrgyzstan being stoned by protesters in 2010, I thought, “Wow, their bodies are forming the kind of triangle that might have been on an ancient pediment.” I ordered riot shields and helmets off the Internet and asked friends to come and reenact the scenario. In this case and in that of the Freeway Collapse, then, I wasn’t making sculptural negatives, per se, nor focusing on an object; rather, I was focusing on my original encounter with a picture that then bore my elaborate process and became a new kind of photograph.

The endgame in each case is to know the thing better than I did before by getting into and then past the thing.

KG: It strikes me in particular that there is a kind of circular movement through an idea or an image or an impression, that often the start point is a photograph and the end point is a photogram (or a photogram placed in relationship to a sculptural negative or other object), and that there is certainly a photographic thread linking the movement. You often mention a “subject”: maybe I’m just confused, but what do you consider to be the subject? Real and depicted space? How figures might reconstitute images from memory or the historical record? Photography itself?

FK: Yes, there is definitely a circulation from a conventional notion of the photographic to another such notion, reimagined and remixed. What begins with an image—found online, in print, or in the memory of a person or institutional memory of a site—ends with an image or an image-object that is an artifact of artistic process rather than of political process. This doesn’t disavow any potential politics of the final product, but I think, just to be honest, once I’ve started working with a subject it becomes, for me, more about how to make the work than about an integrity to the original source. In 2009, I made a photogram based on a Z-Backscatter scan of a U-Haul with an illegal immigrant inside. At international borders, at least in America, at the time, these scanners were used to check for contraband and could indeed see inside an entire vehicle as they now see inside our bodies at airports. I made this photogram in response to the relationship between the photogram and the X-ray, and having made it doesn’t make me an authority on illegal immigration. Having made that work does, though, give me a familiarity with the image, allow me to spend time with that image and its components as I rework it with my hands and eyes, and then rework it with other people—fabricators, models. I told the model to just face me and look at me—not pretend really to be inside the truck; I wanted his address to be at the viewer of the final picture, and I wanted him to seem alone and awkward in that van, rather than as if he were engaged in some provocative narrative of escape. He and I and any helpers spend far more time reimagining the original source image than we would have had it remained a fleeting news item we saw as temporary consumers of information.

One of the challenging aspects of the proliferation of images online is that our concern for any one image tends to be fairly fleeting; I’m not talking about a sense of guilt or liberal responsibility, but about any kind of concern. We may pore over the Instagram accounts of people we want to stalk out of passion, but we spend time with a very large number of images rather than treasuring any one. My work allows me to get inside a part of one and wiggle around until I have a foothold and can go somewhere else with it.

My work also resists reproducibility, on purpose: a photogram is a unique (uneditioned), highly detailed print, and the scale of each one is pre-determined. Re-translating a photogram into a jpeg results in a loss of the potential of a viewer to experience scale along with the many other choices I have made. This resistance to reproducibility stands in pointed contrast to the nature of Instagram and jpegs in general. For instance, I was recently in Cuba, and this guy wanted to thank me with a gift toward the end of my stay there. He offered me a photograph of his baby. It was one of maybe five or six wallet size shots in a small plastic album with clear sleeves of the sort I might have used to collect prints in as a child to remember a birthday party or a class trip. These were clearly the only prints he had, and I refused the gift. Now, had he emailed me a jpeg, I would have felt no such concern for accepting it as a token of his friendship. The value differential there is interesting.

KG: Yes, it is . . . but I wonder if the photo held that much value to him, or if you were projecting because the photograph was a singular physical object rather than an image made up of data that proliferates widely. Or maybe because the man felt the value of the photo, and that was palpable to you, it was that much more important for you to accept it. I’m not suggesting you were wrong to refuse it, only to suggest that value can be really subjective or at the very least significantly based in the relative uniqueness of an object. (For instance, a painting sells for a whole lot more than a videotape.) Anyway, again: what is the subject? You keep mentioning it but it still seems too vague to me.

FK: Struggle.

KG: Ha! Good answer. Recently I was on a trip and I stumbled upon a free screening of the first Jurassic Park movie. What I didn’t know then but I now understand. . . . it is a beautiful movie! And now I’ve been spending the better part of the night looking for a screenshot of the dinosaur lit by data from a computer. The image really struck me for an obvious reason: the “then” as imagined in the replica of the dinosaur already feels antiquated in comparison to the “now” of data—the film came out in 1993—and yet somehow the image is still prescient.

Is this what you mean by taking “struggle” as your subject? Is it the struggle to reimagine events? To invite live subjects, say for instance the veterans in Muscle Memory, to reenact a very real moment in their recent past?

FK: No, I don’t mean that. I was joking, in a way, and trying to encapsulate the last eighteen years of work as if it could possibly have one subject, and if it does, it is certainly not “war”, nor “protest” nor “abstraction” nor “figuration.” It is not the veteran or his gun or the photogram or me making the photogram. Subject is a medium as much as mediums are mediums. A person can become a subject around which one turns one’s feelings, and around which one turns one’s politics, and around which one develops new techniques and formal languages. The figurative work I make tends to come from the place of having identified a particular person whose struggle with a memory or a loss is evocative to me of my own feelings, even if I have never experienced what they have before. I usually leave the person behind during the process, while I work on negatives and smaller, more abstract prints. Even so, I am still turning their experience around as a metaphor for my own. I am still not saying, “I had a hard day,” or “I am so mad about authority figures in my life!”; instead, I am saying, “This yield sign is literally going to yield, sculpturally,” or “These riot cops are going to be stoned to surrender by the force of the people rising against them,” and meanwhile, I am also working on formal issues like, what if the sculptural apparatus supporting the photograph performed what the photograph is supposed to say (i.e. the yield sign literally, physically yields). So my subject is struggle because I struggle, daily, as a person, and so do you, and my subject is struggle because the process behind realizing anything can be a struggle, and also because events of both myopic and global scales always come to some kind of a head and are sometimes worth representing as such. Some artists take the opposite tack and try to represent the distance of contemporary life by making ironic work or work that reflects the distance; I want to smack distance and divested irony in the face and tell them to get out of my neighborhood. That’s what I mean by struggle. It’s who I am and how I am.

On another note, with respect to the idea of dinosaurs . . . sometimes I think nothing would actually happen if we didn’t imagine it wrong in the first place. I mean “imagining wrong” with respect to the disparity between what we imagine we will accomplish and what it turns out we’ve accomplished. This came up for me regarding your comment about the dinosaur’s face lit by the data of a computer screen. You mentioned a mix-up between “then” and “now” insofar as “now” can actually feel antiquated and “then“ can feel prescient if slightly off. In one sense, what we make or use now is always less advanced than what we imagined then, because of course it exists now, so what’s next? Before, it was always imminent—in fact imminence was its essential condition. We imagine overreaching, and then once we’ve reached, even if we achieve what we thought we would, it is missing the “over” part of the “reach,” because it has been realized, and so we must imagine a new “next.”

(Another aspect of this is that fiction often precedes reality; in fact, during the filming of the ’90s Jurassic Park, I think archaeologists discovered the remains of a real dinosaur that the filmmakers had invented—the Utahraptor, which in the movie is basically a really tall velociraptor. That’s just a funny and extreme example, though.)

Part of the way this manifests in representation is that there’s nothing really interesting about a future too far ahead of us to relate to our current needs; aliens aren’t interesting unless they require our resources, even, and they are never sympathetic characters unless they live among us like ET because they, unlike people who seem very much like us but may have slightly better tools, have an entirely different system of resources that we can’t imagine ourselves into. Aliens and dinosaurs aside, what I was relating that to is the very lived experience we all have of advancing to a next level of practice basically because we’re too silly to imagine we’re not already there anyway, in some fashion. For example, overreaching is as natural a part of growth as is a child triumphing over a boulder just to turn around a month later and realize it’s a little rock.

Abstraction—and the question of my subject—actually relates to this idea of the alien as well. You know, you can have an Ellsworth Kelly that is very much derivative of the shapes and colors of a pack of Marlboro Reds or you can have a completely non-objective painting, and both are about painting—the latter more ruthlessly so. Photography’s relationship to abstraction is usually understood as being more on the side of the human character in the futuristic sci-fi film: it is close enough to reality that we search for our experience in it. That’s why people always ask what a photograph is of, or why people always ask me what my exact relationship to my subjects is: even though I work with photograms, they still assume a one-to-one correspondence of a real world to the happenings of the picture plane.

When I started taking pictures as an undergrad, I used what was around me—my friends, and then elements of the landscape—to begin to understand what it was to make a picture photographically. What it was to me was (a.) a fascinating monitor of the way I saw, over time; and (b.) a way to bypass the problem of depiction en route to abstract umph. I had always drawn well, and I hadn’t known how to get over the hump of drawing well in order to actually find out what I was interested in, what subjects I would live with, how I would live with them, how the way I would live with them might change over time, and the significance of how I chose to live with them. Art, like writing, is not significant because of what it depicts; it is significant because of how it depicts. The “how” is the content of the work; not the “what.” When one is a child, learning to draw realistically, the focus seems very much on the “what”; it took photography to get me past that.

The way that changed was actually that I found I wasn’t making portraits of people or places; the subjects weren’t precisely interchangeable or disposable, but they were useful to me in ways that weren’t essential to who or what they were. The more I realized that, the more I narrowed down the ways they were useful, which was abstractly: in terms of lines, gestures, color, scale, and then more largely, poetic narratives, perception, and the nature of being, the nature of looking itself. I found, though, that no one could read a photograph in those terms because photographs were too alien to people’s training. By way of contrast, think of the way that even if you were not trained in painting, you can still read the way a painter pushed his or her brush by looking at the painting. The painter did something—an action verb—that a viewer understands because any viewer has pushed a pen around a paper, and the viewer’s hands implicitly grasp as parallel such choices with paint. These kinds of moves in photography—changing structures and conventions within the medium—are more opaque. It is just as possible when making a photograph to take its grammar or tools and use them otherwise than how they are conventionally used, but this happens so succinctly that the average—even often the very informed—viewer can’t read how it’s done. It is alien, and not in a sympathetic way.

By the time I eliminated cameras from my practice, my pictures had begun to look nothing but formal. There was no subject other than photography or myself, my own way of looking. This wasn’t satisfying either, because I was not trying to create a solipsistic world; if the significance of an artwork is in how it translates its subject to the world, in what kind of proposal that then makes about human encounter, I was being exclusive. When I began to photogram, I allowed the subject to appear again as itself, because finally I had a medium through which I thought people could follow traces of my process as clues. You can see pins photogrammed where the work was pinned to the wall during its exposure, which is a clue as to the one-to-one scale of the rest of the image. You can see scuffs where objects have literally abraded the paper during exposure; you can also see whites where they touched the paper, blocking all light, as opposed to other areas, which have color in a variety of shades depending upon, again, the physical relationship of the object to the paper. So finally, the work didn’t feel alien anymore to me; the final product related very much to my concerns, both immediate and those that evolve over the long-term of a project or within my practice in general—yes, the bodies and stories of people, places, and things around me, which can be the subject of the work—but the work didn’t end there as would a documentary photograph. It related also to the way I handled and processed those bodies and stories over time in my studio, and it related very immediately to the gestures I and they made in the darkroom at the moment of exposure, as well as the gestures the light and paper made generously in return.

So you can say my subject is photography; you can say my subject is process; you can say my subject is any one of the things my pictures has depicted. But all of those potential subjects are too easily dismissed; we understand what we mean by them already—even “process.” When I said my subject was struggle, I really meant it to apply to all of those things: yes, the things my pictures depict are usually people, places, or things that have gone through struggle and faced the question of surrender. (This applies to ice melting as much as riot cops being attacked.) Yes, artmaking or photography as a practice and my process in particular can parallel those processes of struggle. Yes, my life—and yours and everybody’s—is a constant push and pull of inaccurate longings for what we might do and what we actually do.

I suppose then that the real subject of the work is the position it takes, largely, on the act of beholding as 21st century citizens. How do we put pressure on the fissures of contemporary representation and contemporary life—its distancing mechanisms, its tendency to oversaturate? My answer is not mimetic and it is not dispassionate. I do not distance and I do not oversaturate, simply to communicate those conditions. Instead, I use the body as my guide, rendering the photograph physical, present, and unique.
_____

Farrah Karapetian was born in Marin, California, in 1978. She received a BA from Yale and an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include the Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles, the Danziger Gallery in New York City, the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, the UCR/California Museum of Photography in Riverside, and the Orange County Museum of Art. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Katie Geha is the Director of the Dodd Galleries at the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Read original interview here

Firework Explosions Captured on Paper — Rosemarie Fiore featured @ The Creators Project

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Nov 2015 21:15:00 +0000

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #21, 2015, 28x 28 inches

By Noémie Jennifer

"Painters usually have to work with the element of gravity, with paint dripping down. With me it's the opposite. My materials want to shoot up, and the challenge is to force them down onto the paper," explains Rosemarie Fiore on the phone from Los Angeles, where a show of her paintings opened last weekend at Von Lintel Gallery. The works, which feature circular pools of rich colors, make up a new series entitled Eclipse. Like planets orbiting silently, they cross each other’s paths and seem to vibrate on the paper.

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #21, 2015, 28x 28 inches

Fiore lives and works in the Bronx and has been using found machinery to create artwork since her residency at Skowhegan, completed after her years in graduate school. Her first experiments with fireworks began during a stint in Roswell, New Mexico, with an accident. “I was lighting off a smoke bomb and dropped it, and as it moved it left a blue dotted line,” she says.

Photo by Ross Willows, courtesy of Rosemarie Fiore Studio and ART OMI, Ghent, NY

Since then she has crafted increasingly sophisticated tools to capture color and smoke. “At first I was just duct taping fireworks to a broomstick and dragging it along the paper,” she says. Now her laboratory includes various containers on wheels, with spouts specially designed so the lit smoke bombs hit the paper with the right pressure. The tools are perpetually in development: “While I’m creating the work, I’ll see that I can add a new extension. I’m always editing the tools and developing things.” For the Eclipse series, she modified a trash can lid and named it "Space Oddity."

She describes her process as a meditative dance on top of the paper, carried out in silence—these are smoke bombs, not fireworks with gun powder. “Some machines move better than others. It’s like a dance partner: when you have a good partner, you don’t have to force anything. You can anticipate each other’s movements and move together smoothly.” The dance has strict time limits: once the smoke bombs run out of pigment, the show is over.

The Eclipse works are pared down compared to the larger paintings Fiore previously made with smoke bombs, which used collage to create hectic, layered compositions. “This show is much more about the simplicity of the smoke, about the colors interacting and creating subtle depths.” The use of a smooth printmaking paper also helped to yield those dreamy hues.

Larger pieces in this series are in the works. In coming months, Fiore will be collaborating with the metals department at UNC Greensboro to create a huge “eclipse maker tool” four feet in diameter.

She describes her process as a meditative dance on top of the paper, carried out in silence—these are smoke bombs, not fireworks with gun powder. “Some machines move better than others. It’s like a dance partner: when you have a good partner, you don’t have to force anything. You can anticipate each other’s movements and move together smoothly.” The dance has strict time limits: once the smoke bombs run out of pigment, the show is over.

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #52, 2015, 28x 28 inches

The Eclipse works are pared down compared to the larger paintings Fiore previously made with smoke bombs, which used collage to create hectic, layered compositions. “This show is much more about the simplicity of the smoke, about the colors interacting and creating subtle depths.” The use of a smooth printmaking paper also helped to yield those dreamy hues.

Larger pieces in this series are in the works. In coming months, Fiore will be collaborating with the metals department at UNC Greensboro to create a huge “eclipse maker tool” four feet in diameter.

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #42, 2015, 28x 28 inches

Read full feature @ The Creators Project

Edward Burtynsky’s Mesmerizing Images of Copper Mines | Feature in The New York Times Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:12:00 +0000

The scale of an open-pit copper mine feels impossible; it is a Bible-grade phenomenon made by machines. Vehicles called bucket-wheel excavators, nearly five times the size of the largest dinosaurs, rip up the surface and gradually descend, piling 200,000 cubic meters or more of rock behind them every day. Once the copper is extracted, waste products and unrecoverable metals stream out as tailings, snaking tributaries that turn psychedelic-looking as they oxidize in open air for the first time in millions of years. Each excavator, meanwhile, turns the land it is standing on into a ledge and leaves a succession of these steps, or ‘‘benches,’’ behind it as it goes. The Chino Mine, for example, in Grant County, N.M., has been excavated persistently for more than a century and now stretches almost two miles across and 1,350 feet down. It’s a chasm, a void, a deep and disordered amphitheater built around an abyss. It gets four out of five stars on TripAdvisor.

‘‘Wow is that place HUGE If you get time go visit this mine it is just huge,’’ writes one reviewer who visited the overlook point on the side of Highway 152. ‘‘What a huge pit,’’ says another. Another: ‘‘Wow!’’ Another: ‘‘What a hole in the ground’’ And: ‘‘Dange [sic] it’s deep. What a hole!@!!!! Huge hole in the ground.’’

Stupefied giddiness, disbelief: these seem to be universal responses to open-pit mines. When the photographer Edward Burtynsky started taking pictures of mining complexes in 1981, it was, in part, out of this same simple wonderment. ‘‘I look for the biggest mines in the world,’’ Burtynsky says, and these photographs, shot in Arizona and New Mexico in 2012 and published here for the first time, include both the Chino and the continent’s largest copper mine, the Morenci Mine, which is projected to produce 900 million pounds of copper every year for the next five years.

Open-pit mines are wounds we’ve inflicted, and the wonderment they excite easily becomes tinged with pangs of remorse or dread. Burtynsky calls that storm of feeling ‘‘a reversal of the sublime. In the beginning, ‘the sublime’ meant us in fear of nature,’’ he explains. We would look up at a thundercloud or mountain, or across a heavy sea, and be ‘‘awe-struck or powerless. But fast forward to the Industrial Revolution, and 150 years after that, and now we are the awesome and fearsome force that’s reshaping the planet.’’

And that power can’t be disowned. ‘‘We work in a world of atoms and molecules,’’ Burtynsky told me. ‘‘I’m talking to you on a phone. There’s copper in this phone.’’ It’s in our appliances and cars, inside the walls of our homes. ‘‘If you feel revulsion to this landscape,’’ he said, ‘‘you should have a revulsion to your whole life.’’

That tension is irreconcilable, maybe inevitable. Humans have always ripped materials out of nature, but the pace and scale of that extraction has accelerated so quickly that it challenges, or even outpaces, the individual human imagination’s ability to make sense of the consequences. It’s a strange predicament: to feel dwarfed by the momentum of your own species; to feel yourself being threatened, even swallowed up, by problems and to recognize that you’re also complicit in them. Think of how the person operating the excavator must feel, disappearing down the mine.

Burtynsky’s photographs are opportunities to stare that dilemma in its abysmal eye and let that tension in; to look down — way down in these mines — and allow yourself to feel unsettled, to lose your balance a little.

‘‘Huge hole in the ground,’’ one of the more pensive TripAdvisor reviewers wrote. ‘‘I just imagine falling into that hole.’’ Exactly. There may be no getting to the bottom of any of this.

Read original article @ The New York Times Magazine

KLEA McKENNA | Contact: Direct Reflections of Landscape — Featured Interview @ lensculture

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 24 Oct 2015 23:53:00 +0000

For the past few years, California Bay Area artist Klea McKenna has focused her attention on photograms—an image created directly on a light-sensitive surface, without the aid of a camera. By responding deeply and personally to particular locations, McKenna produces large, immersive works that, though seemingly abstract, retain a direct link to the environment that produced them.

Her work is beautiful yet entirely mysterious. Each photogram (which is unique) seems to hold a silent secret that pulls us in deeper with each passing moment. Managing editor Alexander Strecker had the chance to sit down with McKenna and find out more about her work and the lessons she has learned as an artist.

LC: Walk us through constructing one of your photograms, say your "Rain Study" series. You take a piece of photo-paper, you bring it outside and...?

KM: For my "Rain Studies," I work at night, outdoors, in the pitch darkness. I need to work far away from civilization and on nights where there is no (or very little) moonlight. Lately I've been making Rain Studies in Hawaii and I try to schedule my stays to coincide with the dark of the moon or to work at night when the moon hasn’t risen yet or has already set. And of course, it has to be raining!

While I work, I have a covered area that I can keep my supplies under, a garage, barn or when I'm in Hawaii I work out of a shipping container in the forest. I run in and out of the rain and my work station and make exposures using flashlights.

The things that affect the finished image: every storm is different and there are different-sized raindrops and different patterns that the drops make. The part I can control that affects the image are the angles: there's the angle of the light to the paper, the angle of the light to the rain, the angle of the rain to the paper. After all, if you think about photography—the film and the camera, enlarging in the darkroom—the relationship between the substrate and the light is almost always perpendicular. If you change that, a whole world of possibilities opens up.

When I'm in Hawaii (or really anywhere working on location) I work completely blind for a few weeks. It's like the entire outdoors become my darkroom—but since I don’t actually have a wet darkroom out there, I can't develop anything. Two weeks is usually the psychological limit to how long I can work without seeing any results. After that, I start to doubt myself and ask, "Maybe this is all just gonna be black...what am I even doing?"

LC: What inspires you to pick the locations that you choose?

KM: The landscapes I choose are places that hold some personal significance for me or mark a collective history that I find interesting. Although I'm very thoughtful about where I go, in the end, my aim is to make my materials interact directly with the place, to figure out ways to make the landscape imprint on my materials. I'm trying to orchestrate an interaction—but mostly I'm trying to get out of the way.

A few years ago, I went back to Hawaii where I had spent much of my early childhood. Since my dad had died a decade earlier, I hadn't been back much. But I decided to return to our family house—way up in the middle of nowhere, off-the-grid and adjoining a forest preserve—and just bring all of my light-sensitive materials.

The way I work is rooted in a deep observation of the landscape and of nature. And each work comes out of direct contact with its surrounding environment. In that way, it's totally photographic: there's a direct reference to reality. Even if the work appears abstract at first glance, it's actually hyperrealistic in some cases.

Read full interview @ lensculture

MICHAEL WAUGH: BOOM AT VON LINTEL GALLERY — Daily Serving Feature

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 22:20:00 +0000

Michael Waugh. Les Règles de l’Art, 2015
ink on Mylar; four panels, 102 x 42 in. each

Written by Calder Yates

Michael Waugh's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Boom, is currently on view at Von Lintel Gallery. Using ink on Mylar, Waugh reimagines an assortment of 19th-century tableaux, depicting quaint scenes of countryside estates and horse stables, as well as turn-of-the-century buildings on New York City streets. These representational drawings consist wholly of handwritten text: Scribbled sentences produce the contour lines of buildings as they crumble to the ground, while epistolary markings provide contrast to form the underside of a horse. Letters and numbers further constitute the hands and faces of male figures. Waugh has painstakingly scrawled and layered words and sentences across the sheets of Mylar to construct the entirety of every image, spending three to four thousand hours to produce each piece. The amount of labor alone puts Waugh’s drawings on par with the historical legacies of endurance works.

The incongruous titles of the drawings, such as Unfettered Markets (FCIR, part 4) (2015), hint at the content of the words and sentences used to create them. Waugh uses the Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Report to form the images of stately manors and equestrians. In Derivative (FCIR, part 5) (2015), the phrase “too big to fail” delineates the horse’s genitals. For the largest piece in the show—a four-panel work depicting a crowd watching a building collapse—Waugh plums Les Règles de l'Art (The Rules of Art) written by the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu. Like a gunshot, the stupendous amount of time and labor put into Les Règles de l’Art (2015) is immediate and breathtakingly obvious.

Michael Waugh. Derivative (FCIR, part 5), 2015 (detail)
ink on Mylar; 42 x 65 in

None of Waugh’s drawings contain a single image of a woman. Waugh depicts men circulating among more men through fictional thoroughfares or rowing along on a polite, tree-lined river. Even inside the stables, only studs are found. Waugh evokes an old world based on good manners, pedigree, and male dominance. In the far right panel of Les Règles, a couple of men grope each other. Pleasure, here, flows only between men.

By combining three basic elements—images of 19th-century “good taste,” words describing 21st-century financial catastrophe, and dominant masculinity—Waugh implies that our current economic boom-and-bust cycles are rooted in a history of gendered aesthetic calculus. In other words, the “good life”200 years ago—a life that included property, leisure, and commodities, and that excluded any instances of women or people of color—continues to inform our present-day, exploitative, unequal economic system. Waugh’s drawings are a veiled swipe at an earlier era’s role in the construction of our inherited conditions of hierarchy.

Michael Waugh. Before Our Very Eyes (FCIR, part 2), 2015 (detail)
ink on Mylar; 25 x 25 in.

As a result of their illustrative qualities, Waugh’s drawings serve primarily as a demonstration of his argument, acting as a simple equation toward his artistic logic. The works indicate a cognitive tension, all the while allowing viewers to walk away with no visceral uneasiness—mostly due to the drawings' benign imagery. The only tension in the works lies exclusively within Waugh’s implied argument that 19th-century male-dominated society may be ipso facto the very problem we have today. The drawings hint at—rather than declare—this argument, which is an unsurprising one that has already been well-articulated over the past half-century.

Other artists have created this cognitive tension while also exploring material and visual tension. Glenn Ligon's text-based paintings, for example, contain similar, damning references to hierarchies of class, race, and power. Ligon's works, however, also contain an exploration of materials: coal dust mixed with acrylic, silkscreens on unstretched canvasses, neon lettering, and powder-coated aluminum. Waugh seems to ask viewers to look past his use of materials (ink on Mylar) to consider only his imagery, while Ligon's use of materials deliberately confuses image and ground, never taking the white surface for granted.

Michael Waugh. Derivative (FCIR, part 5), 2015
ink on Mylar; 42 x 65 in.

Waugh's drawings and the tidiness of his argument suffer from the very processes he hopes to critique. Beyond the horse scrotum cheekily formed from the words “too big to fail,” there is little surprise or confusion in his work; the drawings are fun and easy to look at. Where is the moment when the viewers of the work are implicated in the drawings' depictions of hierarchy of class and power? This is the irony of easily digestible (and purchasable) critiques of hegemony. Like a flu shot, the hegemonic system has taken in and processed its critique, and becomes stronger and more entrenched as a result. When does looking at these drawings move beyond a gentle and agreeable experience, and into an uncomfortable one, in which one cannot—ought not—look away?

Read original article @ Daily Serving

CONTINUED AND RECOMMENDED, OCTOBER 2015 | ARTSCENE Feature

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 21:25:00 +0000

Michael Waugh, “Les régles de l’art,”
2015, ink on mylar, 4 panels, each 102 x 42"

Michael Waugh's obsessively intricate drawings on mylar have a noble and ever-poignant central core — the troubling intersections of politics, wealth and power. Using micrography, transforming written text into representational imagery, he presents scenes both urban and semi-rural, as well as detailed portraits of horses, in a graphic aesthetic consistent with their late 19th/early 20th-century settings. Using texts from capitalist theory among other similar sources, Waugh's newsprint-like imagery is so finely rendered that it only breaks down into text under careful inspection. These are not mere formal exercises. The horses and human figures alike are depicted with an innocent charm that belie the ominous forebodings made apparent in titles such as "Crisis on the Horizon," or the spot-on word-to-text interplay of "Before Our Very Eyes." "Les règles de l’art," at 102 x 168 inches on four panels, is by far the largest piece, and also the most spectacular: a city street of perhaps a century ago stretches from a corner off towards a distant bend. The fourth building down from the corner is in mid-implosion, as if detonated from within, but only the horse-and-carriage faltering just beneath its collapse appears to register the dire circumstance; others just mill about. The work is too stylized to suit the literal content of Pierre Bourdieu’s book Les règles de l’art, (“The Rules of Art”) which explores the connection between art and the social structures within society by which art is produced and received. But Waugh's message and method execute a perfect tip-toe of a sneak attack.

Also on view are selections of Izima Kaoru’s large-scale, highly saturated color photographs from the series "Landscape with A Corpse." The photographer depicts moments of death as imagined by his super-star models. In each staging the model is dressed in high fashion, albeit sometimes covered in blood. The magnificence and power of the industrial and natural landscape depicted in the photographs, in many cases, dwarfs the figure whose dramatically staged death is thus insignificant in relationship to the architecture (Von Lintel Gallery, Culver City).

Michael Shaw / Jody Zellen

Read more @ ARTSCENE

MICHAEL WAUGH | BOOM - Sept 12 — Oct 31, 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 21:27:00 +0000

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present Boom—an exhibition of new work by artist, Michael Waugh. The exhibition marks the artist’s first solo show with the gallery and in the city of Los Angeles.

Waugh’s ink drawings on mylar utilize imagery constructed entirely out of handwritten text. Hundreds of pages from government reports and theoretical writings about power and capitalism are transcribed word for word into airy, visual compositions that reinterpret 19th century tableaux: stately portraits of horses, cowboys on the homestead, a team of rowers racing down the river.

The white space and sense of lightness in these drawings belie a frenetic surface teeming with cramped, labored handwriting only visible upon close inspection. Occasionally, the tight scrawls unfold into a more generous script. Discernible words and phrases like “CITIBANK” and “clearly illegal” surrender a subtle awareness of the works' larger context, raising questions about the difficult to digest text, in this case—The Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Report. The bureaucratic haze of the document is amplified and mirrored in the tension between image and word.

Included in the exhibition is the largest piece the artist has constructed to date: a four panel work measuring fourteen-feet in length. The text is a complete transcription of Pierre Bourdieu's Les régles de l’art—or, The Rules of Art—exploring the interconnection between art and the societal structures within which it is produced and received. Inked by Waugh in the original French, Bourdieu's sociological musings on cultural capital are woven into a street scene of an exploding building, threatening a crowd too distracted to notice.

Michael Waugh was born in Cambridge, MA. He earned his graduate degree in painting from New York University in 2000; but he also has degrees in writing from Texas State University and history from the University of Texas. He has exhibited internationally for the last fifteen years and his work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Art in America and ARTNews. He is the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Marie Walsh Sharp Space Program and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Floris Neusüss and Perfect Likeness | KCRW Art Talk Feature

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Aug 2015 11:21:00 +0000

The photogram, using an enlarger and photosensitive paper to make an image without the use of a camera, was a staple of experimental photography in the early 20th century and used to great effect by Man Ray or Lázsló Moholy-Nagy. Such analog techniques have been embraced recently by a number of contemporary photographers. Thus, it is ideal timing for a small show of work by the German artist Floris Neususs, who has done extraordinary things for 50 years with the photogram technique. Dreams + Photograms at Von Lintel Gallery closes August 15.

Most well-known are his nudograms from the 1960's and 70's — Korperbilder — that track the human figure, especially women, as ghostly presences, both dark and light, detailed and unclear, yet life size on huge sheets of paper.

Floris Neusüss, "Portrait of Robert Heinecken; Portrait of Joyce Neimanas," 1997
Gelatin silver photograms on auto-reversal paper; 90.6 x 41.7 inches (230 x 106 cm), each
Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery

This show includes the 1997 life size photograms of his close friend and collaborator Robert Heinecken and his wife, photographer Joyce Neimanas. Their dark silhouettes on creamy backgrounds are instantly recognizable to anyone who knew them. And, they are only sold as a pair, so they can remain a couple.

Floris Neusüss, "Nachtbild (48), 1991
Gelatin silver photogram; 68 x 42 inches (175 x 106 cm)
Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery

Neususs also made photograms of landscape by placing the paper with the emulsion side down and exposing it to lightning. Grasses, leaves, twigs appear in a beautiful chaos of silvery blacks and grays. Even Neususs student work from the 1950's, before he embarked on photograms, shows a propensity to experimentation.

Floris Neususs — LA Times Review by Christopher Knight

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 20:33:00 +0000

Before there were photographs made with cameras, there were photograms – or, to use Henry Fox Talbot's 1834 term, “photogenic drawings.” Put an object on light-sensitive paper, add strong illumination and a shadowy picturee appears – without mediating machinery.

At Von Lintel Gallery, a selection of seven photograms (plus seven conventional photographs made with multiple negatives) by German artist Floris Neusüss show how camera-less images have periodically been re-embraced. Neusüss’ photograms, dating as early as 1971 and as recently as 1997, are silhouettes of life-size figures.

Two mostly documentary works, their contours suggestive of paper-cutouts, show L.A. artists Joyce Neimanas and Robert Heinecken, who also made photo-based works without benefit of a camera. Another sets a profile figure against a building whose windows offer a glimpse of a photographer’s studio within. That the figure recalls the stiff formality of an ancient Egyptian wall painting yields an aura at once rudimentary and reverently antique.

Three abstracted female nudes feature flame-like bodies, since the figures only partially touched the light-sensitive paper during exposure. Light seeped around and beneath their torsos and limbs, and the bodies may have moved.

The fluid results are distinctive. Pinned to the wall and hanging loose, like scrolls, they exist somewhere between traditional Japanese ink paintings and the 1960s “anthropometries” of Yves Klein.

Klein’s models pressed their paint-smeared bodies against large sheets of paper to make latter-day versions of Matisse’s landmark “Blue Nude” painting and collages. In a photogram, the conventional photographic distance between subject and image is likewise collapsed.

Neusüss’ photograms are less technical innovations than they are cross-disciplinary meditations on aesthetic fundamentals, regardless of time or place. Their perhaps surprising sense of intimacy comes from the simple knowledge that human bodies actually touched the paper that we’re looking at.

Neusüss spells it out in the final work, in which a young man hanging a black rectangle on a wall stands on the silhouette of a chair to reach the top, while the actual chair abuts the photogram. A whimsical image of ephemeral existence, it’s like a picture of Peter Pan trying to get his purloined shadow back.

LA Times

FLORIS NEUSÜSS | DREAMS + PHOTOGRAMS, June 27 — Aug 15, 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 20:01:00 +0000

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present work from acclaimed German photogram artist, Floris Neusüss. A pioneer of experimental photography since 1958, Neusüss has devoted his entire career to the rigorous study, practice and teaching of the photogram technique.

Analog methods are experiencing a wave of resurgence as contemporary artists mine history to investigate the possibilities of photographic materials. Neusüss is recognized as part of the photogram vanguard along with predecessors Man Ray and Lázló Maholy-Nagy. His work has been included in major experimental photography exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and the International Center of Photography, New York among others.

The Von Lintel Gallery exhibition features the artist’s iconic nudograms—Körperbilder—from the 1960s and 70s that were made by exposing the human figure directly onto photographic paper. The proximity of the model to the paper influenced the sharpness of the contours and the amount of light dispensed affected the intensity of the tones. Movement—either accidental or intentional—dissolved and fractured the silhouettes into transcendent forms removed from any sense of time or place. Despite the subject’s absence, a palpable intimacy—or, presence—is felt. Such is the magic of a photogram.

A similar phenomena transpired when Neusüss applied the photogram to portraiture. He and Robert Heinecken were friends and collaborators. The Getty Museum owns Dinner for Heinecken—a Neusüss photogram exposed during a dinner that used light-sensitive paper in lieu of a table cloth. During another work session, Floris exposed Heinecken’s full body on profile. The work—included in the show—does not reveal any surface details and yet the expressive body language and attitude of the subject is uncannily recognizable. As Neusüss says, “If you knew Robert Heinecken, when you look at his portrait photogram, you automatically feel close to him.”

Also on view are early gelatin silver prints from late 1950s made while still a student in Munich; an innovative piece from the 1980s that merged a photogram with sculpture; and Nachtbilder, a series produced by placing photo paper emulsion side down into a woodland or garden at night. At times created during a thunderstorm, lightning would expose the paper from all directions, catching gusts of impressions from below and above. A sense of movement and chaos transformed the familiar into something much more arresting; an aesthetic echoed throughout Neusüss’ career.

Floris Neusüss was born in 1937 in Remscheid Lennep, Germany. He has exhibited internationally for over fifty years and his work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work has been published in several monographs and he was the subject of an expansive illustrated volume produced in conjunction with the 2010-11 Victoria and Albert exhibition on the work of five camera-less photographers. He was an influential teacher in Germany and recently retired as Professor in Experimental Photography at the University of Kassel, a post he had held since 1971.
Neusüss lives and works in Kassel, Germany with his partner Renate Heyne.

ANTONIO MURADO | DISTANCES, June 27 — Aug 15, 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 19:58:00 +0000

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by New York artist, Antonio Murado. Distances marks the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Murado is a technical virtuoso who returns to familiar motifs to continue experimenting with the capacity of paint to express the realities of nature. Whereas many artists lament the mind’s habitual reflex to interpret a horizontal piece as a landscape, Murado embraces it. His work hinges upon illusion as he conjures forms without actually rendering them. From a distance, latitudinal swipes of rusted orange or chartreuse green anchor apparent twinkling cityscapes or mountain ranges. But in actuality, the works are deft striations of pigment impressed with textural patterns.

Similarly, material investigation and process reinvigorate traditional conceits of still life. Canvases are treated with delicate, transparent layers of oil and turpentine that underwrite pools of paint, blown with air. The shapes may mimic flower petals floating in mid-air or across a flow of water, but it is gesture that reigns here over figuration.

“The results of these experiments in alchemical materiality is a variegated series of paintings that, with infinite nuance, convey Murado’s own plastic versions of the different domains of the life of nature.” —Alexandre Melo, ArtForum.

Murado was born in Lugo, Spain in 1964 and graduated from the University of Salamanca. Shown internationally in multiple solo and group exhibitions around the world, Murado’s paintings are now held in prominent museum, corporate, and private collections including The Galician Center of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Museum of Fine Art, Vitoria, Spain; The Nagasaki Art Museum, Japan; and in the collections of Phillip Morris, American Express, Chase Manhattan Bank, AXA, Pfizer, and The Coca-Cola Corporation.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 16 May 2015 20:02:00 +0000

By David Pagel

May 15, 2015

If ants had cameras—as well as helicopters, drones and hydraulic lifts—they might make photographs that look a lot like Edward Burtynsky’s sublime pictures of the marks humans have made on our planet.

These include massive dams, mines, wells and farms, alongside quarries, irrigation systems and flood control plains. At Von Lintel Gallery, the Canadian photographer, who has traveled the globe to make his stunning images, invites visitors to see humanity as a species—not as unique individuals who stand out from the crowd, but as indistinguishable, and very small, components of a much larger whole—like ants in a colony.

That’s a fascinating perspective, partly because it flies in the face of the way we usually look at art—as an embodiment of the singular genius of singular geniuses—and partly because it gets us to look at the big picture: our global economy in which some fundamental resources—like water, air and food—may not be able to sustain the rate at which humans have been reproducing. What that means for life as we know it is the subject of Burtynsky’s panoramic landscapes.

Beauty and ugliness, nature and industry, exist cheek-by-jowl in his crystal-clear pictures. Some are hellish, their glistening lakes of radioactive oil bleeding from the Earth like a toxic wound that won’t heal. Others are gorgeous, their snow-capped peaks and steep ravines so breathtakingly vast that they make human beings seem inconsequential.

Most are both. A drone’s-eye view of a dam under construction on the Yangtze River presents an entirely manmade landscape that looks utterly alien, like a concrete spaceship so far out in the galaxy that it’s impossible to tell up from down, left from right, right from wrong. Shot from helicopters, two views of terraced mountainsides, where Chinese farmers grow rice, show what daily labor adds up to when it’s done over centuries.

Above all else, Burtynsky’s pictures are humbling. Sober and sensible, they make it clear just how little individuals can do on our own while suggesting that as a group we have a lot to learn from ants.

Read more @ LA TIMES

FARRAH KARAPETIAN | Featured in fabrik — Issue 28

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 14 May 2015 22:37:00 +0000

Edward Burtinynsky's "Nature Transformed" @ Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles | Juxtapoz Magazine Feature

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 08 May 2015 17:33:00 +0000

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of large-format color photographs by renowned photographer, Edward Burtynsky. the photographer is known for his incisive look at landscapes reshaped by human interference. Nature Transformed primarily culls from Water, a five-year project chronicling the dramatic effects of manufacturing and consumption on the world’s most vital and rapidly depleting resource. Science fiction-esque irrigation plots in Texas, ancient carved stepwells in India, and geometric rice terraces in China are translated in vivid color and crystalline detail from upwards of 7,000 feet. The aerial perspective necessarily brings into focus the massive scale and impact of these systems employed to redirect and control water. “I document landscapes that, whether you think of them as beautiful or monstrous, or as some strange combination of the two, are clearly not vistas of an inexhaustible, sustainable world,” Burtynsky states. “We have to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival, something we often take for granted—until it’s gone.”

Also on view are images depicting the pitch black Volcanic sands of Iceland, marking Burtynsky’s return to pristine wilderness for the first time in over thirty years, and photographs from the Oil series: rectilinear rigs in Asia and tar sands operations in Alberta, Canada

Exhibtion runs: April 25 -June 20, 2015

Read original article @ Juxtapoz Magazine

Perspective Paris Photo Los Angeles 2015 | Klea McKenna Featured in Collector Daily

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 08 May 2015 17:28:00 +0000

Editor’s Note: The Paris Photo Los Angeles fair held last weekend was one we unfortunately couldn’t attend in person, but we asked Carol Lee Brosseau to gather up her image highlights as a proxy for actually walking the halls ourselves. Carol Lee is an LA-based art advisor, appraiser, and former gallery director at Joseph Bellows Gallery (her site is here). We’ve known Carol Lee for the better part of a decade, and she has always had an uncanny ability to understand our eclectic eye for work. While she has been able to highlight images that fit into our personal collection with surprising consistency over the years, the choices and comments below are her own. -LK

By Carol Lee Brosseau / In Art Fairs / May 5, 2015

Paris Photo! In Los Angeles! On a New York back lot!

To me, Paris Photo LA at Paramount Pictures Studios is one of the most fun art fairs to attend. The relaxed and entertainment-driven atmosphere is a welcome antidote to the often hectic grind of other art fairs. While the majority of galleries are set up in booths on the larger sound stages, several galleries and the book dealers are set up in the “brownstones,” “shops,” and “cafés” of the New York City street back lot. The result is essentially a faux city where guests can go door-to-door, just like gallery hopping in Chelsea. It’s like The Truman Show…with photographs.

Visitors snack on tacos from food trucks and sip wine or beer on any one of the “New York City stoops,” chatting, people watching, and celeb spotting. The outdoor spaces and sunny LA weather make the fair quite a pleasant place to be.

This year there are 80 galleries and book dealers from 17 countries. The inclusion of so many international galleries is nice as they offer fresh work not often seen in LA. The fair is heavy on contemporary photography. There are some vintage photographs and older work sprinkled around, but the vast majority of the work is medium to larger-scale contemporary.

Missing from the fair are a lot big names in photography, referring to both dealers and photographers. (Galleries such as Gagosian and Fraenkel, who have participated in past years, were absent this year. And it’s been a while since I’ve been to a photo fair with out seeing an Eggleston.) I couldn’t help but think it would be nice to have more classic photography and more of the staple photo dealers there to give context and to balance out much of the newer work and younger galleries. But I suppose when you’re standing in a temporary plywood room just inside a brownstone façade on an artificial New York street in Los Angeles, the need for context has already been eliminated. And it is in fact refreshing to see so many new galleries and new work represented.

All in all, Paris Photo LA is a great way to spend an afternoon or a weekend and see lots of art. Here are some of the highlights for me.

Read original article @ Collector Daily

artsy | Jamie Lee Curtis Picks the 9 Best Works from Paris Photo L.A.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 19:25:00 +0000

For actress Jamie Lee Curtis, the early 1980s began her heyday as the horror genre’s “Scream Queen,” her marriage to Christopher Guest, and the couple’s foray into art collecting—photographs and original cartoons. In advance of Paris Photo Los Angeles, Curtis, still an avid photography collector, picked out the nine works that she finds most compelling at the fair.

In 1984 we were newlyweds, living in TriBeCa while [Guest] was doing a year on SNL, and it was only a few years after Cindy Sherman’s work had first started to be exhibited. I saw a piece in a magazine about her work and Chris and I went to Metro Pictures and wondered if we should buy an “Untitled Film Still” or the new, bigger, color work. The platinum blond, in a suit with fists clenched, reminded me of the town where I grew up—and so we bought it. I remember at the time that it was costly but in our new marital partnership, a wonderful first art purchase together.

Over these 30 years we have added to our collection with an eclectic group of images. We are not art snobs, we don’t read art criticism, and we don’t work with an art consultant. We buy what we like—what moves us and what we can afford. We have some masters of the form, Irving Penn, Sally Mann, Sebastião Salgado, alongside newer photographers; a Shawna Ankenbrandt nude hangs next to an Alexandra Hedison composite. I recently bought two pieces from my niece, Lena Hindes, who, for her senior art piece in high school, did this work as her reaction to the shaming of pubic hair in today’s society. They are photographs that she crocheted over. Stunning work and so exciting.

Edward Burtynsky

Dryland Farming #2, Monegros County, Aragon, Spain, 2010

I love Edward Burtynsky’s work at Von Lintel Gallery. His perspective on the beauty of nature and its power is very strong. It reminded me of Salgado's "Genesis" at Peter Fetterman. It’s a grand perspective, an emotional understanding of life.

Read more @ artsy

artnet | Paris Photo Los Angeles Is Set to Have Its Best Year Yet—See Why

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 19:20:00 +0000

By Cait Munro, Monday, April 27, 2015

Opening May 1, Paris Photo Los Angeles is back for its third consecutive year at Paramount Pictures Studios, bringing the best photography from around the world to the city of the silver screen. With 80 galleries from 17 countries, it's a shutterbug's paradise (see Paris Photo LA Taps the West Coast's Emerging Art Market).

Unlike larger, less specialized fairs where gallerists often choose to feature a single artist, most of the galleries showing at Paris Photo are bringing works from an assortment of the photographers in their stable. Of course, for those that exclusively deal in photography, it's a tougher choice.

Read more @ artnet

Paris Photo comes back to L.A. | VLG Featured in California Sunday Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 19:15:00 +0000

From May 1 to 3, Paris Photo, the international art fair for photography and video, will take over much of Paramount Pictures Studios in Hollywood for its third edition. More than 75 art galleries and book publishers will set up on soundstages and in backlots. Here is a look at some of the images that will be on exhibit, selected by California Sunday Photography Director Jacqueline Bates, from artists and galleries in the West, Asia, and Latin America.

Read more @ California Sunday Magazine

EDWARD BURTYNSKY | Featured in ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 23:28:00 +0000

Dryland Farming #2, Monegros County,
Aragon, Spain, 2010
Edward Burtynsky

Text by Meredith Mendelsohn

April 22, 2015

Long before California’s drought became severe enough for the state’s governor to restrict water use, Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky had started speaking out, through intense large-scale color landscape photographs, about the urgency of protecting one of our planet’s most endangered natural resource.

Through arresting bird’s-eye images of water use around the world—from elaborately planted rice paddies and massive dams in China to oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico, and erosion in Iceland—Burtynsky has captured the astounding impact, and strange beauty, of human intervention on the Earth. “Nature Transformed,” the inaugural show of Burtynsky’s work at Los Angeles’s Von Lintel Gallery, is a rare opportunity to see many of his most striking images all together, on view from April 25 through June 20.

While Burtynsky is certainly coming to his subject matter through environmental activism, his photos are often breathtaking, and he clearly has an eye for a good shot. His sweeping landscapes show the intense colors and formal patterns that industrialization has wrought on the planet—electric yellow, geometric fields of canola; fiery orange rivers snaking through blackened hills—in the way that some of our most poetic abstract painters might capture form, except, of course, these photos are not staged or altered.

In his series on Spain’s dryland farms—waterless land cultivated for crops without irrigation—swaths of brown earth are embellished with miles of botanic-like patterns worthy of a luxury textile, while aerial views of copper-color pivot irrigation systems in the Texas Panhandle have a highly artistic serial effect. Although his images can be disturbing and disheartening, they do give hope in the human ability to find poetry in everyday life.

Read more @ ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST

VON LINTEL GALLERY NOW REPRESENTS EDWARD BURTYNSKY

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 23:16:00 +0000

Edward Burtynsky is known as one of Canada's most respected photographers. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over sixty major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California.

Burtynsky was born in 1955 of Ukrainian heritage in St. Catharines, Ontario. He received his BAA in Photography/Media Studies from Ryerson University in 1982, and in 1985 founded Toronto Image Works, a darkroom rental facility, custom photo laboratory, digital imaging and new media computer-training centre catering to all levels of Toronto's art community.

Early exposure to the sites and images of the General Motors plant in his hometown helped to formulate the development of his photographic work. His imagery explores the collective impact we as a species are having on the surface of the planet; an inspection of the human systems we've imposed onto natural landscapes.

Burtynsky’s work is the subject of two documentary feature films. Manufactured Landscapes (2006) follows the artist to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. Watermark (2012) brings together diverse stories from around the globe about our relationship with water: how we are drawn to it, how we use it and the consequences of that use.

Read more @ VON LINTEL GALLERY

Edward Burtynsky's "Nature Transformed" Large-Format Photographs At Von Lintel Gallery - April 25 To June 7, 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 23:05:00 +0000

Edward Burtynsky's Nature Transformed at Von Lintel Gallery (2685 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles) from April 25 to June 7, 2015. There will be an opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday, April 25. This is Burtynsky's first solo show with the gallery. The artist is known for his look at how landscapes are reshaped via human interference. These large-scale photographs are from far above and turn these images of rice terraces and irrigation plots into colorful images that seem almost out of science fiction. They are beautiful, staggering and sometimes terrifying pieces in their implication.

Burtynsky's work is featured in the collections of over 60 major museums. His fifth book, Burtynsky-Water, came out in 2013 along with a documentary Watermark. We posted o this last year. Any opportunity to see his work in person should be seized.

Mapanare

Seeking Contemporary Photography at AIPAD 2015 | Featured in Don't Take Pictures

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 23:01:00 +0000

In its 35th year, The AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers) Show in New York continues to be one of the world’s most anticipated photography events. Running from Wednesday to Sunday last week, this year’s show featured over 90 galleries and dealers displaying work ranging from early daguerreotypes to contemporary digital prints and new media. While New York galleries occupied the majority of the booths, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and other parts of the United States were also well represented.

The majority of booths exhibited vintage works, spanning the iconic to the vernacular. While it is both thrilling and humbling to see the prints of master photographers such as Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, André Kertész in person, I was most inspired by new names and images. Presenting all of the fantastic work on view would be a herculean task, so here are five contemporary photographers whose work has been swirling around in my mind since the fair.

Izima Kaoru at Von Lintel Gallery Izima Kaoru Izima Kaoru’s circular photographs stood out amidst rows of rectangular booths exhibiting rectangular images. From the series One Sun, each photograph is a single exposure of the sun’s movement across the sky. The representatives from Von Lintel Gallery explained that the photographs were made with a specialized camera that tracks the sun and produces a round image. They are not cropped nor are they distorted in Photoshop. Needless to say, these prints were mostly sold in their frames, as finding a framer could be a challenge.

Read more @ Don't Take Pictures

VLG @ AIPAD, NYC | featured in artnews

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 15:43:00 +0000

The 35th edition of the annual AIPAD show (Association of International Photography Art Dealers), opens for previews today at the 67th Regiment Armory on Park Avenue and continues through April 19. As usual the show will feature a vast array of works, ranging from classic vintage prints to cutting-edge contemporary works—including 19th-century photographs, photo-based art, video and new media—from 89 exhibitors hailing from the US, Canada, Europe, Asia and South America. (See: AIPAD, Still Beautifully Unsettling After All These Years and Will Helmut Newton and Lee Friedlander Smash Records at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips Photo Sales?

AIPAD president Catherine Edelman called the AIPAD show the "go-to art fair for photography collectors at all levels." This year the Chicago gallerist is showing new work by environmental photographer Daniel Beltrá, as well as new work by Ysabel LeMay who is currently having a solo exhibition at the gallery. Edelman is also showing black-and-white works from a collaborative series between actor John Malkovich and photographer Sandro Miller, titled "Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich—Homage to Photographic Masters." (See: John Malkovich Impersonates Celebrities for Portrait Show and Artist Behind Viral John Malkovich Photos Wanted to Critique Social Media.)

"Since our move…[to the Park Avenue Armory] 9 years ago," Kraige Block, executive director of Throckmorton Fine Art and vice president of AIPAD, told artnet News, "AIPAD has continued to grow, improve and develop, and has garnered a reputation as one of the leading art fairs on a global level for fine art photography." Formerly the fair had long been housed in a midtown Hilton Hotel.

Among the works, Block has chosen for the show this year are several black-and-white prints showing artist Frida Kahlo, as well as prints by Tina Modotti, George Platt Lynes, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Brett Weston, and Flor Garduno.

"[AIPAD] is a very strong indicator as to how the photography market is moving and growing," Block said. "Exciting new artists are emerging on the scene." (See: Celebrating The Art of Low Tech Photography With Krappy Kameras and Winners of Krappy Kamera Contest Unveiled in Soho).

Hans P. Kraus Jr., who specializes in old masters of 19th century photography and will be showing work by Captain Linnaeus Tripe, Charles Marville (who had a major show of Paris photos at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014), and William Henry Fox Talbot, among others.

Chelsea dealer Bryce Wolkowitz will be showing new photo-based LED work by Jim Campbell, works by kinetic sculptor Robert Currie (who creates photo realistic paintings on monofilament), new images from Edward Burtynsky's "Water" series, and work by by Jimmy Nelson from the series "Before They Pass Away" (a five-year body of work photographing indigenous tribes around the world). Also showing Burtynsky is LA's Von Lintel Gallery, which will feature as well a selection of unique process-oriented works by Floris Neusüss, Klea McKenna, and Wendy Small.

AIPAD will host a full day of programming on Saturday, April 18, including a selection of short films featuring artists working with photography today such as Liz Magic Laser, Shana Moulton, and Mika Rottenberg. There will also be a showing of From Darkroom to Daylight, a documentary by Harry Wang that explores how the dramatic change from film to digital has affected photographers and their work. It includes interviews with Sally Mann, Jerome Liebling, George Tice, and Ruud van Empel.

Read original article @ artnet

AIPAD 2015 : Von Lintel Gallery | Featured in L'Oeil de la Photographie

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 15:36:00 +0000

Von Lintel is a contemporary art gallery representing eighteen artists. In early 2014, the gallery relocated to Culver City near Los Angeles after enjoying 15 years in New York City’s Chelsea district and, before that, seven successful years in Munich, Germany. Since its inception, Von Lintel has presented work that is both avant-garde and maintains a sense of aesthetic tradition. The gallery artists work in a variety of media including painting, photography and works on paper and their practices include both representational and abstract compositions.

Among the photographers, there is an emphasis on one-of-a-kind photography and many of the artists working in other media draw on or allude to photographic traditions. Von Lintel Gallery produces illustrated catalogues in conjunction with many exhibitions and has attracted a high level of critical success as well as a devoted following of collectors. In part of the AIPAD Photography Show 2015, the gallery selected for us three prints by Klea McKenna, Farrah Karapetian and Izima Kaoru.

1. Klea McKenna Rain Study (Puna) 8 2014 Photogram of rain on gelatin silver fiber paper 24 x 20 inches (61.0 x 50.8 cm) Unique

Klea McKenna’s unique photograms of rain were made during a trip to Hawaii, where the artist spent an early childhood living off-the-grid. She used the dark of night as her make-shift darkroom; devising innovative ways to imprint her surroundings using light-sensitive materials; transforming familiar elements into abstractions of light and form.

2. Farrah Karapetian Cymbalscape XXI 2015 Chromogenic photogram from constructed negative, metallic 24 x 16 inches (61.0 x 40.6 cm) Unique

Farrah Karapetian’s camera-less practice borrows from the memories of her subjects and engages those subjects in the process of the ir own representation using handmade transparent props that she terms, “constructed negatives.” Her recent series, Stagecraft, draws parallels between the performative nature of her process and staged musical performance and sound. Usually the photogram makes a very flat space, a silhouette against a field of color, but Karapetian is interested here in persuading movement and volume from the picture plane. In this setting, the rhythms of object and shadow on paper translate into wavelengths of musical sound; reflection easily interpreted as reverberation

3. Izima Kaoru Sentosa, Singapore (One Sun) 2006 C-print with acrylic diasec 47 inch (119.4 cm) [diameter] AP

Japanese photographer, Izima Kaoru approached landscape by tilting his camera towards the sky, using a fish-eye lens and day-long exposure to track the trajectory of the sun from sunrise to sunset in different cities around the world.

Read full feature @ L'Oeil de la Photographie