Wrong, 26/39

The images of Asger Carlsen occupy the hazy cloud-cuckoo land between analog and digital photography. His pictures maintain an interesting haphazardness, a truth-before-the lens aesthetic, which is combined with eerie digital manipulations. The apparent on-camera flash and black and white tones further heighten the disconnect between the “real” and the fabricated. Carlsen often employs the visual cues of snapshot photography to suggest a physical, temporal connection between the photographer and the subject. His images depict a version of reality that is both firsthand and dissembling.

Wrong, 17/39

Wrong, 29/39

Hester, 13/19

The series Wrong posits the fantastical as quotidian. Persons with prosthetic legs fresh from the wood-shop, or those who may be blessed with backward-bending knees are shown as ordinary as anyone else. One image, similar to William Eggleston’s photograph of a man touching delicately an orange United States Air Force craft, depicts a man kissing, groping a towering mound of otherworldly ectoplasm. Carlsen’s microcosm equalizes all disparate activity; lycanthropes and Janus-faced characters coolly inhabit scenes lit by the glare of the camera’s clinical flash. All of which suggests both the degree to which the camera normalizes and objectifies experience, as well as the reticence of viewers to accept as factual all forms of photographic vision. Wrong grafts a truthful and authoritative aesthetic upon deliberately fanciful constructions.

Hester, 10/19

Hester continues in the casual, documentary style but is concerned with the artistic nude. The camera’s phallic gaze inspects malformed, gender-indeterminate masses of flesh and limbs. Carlsen undermines the artist’s role as traditional maker, shaper and possessor of subjects; the digital reassembling of the human body into perverse shapes mirrors the greedy infiltration of the subject, which ultimately refigures and dehumanizes both artist and sitter.

Spider Universe

Brea Souders is an American artist with lineage from Ireland, Italy and France, countries ripe with art history and tradition—both religious and familial—that have collectively produced countless descendants in the US. Souders’ deep rooted desire to connect with personal ethnic lines leads her between lingering traces of the proverbial outsider, familiarity and the search for belonging and meaning. As the 2011 WIP-LTI/Lightside Materials Grant Recipient, Souders will continue this new series of elegant images examining and exploring introspection and place within her varied European ancestry.

Seine Fingers

Souders photographs operate on innate, intricate levels of subjective emotion and impression, instinctual signs of sincere yearning and paucity. The series is obscurely demure and delicate, both feminine and thoughtful—reminiscent of a familiar pleasing sound or aromatic smell that is meaningful and distinct—yet cannot be placed in memory.

Sunburn in Naples

Souders created her initial photograph of the series in Italy in May, 2010, titled Sunburn in Naples. This image “encapsulated her feelings—a desire to own her Italian ancestral roots, to be wholly a part of something, but an inability to do so. The Neapolitan sun burned the Irish skin that she inherited from her father’s father. Upon her return to the US, she continued her work, creating images that reflect her research of Christianity, art history, European history, family traditions and the desire to connect all of the pieces together into one unified whole.”

Bed Moon

With many generations of Americans moving further and further away from the motherland traditions, customs and roots of their immigrant forebears, the general sense of belonging (as well as support and understanding of the humanities) diminishes on innumerable levels—both personal and societal. Souders’ images mirror the dilemma of so many American’s deep cultural lack, homogenizing the sense of loss and confusion of self and place. Souders’ images demonstrate impressions of precious and idiosyncratic awareness of fleeting time, portraying snippets of base aesthetic experience of the emotive tourist searching for identity, significance and rapport. She delicately and poignantly reminds the viewer that wherever you go, there you are…and perhaps delving further into her unique perspective of essential being and locus provides a contemporary tenor of memento mori.

Butter Moth

Brea Souders was born in Frederick, Maryland, and studied photography at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her work has been exhibited and screened at institutions such as Abrons Arts Center, Jack the Pelican Presents, and Affirmation Arts in New York City; the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the American University Museum, Washington, D.C; and at festivals including the New York Photo Festival; PhotoIreland in Dublin; the Singapore International Photography Festival, and Head On in Sydney, Australia. Her work has been supported by the Camac Art Centre and Fondation Ténot, Marnay-sur-Seine, France; The Millay Colony of the Arts, Austerlitz, NY and the Camera Club of New York.

Selected publications and clients include: New York Magazine, Gar-de, Vogue Paris, Real Simple, Dear Dave, Canteen, Warner Brothers Records, and Feltrinelli Publishing House. Brea lives and works in New York City.

Light Years Ago, c-print, 40 x 30 in., 2011

The representation of history is the driving force behind artist, Marget Long’s practice. She works in a wide range of mediums including, photographs, video and text. Most of her projects explore the history of photography, such as “Bad Light,” which considers how we experience the use of flash in photography over the years through its technological advances. “$pooky Photographs for Sale$,” is a running series of photographs, many vintage from the early 1900s, found for sale online under the tagline of “spooky photographs.” In her most recent project, “A Daguerreotype Sideways: Re-visiting Mathew Brady’s Studio @ 359 Broadway,” Long also investigates the meanings behind the history of photographic space. Her innovative approach and explorations into the practice of photography, from its history to its present day interpretations, set Long apart from her contemporaries.

Long received a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at Anthology Film Archives, Exit Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Contemporary Artists Center, Cinders, American Cinémathèque, DGA Video in Los Angeles, and in a solo show at Safe-T Gallery in Brooklyn. She lives and works in New York.

Briana McKinnell: What initiated your romance with photography?

Marget Long: Funny you should use the word “romance” because lately I’ve been struck by how many of my projects veer towards the darker side of photography—its ties to modes of surveillance, violence and regulation of the body. Even with my project on Mathew Brady’s studio building—potentially a hyper-romantic site for a photographer—I was, in the end, most fascinated by the fact that Brady went bankrupt. How did one of the 19th century’s most vibrant commercial studios end up gutted and sold for parts by a team of lawyers? I guess bankruptcy – financial, emotional or otherwise — is the dark side of romance!

I’ve always been deeply attracted, even romantic, about cameras. The way they look and feel. The sound the shutter makes. You know, the mystery of the black box. Both my father and my grandfather were avid amateur photographers. My grandfather kept all his cameras, projectors and flash attachments in a narrow closet in the corner of his living room. As a very small child, I remember opening and closing that closet, over and over, just to look at that amazing stockpile of cameras.

BM: Essentially what drives your work? Where do you draw your inspiration from?

ML: This might sound pretty basic but I’m driven to communicate ideas, to share experiences, to pose questions about the world in which we live. I’m also quite interested in the bigger, trickier questions of photographic representation itself. How do photographs work? When do they fail us?

In the case of my most recent project, ”A Daguerreotype Sideways,” I was presented with a difficult representational problem. I had access to Mathew Brady’s former daguerreotype studio–this incredible site of artistic production—that now bears very few traces of that past. In some ways, the building was just another vacant industrial building in Tribeca, ripe for condo conversion. Yet as someone who works with photographs, I had all kinds of deep emotional, physical and intellectual responses to that building, particularly Brady’s skylight, which is still intact. How could I find a way to depict that space and that history with photographs? How can a photograph begin to describe what we experience when we step into a historic space? And to compound the problem, how does this pursuit change when so many iconic photographs had been produced in Brady’s studio, like the photo of Abraham Lincoln on a five-dollar bill.

BM: What artists inspire you, whether they are other photographers, musicians, painters, etc.?

ML: In his piece, Some Rules for Students and Teachers, John Cage wrote, “Always be around. Come and go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything—it might come in handy later.” I try to live like that. I go to see everything I can. I read a lot, everything from trashy novels, to Cabinet Magazine, to obscure camera manuals from the 1960s. I really enjoy queer performance, the recent collaborative work of Sharon Hayes and Brooke O’Hara (last spring, they did an amazing eight-hour rendition of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse), Jibz Cameron (aka Dynasty Handbag), the legendary duo Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, and the incredible work of Justin Vivian Bond, who inspires me to no end. Reading Martha Rosler’s writing on feminism, architecture and documentary photography were pivotal for me, as was the work of Deborah Bright and Penelope Umbrico, both of whom were my teachers at RISD. I’m indebted to the work of Johan Grimonprez and Mathew Buckingham, as they each present history as a subject open for unlimited play and critical inquiry. I also have an important on-going dialogue about historiography with my girlfriend, Carolyn Dinshaw, author of the book Getting Medieval. I find Pradeep Dalal’s wavering scanner-made tableaux of Indian subjects to be very moving. And Liz Deschenes optically-charged photos are just plain awesome. Finally, I admire the work of many younger artists like Miranda Lichtenstein, Joachim Schmidt, João Enxuto, and Daniel Gordon, especially his photographs of himself flying. Now there’s my kind of romantic.

BM: Much of your practice draws on the history of photography, what draws you so much to the past?

ML: History, for me, is a live thing and that, of course, includes the history of photography. It reverberates in the everyday. It’s both everywhere and nowhere–in the air, in my body, and then, poof, it’s gone. This elusiveness attracts me. As an artist, I feel it’s an open invitation to question how our histories get told and who gets to tell them. More generally, feeling the presence (or absence) of history allows us to think more expansively about the present moment and sometimes, in rare spark-like bursts, allows us dream about a better future.

Mathew Brady's Skylight, c-print, 20 x 16 in.

BM: Could you talk about your most recent project, A Daguerreotype Sideways: Re-Visiting Mathew Brady’s Studio @ 359 Broadway?

ML: Sure. I’ve already talked a bit about that project but I should probably back up. In 2009, I gained access to the vacant building on lower Broadway that housed Mathew Brady’s daguerreotype studio in the mid-1850s. Inside that five-story industrial building, Brady and his team of “operators” photographed thousands of people, many of whom were experiencing photography for the very first time. My access to the building wasn’t exactly legal, so I had to work quickly and quietly. And even though rationally I knew that I probably wouldn’t do jail time as a white woman trespassing with a view camera, I was quite jumpy the entire time I was in there. Dark empty buildings are surprisingly talkative!

I ended up taking direct pictures of Brady’s skylight, making “Walk-in Portraits” under the skylight, as well as a set of “Visiting Cards” using discarded stuff I found inside the building. The visiting cards were based on a set of Brady cartes-de-visite that I discovered in my research between shoots. The skylight pictures started out as straight, representational images; the photos became more abstract as I further considered what it meant to stand under that glass. In the end, I wanted the photographs to emit the heat generated by that particular glass, both literally and metaphorically. I also wanted to refer to the skylight’s intense brightness and its lasting optical impression, like the afterimages that float around under our eyelids even after we’ve turned away from something.

I’m very fond of a picture I made later in my studio of a small shard of the Brady skylight glass that I found in the building. My concept was to make the most idealized photograph possible of that glass, to give it the star treatment. In the end, I think the picture is pretty funny. A curator who visited my studio referred to it as a photo that might appear on a Pink Floyd album cover. That reading made me very happy.

BM: How did you first hear or learn of Mathew Brady?

ML: In the standard way, by reading one of the many the canonical accounts of photo history. Mathew Brady figures prominently in the canon, particularly his Civil War photographs, which he and his assistants took in the aftermath of various very bloody battles. They developed those photos in a portable, horse drawn darkroom. Early on, I was less aware of Brady’s portrait work, his staggering output of daguerreotypes (and later Ambrotypes) of presidents, senators, and ordinary citizens-of-means.

In my teaching, Brady was always one of the go-to people for talking about the reliability of photographs as documents. This idea that photographs have always been staged and manipulated can sometimes really bother beginning students who, somewhat romantically (there’s that word again!) flock to analogue photography in search of something stable, or images that they can trust. I can really relate to my students’ impulse to find something fixed, stable or material in photography. Photographs are now mostly untouchable bits of screen-matter—backlit apparitions that live in “the cloud” and fly endlessly by us on our screens. The speed at which they’re made and disseminated is an amazing thing, but it also makes me (and a lot of other people who care about these things) wonder how well these images can be absorbed, considered or analyzed when they’re coming at us so fast and furiously.

Tintype Photo Cute Boy Spooky Hidden Mother Under Sheet

Christina Ricci – 8 x 10 in.

BM: Please tell us more about $pooky Photographs for Sale$. What is the concept behind the project? What role does time play?

ML: That’s kind of a crazy project. It began as a daily activity, as a slightly OCD warm-up exercise that I did in the morning before I prepared for “real work.” I chose the search category “spooky photographs” somewhat arbitrarily but eBay was an important part of the formula because of its function as the ultimate clearinghouse for man-made stuff, especially photographs.

It’s become a simple matter of moving pixels from one on-line space to another. I drag the images and texts from eBay’s search window across my desktop and into a window on my website. In that short digital trip an entirely new context and possibility for reading is opened up. You get a publicity photograph of Christina Ricci and then a photo of a boy and his “spooky hidden mother” in a Victorian tintype. To me, this is one of the most intriguing things about the on-line world–how these bizarre new categories spring into being; how the internet is constantly corralling so-called like things. I’m interested in what these kinds of instant archives can tell us about our culture and, more importantly, the kind of ready-made material they provide us as artists. For now it appears that “spooky photographs” are usually old photos of old women. “Spooky photographs” are also photos in which women appear without men. People of color, no surprise, also figure in the “spooky” category quite often.

One unexpected side-effect of this project is that the eBay sellers—there seem to be a few regulars that specialize in “spooky photographs”– have started marking up their photographs with random texts, I suppose, to keep people like me from using them without paying. (The sellers are predisposed to use the “Marker Pen” font in lime green, which is extra-amazing.) So the archive is being re-shaped even before it comes to me based, at least in part, on my actions. That’s where your very astute question about time comes into play. What you get from these re-aggregations is a representation of time and space that is fantastically whacked-out–it’s not linear, it’s not regular and it’s clearly not finite. These strange temporalities are, of course, already present nearly everywhere on the internet. “$pooky Photographs for Sale$” only highlights them and thankfully, for my procrastinatory purposes, the material is infinite.

Walk-In #1, c-print, 20 x 16 in., 2009

BM: What do you find to be the biggest cliché in photography these days?

ML: I love clichés and photography is chock-full of them, no matter where you turn. Sunsets. Kittens. Young women splayed out in a threatening landscape. I look at clichés as aggregated data or information. They can tell me a lot about a culture and its aesthetic values at any given moment. Plus they can be really quite funny!

BM: What are you working on now? Future projects?

ML: I’m working on a text and image book about the Sylvania flashcube, a space-aged photo flash device that was revolutionary in 1965 and obsolete by 1975.

BM: Currently, what’s the greatest challenge you face in your practice?

ML: Probably the same things that challenges most other working artists, time and money. Money buys you time to think, time to work, time to figure out how to navigate the many newly available distribution channels for your projects. And of course it takes time to earn money.

Kathryn Garcia, Film Still, Lily of The Valley, 2011

Legacy Russell: Let’s talk about your relationship to visuality. What role does the lens play in toying with representation in your work? Does it stand in the way or act in solidarity with your gaze as an artist? In your borrowing of parts from other sources, do you ever find yourself behind the camera?

Kathryn Garcia: Well you know the movie Peeping Tom by Michael Powell? I would say that movie is very formative in my understanding of the gaze, the gaze of the camera, the violence of the gaze. My approach is different than what Powell was exploring in that film I would say, but informed by it nonetheless. I am very much interested in voyeurism in relationship to film. Like in Pussy Little Panty Boy for instance, I gave Matt Greene [from the film] an idea and let him run with it, but the idea I suggested was something he had fantasized about before I suggested it. My friend Natalie Rodgers filmed it while I watched. So my role was more to act as a voyeur who empowers the others fantasy with use of the gaze rather than act as director. Similarly in Lily of the Valley, the movie I’m working on now, the character is developed with Gordon who plays Lily, and is very much a fictional autobiography. To me at least with the type of work I’m doing, film is fantasy – the screen is fantasy, the image of woman on the screen is very much related to a fantasy of the feminine, whether it be played by a woman or not – it’s a construction based on fantasy. Maybe that’s why I like asking men to act as women, to construct their fantasies of women for the screen- because I think that as a woman I am still constructed from a fantasy of what a woman is, and a man enacting this makes it more obvious that it is in fact a construction.

LR: What are some characters used in your creative process that you have “met” through producing work?

KG: Carla and Lily definitely. Lily is a character I developed with Gordon who plays her, she’s named after the hermaphroditic flower of the same name. She wears a lot of white so the name kind of fit her character. Carla, I don’t know Carla just came to me while I was drawing her, I think it was the heels that made her have a personality so I decided to name her. Carla is an ongoing character that I am continuously developing she’s kind of based on the structure of a comic book protagonist. Lily was recently killed but will re-appear in the afterlife.

LR: Let’s talk about your piece “Cooking Instructions;” the collision of the female form, the kitchen, and sex has been experimented with many times before. I think about Janine Antoni’s food work or Isabella Rossellini’s “Green Porno.” What’s your politic when it comes to the kitchen?

KG: Well that work was a reference to Alice Constance Austin, an early feminist architect and city planner who designed a utopian cooperative commune called Llano del Rio in what is now the city of Palmdale, California. The commune was founded on several feminist principles, such as the design of a kitchen-less house. The kitchen-less house was thought of as a “feminist” solution to long workdays spent in the kitchen. I made a few works based on this work, as a way to kind of expose gender roles implicit to early feminist thought, and to kind of parody the idea of utopia related to architecture. The first work was called “kitchens of the future,” which was composed from found footage from General Motors’ “Design for Dreaming,” and film coverage of the Monsanto “House of the Future,” located in Tomorrowland, Disneyland both films were created as futuristic fantasies of kitchens that aided women in their housework thereby allowing them more free time. I inserted clips from lesbian porn into the montages, superimposing them onto the appliances operating within these “futuristic” kitchens. The video you are referring to was basically the same idea except that instead of 50’s era promo videos I used a SIMS video about Kitchen Design. I found out that SIMS was the best selling PC game in history, and it’s basically like 2nd Life but more popular, and in a way more suburban. The characters buy houses, find jobs, have relationships. The clip I used from SIMS is all about designing your kitchen, so in a way this simulated kitchen was also a utopic kitchen. I just imagined suburban housewives going nuts over designing their “perfect” kitchen and what that implies – what kind of gender policing it basically conforms to or propagates, so inserting porn and cooking instructions into this was a way to parody the policing of gender in relationship to architecture.

OG Kitchen Video

Kitchen Video with SIMS

LR: What about Pussy Little Panty Boy? What does it mean to project these images many times over in a dark room? How does the experience of “the cinema” and the vast histories therein inform the viewing of your work? How did this experience inform your showing at P.S.1 last year?

KG: So Pussy Little Panty Boy is a work I made for a show that Sarvia and I did in our apt gallery (second-floor) that was based around the movie “single white female;” that movie is basically about a pathologized lesbian who emulates her roommate and basically steals her identity, in a way she steals it out of repressed desire for the roommate. She is becoming the object of affection. The other as fetish. So in this video I asked Matt to imagine becoming me or to be the third member of my relationship. Matt had asked me to pose for his works before and so I felt there was a natural transference between us. I was exploring an aspect of desire that turns into fetish of the other, becoming the other. Like the mis-identification with the muse or like in the beginning of Virdiana when the male character caresses Viridiana’s clothes and puts on one of her shoes. How desire can turn into a fetish of becoming the desired.

I guess cinema influences my way of seeing in general, I think that’s almost unavoidable having grown up in L.A. I wanted this work to look kind of like a home video, like a homemade fetish video. There is this sense that you’re looking into someone’s room, the almost anonymity of the bodies against the curtain in the background you can see the scene but not everything is revealed. It’s really about voyeurism in relationship to film – looking into something that you’re excluded from. The multichannel projection was more of a curatorial decision although when I first imagined presenting the piece I imagined it as a series of projections on multiple screens, to make it carnivalesque, dreamlike, and confrontational, like a series of images out of sequence yet related, like a dream sequence or montage in an old Hollywood film. The experience of walking into a room to be surrounded by images out of sequence, like a voyeuristic glimpse into someone else’s fantasy.

PUSSY LITTLE PANTY BOY

LR: Tell us about the piece Waltz with Royce.

KG: Waltz with Royce is just basically a found video that I found really captivating and eerie so I’ve kept it as the outro of the site since it launched. I like how Royce is kind of ambiguous I think it’s a woman, but in context to the other stuff on the site people always wonder if it’s a man. She’s so haunting and beautiful to me.

Waltz with Royce

LR: When looking at your work, I often think of Jorge Luis Borge’s essay Blindness, or Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929); can you expand on your own modes of seeing, re-seeing? Presenting, re-presenting?

KG: Well Bunuel is definitely an influence of mine, the last scene I filmed with Lily was in part based on Viridiana. I love Bunuel and how he has these kinds of surrealist narratives that lead nowhere but in the end are sort of rhetorical, like in Exterminating Angel (1962) for instance where they can’t leave the room and this group of very elite bourgeoisie are basically reduced to animals, trapped within their class. Afterward they go on to be trapped within their ideology, after they escape the manor they are trapped within a church. Bunuel is breaking through the ideologies of his time or the ideologies in context to his work, his experience. I guess my work is similar, but the ideologies are different. Using an image or visual language to break through constructs of seeing that in a sense become ideology, you know what I mean? I like to break through constructs of masculine and feminine. In the last scene with Lily I am very much playing with the idea of masculine vs feminine and that being an imaginary binary (every binary is imaginary) but also the image of Lily very much replicates an odalisque, the quintessential portrait of the woman but in this case it is a man.

Legacy Russell is a writer, artist, and cultural producer. She is the Art Editor for BOMB magazine’s BOMBlog and the co-founder of CONTACTProject.net.

Rafaël Rozendaal with his piece at BYOB New York

Rafaël Rozendaal is a contemporary Internet artist who’s artistic practice notoriously utilizes websites and installations to investigate the screen as a pictorial plane. It only seemed natural for him to establish the curatorial project BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) in July 2010. Since the original event in Berlin, BYOB has taken place in 42 locations around the world.

Robin Juan: Can you give us a run down on how BYOB works?

Rafaël Rozendaal: BYOB is extremely simple: Find a place, invite many artists, ask them to bring a projector. If everyone takes care of themselves, it’s quick and easy, and you have a huge one-night-exhibition with overlapping moving images, a room filled with light and ideas. Anyone can organize a BYOB, the idea is open, it is an open-source curatorial format. If you send me an email I can announce your BYOB on byobworldwide.com.

Perfect Vacuum Rafaël Rozendaal solo exhibition at Galeri Pictura, Lund, Sweden. 2010

RJ: What was your inspiration for creating BYOB?

RR: I noticed that many of my friends own projectors, and many of them make moving images. I thought wouldn’t it be great if we got together in a big space and filled the room with moving images? I also noticed that group shows often are very stressful and lots of artists are frustrated because of it, I hope the BYOB format is more spontaneous and fun.

RJ: And who’s curatorial project do you see it as, your own, the organizer, or both?

RR: Both; I set the ground rules, and then each curator creates their version. It is very important that each curator gives their respective idea a twist. I love seeing new ideas, improving, mutating, that’s why it’s open source.

BYOB Berlin installation

RJ: How many events have you been to, and what makes them successful?

RR: I’ve been to 6 BYOB’s so far. What really makes a great BYOB is a cohesive community of artists, especially if people know each other well from the Internet but they meet in real life for the first time. Then you create a very special moment.

Also, it’s nice when it’s really really packed; packed with hardware, packed with images, packed with artists, packed with audience.

BYOB Berlin installation

RJ: Is there an end date to this project or will it keep going as long as people want to participate?

RR: I have no idea, the whole project was only intended to happen once, all the other editions are a total surprise to me! As long as people are excited, it should go on. I hope to see more and more mutations.

RJ: Do you see specific trends between the work being shown in different locations?

RR: Maybe not so much in the works but mostly in the attitude people have towards exhibiting. In Berlin it was very chill like going camping, in NY people were really pumped up, I think it says a lot about each place.

RJ: At the beginning of September, two BYOB events took place in Linz, Austria to coincide with the annual Ars Electronica festival. One of the events was organized for remote participants to upload videos to Vimeo, which would then be projected. How do you feel about this evolution?

RR: I love it! BYOB is all about letting the Internet out of the machine and into big spaces.

BYOB Tokyo

RJ: And what do you see in the future for BYOB?

RR: I think BYOB is a model for how we might use computers in the future, not confined to devices, but floating around us.

BYOB Austin

RJ: And my last “fun” question: As an artist and person, do you have a city you call home or identify with the most?

RR: Most beautiful city: Rio; Efficient city: Amsterdam; Best food: Tokyo; Art friends: Berlin

byobworldwide.com

Tina Schula
Radical Camp
9.5. x 9 in.
Perfect Bound
Soft Cover
26 Pages
Edition of 40
Self-Published
Publication Date: 2011

I’m reminded of a photograph. It appears innocent enough at first glance; a grouping of bunk beds, all occupied. The figures, each obscured by blankets could be sleeping. They’re not. Documenting the 1997 mass suicide of thirty-nine individuals, each members of the American religious group Heaven’s Gate, the photograph simplifies a more complex narrative, distilling the moment into a tender, albeit naïve, sentiment.

There are moments of such tenderness in Tina Schula’s quietly haunting Radical Camp. Figures recline casually on the floor in a dialogue with each other; they embrace, smiling in the warmth of the sun. These moments will not last. Explosives are built. A hostage is taken. And so, over the course of twenty-six constructed tableaux, Schula weaves a complex narrative centered on an invisible target, an unknown goal.

Focused on a small but disparate group of men and women, Radical Camp basks in mystery. The militia, if one is to get into the business of classification, is lead by an enigmatic man introduced only as Duke. An uncomfortable figure, Duke commands the attention of both his cohorts and Schula’s camera. Opening to his determined gaze, Duke establishes himself not as a towering presence, but someone with towering aspirations. His worried eyes concealed behind gold-framed sunglasses, the greasy haired leader most closely resembles the guitar playing Branch Davidian, David Koresh.

The book’s preface, a quote from Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer gives philosophical form to the ambiguously defined group. Hoffer writes, “a rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.” In this light, the additional cast of characters in Schula’s work, Junior, Cyndi, David, Lynn, Josh, and Dwayne appear as members of a familial body. They accept their leader with little reluctance. Duke watches over his family with the bewildered temperament of a reluctant father thrust head first into a world of great responsibility.

If Radical Camp appears as a cipher it is precisely because as viewers we are positioned as outsiders, privileged enough to glean some information, but foreign enough to only catch a glimpse. We develop theories. We are left wondering.

Purchase Radical Camp

Arrangement #2, 2010

Sensibility and art often have little to do with one another. Celebration of technique, symbolism, ritual and a myriad of life experiences often times trumps quiet inquisition. Art photographer and teacher, Adam Ekberg counters such stimuli with sincerity. Ekberg cleverly locates the space between celebration and isolation, explaining how absence can be sweeter than actual presence. His knack for creating the middle of nowhere among the bustle of everything inundating our lives creates a refreshing stillness begging to not only be contemplated, but felt through experience. An exhibition opens later this month at the Thomas Roberto Gallery in Chicago.

Rachel Wolfe: Artists can easily form visuals that either relate directly with or oppose their own sense of being or understanding of existence, but their intention can never been truly passed over. In other words, some artists may wish to create beauty when their life seemingly has none, while others create images of disdain to explore the mundanity of life all while they live a more joyful existence. Your work seems to be neither of these two poles. Instead, a certain sense of humor adjoins with a sort of all of everything all at once. Eloquently displayed within your photographs is a synopsis of a particular disposition. The intangibility of such certainly parallels with your statement, but would you care to comment on your disposition, the sort of style your roots navigate the dirt of life?

Adam Ekberg: I suppose this sensibility is a result of having been through experiences that were altogether euphoric and others that were overtly bleak. So I have certainly indulged in both poles of experience. At the end of the day, sensibility is the thing that cannot be taught or learned but only acquired as if each experience left a trace of itself on you. What I find interesting is the combination of signifiers of different sensibilities that are oppositional—for example, celebration and isolation. When two such signifiers coexist in a photograph they do not subvert one another but heighten each other.

I learned this a long time ago. I had several lost years after college that were wonderful and, in hindsight, very instructive. I remember that when several friends and I were living in the Southwest and we would leave Taos to drive towards the town we were staying in, we could listen as every radio station vanished as we drove into the mountains. I remember turning the dial, not listening to the stations, but just listening to them disappear. I remember feeling both a sort of loneliness and exhilaration that these radio signals were no longer reaching us, that the human world was vanishing and we were alone in the high desert. Had I not paid attention to that or just looked out the window or concentrated on driving, I would not have felt that simultaneous loneliness/exhilaration. In much the same way, my picture of a Sparkler on a Frozen Lake records the presence of something that makes its absence more tangible and sweeter. Arguably, a picture of a frozen lake with no sparkler is emptier, but the presence of the sparkler illuminates the loneliness of that environment.

A sparkler on a frozen lake, 2006

RW: Constructing a happenstance scene as a “metaphor for existence” is, as you’ve described in your statement, an elaborate process. What in particular draws you to employ the symbols of celebration? And to what degree is the place of the object and the object itself relevant to your mission as an artist?

EK: It is hard to acknowledge the attraction to the object’s that signify celebration without speaking very directly about how I first started using this set of objects in my photographs when I moved to Chicago in 2004. I was frustrated with graduate school because although I was reading a lot and having new experiences, I felt weird being in school as an adult who had been out of school for six years. I was at an impasse—I found my life experiences prior to graduate school more interesting than being a student. Searching for subject matter, I began to make photographs about having nothing to photograph. I took a picture of a bunch of #2 pencils stuck in a drop ceiling implying the boredom that leads to such behavior. Another example: for some reason, a small disco ball had made the move to Chicago and I recall hanging it beneath the sink in my apartment next to the cleaning detergent and potting soil. I pointed a flashlight at the disco ball and made a picture. It was not an ironic gesture of displacing a signifier of parties from its expected environment by placing it in the most banal section of my apartment: it was a sincere gesture. When I saw the celebratory qualities of the disco ball melding with such a commonplace space, I knew I had found a way of making pictures true to my perspective and sensibility.

RW: In your work, perfect inquisitions are relayed through an arrangement of imperfect objects back into a constructed reality. What do you desire to bring to this translation?

EK: There is something satisfying in the illogical gesture of perusing ones desires wherever they take you. The point of origin for a picture is variable, but once I make a pencil sketch of an idea, I cannot wait to realize the concept. Precise Equilibrium, is a good example of this. For three months, I went to the same place in the woods with balloons filled with oxygen and others filled with helium. I tied the balloons together attempting to make this object that would neither fly nor fall, but hover. I attempted this effect countless times and had every possible failure—balloons flew away, popped on tree limbs, etc. Eventually, one pair hovered perfectly and I made the picture.

Precise Equilibrium, 2008

Untitled (A room filled with Bic lighters and cocktail umbrellas), 2010

RW: Reoccurring themes could be perceived as excessive or even obsessive. Yet, the continual appearances of nature and celebration hint at something more, perhaps an investigation of a nearly scientific approach. Your photographs depict manifested permanence as if it were born from the ephemeral. Can you describe your relationship to the woods and the ontology of the material and non-materials worlds your images portray?

EK: I can assure you that my approach is anything but scientific. The process of making an image stems from the desire to see something in the physical world and then depicted in a photographic representation. It can be something grand—like a meteorite piercing an empty seascape—or diminutive—like an ice cube melting on the floor of my apartment. Whatever the image, I’m interested in doing whatever is necessary in the physical world to arrive at the phenomena I’m after. In some cases, the thing photographed happens so quickly it only exists in the photograph. It is imperceptible in the moment of making. Often times the thing photographed lingers in space and time. After all of the setting up, carrying of objects, performing of tasks, and making of photographs, I relish a moment in which I am able to simply sit with this thing. This moment represents the end of a process, sometimes one of months or years: what began with a desire to see the thing has led to sketches being made, materials acquired, locations scouted, objects carried to just the right spot, and camera set up. All of these steps makes the thing photographed feel almost alive, but after that, lights go out, balloons fall, and I clean up the mess.

RW: You have taught photography for several years and noted in other interviews the essential lessons you continue to gain from teaching, is this something you plan to continue?

EK: Absolutely. I really love teaching and find it a wonderful compliment to making art. I am really lucky to have joined an outstanding faculty at the University of South Florida and am inspired by the work of my colleagues and students. I teach undergraduate courses in which I have students examine the intentions of the photographs they make as well as reconsider what a photograph can be. I also work with graduate students, which I really like because I easily remember and relate to a lot of the things they are experiencing.

I was fortunate to have several people who were very important teachers to me. Two of my good friends as a child were a naturalist/photographer and a paleontologist/professor. Of course, later, I had formal teachers in institutions but I continued to find mentors outside of school who have been extremely important to me. I hope that on some level I can perform either role for someone else.

Arrangement #1, 2009

RW: And having explored the Midwest, Northeast and Florida regions, are you being drawn towards a new area or to explore new symbols for your work? In other words, can you share any of your current or future plans for us?

EK: When I first moved to the Midwest I was constantly looking for vantage points that resembled New England, where I grew up. It took a while before I was able to embrace the fact that I lived in the middle of the country, surrounded by all of that flat land that initially had made me anxious. Now, having left the Midwest, I’ve started to use the landscape in Florida, which is also really foreign to me. Moss hangs on everything, and there are all sorts of exotic plants and animals.

I remember several years ago, Alan Artner, the former art critic at the Chicago Tribune, wrote my use of landscape is “almost generic shots of forest, field and ocean” as if I use the landscape as a backdrop for the thing I am making. On a certain level, I think this is true. The natural world in photographs functions as a void or space in which to actualize something that I want to see. Be it New England, the Midwest, Florida, or wherever, that space just needs to have a certain rightness to it. It needs to feel the way I want the picture to be, whether that is empty, desolate, balanced, or lush. I suppose on a very basic level I am most comfortable with the landscape that I know best. On some intuitive level I know where to go in New England to find the landscape I wand, whereas in Florida I walk through the woods like a tourist. But even on the outskirts of a giant American city like Chicago, I can locate a place that seems like the middle of nowhere—when, in fact, just outside of the picture frame are signs of modernity and I recall hearing airplanes at O’Hare during the shoot.

At the time of this interview, I’m staying in a small shed in my friend’s backyard in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Having a significant part of the summer to myself is a luxury that I have not had since I started working in high school. I have been making new images in the area for the past many weeks that will be part of my upcoming solo exhibition at Thomas Robertello Gallery in Chicago. It has been a really nice period of making art, a feeling better than anything else I know. The show opens in Chicago on October 21st. The new work will also be online at Adam Ekberg or Thomas Robertello, but if you find yourself in Chicago please swing by!

Sadako, 2009

Swiss-Japanese photographer David Favrod draws his inspiration from his bi-cultural upbringing as well as from his dreams and the stories he reads. In his work, he explores the notion of identity and belonging. In this interview, he talks more about his photographic approach and the series Gaijin for which he was awarded the Aperture Portfolio Prize 2010.

Gesche Würfel: The majority of your photographic series explore the notion of identity. How does photography help you explore and communicate identity issues?

David Favrod: I’m 29, but I still have many parts of myself to be illuminated. There is still misunderstanding. For this research (my photographic series), I am trying to reduce them. I’m making some efforts on my way. I try to understand my motivations, what bothers me or on the contrary makes me dream. So I ask you this question: What do we really know of ourselves? I usually find it hard to speak about myself. I always stumble upon the paradoxes of who am I. The notion of identity occurred to me when Japan refused to give me dual citizenship. It is from this feeling of rejection and also from a desire to prove that I am as Japanese as Swiss that this work Gaijin was created. I think that photography came to me naturally. It allows me to shape my own reality.

Untitled, 2011

GW: Where do you draw your inspiration for your work from? How does your bi-cultural upbringing influence the subject matter of your work?

DF: The majority of my inspiration comes from around and within me. My bi-cultural education is the essence of my inspiration.

Kobé, 2010

GW: Please tell us more about the series Gaijin. What is the project about? What made you create it? Please talk a bit more about the visual language that you have chosen.

DF: Gaijin is a project that I began in 2009. I started it as my bachelor degree’s project at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne and afterward extended the series. This first approach has brought together various topics that are important to me, for example the war stories of my grandparents, the correlation between Switzerland and Japan, the family archives, the stories that my mother told me when I was little, or the mountains. Gaijin is a fictional recital, a tool for my quest for identity, where auto-portraits imply an intimate and solitary relationship that I have with myself. The mirror image is frozen in a figurative alter ego that serves as an anchor point.

The image of the window with the paper birds is about the woman Sadako who at her home close to Ground Zero when the atom bomb was dropped in Hiroshima in 1945. Years later, she developed leukemia and was hospitalized in 1955 and given a year to live. She died in 1955 aged 12. During a hospital visit Sadako’s best friend folds an origami crane as an old Japanese story says that who folds 1,000 origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane. As Sadako didn’t manage to fold all 1,000 cranes, her friends folded the remaining ones and buried them with her. With this image I want to speak about the war and the atomic bomb but in a more lyrical way.

After Gaijin, in 2010, I produced the work Omoide Poroporo, which was published at Kodoji Press. It is a mix of my pictures and archives of and from my family, and now I am producing a series with Yokais as the main subject. Yokais are supernatural creatures that shift shapes and are very common in Japanese folklore. They can look almost like humans, often they have animal features, but they can also have no recognizable features at all.

Autoportrait en poulpe, 2009

GW: Where does your interest in constructing fictional stories derive? What are you trying to achieve? And what responses are you trying to evoke from the viewer?

DF: My interest in the construction of fictional stories comes from my dreams and my readings. A natural need. A need to escape. I do not think I can provide answers to the audience. My work is a proposal, an invitation.

Fuji, 2011

GW: What are your artistic concerns and how do they translate into your work? My artistic concerns?

DF: I do not think that there are artistic concerns, but rather a need. The Gaijin project came to me naturally.

portraits_001

Emile Hyperion Dubuisson worked as a cinematographer in Paris before turning to the field of photography. The revisiting of Far, a series the artist left untouched for ten years, has helped him become more “radical” in his creative process. He spoke with Humble Arts Foundation about his recent work, Lighted, which is on view in New York at the Dark Room Residency until October 29, 2011.

Gesche Würfel: I read that your series Far was your first experience with photography. Can you speak a bit more about that particular project?

Emile Hyperion Dubuisson: In Mac Cahill’s movie Another Earth, the magnificent Brit Marling tells the story of a Russian cosmonaut’s first trip into space. As he is looking down at the curve of the Earth, he starts hearing a repetitive and worrisome sound: “So the cosmonaut decides that the only way to save his sanity is to fall in love with the sound. So he closes his eyes, and he goes into his imagination, and then he opens them…he doesn’t hear ticking anymore. He hears music. And he spends the remainder of his time, sailing through space, in total bliss, in peace.”

With Far, I had to deal with the fact that the images I took were totally unprintable, almost in existent. That disappointment kept me away from photography for a decade. It’s only recently that I started to fall in love with those scratchy images. I suddenly got the feeling that the images had the potential to be beautiful.

portraits_003

GW: You’ve described Far as “magical, consistent, and surreal.” How has this series influenced subsequent projects you’ve done?

EHD: Far has a place in our collective imagination of the furthest reaches—the undiscovered. When you see the images, you don’t need to know where it takes place, you know it; it’s Siberia. You are directly transported to a mysterious land full of phantasms. The images make you travel in space, but also in time—because of the specific facture that they have. A catastrophic processing produced very damaged images. The scratches and dust are a synonym of time. Far gave the opportunity to take more radical directions in my creative processes.

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portraits_004

GW: Please tell us more about your most recent series, Lighted. What is the concept of the series? What reactions are you trying to evoke from the viewer? Do you have any ideas about where to exhibit this body of work?

EHD: Lighted sketches our silence and desires. It is a series of instants, a suspended time. The portraits highlight the moment between a question and a decision. The flash delicately coats the body with an intimate and unexpected fragility. The light envelops the face in a protective intention, favorable to a meditation. The light works like a filter, revealing a certain fragility of our humanity. I do care to find in each of us the angle that best describes our sensibility. I go around each person and highlight the detail that makes me want to photograph that person. I know that there is something that moves me in all of them and my goal is to find it.

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GW: What drives your practice? Are there any particular questions or issues that your work addresses?

EHD: I do things fairly instinctively, even when they are intentional. For me, photography is a sequence of more or less conscious accidents and unforeseen incidents.

Emile Hyperion Dubuisson

In Tereza Zelenkova’s artist statement accompanying the body of work Supreme Vice (2011), the Czech-born visual artist explains that this body of work evolved from ideas surrounding the occult revival in the 19th century. This renewed interest in the occult posits a counter-narrative to prominent Western ideologies regarding perception, reality, and the human experience. As many have noted, photography was born from a collective desire to accurately render the visual world. There is the simplified story of Louis Daguerre and Fox Talbot simultaneously arriving at the creation of commercially viable photographic technology, but the idea of photography was inherited. The increasing dependence of Western ideology and thought on vision, the preferred sense from which to perceive and understand the surrounding world, accounts for the photographic impulse that entertained the use of the camera obscura, diorama, physionotrace, and other interpretations of the photographic. The pervasiveness of positivism, rationality and the scientific method justified what could be seen and quantified as the only valid form of experience and truth. The photographic embodies this reliance on sight and reality. It is important to account for Zelenkova’s use of photographic technology to unravel the façade of rationality we attribute to our history and society. Her use of compositionally direct black and white photographs, a medium associated with truth, to give credence and visuality to “our susceptibility to irrational beliefs” emphasizes this duality as an integral part of human experience.*

The seeming opposition of the irrational and rational, of vision and blindness, is acutely illustrated in Supreme Vice. Zelenkova’s sophisticated rhythm and imagery implicates us into an uncomfortable state in which fear, superstition, and death are the norm. The last image in the booklet presents us with the culmination of esoteric symbolism, a robed and hooded figure placed in front of a stark white background. We are not afforded the resolution of identifying with the figure’s humanity as the face is completely hidden, leaving us involved. She continuously deprives our desire to define the subjects who are photographed. There are no faces, no geographical landmarks, no references for us to grasp to, and this ambiguity reinforces her stark postmodern vision. The second spread presents us with a disconcerting pair: the left image is of varying bones artfully and decisively placed in a triangular pattern, the right image is of a dressed skeleton in which only the skull is visible. Not only does the skeleton obviously remind us of the nature of our existence but also the bone symbol implies a talismanic quality invoking ever-present death. This preoccupation with irrationality, spiritualism, and death not only questions our seeming rationality; it also reminds us that photographs create mediated experiences and contingent truths. This tension is most wonderfully illustrated in what appears to be an otherworldly aerial landscape. It is at once an optical illusion and a fictitious truth; under scrutiny the landscape is inconsistent and impossible until the realization that it is water over sand. Although its illusion and untruth has been revealed, there is still the stubborn impulse to regard it as a landscape. It is symptomatic of the human experience to be able to fully invest in two contradictory truths, into rationality and irrationality, science and mysticism, blindness and vision. The occult revival was a backlash against overbearing concepts of reality, which threatened to reduce the multiplicity of experiences and perspectives enjoyed by humanity into one meta-narrative of truth.

24 Pages
19 X 27 cm
Edition 250
£12.00
ISBN 978-1-907071-24-9
Published in London by Mörel Books
morelbooks.com

Images: Supreme Vice, 2011 © Tereza Zelenkova & Mörel Books

*Quoted from Tereza Zelenkova’s statement, which can be accessed at terezazelenkova.com