digital photography « Art Blart

Archive for the 'digital photography' Category

May

Review: ‘Littoral’ by Kristian Laemmle-Ruff at Colour Factory Gallery, Fitzroy

Exhibition dates: 4th May – 26th May 2012

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff
Truck in Safi
2010
Type C print
100cm x 67cm

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff
New Homes
2011
Type C print
100cm x 67cm

Jeff Wall, the renowned Canadian photographer, observed recently that, “Photography is such a wide, complex art form medium that there’s no real single way of practising it. Up until 30 to 40 years ago, it was pretty much presumed that the way you practised photography seriously was in the documentary mode. It was very unilateral, other things weren’t really plausible. I never objected to documentary photography, but it’s not the whole story…”1

How true. In this post-photography world there are many spaces in the city for showing all kinds of photographic work, notably at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Fitzroy. While the viewer does learn about different modes of photographic representation through experiential learning (making meaning from the direct experience of looking at such work), personally some contemporary photography often leaves me feeling rather underwhelmed. Rarely do I leave the CCP thinking, wow, that was a great “photography” exhibition, I have seen something amazing about the world that I had not recognised before. Interesting: possibly; inspiring/engaging/memorable: occasionally, which is perhaps why reviews of exhibitions at the CCP occur rather rarely on this blog. This is not to belittle the work that the CCP does as an establishment, far from it, but just to note that not much contemporary photography lasts long in the mind.

It was such a joy then to walk around the corner from the CCP to the Colour Factory Gallery and view the exhibition Littoral by emerging artist Kristian Laemmle-Ruff. This is one of the best, if not the best, “photography” exhibition I have seen so far this year. As soon as you walk into the simple, elegant gallery you are surrounded by fourteen large scale horizontal photographs that are suffused with colour variations bouncing across the gallery – here a blue, there a green, now a lush orange palette. The effect is much like Monet’s waterlilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris; seated in the middle of the four curved paintings you are surrounded by large daubs of paint of various hues that have an elemental effect – resonances of earth, air, water, fire – on the viewer. The same affection of colour and space can be found in Laemmle-Ruff’s photographs.

The artist’s literal rendition (the definition of littoral is that it relates to the coastal zone between the limits of high and low tides) of the interstitial spaces at the edge of urbana, the fluid spaces of a no man’s land, are beautifully visualised in the work. These entropic spaces are mainly devoid of physical human presence but filled with the detritus of humanity: concrete boxes and tangled beams of steel, satellite dishes and red-eyed chimney stacks. In Casablanca Terrace II (2010, below) satellite dishes shimmer in orange while in the distance alien lights seem to hover over the city; in Manneheim (2010, below) the whole photograph is a cold, chilly blue the only visible signs of human existence a couple of lights peeping from the flat windows (at left) while the belching smoke from numerous alien, red-eyed War of the Worlds chimney stacks blends seamlessly into the overcast sky (please enlarge the photograph to see these). When first looking at New Homes (2011, above) I thought the green lines at bottom left were trenches until I realised they were hedges. Then I noticed the empty oval in the upper right quadrant – a demolished sporting facility… a racetrack… a spaceship landing pad? In these familiar but alien landscapes (ice covered swimming pools, graveyards sitting under mountains) Laemmle-Ruff plays with colour, space and depth of field. In some photographs, such as Road to Essaouira (2010, below bottom) the depth of field is very shallow, the focus point in the photograph being the road and gravel, silver road sign and buildings falling out of focus beyond. Like the shifting of colour, this expansion and contraction of DOF from one photograph to the next adds to the body of works ethereality.

The best print in the exhibition is Truck in Safi (2010, above) which is an absolute knockout. The composition is beautifully visualised and the print is incredibly luminous and well balanced. The large white ‘M’ on the back of the earth-filled truck solidifies our gaze in the mid-foreground while, metaphorically, the letter stamps the earth as the possession of man. The road curves into the distance and upon it, as minute specks, are a bicycle and two motorbikes. The sweep of an industrial plant fills the horizon line in a sensuous entanglement of vessels and pipes. This truly is a beautiful photograph and therein lies the contradiction present in Laemmle-Ruff’s body of work. While seeking to capture the paradoxes of urbanisation and consumerism, a vernacular world, familiar and normal (both the beauty and frailty of our times as Laemmle-Ruff puts it), the beauty of the photographs becomes the heart of the work, its strength in the presence of the viewer and perhaps its slight weakness as well. The artist’s visual acoustics, his mythologising of the city if you like - the (dis)ease of the city as sublime photograph picturing the picturesque – has, to my mind, elements of Pictorialism in the artist’s scopophiliac looking. Nothing wrong with that, but we must acknowledge that there is a contradiction here, not between the beauty and frailty of our times, but between the frailty of the earth and the constructed beauty of the photograph seen through a desirous looking that might be at odds with Laemmle-Ruff’s intended project.

Be that as it may, it is a great pleasure to see a young, emerging artist produce such memorable photographic works. Walking into the gallery the viewer can littorally feel the pleasure that the artist has in capturing these complex, fluid spaces. The artist is at the beginning of a path of exploration where each new body of work will develop thematically out of concerns that have been evidenced here. Where this journey will take him is unknown but with courage, fortitude, knowledge, passion, a good eye and a camera he will go far. Good stuff!

.
Many thankx to the artist and the Colour Factory Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff
Casablanca Terrace II
2010
Type C print
100cm x 67cm

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff
Manneheim
2010
Type C print
100cm x 67cm

“Littoral examines the shifting overlap between landscape and urbanscape. As a reaction to a traditional approach where the two are consciously separated, Laemmle-Ruff focuses on the often grotesque and ever-expanding littoral zone between civilisation and nature.

“I found these undefined zones did not discriminate on place or culture. From Morocco to the post WWII suburbs of Germany, somber skies were met with stubborn and aggressive urbanisation. I was drawn to contradictions. “The World Tastes Better with Pall Mall” claimed the cigarette ad. These empty remarks of consumerism seemed to go unchallenged. My intention was to capture these paradoxes and pull them from the wallpaper of modern sensibility. Our gaze once traveled to picturesque, unspoiled horizons, forests in mist and rolling plains. Instead it stops on concrete or becomes tangled in steel beams.”

Littoral presents us with spaces anticipating themselves. Housing estates on the fringe of development yet to be occupied; North African peasants walking past the mall’s facade where the market once stood; roof top terraces lined with satellite dishes streaming immaculate reception. We are left to wonder who will fill these homes. Who is in control of where urbanisation will go next?

Ultimately, this series may appear to be a presentation of a vernacular world, familiar and normal. This, in turn alludes to a desensitisation to our changing surroundings in an age of globalisation and overpopulation. Our landscape is increasingly becoming a manifestation of ourselves. Littoral urges one to question where the present seems to be leading us.

Practicing in both documentary and conceptual photography, from warm narratives to surreal visions, Kristian Laemmle-Ruff’s photographs subtly bring to light both the beauty and frailty of our times. As we spiral up the exponential curve of ‘progress’ there are dynamic ruptures, vulnerabilities and regenerative possibilities in our human reality – this is his motivation – a truth worth capturing.”

Press release from the Colour Factory Gallery website

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff
Olympic Stadium
2012
Type C print
100cm x 67cm

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff
Road to Essaouira
2010
Type C print
100cm x 67cm

1. Wall, Jeff quoted in Laurie, Victoria. “Lights, Camera,” in The Weekend Australian Review. May 19-20 2012, p.5.

Colour Factory Gallery
409 – 429 Gore Street
Fitzroy, Victoria 3056
T: +61 3 9419 8756

Colour Factory Gallery website

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

May

Exhibition: ‘Behind the Curtain – The Aesthetics of the Photobooth’ at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, English artist, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, space, time and works on paper
Tags: aesthetics, Aesthetics of the Photobooth, andy warhol, Andy Warhol Frances Lewis, Anne Deleporte, Anne Deleporte I.D. Stack #6, Anonymous Collection of albums of purikuras, Anonymous Walter and I at the BIG SLIDE, Automatism, Behind the Curtain, Behind the Curtain The Aesthetics of the Photobooth, chromogenic prints, Cindy Sherman, Cindy Sherman Untitled 1975, Collection of albums of purikuras, Frances Lewis, Franco Vaccari, Franco Vaccari Esposizione in tempo reale num. 4, Franco Vaccari Exhibition in real time, Gillian Wearing, Gillian Wearing Self-Portrait at 17 Years Old, I.D. Stack #6, Jan Wenzel, Jan Wenzel Curtain, Jan Wenzel Vohang, Jonathan Mickael Priscilla Photobooth, Lausanne, Mathieu Pernot, Mathieu Pernot Jonathan Mickael Priscilla cabine du photomaton, Mathieu Pernot Jonathan Mickael Priscilla Photobooth, montage, Musée de l'Elysée, photobooth, photobooth portraits, purikuras, Self-Portrait at 17 Years Old, Selfportrait in a Photobooth, standardized legal portraits, The Aesthetics of the Photobooth, The Booth, The Strip, Walter and I at the BIG SLIDE, Yves Tanguy, Yves Tanguy Selfportrait in a Photobooth

Exhibition dates: February – 20th May 2012

This is one exhibition I wish I could really see in person. Such a fascinating subject!

The images are timeless, contextless and quite beguiling. The exhibition questions the aesthetics of the photobooth through six major themes: The Booth, Automatism, The Strip, Who Am I?, Who Are You?, Who Are We?. In Melbourne there are still two black and white photobooths outside the Elizabeth Street exit of Flinders Street railway station, standing there like silent sentinels of a bygone age. I remember when I was younger queueing to have my photograph taken, for student cards and for my first passport. You needed two nearly identical black and white shoulder up portraits, no smiling, no glasses on. Now you just go to the chemist for your colour renditions. The magic and the fun has gone.

The whole performance has the illusion of the cinematic. You queue to get in, drawing back the curtain and closing it behind you, as they close the doors of the cinema. The privacy of the booth, not in darkness but behind a curtain that shields your face from prying eyes but leaves the lower half of your body exposed. Behind where you will be sitting another curtain – drawn or open? What background do you want? You adjust the seat up and down so that your face is at the correct level with the mark on the screen, enter your money and wait. The red light comes on, you (com)pose yourself and a couple of seconds later: flash! Your eyes try to recover in time for the next red light: flash!

Time seems to slow down and almost stop between the flashes of light. The experience of your performance before the screen possesses such a visceral, tense, gut feel but also a disembodied feeling. I never know how I am going to look on the cinematic film strip, not at 24 frames a second, but at 4 frames per minute. What happens to the time in between? Standing outside the booth waiting for a strip of paper with your impression on it, not knowing what the images are going to be like, whether the development of the image in such a short space of time has worked correctly – and the smell of the chemicals on the paper as you handle the still wet strip. Magic…

.
Many thankx to the Musée de l’Elysée for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Franco Vaccari
Esposizione in tempo reale num. 4: Lascia su queste pareti una traccia fotografica del tuo passaggio (Exhibition in real time: leave a photographic sign of your passage on these walls)
1972
Collage of photobooths mounted on cardboard, gelatin silver prints
45.5 x 58.5 cm (detail)
© Franco Vaccari, property of the Artist

Mathieu Pernot
Jonathan, Mickael, Priscilla, cabine du photomaton (Jonathan, Mickael, Priscilla, Photobooth)
1996
Three gelatin silver prints
540 x 195 cm
© Mathieu Pernot / collection Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne

Cindy Sherman
Untitled
1975
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 20.4 cm
© Courtesy of the Artist, Metro Pictures, collection Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Gillian Wearing
Self Portrait at 17 Years Old
2003
Framed c-type print
115.5 x 92 cm
Collection of Contemporary Art Fundació ‘La Caixa’, Barcelone
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Anne Deleporte
I.D. Stack #6
1992
Stack of photobooth portraits, gelatin silver and chromogenic prints
6 x 5 x 3 cm
© Anne Deleporte

“When the first photobooths were set up in Paris in 1928, the Surrealists used them heavily and compulsively. In a few minutes, and for a small price, the machine offered them, through a portrait, an experience similar to automatic writing. Since then, generations of artists have been fascinated by the concept of the photobooth. From Andy Warhol to Arnulf Rainer, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, many used it to play with their identity, tell stories, or simply create worlds.

Behind the Curtain – the Aesthetics of the Photobooth, an exhibition created by the Musée de l’Elysée, is the first to focus on the aesthetics of the photobooth. It is divided into six major themes: the booth, the automated process, the strip, who am I ?, who are you?, who are we?. Provider of standardized legal portraits, it is the ideal tool for introspection and reflection on others, whether individually or in groups. By bringing together over 600 pieces made on different media (photographs, paintings, lithographs and videos ) from sixty international artists, the exhibition reveals the influence of the photobooth within the artistic community, from its inception to the present day.

The exhibition questions the aesthetics of the photobooth through six major themes.

.
The Booth

An isolated space, closed in as if it were some sort of modern confessional, the photobooth is an invitation to the most intimate revelations. Generally located in public spaces-subway station, department store or train station-it also offers an extraordinary observation point onto the urban hustle and bustle. It is a world in between the intimate and the public, the inside and the outside, the debarred and the open.

.
Automatism

From the Surrealists to the most contemporary artists, all have been fascinated by the automatism of the photobooth. The machine does the work. The author vanishes behind the almighty technology. Malfunction can occur at times. The result is a form of poetry of the automatism made visible in its faults, failures or blunders.

.
The Strip

As a series of juxtaposed images, the strip recreates spatial or temporal continuities. It reconstructs improbable spaces: a closer look shows that, in fact, the adjacent image is the following image. Through this succession of images, the photobooth holds, as if folded into it, the principle of the cinema. Putting images side by side is already telling a story.

.
Who am I?

Identity is embodied within the space of the photobooth. It is a space for self-staging, where social, ethnic, sexual, community or any other identity can be strengthened or undone. One can pretend to ascertain one’s naked identity through the mirror of the photobooth, or on the contrary, by pulling faces or in disguise, to establish metamorphoses of the self. The photobooth is the ideal introspective tool.

.
Who are you?

The photobooth is not only a place suitable for self-reflection, it is also a place in which the other can be questioned, in particular through the legal identification system that delivers what is commonly referred to as ‘ ID. ‘ In devoting oneself to the compulsive and bulimic collecting of photobooth strips, one can also get lost in the faces of others.

.
Who are we?

While it allows us to reflect upon our own identity, or other people’s, the photobooth is also an opportunity to ponder about the nature of the couple, or the group. Inside the booth, some build their image through the mirror of the other, or of others; they pose in pairs or more, thus asserting their affiliation to a social entity. The photobooth reinforces our gregarious instinct; it embodies collective identity.

With works by Jacques -Henri Lartigue, Willy Michel, Lorna Simpson, Amanda Tetrault and the collection of albums of purikuras (see photograph below: in Japan, the name purikuras refers to a photo sticker booth or the product of such a photo booth. The name is a shortened form of the registered trademark Purinto Kurabu (プリント倶楽部). The term derives from the English print club. Jointly developed by Atlus and Sega, the first purikura machines were sold in July 1995).

.
Artists:  Jean-Michel Alberola, Louis Aragon, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, Richard Avedon, Alain Baczynsky, Jared Bark, Marc Bellini, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, Hansjürg Buchmeier, Anita Cruz-Eberhard, Sabine Delafon, Anne Deleporte, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Michael Fent, Michel Folco, Valentine Fournier, Lee Friedlander, Näkki Goranin, Jeff Grostern, Susan Hiller, Dick Jewell , Svetlana Khachaturova, Jürgen Klauke, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Naomi Leibowitz, Leon Levinstein, Annette Messager, Willy Michel, Daniel Minnick, Suzanne Muzard, Raynal Pellicer, Mathieu Pernot, Steven Pippin, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, Arnulf Rainer, Timm Rautert, Bruno Richard, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Michel Salsmann, Tomoko Sawada, Joachim Schmid, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Dimitri Soulas, Yves Tanguy, Amanda Tetrault, Roland Topor, Franco Vaccari, Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, Jan Wenzel, David Wojnarowicz and the group Fluxus.”

Press release from the Musée de l’Elysée website

Anonymous
Collection of albums of purikuras
1995 – 2010
Collection of digital images printed on stickers mounted in booklets
Various sizes from 9 x 12.8 cm to 11.9 x 14.5 cm
© Kenji Hirasawa (art collector)

Andy Warhol
Frances Lewis
1966
Acrylic and silkscreen on linen, 12 panels
162.5 x 167.6 cm
© Collection The Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation / 2011
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society ( ARS ), New York

Jan Wenzel
Vohang (Curtain)
2009
From the series Instant History
Montage of four photobooth prints, chromogenic prints
41.7 x 31.7 cm
© Jan Wenzel / Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs

Yves Tanguy
Selfportrait in a Photobooth
ca. 1929
Gelatin silver print
20.5 x 3.8 cm
© Collection Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne / 2011, ProLitteris, Zurich

Anonymous
Walter and I at the BIG SLIDE
ca. 1970
Gelatin silver print
ca. 20.5 x 3.8 cm
© Collection Näkki Goranin

Musée de l’Elysée
18, avenue de l’Elysée CH
1014 Lausanne
T: + 41 21 316 99 11

Opening hours
Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 6pm
Closed Monday, except for Bank holidays

Musée de l’Elysée website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

May

Exhibition: ‘Pieter Hugo: This must be the place’ at The Hague Museum of Photography, The Netherlands

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography and time
Tags: Abdulai Yahaya, Abuja, Accra, Agbogbloshie Market, David Akore, Dayaba Usman, Dayaba Usman with the monkey Clear, Enugu, Escort Kama, Mallam Mantari Lamal, Mallam Mantari Lamal with Mainasara, Mummy Ahmadu, Mummy Ahmadu and a snake charmer with a rock python, Nollywood, Obechukwu Nwoye, Permanent Error, Pieter Hugo, Pieter Hugo Abdulai Yahaya, Pieter Hugo David Akore, Pieter Hugo Dayaba Usman with the monkey Clear, Pieter Hugo Escort Kama, Pieter Hugo Mallam Mantari Lamal with Mainasara, Pieter Hugo Mummy Ahmadu and a snake charmer with a rock python, Pieter Hugo Obechukwu Nwoye, The Hyena & Other Men

Exhibition dates: 3rd March – 20th May 2012

Sexy, scary and very sad.

The hand of the monkey Clear on the thigh of Dayaba Usman (see second photograph below) – and the look on his face – makes one wonder who is really in chains.

.
Many thankx to the Hague Museum of Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Pieter Hugo
Mallam Mantari Lamal with Mainasara, Abuja
2005 – 2007
From the series The Hyena & Other Men
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

Pieter Hugo
Dayaba Usman with the monkey Clear, Abuja
2005 – 2007
From the series The Hyena & Other Men
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

Pieter Hugo
Mummy Ahmadu and a snake charmer with a rock python, Abuja
2005 – 2007
From the series The Hyena & Other Men
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

“The South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s (1976) monumental photographs, centred around contemporary Africa, are now well known around the world. He has already won numerous awards including the KLM Paul Huf award in 2008 and was recently nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012. The Hague Museum of Photography will be the first museum to exhibit a comprehensive survey of Hugo’s work from 2002 – 2011. Together with many previously unseen works, the exhibition will include a curated selection of his most well-known series: The Hyena & Other Men, the bizarre Nollywood and the striking Permanent Error. His impressive portraits tell personal stories about recurring themes throughout his oeuvre, namely those people who inhabit the margins of society in Sub-Saharan Africa.   The differences between the West and Africa, rich and poor, white and black are confronted in Hugo’s vivid compositions. Many of his series are prompted by newspaper articles, or radio and television pieces, which he finds compelling. He came in contact, for instance with the group of men who travel around Nigeria with hyenas and pythons, through an image sent via cell phone camera by a friend. He decided to accompany the group on their travels, and the outcome of this experience is The Hyena & Other Men (2005 – 2007), a series of portraits from a travelling group of street performers, who together with their – sometimes forcefully – tamed animals earn money to continue travelling.

In the series Permanent Error (2009 – 2010) he offers portraits of young men and woman who live amidst an immense waste dump of broken computers, mother boards and keyboards. To earn money these young people burn the computers dumped here as a means to extract valuable metals. The dangerous and poisonous vapours produce a hell on earth, where the quality of life is already challenging. The people who pose for Hugo stand in front of the camera with a defiant self-confidence.

From a different perspective comes his series about Nollywood (2008 – 2009) in Nigeria, the biggest film industry in the world after Hollywood and Bollywood. Here, stories that have for centuries been part of an oral tradition are told in dramatic films in which a central role is reserved for themes such as romance, witchcraft, bribery and prostitution. It is this world, where the everyday and the surreal exist simultaneously, that Hugo finds fascinating. In this series Hugo depicts actors and assistants posing in the role of movie characters. The result is an absurd tableau such as a photo of a half-naked woman sitting on a bed with a bloody knife stuck between her breasts. All the while she stares blankly at the camera. In another image, a woman well-dressed in Nigerian clothing sits completely unfazed by the man next to her made-up as the devil.”

Press release from The Hague Museum of Photography website

Pieter Hugo
Escort Kama, Enugu
2008 – 2009
From the series Nollywood
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

Pieter Hugo
Obechukwu Nwoye, Enugu
2008 – 2009
From the series Nollywood
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

Pieter Hugo
Abdulai Yahaya, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra
2009 – 2010
From the series Permanent Error
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

Pieter Hugo
David Akore, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra
2009 – 2010
From the series Permanent Error
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

The Hague Museum of Photography
Stadhouderslaan 43
2517 HV Den Haag
T: 31 (0)70 – 33 811 44

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday, 12 – 6 p.m.

The Hague Museum of Photography website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

May

Review: ‘Jacqui Stockdale: The Quiet Wild’ at Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: aborigine, Australian artist, digital photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, Melbourne, memory, painting, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, review, sculpture, space and time
Tags: Aboriginal name, Australian scenery, Bakhtin, Bakhtin carnivalesque, carnival, Carnivale, carnivalesque, cartes de visite, Coco Fusco, collage, Cradle Mountain, Dogboy of Gondwanan, exotic postcards, fantasy, God Rama, Goya Negro Returno, Helen Gory Galerie, identity, identity inversion, Jaara Long Gully region, Jacqui Stockdale, Jacqui Stockdale Dogboy of Gondwanan, Jacqui Stockdale Jaguar Hombre, Jacqui Stockdale Lagunta Man Leeawuleena, Jacqui Stockdale Les Jumeaux, Jacqui Stockdale Luchadora Botanica, Jacqui Stockdale Negro Returno, Jacqui Stockdale Negro Returno Long Gully, Jacqui Stockdale Rama-Jaara the Royal Shepherdess, Jacqui Stockdale: The Quiet Wild, Jaguar Hombre, Joss paper, Lagunta, Lagunta Man, Lagunta Man Leeawuleena, Lake Saint Claire, Las Meninas, Leeawuleena, Les Jumeaux, Long Gully, Long Gully region, Luchadora Botanica, Major Arcana, masks, Mexican carnival, Mexican masks, Mikhail Bakhtin, Negro Returno, Negro Returno Long Gully, painting the body, painting the human subject, performance, photographic collages, Rama-Jaara the Royal Shepherdess, ritual, ritual and performance, Tarot, Tasmanian Tiger, The Bodies That Were Not Ours, The Quiet Wild, Velasquez Las Meninas

Exhibition dates: 18th April – 19th May 2012

After a slow start to the season there has be a veritable feast of excellent photography exhibitions in Melbourne over the last month or so, including John Gollings and Jane Brown at Edmund Pearce Gallery, the Fred Kruger and Light Works exhibitions (at NGVA and NGVI respectively), Littoral by Kristian Laemmle-Ruff at Colour Factory (the next local review after this one) and this exhibition, The Quiet Wild by Jacqui Stockdale at Helen Gory Galerie.

This is a very strong exhibition by Jacqui Stockdale, the metre tall colour prints (printed by the Colour Factory) displaying magnificently in the large gallery at Helen Gory. The photographs remind me of a perverse take on the ethnographic Cartes de visite that were produced during the colonial Victorian era in Australia, images of native peoples taken in studios with painted backdrops together with their cultural artefacts (which, coincidentally, can be seen in great detail and sadness in the Fred Kruger exhibition at NGVA). Drawing on personal places and stories, Mexican carnival and wrestlers masks, Indian masks, Aboriginal names and locations, Velasquez’s Las Meninas, the ghost of Frida Kahlo, rituals, gods (such as Rama) and deities, Australian scenery, performance (the process of painting the models and the outcome of this interaction), Stockdale creates a wonderful melange of archetypal characters that subvert traditional identities and narratives. Her creations “shape-shift” and frustrate attempts at categorization and assimilation.

Stockdale’s performative tactics and multiple modes of address, her polyvocal subject if you like, may be said to be an effect of textuality: “a conscious recognition and pursuit of an altogether different set of values and historical and cultural trajectories.”1 Undeniably this performative act (this “ritual spectacle”2) has links to the Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque and the carnival paradigm, which accords to certain patterns of play. Stockdale inverts cultural stereotypes (which embody elements of fixity, repetition, and ambivalence) located within the realms of the fetish, the scopic, and the Imaginary in order to subvert the collective memory of viewers that have been inscribed with a stereotypical collective vernacular: her work transgresses the fantasy that plays a formative role in colonial exercises of power.3

“Bakhtin likens the carnivalesque in literature to the type of activity that often takes place in the carnivals of popular culture. In the carnival… social hierarchies of everyday life – their solemnities and pieties and etiquettes, as well as all ready-made truths – are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies. Thus, fools become wise, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled (fact and fantasy, heaven and hell).”4

In Stockdale’s world, a “world upside-down” (quite appropriate for Australia), “Each new identity is one of inversion; man becomes woman, child becomes adult, animals transform into humans and vice-versa.” Another example of this inversion can be seen in the “branding” of her photographs. In colonial Cartes de visite the sitter is, more often than not, unknown – unless it is an important person. It is the photographer’s name which is printed on the front and back of the card. In these photographs the photographers name is an illegible signature at bottom left, while the title of the person in the photograph is stamped into the work at bottom right. Here Stockdale again inverts traditional textual readings, the titles of her “photographic portraits that embody a world of mystical characters in masquerade” indecipherable to the uninitiated: a coded language of identity and place - Lagunta Man, El Gato, Les Jumeaux, Dogboy of Gondwanan, Infanta Shamanta and Rama Jaara, The Royal Shepherdess. ‘Lagunta’ is Aboriginal for Tasmanian Tiger and ‘Leeawuleena’ for the land around Cradle Mountain. ‘El Gato’ is the cat, ’Jaara’ being the Aboriginal name for the Long Gully region and ‘Gondwanan’ the name for the southernmost of two supercontinents (the other being Laurasia) before the world split apart into the structure that we known today.

These are incredibly humorous, magical and symbolic photographs. A thought came into my mind when I was in the gallery surrounded by the work: for me they represented a vision of the Major Arcana of the Tarot (for example Jaguar Hombre could be seen as an inverted version of the Hanged Man with his foot in a figure four, the Hanged Man symbolising the need to just be in the world, yielding his mind and body to the Universal flow). The Major Arcana deal with the human condition, each card representing the joys and sorrows every man and woman can experience in a lifetime. In a way Stockdale offers us her own set of subversive Major Arcana, images that transgress the boundaries of the colonial vernacular, offering the viewer a chance to explore the heart of the quiet wild.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

Many thankx to Helen Gory Galerie for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Jacqui Stockdale
Rama-Jaara the Royal Shepherdess
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

Jacqui Stockdale
Les Jumeaux
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

“In this modern world of distractions there is a wild nature that stirs inside of us. A desire for transcendence, to become someone else, dance part naked and chant our lost songs so that they can be heard above the sounds of cities and mobile ring tones.

The Quiet Wild is a series of photographic portraits that embodies a world of mystical characters in masquerade set against hand-painted landscapes. The portraits playfully mimic the genre of exotic postcards and historical paintings where a fanciful subject is formally positioned within a make-believe landscape. The hand-painted settings in my photographs feature Australian scenery from places around Australia that have meaning to me including my mother’s property in Bendigo, the Melbourne Botanical Gardens and Lake Saint Claire in Tasmania.

I paint the models bodies and combine costumes and props including my own collection of rare masks originally used in dances of Mexican Carnival. This new work responds to established portrayals of human identity and masquerade informed by my research into different aspects of folk Carnivals where the masquerades are a fusion of clandestine voodoo, ancestral memory and personal revelation ritual and performance. Performance also plays a part in my photographic process where I interact with the models and allow the process to greatly determine the outcome. Each new identity is one of inversion; man becomes woman, child becomes adult, animals transform into humans and vice-versa.

The difference between painting the human subject and taking their portrait with a camera it is that during a photo shoot there is more of an element of performance. The subject, over a period of many hours often becomes a new character, extending a side of them that is not prevalent in daily life or invents a new identity. This is brought about by what I dress them in and how I direct them, provoking certain ideas, strengths about an animal power or super natural deity. I begin with an idea of character and a selection of costumes and them work intuitively as though in the dark or with eyes part open. I rarely end up with what I first imagined and revel in the surprise or discovery of a combined effort.

The inspiration for this series of work has come from a unique, rich and beautiful form of human expression that is found in the ritual side of folk art in the cultures around the world but mostly in Mexico. The traditional dances of Mexican Carnival provide an opportunity to revive the primeval gods from the depths of our communal memory, since dance constitutes our remotest language and most primitive sacred offering. The masks I have used in this series are from these types of ritual dance. They are recontextualised and worn in the works Lagunta Man and El Gato, Les Jumeaux, Dogboy of Gonwanan, Infanta Shamanta and Carnival of the Night. Other influences come from images of Exotic Postcards, regarding the formal presentation of the models, the constructed settings and the borders and way of labeling the image. Luchadora Botanica was influenced by a Goya Painting, Negro Returno – I wanted to bring one of my recent collages to life, See ‘to return’.

What I have done is imagined my own family as part ritualistic characters, setting in them in a landscape that I have visited.”

Artist statement by Jacqui Stockdale 2012

Jacqui Stockdale
Jaguar Hombre
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

Jacqui Stockdale
Lagunta Man, Leeawuleena
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

“The ghost of Frida Kahlo is a haunting one that permeates many artists consciousness bringing with it not just a tragic story but intoxicating aromas of Mexican exotic, masks, Voo-Doo, bloody Mayan rituals and Catholicism gone troppo.

This is clearly evidenced in Jacqui Stockdale’s latest exhibition at Helen Gory Galerie in works such as Negro-Returno, Long Gully. The white lacy heart-shaped overlay of ghostly trees conceals a part-portrait of Frida here depicted in front of Long Gully Bendigo, the Stockdale property, after the Black Saturday bush fire three years ago. This haunting shadowy backdrop appears again in Rama Jaara, The Royal Shepherdess, ‘Jaara’ being the Aboriginal name for the Long Gully region. It is a personal aside of something that obviously touched this artist deeply, one to which she has bought her troupe of tableau vivant players to. Here, a Mauritian girl called Mimi, standing at attention, arms akimbo, dressed in remnants of regal colonial attire. The pose reminiscent of that of the Infanta Margarita in Velasquez’s Las Meninas. The dog has moved from bottom right to bottom left, here a small spotted Chinese Joss paper effigy made for the journey to the afterlife, rather than a great bounding Spanish mastiff. Our young self-possessed Mimi stares directly out of the picture space not as an Infanta, but as one of nature’s children, a shepherdess, her hairstyle resembling a ram’s head, informing that part of the title, ‘Rama’ a play on words.

Both the artists brothers are also players in this tableau: the younger as Lagunta Man, Leeawuleena and the artist’s twin as El Gato, van Diemonia. ‘Lagunta’ is Aboriginal for Tasmanian Tiger and ‘Leeawuleena’ for the land around Cradle Mountain. ‘El Gato’ is the cat, and both carrying a filmic reference to the recent movie The Hunter, filmed around Cradle Mt in Northern Tasmania. While the compositional phrasing has more than a nostalgic whiff of 19th century still studio photography, seen here such staged manners marry well to popular cinematic culture.

As this exhibition unfolds certain characterising concerns appear and reappear. Decapitation, and cross-cultural iconography make this a lavish art dining at the high table of pictorial fusion cuisine. Mexican masks, Joss paper, skulls, rites of passage tit-bits mix it with popular culture on the shag pile to produce a totally new hybrid. Folk memories merge with diaristic experiences, found objects flirt with finely painted trompe-oeil effects in an almost self-regulating metamorphosis.

In this Stockdale becomes a sort of gatekeeper, a ring master choreographer who will both mystify and amaze you with her family carnivale. Picture by picture, costume by costume, the staged imagined and the real, combine into a most fascinating enticement I find impossible to resist.”

Catalogue essay by Jeff Makin, 2012

Jacqui Stockdale
Dogboy of Gondwanan
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

Jacqui Stockdale
Negro Returno, Long Gully
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

Jacqui Stockdale
Luchadora Botanica
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

1. Fisher, Jean. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco Fusco,” in Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 227 – 228.

2. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World (trans. Helene Iswolsky). Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968, p.5.

3. “According to Bhabha, stereotypes are located within the realms of the fetish, the scopic, and the Imaginary. He suggests that fantasy plays a formative role in colonial exercises of power. Bhabha describes the mechanism of cultural stereotypes as embodying elements of fixity, repetition, fantasy, and ambivalence, and suggests that if certain types of images are constantly presented in a range of different contexts, they will become imprinted onto the collective memory of viewers and inscribed within a collective vernacular.”

Vercoe, Caroline. “Agency and Ambivalence: A Reading of Works by Coco Fusco,” in Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, p.240.

4. Anon. “Carnivalesque,” on Wikipedia. [Online] Cited 13/05/2012. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivalesque

Helen Gory Galerie
25 St Edmonds Rd
Prahran VIC 3181
T: +61 3 9525 2808

Opening hours:
Wed – Sat 11am – 5pm

Helen Gory Galerie website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

May

Exhibition: ‘The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann’ at Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 11th February – 15th July 15 2012

More wonderful photographs from this magnificent photographer as featured in this touring exhibition. It is invaluable to see other images from the artist’s oeuvre (especially early work from the 1950s to observe thematic development), not just the most famous of the surreal montages. Untitled (1966, below) is an absolute ripper that I have never seen before while Untitled (1959, bottom) is as disturbing in a fantastical way as any of Joel-Peter Witkins’ theatrical tableaux vivant. See my other posting on this exhibition from the Harn Museum of Art, Florida.

Many thankx to the Peabody Essex Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934)
Untitled (Pigeon Hill, Bloomington, Indiana)
1958-59
Gelatin silver print
5 3/8 x 9 1/8 in (13.6 x 23.3 cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934)
Room #1
1963
Gelatin silver print
9 1/8 x 13 3/4 in (23.3 x 34.8 cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934)
Untitled
1966
Gelatin silver print
6 1/2 x 6 5/8 in (16.6 x 16.8 cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934)
Untitled
1962
Gelatin silver print
8 1/2 in x 7 3/4 in (21.5 x 19.6 cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934)
Bless Our Home and Eagle
1962
Gelatin silver print
13 3/8 x 10 1/2 in (33.8 x 26.5 cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

“Beautiful and surreal, funny and provocative, the photographs of Jerry Uelsmann are icons of American photo history. The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) presents the first retrospective of Uelsmann’s work in over 30 years. The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann features 90 works spanning the artist’s celebrated and wide-ranging career, with well-known works shown alongside never-before-seen recent images.

As a pioneer of contemporary photography and master of experimental darkroom technique, Uelsmann has continuously pushed the creative and technical boundaries of photography, revealing new visual possibilities and critical considerations for the medium. In the late 1950s, Uelsmann began experimenting with multiple enlargers and advanced masking, diffusing, burning and dodging techniques, to create imaginary images in the darkroom decades before the advent of Photoshop. Uelsmann’s ingenious work references Surrealists like Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, as well as Modern photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. He has spent his career advocating for the acceptance of experimental photography as an art form.

“For more than half a century, Uelsmann has challenged conventional ideas about what photography can and should do,” said Phillip Prodger, exhibition curator and PEM’s curator of photography. “Uelsmann’s pictures provide a valuable touchstone for understanding new trends in photographic art. His ideas and example have become ever more relevant as photography embraces Photoshop and other computer technologies for altering and manipulating photographs.”

The Mind’s Eye presents works drawn from the artist’s personal archive of vintage materials and, in addition to photographic prints, includes a selection of three-dimensional photographic sculptures, films, artist’s books, albums and work prints to give viewers first-hand insight into Uelsmann’s creative process and expressive range. Through experimental techniques, Uelsmann has explored universal themes of relationships, family, home and politics by creating unexpected and surprising juxtapositions.

“My visual quest is driven by a desire to create a universe capable of supporting feelings and ideas,” said Jerry Uelsmann. “I am drawn to art that challenges one’s sense of reality.”

Born in Detroit in 1934, Uelsmann received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and Master of Science and Master of Fine Arts degrees from Indiana University in 1960. He is recently retired from the faculty of the University of Florida, which he joined in 1960. Uelsmann received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1967 he had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.”

Press release from the PEM website

Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934)
Untitled
1977
Gelatin silver print
13 1/8 x 10 5/8 in (33.5 x 27.1 cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934)
Untitled
1996
Gelatin silver print
19 5/8 x 14 3/4 in (49.8 x 37.4 cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934)
Untitled
1976
Gelatin silver print
19 1/2 x 14 1/2 in (49.5 x 36.9 cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934)
Bloomington, Indiana
1958
Gelatin silver print
7 7/8 x 7 1/4 in (19.9 x 18.3 cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
13 1/2 x 5 5/8 in (34.2 x 14.3 cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Peabody Essex Museum
East India Square
161 Essex Street
Salem, MA 01970-3783 USA
T: 978-745-9500, 866-745-1876

Opening hours:
Open Tuesday – Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm.
Closed Mondays

Peabody Essex Museum website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Apr

Exhibition: ‘Songs of the Future: Canadian Industrial Photographs, 1858 – Today’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: photographic series, documentary photography, sculpture, gallery website, exhibition, photography, reality, existence, time, space, colour photography, black and white photography, landscape, Edward Burtynsky, digital photography, memory, psychological and light
Tags: architecture, Edward Burtynsky, Canadian photographer, gelatin silver print, Canadian artist, Canada, industrial photography, arts, Ottawa, Ontario, Art Gallery of Ontario, AGO, Musée des beaux-arts de l’Ontario, Toronto, John Vanderpant No.2 Towers in White, No.2 Towers in White, John Vanderpant, Ralph Greenhill Prince of Wales Bridge, Prince of Wales Bridge, Ralph Greenhill, Peter MacCallum Finishing Mill Department, Finishing Mill Department, Peter MacCallum, Peter MacCallum Concrete Industries, Concrete Industries, Edward Burtynsky C.N. Track, Edward Burtynsky Thompson River #002, British Columbia, Alexander Henderson Miramichi Bridges, Alexander Henderson, Miramichi Bridges Southwest Branch, George Hunter Dofasco and Stelco steel mills, George Hunter, Dofasco and Stelco steel mills, Hamilton, E. Haanel Cassidy Man on Tower, E. Haanel Cassidy, Man on Tower, Isabelle Hayeur Jade, Isabelle Hayeur Model Homes, Model Homes, Gordon Lightfoot, Songs of the Future, Songs of the Future: Canadian Industrial Photographs, Canadian Industrial Photographs, Canadian Industrial Photographs 1858 - Today, Songs of the Future Canadian Industrial Photographs 1858 - Today, canadian railroad trilogy

Exhibition dates: 20th August 2011 – 29th April 2012

Another eclectic photography exhibition. I do love them for their interesting subject matter. Much as Australian photography may seem slightly obscure to the rest of the world so Canadian photography is little known in Australia. One of the important briefs of this blog is to promote all photography in its many forms, including Australian, to the four corners of the globe.

Many thankx to the Art Gallery of Ontario for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Oh the song of the future has been sung / All the battles have been won
On the mountain tops we stand / All the world at our command
We have opened up her soil / With our teardrops and our toil”

.
Gordon Lightfoot, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”

Isabelle Hayeur
Jade
2004
from the series Model Homes, 2004 – 2007
Chromogenic print
107 x 160 cm
Gift of Paul Bain, 2008
Image courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario / AGO Image Resources
© 2011 Art Gallery of Ontario

E. Haanel Cassidy
Man on Tower
1940
from the series Canadian Industry – Grain Elevator
Gelatin silver print
23.7 x 35.3 cm
Gift of Sylvia Platt, 2002
Image courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario / AGO Image Resources
© 2011 Art Gallery of Ontario

George Hunter
Dofasco and Stelco steel mills, Hamilton, Ontario
1954
Dye transfer print
31.2 x 42.1 cm
Gift of George Hunter, R.C.A, 2010
Image courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario / AGO Image Resources
© 2011 Art Gallery of Ontario

“The practice of photography in Canada closely parallels the development of its industries. As railroad tracks were laid and bridges were built to allow access to remote forests and mineral-rich territories, photographers followed, as they did when mining and lumber interests developed. These industrial activities have undeniably shaped the Canadian landscape – for better and for worse. And photographs of these activities – whether made on commission by those eager to document their contribution to national progress, or for the photographer’s own interest – continue to feed our imaginations, shape our opinions and make us aware of what is at stake.

Songs of Future: Canadian Industrial Photographs, 1858 to Today includes more than 100 photographs – by such figures as William Notman, Alexander Henderson, Richard Maynard, J.C.M. Hayward, John Vanderpant, E. Haanel Cassidy, George Hunter, Bill Vazan, Ralph Greenhill, Geoffrey James, Edward Burtynsky, Peter MacCallum, Steven Evans, Jesse Boles, and Isabelle Hayeur – most drawn from the AGO’s permanent collection, and many of which have never been shown. Featuring sites from the west coast to the Maritimes, the exhibition showcases this other landscape tradition in Canadian art and the Canadian photographers who have described, evoked, celebrated, and cast a critical eye on our industrial landscapes for more than 150 years.

Depicting railway and bridge building, quarries and mines, and the lumber, pulp and paper, and concrete industries in Canada, Songs of the Future traces the shifting perspectives on industry and the Canadian landscape from the Industrial Revolution to today. The exhibition highlights the ways in which the photographers’ perspectives on industry have shifted along with those of society at large, as celebratory images of human domination over nature give way to more critical views of industrial impact.

The exhibition is curated by Sophie Hackett, the AGO’s assistant curator of photography, who integrates works from various periods into thematic concentrations, including images featuring: the construction of the Victoria Bridge over the St. Lawrence River in the late 1850s; the building of the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company, a pulp-and-paper mill located in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, in 1912; and the development of the railroad in Canada.

“The exhibition explores the history of Canadian photography through the topic of industrial imagery,” says Hackett. “Featuring sites from the Maritimes to the west coast, and rooted in the fundamentally Canadian genre of landscape, the photographs bear witness to the various aesthetic techniques and styles emphasized by Canadian photographers over the past 150 years.”"

Press release from the AGO website

Alexander Henderson
Miramichi Bridges: Southwest Branch, View of Pier G, completed September 15, 1873
1873
Albumen print
25.3 x 30.5 cm
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Berger, 2008
Image courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario / AGO Image Resources
© 2011 Art Gallery of Ontario

Edward Burtynsky
C.N. Track, Thompson River #002, British Columbia
1985
from the series Railcuts
Chromogenic print
121.9 x 147.3 cm
Gift of Harry and Ann Malcolmson, 2008
Image courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario / AGO Image Resources
© 2011 Art Gallery of Ontario

Peter MacCallum
Finishing Mill Department, St. Marys Cement, Bowmanville, Ontario
1999
from the series Concrete Industries, 1998 – 2004
Gelatin silver print
50.8 x 40.6 cm
Purchase, funds donated by James Lahey and Pym Buitenhuis, 2008
Image courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario / AGO Image Resources
© 2011 Art Gallery of Ontario

Ralph Greenhill
Prince of Wales Bridge, Ottawa, Ontario
1977
Gelatin silver print
22.6 x 17.4 cm
Gift of Av Isaacs, 2008
Image courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario / AGO Image Resources
© 2011 Art Gallery of Ontario

John Vanderpant
No.2, Towers in White
around 1934
Gelatin silver print
34.4 x 27 cm
Purchase, donated funds in memory of Eric Steiner, 2002
Image courtesy the Art Gallery of Ontario / AGO Image Resources
© 2011 Art Gallery of Ontario

Art Gallery of Ontario
Musée des beaux-arts de l’Ontario
317 Dundas Street West
Toronto Ontario Canada M5T 1G4

Opening hours:
Tue – Sunday 10.30am – 5.30pm
Closed Mondays

Art Gallery of Ontario website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Apr

Exhibition: ‘Polixeni Papapetrou: The Dreamkeepers’ at Stills Gallery, Sydney

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 28th March – 5th May 2012

I absolutely love these. The colours, the spaces, the ambiguous vistas, the fantastical archetypes, the fables. What springs to mind, with the use of masks to disguise youth positioned within the decorous landscape, is the notion of “passing”. Passing on (as in dying), passing through (as in travelling), in passing (as in an aside) and just “passing” (passing yourself off as someone or something else) to hide your true character or feelings. Gay men did this in the 1950s and 60s all the better to fit into society, for if it was found that you were homosexual you could loose your job, your apartment and even your life. Of course, there is also the passing of time, the longing for misspent youth in these masked ephebes and adolescent women. Age shall not weary them…

Wandering, dreaming, remembering, keeping, collecting, counting. These neophytes on the path of life, both old/wise, young/hidden pass through (into?) our dreams. Papapetrou creates visions that elude the senses, visions that slip between dreaming and waking, between conscious and subconscious realms. As John Berger and Jean Mohr have observed,

“Cameras are boxes for transporting appearances. Are the appearances which a camera transports a construction, a man-made cultural artefact, or are they, like a footprint in the sand, a trace naturally left by something that has passed? The photographer choses the events he photographs. This choice can be thought of as a cultural construction. The space for this construction is, as it were, cleared by his rejection of what he did not choose to photograph.”1

As an artist Papapetrou has the intelligence to leave this nature/nurture question open in her photographs. Her skill as an artist is in choosing the right things to photograph. This enables her creatures to pass through liminal spaces, the space of our consciousness. Through this process a trace will always be left with us, for this is a strong body of work, well realised, in passing.

.
Many thankx to Stills Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Wanderer No. 3
2012
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Wave Counter
2011
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Lantern Keeper
2012
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

“These transitional places in one’s life are often the most creative, and as we grapple for answers and clarity what is often realized is ambiguity and confusion that reigns supreme. Like fairy stories, Papapetrou uses absurdity to make symbolic sense of world she struggles to understand.”

.
Susan Bright. Between Worlds catalogue 2009

In Polixeni Papapetrou’s work there is identification with the world of children that is rare and remarkable. She sees children themselves as ‘between worlds’, between infancy and adulthood. Yet she does more than identify, creating fantastical worlds that only adults can truly understand and relate to.

A man in blue striped pyjamas stands on a rock by the sea, leaning into the wind. His body seems young yet he supports himself with a walking frame. His face is old, oversized, a little grotesque. He is The Wavecounter. Like the other characters in Polixeni Papapetrou’s series The Dreamkeepers, he is lithe in body yet gnarly of physiognomy, both young and old. Gazing out in contemplation these dream keepers look with anticipation to the future, or is it with nostalgia to the past? The timeless backdrops of shoreline or hilltop reflect this ambiguity, echoing through landscape the collapsing of thresholds and blurring of boundaries.

Papapetrou’s art practice has involved collaboration with her children and their friends for over 10 years. As they have grown and transformed so too have the roles they perform and spaces they inhabit. It is the awkward evolution of adolescence that informs the in-between space of The Dreamkeepers. To parallel the cripplingly self-conscious yet powerfully self-realising period of our lives, Papapetrou engages part reality, part fantasy from which a space of unreality emerges, the space of archetype. Here the anonymity afforded by masks separates her adolescent actors from who they really are, and allows them to stand in for us all. In this way, Papapetrou asks us to consider how masks, whether symbolic or literal, not only conceal identity, but also expand and transform it.

The aged masks do so in The Dreamkeepers by confounding adolescence, as the characters exude a quiet lack of self-consciousness, despite their disturbing appearance. They arouse a gentle pathos, reminding us of our own shapeshifting, of time playing out on our bodies and minds. The abstract meeting of these two ages may indicate the latent wisdom and self-acceptance that only realises with maturity, or the cyclical nature of our life spans that inevitably brings us back to the vulnerability of youth. In either case the work is a powerful testament to the surrendering of childhood.

Also on exhibition is a small selection of works from Papapetrou’s current work in progress. Using ghillie suits, she transforms her actors into animate objects – rocks with life and seaweed with attitude.”

Press release from the Stills Gallery website

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Holiday Makers
2011
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Joy Pedlars
2011
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Shell Collectors
2012
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Lighthouse Keepers
2011
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

1. Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, pp.92-93.

Stills Gallery
36 Gosbell Street
Paddington NSW 2021
Australia
T: 61 2 9331 7775

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 11.00 am – 6.00 pm

Stills Gallery website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Mar

Review: The work of Robyn Hosking, ‘AT_SALON’ at Anita Traverso Gallery, Richmond

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 6th March – 24th March 2012

Although not the first to promote the concept, Anita Traverso Gallery must be congratulated for exhibiting nine unrepresented emerging and mid-career artists in the AT_SALON exhibition program. This inaugural exhibition features hand-picked artists practicing over a variety of media including ceramics, textiles, drawing, painting and photography allowing them to exhibit in a professional gallery environment which bridges the gap between artist-run spaces and full gallery representation.

Out of the nine artists it was the hilarious work of Robyn Hosking that was the standout for me. While guffaw inducing one couldn’t help but be entranced by these waggish, chimerical creations and wonder at their technical brilliance. Every detail, every nuance is meticulously observed and the sculptures are beautifully made (mostly using glazed ceramics). Every observation on contemporary politics, war and beauty regimes is concisely conceptualised and executed with panache and humour. For example, in the work Dodgem Discourse (2011) Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens, is the only diver figure not to be in his dodgem car while everyone else is bashing into each other, having got out to push his car because the solar power has failed. What you cannot see in the photograph is that the lights atop the dodgem poles flash on and off on every other car except his! While Julia Gillard’s car is emblazoned with the number 1 on its side, another gem is that the number plates say “Question Time” referring to question time in Parliament, but also a double entendre as the viewer questions the supposed wisdom of our elected officials.

HMAS Ineptitude (2011) assiduously comments on the white elephant that is the North South pipeline while the slowly revolving HMAS Obfuscation (2011) – how I love that word: the hiding of intended meaning in communication, making communication confusing, wilfully ambiguous – spins the SPIN, spelt out on the wing-like form at the top of the sculpture, on the machinations of our politicians who are mounted on rearing ceramic kangaroos with the large, gold lettered word PARLIAMENT on the base. Profound, amusing and beautifully made.

My favourite has to be The Wing Walker (2011) as an irate Julia Gillard tries to get rid of Kevin Rudd once and for all, even poking him with a stick to push him off the edge of the biplane. Balanced on a slowly revolving turntable with the world at its centre, this political merry-go round is panacea for the soul for people sick of politicians. This is brilliant political satire. The planes are all ends up and even when Julia thinks she has got rid of Kevin there he is, hanging on for dear life from the undercarriage of one of the planes. Priceless…

Reminding me of the fantasy creatures of Tom Moore, these whimsical manifestations deal with serious, life changing and challenging issues with purpose, feeling and a wicked sense of humour. I really enjoyed this art (and joy is the correct word) because it takes real world issues, melds fantasy and pointed observation and reflects it back, as the artist observes, in a funfair’s distorted mirror. Magic!

Many thankx to Anita for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Robyn Hosking
Dodgem Discourse
2011
Mixed media

Robyn Hosking
Dodgem Discourse (detail)
2011
Mixed media

Robyn Hosking
The Wing Walker
2011
Mixed media

Robyn Hosking
The Wing Walker (detail)
2011
Mixed media

Robyn Hosking Artist Statement

My work launches a humorous, freewheeling attack on our desensitisation to the white noise and emptiness surrounding us. Looking like a hybrid between art, machine and toy, my sculptures maintain a circus-like sense of amusement and curiosity for the viewer, all the while sending up societal norms and politics.

I like to celebrate the lavishly eccentric design of past eras and the sense of possibility it embodied. As hackneyed as it sounds, a Brave New World is upon us, stranger perhaps than our imaginations can conceive of. While my work casts a disparaging eye at the use of technology for inane and selfish reasons – from Botox to weaponry – it retains a playful, humorous edge. I am not interested in producing depressingly macabre images. Every work becomes a caricature or parody, as though the world is being viewed in a funfair’s distorted mirror.

Robyn Hosking
HMAS Ineptitude
2011
Mixed media

Robyn Hosking
HMAS Ineptitude (detail)
2011
Mixed media

Robyn Hosking
HMAS Obfuscation
2011
Mixed media

Robyn Hosking
HMAS Obfuscation (detail)
2011
Mixed media

Anita Traverso Gallery
7, Albert Street
Richmond, Vic 3121

Opening hours:
Wed – Sat 11 – 5

Anita Traverso Gallery website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Mar

Opening: ‘Traverse’ by Kim Percy at Stockroom, Kyneton

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: Art Blart, Australian artist, colour photography, digital photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, installation art, intimacy, landscape, light, Marcus Bunyan, memory, photographic series, photography, psychological, quotation, reality, sculpture, space and time
Tags: (in)between space, asylum seekers, Australian detention centres, Australian immigration, Australian photographer, Australian photography, Australian refugees, axis of visibility, boat people, boat people arriving in Australia, Christmas Island, current-events, detention centers, diaspora, displacement, forgotten space, horizon line, human-rights, interstitial space, inverted Panopticon, Kim Percy Traverse, Kyneton, liminal space, Marc Augé, Marcus Bunyan Out of Sight Out of Mind, no beginning and no end, non-place, Other, Out of Sight Out of Mind, panopticon, parentheses, politics, refugees, SIEV-221, Stockroom, Tampa, travel, Traverse, visual parentheses

Exhibition dates: 10th March – 8th April 2012

Many thanx to Jason, Magali and Kent for inviting me to the gallery, and Kim for asking me to open the exhibition – it was fun!

I have known Kim since the early 1990s when we both did our Bachelor of Arts in photography at RMIT University so it was wonderful to have opened her show yesterday. Reprinted below is the speech I gave at the opening with its musings on the (in)visibility of asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australia. I hope you enjoy reading the text. Marcus.

Opening speech by Dr Marcus Bunyan, 10th March 2012

Out of Sight, Out of Mind _______________

“What I am about to say, my musings if you like, are inspired by Kim’s wonderful installation. The work before you is the basis of my inquiry. The issues involved are difficult and not to be dealt with lightly but I hope you will follow my drift, my traverse if you like.

I would like to take you on a journey – physical, metaphorical and maybe even philosophical. I want to ask questions of the world, questions about the journey we all take as human beings. These questions are prompted by my personal response to two elements of Kim’s work – water and the journey, specifically the image of asylum seekers arriving here in Australia. Imagine being an asylum seeker making that journey.

Imagine living in an (in)between space, living in a refugee camp over there. Marc Augé coined the phrase “non-place” to refer to places of transience that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places.”1 These camps are such places. Put yourself in that predicament, seeking a better life, seeking to escape persecution, war (of which we as a nation are often part), prejudice and death, deliberately placing yourself and your family in a fragile boat, like a seed pod floating upon the waters, taking the dangerous journey to reach Australia. Imagine the emotional and intellectual turmoil that must surround such a decision, the decision to place your life in the hands of the ocean. Important decisions affecting the entire course of one’s life are rarely made without some form of mental distress.

Nurtured in water, some baptised in it, water is the life-blood of the world and the asylum seeker must trust to its benevolence. Marc Augé “argues that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses.”2 This is the journey that the asylum seeker takes over water, a journey through an interstitial space that has no beginning and no end caught between a set of parentheses [insert life here / or not].

Now let us move our line of sight. What about a visual parentheses?

.
Asylum seekers are almost invisible from Australia living over there. They are over the horizon, out of sight and out of mind. When they journey across the sea – an open ended journey passing through a liminal space, a forgotten space – they suddenly appear as if by magic washed up on the shore, unseen despite surveillance planes, ships and other forms of tracking and reconnaissance. Think, for example, of the sudden and surprising arrival of the boat SIEV-221 when it was washed onto the rocks of Christmas Island in December 2010. The invisible made visible caught in a non-place.

This (in)visibility can be evidenced in other ways. The specks of humanity waving from the deck of the Tampa, the asylum seekers being escorted from arriving boats, seen for a few brief seconds on the evening news and then disappearing from view, almost like being sucked into the depths of the sea. Here and not here; here and there. Halfway between nothingness and being: they walk between one state and another, forward and backward, backward and forward.

.
Displacement
Diaspora
Disruption

.
The spectacle of the asylum seekers is despectacularised by and for the viewer. We remove ourselves from the emotion of these people, the presence of these images. They become ordinary as if seen from far away – glimpsed every so often as though viewing the world of another. They become Other.

The movement of the ship, the movement of the sky, the movement of vision is a constant decentering through a push / pull with something else – some other order of the world. Their journey into the unknown is a journey to submit to the ordering of another: the socially constructed system of classification: “refugee,” “asylum seeker.” The axis of visibility3 that operates in relation to subject, object, and space is not interrogated as to the representations that are constructed. This is what I am interested in here. These vital, alive human beings come from one taxonomic system (of ordered death, persecution, injustice), become visible from a brief instance, and are then fed into another taxonomic system of order – that of the detention center.

Taking the metaphor of the horizon line further, I would argue that detention centers are like an inverted Panopticon. The Panopticon “is a type of institutional building, a prison, designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.”4 The guard sits in a central tower and can observe and inspect all prisoners on the outer 360 degree circle, while the prisoners cannot see the guard and can only presume he is there (an omnipresent God) and hence they behave.

Let us invert this concept.

Now the asylum seekers sit in the tower looking outwards, seeing the promised land but unable to touch it and the guards (prison officers, government, the Australian people) are all around but most are blind. They look inwards but cannot see / they look outwards and most go about their daily business. The perimeter fence of the detention center becomes the horizon line of the sea. As in Kim’s red lined horizons, over the horizon is out of sight, out of mind _________________

.
What Kim’s eloquent, minimal, brooding installation does is hold our attention and ask certain questions of us as human beings. If photography is a mode of visually addressing a certain order in the world – be it horror, war, peace, human tragedy, public, private – and then destabilizing it, then Kim destabilizes the binary sea / sky through fragmentation and isolation. She redlines our experience and asks us to inhabit the non-space, the non-place of the gallery, allowing us to hover between boat and image, between sea and sky, between seeing and feeling. Through her work she asks us to become more aware. She asks us to see things more clearly. Above all she asks us to have faith in the compassion of human beings.

The asylum seekers have faith: faith to get into a fragile boat to venture upon the sea in search of a better life. If we had more faith in ourselves then we would have less need to rely on the images of the past, a white colonial past.

I will finish with a quote from Jeff Brown.

“Sometimes we have to surrender to the not knowing. At other times, it is helpful to adventure outward and explore new possibilities. Like swashbucklers of the spirit, we bravely seek out any experience that might inform our path. When we are afraid of something, we live it fully and see what floats to the surface in the doing. We participate in our own revealing. We have faith in the shaping of what we cannot see.”5

.
The seekers surrender to the not knowing and have faith in the shaping of what they cannot see. These risk takers are the strong ones that are going to make a difference in a new society by the very fact of their strength and determination to survive and live in a free society, for the very fact of the risks undertaken. This exhibition informs their path as it informs our path. Be aware of the doing, be bold and forthright in the being. Enjoy.

Thank you

.
Dr Marcus Bunyan

Kim Percy
Pale Sea
2012
Digital photograph

Kim Percy
Where
2012
Digital photograph

Kim Percy
Rough Water
2012
Digital photograph

Kim Percy
Traverse
2012
Digital photograph

Kim Percy
Red Horizon No.1
2012
Digital photograph

Kim Percy
Red Horizon No.2
2012
Digital photograph

Footnotes

1. Augé, Marc (trans. John Howe). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995.
2. Ibid.,
3. Hooper-Grenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2000, p.7.
4. Anon. “Panopticon,” on Wikipedia. [Online] Cited 09/03/2012.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
5. Brown, Jeff. Soulshaping. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2009, np quoted on Stroud, Jeff. The reluctant blogger website. [Online] Cited 09/03/2012.
jeffstroud.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/884/

Stockroom
98 Piper street, Kyneton
T: 03 5422 3215

Opening hours:
Monday, Thursday, Friday 10.30am – 5pm
Saturday – Sunday 10am – 6pm

Stockroom website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Mar

Notes from the lecture ‘Anti-Entropy: A natural History of the Studio’ by William Kentridge at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: designer, digital photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, light, Melbourne, memory, painting, photography, portrait, printmaking, psychological, quotation, reality, sculpture, space, time, video and works on paper
Tags: A natural History of the Studio, A view of Philip James de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon, ACMI, Anamorphic Mirror, animation, Anti-Entropy: A natural History of the Studio, appearances, architecture, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, carrousel, cinema, Claude Glass, Congealed time, disappearances, Edward Francis Burney, Edward Francis Burney A view of Philip James de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon, Eidophusikon, elision of time, etching, First History of the Cinema, George Méliès The Living Playing Cards, Georges Méliès, history, illustration, Johannesburg, landscape with no edge, looking, memory, multimedia, Noh theatre, On Looking, On memory, On play, On self-doubt as an artist, opera, Pen and grey ink and grey wash, performance, performance art, Performances of Transformation, Philip James de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon, play, Pre-cinematic devices, quick change artist, reconfigured seeing, repetition, reversal of time, Second History of the Cinema, self doubt, shadow dancing, Six different degrees of tension, South Africa, South African, South African artist, stage magician, stage sets, stereoscope, Stopping time, tearing of time, Technologies of Looking, the body and the construction of the image, The Etching Press, the process of seeing in the world, The space of the studio, the studio, Third History of Cinema, walking, walking around the studio, watercolour, William George Horner, William Kentridge, William Kentridge Drawing for the film Stereoscope, William Kentridge: Anti-Entropy, Zoetrope

Date: 8th March 2012

A munificence of Minor White and the revelation of the object through contemplation could be found in the lecture by William Kentridge. As an artist you must keep repeating and constructively playing and something else, some new idea, some new way of looking at the world may emerge. As a glimpse into the working methodology of one of the worlds great artists the lecture was fascinating stuff!

Images in this posting are used under fair use for commentary and illustration of the lecture notes. No copyright breach is intended. © All rights remain with the copyright holder. My additions to the text can be found in [ ] brackets.

On self-doubt as an artist
“At four in the morning there are no lack of branches for the crow of doubt to land upon.”

.
On Memory
“Memory – both memory and the forgetting of memory. For example, the building of monuments [monuments to the Holocaust, to wars] takes the responsibility of remembering away.”

.
On Play
“We absolutely want to make sense of the world in that way. That’s one of the principles of play – that however much you distort and break things apart, in the end we will try to reconstruct them in some way to make sense of the world. I think that every child does it. It’s fundamental.”
.
On Looking
“It’s the capacity for recognition that makes a difference between order and disorder in looking at visual images. And it’s the vocabulary of recognizable images that we have inside us, which is completely vital to what it is to see. I don’t really buy the idea that order and disorder are the same.”

.
William Kentridge

Edward Francis Burney
A view of Philip James de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon
c.1782
At left a man bowing to a woman, to right figures seated on a bench in the foreground, watching a scene titled ‘Satan Arraying his Troops on the Banks of a Fiery Lake, with the Raising of the Palace of Pandemonium’ during a performance of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” on a stage labelled EIDOPHUSIKON in a cartouche above
Pen and grey ink and grey wash, with watercolour
© The Trustees of the British Museum

First History of the Cinema

Performances of Transformation

Cinema
Shadow dancing
Eidophusikon (The Eidophusikon was a piece of art, no longer extant, created by 18th century English painter Philip James de Loutherbourg. It opened in Leicester Square in February 1781.Described by the media of his day as “Moving Pictures, representing Phenomena of Nature,” the Eidophusikon can be considered an early form of movie making. The effect was achieved by mirrors and pulleys.
Quick change artist
Stage magicians

.
All work against the time of the audience e.g. the quick change artist may take 3 seconds, the sunset in a Georges Méliès film may take 2 minutes instead of 2 hours. The technology /scrims / screens happen at different speeds but the different times become one in the finished film. There is an elision of time: appearances / disappearances. Stopping time [changing a scene, changing clothing etc...], starting time again.

George Méliès starring in The Living Playing Cards (1904)

Second History of the Cinema

The sedimented gaze of the early camera. The slow chemicals meant that the object had to wait under the camera’s gaze for minutes. People were held in place by stiff neck braces to capture the trace of their likeness. Congealed time.

On the other hand, in cinema, a tear forward becomes a repair in reverse.

By rolling the film in reverse there is a REVERSAL of time, a REMAKING of the world – the power to be more than you are – by reversing to perfection. You throw a book or smash a plate: in reverse they become perfect again, a utopian world.

YOU MUST GIVE YOURSELF OVER TO PLAY!

Giving yourself over to what the medium suggests, you follow the metaphor back to the surface. Following the activity [of play] back to its root. Projecting forwards, projecting backwards. There is endless rehearsal, constant repetition, then discovering the nature of the final shot or drawing to be made. New ideas get thrown around: leaning into the experience, the experiment, the repetition, the rehearsal.

.
Four elements

something to be seen
the utopian perfection: perfectibility
the grammar of learning that action
Greater ideas, further ideas and thoughts; potentiality and its LOSS
Further meanings arise

.
How is this achieved?
Rehearsal, repetition

New thoughts will arise being led by the body in the studio NOT in the mind. Not conceptual but the feeling of the body walking in the studio.

The physical action as the starting point not the concept.

.
Six different degrees of tension

Least tension in the body possible: slumped
Relaxed
Neutral
Purpose: an impulse to make things happen – desire
Insistence: listen to me, this is very important
Manic: Noh theatre with its rictus of the body

.
What the body suggests is the construction of an image.

There are different degrees of tension in these performances. What do they suggest? This reverse osmosis from one state to another?

Third History of Cinema

Technologies of Looking

Pre-cinematic devices – a process of seeing in the world, of looking. Produces a reconfigured seeing, the invisible made [moving] visible.

.
Stereoscope

3D world made into a 2D image put back into 3D by our brains. The nature of binocularity, of depth perception. We see an illusion of depth, a construction by the eyes. Our brain is a muscle combining the two images. Depth of Field (DOF): focusing at different distances, we are inside the field of the image. Peripheral vision is blanked off; we look through a magnifying glass. A machine for demonstrating seeing.

William Kentridge
Drawing for the film Stereoscope
1998 – 99
Charcoal, pastel, and colored pencil on paper
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
© 2008 William Kentridge

Zoetrope by William George Horner, 1834

Zoetrope

An illusion of movement not depth. Double revelation:

A/ the brain constructed illusion of movement
B/ Caught in time [as the action goes around and around] and wanting to get out of it!

THIS IS CRITICAL – THE ACTION OF REPETITION IS IMPORTANT!

In the reordering, in the crack, something else may emerge, some new idea may eventuate. The tearing of time.

[Marcus: the cleft in time]

.
The Etching Press

There are erotics built into the language of the etching, but there is also a logic built into the machine used for etching. The Proof print, arriving at the first state. Going on the journey from artist as maker to artist as viewer through the mechanism of the etching press.

.
Claude Glass

“A Claude glass (or black mirror) is a small mirror, slightly convex in shape, with its surface tinted a dark colour. Bound up like a pocket-book or in a carrying case, black mirrors were used by artists, travellers and connoisseurs of landscape and landscape painting. Black Mirrors have the effect of abstracting the subject reflected in it from its surroundings, reducing and simplifying the colour and tonal range of scenes and scenery to give them a painterly quality).” From Wikipedia.

“The Claude glass was standard equipment for Picturesque tourists, producing instant tonal images that supposedly resembled works by Claude. “The person using it ought always to turn his back to the object that he views,” Thomas West explained in his Guide to the Lakes. “It should be suspended by the upper part of the case… holding it a little to the right or the left (as the position of the parts to be viewed require) and the face screened from the sun.”" From the V & A website

Claude Glass, manufactured in England, 18th century. V & A.

Anamorphic Mirror

A counter intuitive way of drawing; turning 2D into 3D. The landscape has no edge, like a carrousel.

A LINK TO THE ENDLESS CIRCLING AND WALKING AROUND THE STUDIO!

Anamorphic drawing and cone shaped mirror

William Kentridge studio
Photo by John Hodgkiss
Art Tatler

The Studio

In the studio you gather the pieces together like a kind of Zoetrope. You may arrive at a new idea, a new starting point. Repetition, going around and around your head (at four in the morning!). There must be a truce between the artist as maker and the artist as viewer. As in earlier times, you walk the cloisters, you promenade.

You find the walk that is the prehistory of the drawing, that is the prehistory to the work.

A multiple, fragmented, layered performance of walking. You are trying to find the grammar of the studio – the necessary stupidity. Making a space for uncertainty. The conscious suppression of rationality. At some point, emerging, escpaping the Zoetrope, from the physical making, something will be revealed. The spaces open up by the stupidities. Something new emerges.

THIS IS THE SPACE OF THE STUDIO.

Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)
Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia

William Kentridge: Five Themes

Thursday 8 March – Sunday 27 May 2012
Exhibition open daily 10am – 6pm

ACMI website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Art Blart RSS feed

RSS - Posts

Art Blart Email Subscription

Marcus Bunyan website – please click on images to view new series ‘Vertical’ 2011

NEW BODY OF WORK: 'Vertical' 2011

Lastest tweets

'Entre Nous' at AIC artblart.com #symbolism #fantasy #the_visible #reality #appearance #French #Lucy_Schwob #France #French_artist 2 days ago
'Entre Nous' at Art Institute of Chicago artblart.com #poetry #assemblage #collage #desire #Suzanne_Malherbe #theatre_of_objects 2 days ago
'Entre Nous' at Art Institute of Chicago artblart.com #eroticism #women #feminine #politics #Jersey #the_resistance #World_War_Two 2 days ago
'Entre Nous' at Art Institute of Chicago artblart.com #women #feminism #autoportrait #subversion #metamorphosis #poetics #androgyny 2 days ago
'Entre Nous: The Art of Claude Cahun' at Art Institute of Chicago artblart.com #sexuality #gay #lesbian #love #partnership #portrait 2 days ago
'Entre Nous: The Art of Claude Cahun' at Art Institute of Chicago artblart.com #Entre_Nous #Claude_Cahun #Cahun #identity #gender 2 days ago

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes the Art Blart blog which reviews exhibitions in Melbourne, Australia and posts exhibitions from around the world. He has a Dr of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne and is currently studying a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne.

AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS BY NAME AND POSTING AT THIS LINK

INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS BY NAME AND POSTING AT THIS LINK

Art Blart

Archive for the 'digital photography' Category

Review: ‘Littoral’ by Kristian Laemmle-Ruff at Colour Factory Gallery, Fitzroy

Exhibition dates: 4th May – 26th May 2012

Exhibition: ‘Behind the Curtain – The Aesthetics of the Photobooth’ at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Exhibition dates: February – 20th May 2012

Exhibition: ‘Pieter Hugo: This must be the place’ at The Hague Museum of Photography, The Netherlands

Exhibition dates: 3rd March – 20th May 2012

Review: ‘Jacqui Stockdale: The Quiet Wild’ at Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 18th April – 19th May 2012

Exhibition: ‘The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann’ at Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA

Exhibition dates: 11th February – 15th July 15 2012

Exhibition: ‘Songs of the Future: Canadian Industrial Photographs, 1858 – Today’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada

Exhibition dates: 20th August 2011 – 29th April 2012

Exhibition: ‘Polixeni Papapetrou: The Dreamkeepers’ at Stills Gallery, Sydney

Exhibition dates: 28th March – 5th May 2012

Review: The work of Robyn Hosking, ‘AT_SALON’ at Anita Traverso Gallery, Richmond

Exhibition dates: 6th March – 24th March 2012

Opening: ‘Traverse’ by Kim Percy at Stockroom, Kyneton

Exhibition dates: 10th March – 8th April 2012

Out of Sight, Out of Mind _______________

Notes from the lecture ‘Anti-Entropy: A natural History of the Studio’ by William Kentridge at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne

Date: 8th March 2012

Images in this posting are used under fair use for commentary and illustration of the lecture notes. No copyright breach is intended. © All rights remain with the copyright holder. My additions to the text can be found in [ ] brackets.

First History of the Cinema

Second History of the Cinema

Third History of Cinema

The Studio

Art Blart RSS feed

Art Blart Email Subscription

Marcus Bunyan website – please click on images to view new series ‘Vertical’ 2011

Recent Posts

Lastest tweets

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Top Posts

Archives

Categories

Interesting Links

Follow “Art Blart”