Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Sekai (meaning ‘be humorous’) 2009
A stimulating exhibition by Emma Davies at Craft Victoria of polypropylene industrial netting and packaging that has been heated, moulded, sculpted and literally morphed into these fantastical sculptures, inspired by the artist’s experiences when visiting Johannesburg in South Africa as part of the South Project. Davies evokes the mysterious and the bizarre in her figures, making the commonplace into something uncommon, taking her themes from the relics of bush medicine present in the street markets: the medicine market of Johannesburg full of dried animal bones, skulls, skins and bottles of alchemistic objects.
Despite their comforting South African names (translated into English as ‘hope’, ‘faith’, ‘quiet, tranquil’, ‘lady’, ‘chief’, ‘prince’ for example) these extremely individual figurative ‘presences’ have a powerful melancholic affect on the viewer. Their elongated long legged and armed, no necked forms create dark eyeless creatures that crouch in rusted boxes or sit on wooden posts with their legs and arms hanging, folded. They seem lonely and sad despite their titles, perhaps reflecting the harsh realities of a life of poverty on the streets of Soweto.
Two figures on wooden blocks seem to walk aimlessly, placed on large rough industrial tables with huge wheels while another figure sits up a rusted ladder propped against the wall. A group of figures are clustered together on top of large wooden posts of different heights, some with arms round each other for comfort, others with black or red feathers sprouting from shoulders, legs or wearing a red feathered skirt. These creatures create a marvellous group of contemplative wandering minstrels while behind them their eerie shadows fall on the gallery wall.
The crystalline nature to the surface of the creatures, like sparkling coal, reminds me of the work of William Kentridge, his white industrial protagonist Felix haunted by images of black workers deep underground mining coal (see Mine (1991) where his coffee plunger goes down into the ground through the bodies of black people). Some of the figures bat like ears also bring to mind the work of Francisco de Goya and specifically his work Los Caprichos (The Whims), plate 43 from the series of 80 etchings published in 1799 titled The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters. The artist described the collection as an exposé of “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilised society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual.”
As Goya began to sympathise with the suffering of the peasants so Davies seems to have been transformed by what she saw around her during her visit, trying to make sense of a foreign culture, dreaming the sleep of reason but surrounded and invaded by a world in which the natural and unnatural has fused and morphed.
I really liked this exhibition and the presence of these figures. I am obviously not alone as the show is almost sold out. A visit to these disturbing, enfolding creatures is recommended.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
All photographs courtesy of Craft Victoria (thankyou Amy Brand!) and taken by their photographer Alexia Skok. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Tariro (meaning ‘hope’) 2009
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Rutendo (detail – meaning ‘faith’) 2009
Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Los Caprichos plate 43 from the series El sueño de la razón produce monstros 1799 Etching and aquatint Height: 21.3cm (8.3″) Width: 15.1cm (5.9″) Museo del Prado, Madrid
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Zola (detail – meaning ‘quiet, tranquil’) 2009
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Group with from left to right: Enitan (person of story), Ntombi (lady), Kgosi (chief), Nkosana (prince), Lucky and Alaba (second child after twins) 2009
Emma Davies (Australian, b. 1968) Nkosana (detail – meaning ‘prince’) 2009
Craft Victoria Watson Place, off Flinders Lane, Melbourne 3000 Phone: 03 9650 7775
Exhibition dates: 16th June – 18th September, 2009
Artist duo George (left) and Gilbert (right) pose in front of their work “The Church of England” in Berlin, Germany
That pair of agent provocateurs are at it again!
Marcus
Many thankx to Arndt & Partner for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, English born Italy, b. 1943) (George Passmore, English, b. 1942) DATING 2008 Mixed media
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, English born Italy, b. 1943) (George Passmore, English, b. 1942) BRITISHISM 2008 Mixed media
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, English born Italy, b. 1943) (George Passmore, English, b. 1942) JESUS JACK 2008 Mixed media
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, English born Italy, b. 1943) (George Passmore, English, b. 1942) ROUND FLAG 2008 Mixed media
As the international tour of the last Gilbert & George retrospective (2007-2009) did not include Berlin, Arndt & Partner are now presenting a solo exhibition of the celebrity artist duo in its gallery rooms behind the Hamburger Bahnhof. It is the first Gilbert & George solo show in Berlin for 14 years. The exhibition features a selection of 20 large-scale pieces from the Jack Freak Pictures, the largest Gilbert & George group of pictures to date. The thrust of the content is given by the colours and shapes of the Union Jack flag that dominate the bulk of the pictures as well as the recurring motive of medals, emblems and trees. In the Jack Freak Pictures the artist duo explores aspects of nationhood and of the sentient individual in the nets of society. In his essay published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition the British writer Michael Bracewell describes these pictures as “the most iconic, philosophically astute and visually violent works that Gilbert & George have ever created …”
Gilbert & George, who met as students of sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art in London 42 years ago, embarked on a joint artistic career that was to encompass a wide range of media from drawing to video and their trademark pictures. Further, the pair revolutionised the concept of sculpture by presenting themselves as “living sculptures” dressed in the quintessentially British tailored suit, shirt and tie. But it was their monumental trademark pictures composed of a grid like array of smaller images which they began to create in the early 70s that first brought them international fame. Figures, cityscapes, symbols, plants, bodily fluids, excrements and text interlock in pictorial messages as visually powerful as their content is provocative. The pictures, which started out in black and white and later assumed increasingly luminous, bold colours, generally also depict portraits of the artists themselves and seize on taboo subjects like sexuality, race, religion and national identity with a brash and fearless candour.
The Jack Freak Pictures again feature the bodies and/or faces of the artists. In these compositions, their bodies function as stylised representatives of the individual in society, whose relationship to social norms and categories, to national, religious and sexual identification processes is relentlessly explored and commented upon. Departing from their earlier oeuvre, some of their new pictures split the raw images into much smaller fragments before merging them into new forms. The result is a fascinating kaleidoscopic mix of the monstrously grotesque with an intricate ornamental structure reminiscent of sacred art. In ever new variations, Gilbert & George order the signs and fragments of social life they find in their neighbourhood – the multicultural East End of London – where solidarity and friendship are as visible as intolerance and marginalisation.
Press release from the Arndt & Partner website [Online] Cited 04/07/2009. No longer available online
Gilbert & George installation photographs of their exhibition Jack Freak Pictures at Arndt & Partner, Berlin
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, English born Italy, b. 1943) (George Passmore, English, b. 1942) JESUS SUITS 2008 Mixed media
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, English born Italy, b. 1943) (George Passmore, English, b. 1942) CHURCH OF ENGLAND 2008 Mixed media
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, English born Italy, b. 1943) (George Passmore, English, b. 1942) POSTER DANCE 2008 Mixed media
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, English born Italy, b. 1943) (George Passmore, English, b. 1942) REALM 2008 Mixed media
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, English born Italy, b. 1943) (George Passmore, English, b. 1942) SPIDER 2008 Mixed media
Gilbert & George (Gilbert Prousch, English born Italy, b. 1943) (George Passmore, English, b. 1942) UNION WALL DANCE 2008 Mixed media
Many thankx to the Paine Art Center for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Alvin Langdon Coburn (English born United States, 1882-1966) The Singer Building, New York c. 1910 Gum bichromate over platinum print
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Nautilus 1927 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 by 7 1/2 in. (24 by 19cm)
Like their painter counterparts, many photographers experimented with abstraction in the 1920s and 1930s, exploring relations of form, tonality, and space. Here, Weston isolates a nautilus shell against a solid black ground, creating a study of curves, subtle shadows, and contrasts between light and dark. As in many of his close-ups of natural forms, the nautilus appears both recognisable and yet strangely unfamiliar. Unlike the rigorously nonrepresentational compositions of photographers like László Moholy-Nagy, Weston’s abstractions always remained grounded in objects from the real world; as he wrote in 1930, “To see the Thing Itself is essential.”
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Nautilus is now recognised as one of Weston’s greatest photographs, but all of his images of shells have a greater-than-life quality to them. Weston biographer Ben Maddow has said that what is so remarkable about them “is not in the closeness nor in the monumentality of the forms; or at least, not in these alone. It is instead in the particular light, almost an inward luminescence, that he saw implicit in them before he put them before the lens. Glowing with an interior life … one is seeing more than form.”
Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940) Italian family looking for lost baggage, Ellis Island 1905 Gelatin silver print
The largest exhibition of masterpieces of American photography ever presented in Wisconsin, Seeing Ourselves features over a hundred iconic images from the internationally acclaimed George Eastman House Collections of Rochester, New York. This extraordinary exhibition dramatically illustrates our country’s landscape, people, culture, and historic events through works ranging from vast western scenes to fascinating documentary photographs to intimate celebrity portraits. Artists represented include such masters of the medium as Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, and dozens of other accomplished photographers.
Spanning more than 150 years of photography, Seeing Ourselves is organised according to five broad themes: American Masterpieces, American Faces, America at War, America the Beautiful, and American Families. Each section features renowned photographs documenting the American experience. The exhibition begins with “American Masterpieces,” which sheds light on celebrated images like Yosemite Valley, Summer by Ansel Adams, Nautilus by Edward Weston, and The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz. Other highlights include Oshkosh native Lewis Hine’s Powerhouse Mechanic, a dynamic image symbolising the arrival of a new Industrial Age, and Dorothea Lange’s unforgettable photograph Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, which gave a human face to poverty and suffering during the Great Depression.
“American Faces” illustrates the diversity of our nation, including subjects ranging from Native Americans whose ancestors have lived here for thousands of years to immigrants at Ellis Island who had just arrived in America that day. Photographs of everyday people are juxtaposed with portraits of illustrious political and civil rights leaders, artists, celebrities, and athletes, including Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe, Babe Ruth, and many other familiar faces. Master photographers who portrayed these individuals include Mathew Brady, Edward S. Curtis, Walker Evans, Richard Avedon, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Steichen.
Some of the most famous, memorable, and shocking images in the history of American photography are photographs of war. While photographs of war may be difficult to look at, they serve as an important record of America’s past. “America at War” displays images from the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, as well as contemporary photographs created in response to 9/11.
“America the Beautiful” features timeless photographs that capture the beauty and power of unspoiled nature, as well as scenes of westward expansion, urban America, and the intimate spaces we call home. Dramatic images of Alaskan glaciers, majestic western views, and tranquil dunes are contrasted with big-city skyscrapers, small-town neighborhoods, and backyard gardens. Major works in this section include Alvin Langdon Coburn’s beautifully atmospheric view of New York’s Singer Building and landscapes by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.
The final section, “American Families,” brings together families from all walks of life, exploring their differences and commonalities. A variety of examples by such notable photographers as Weegee, Lewis Hine, Aaron Siskind, Margaret Bourke-White, and Mary Ellen Mark are included. Some works portray idealised scenes of American life, while others capture a glimpse of everyday life and the serious challenges many families face, such as poverty or illness. Highlights include Hine’s photograph of an Italian family seeking lost luggage at Ellis Island and a tender portrait of a mother and son from the series Black in America by Eli Reed, an award-winning member of Magnum, the prestigious photojournalists’ cooperative.
Seeing Ourselves: Masterpieces of American Photography from George Eastman House Collections is organised by George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film and is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as part of the American Masterpieces program. George Eastman House is the world’s oldest photography museum, founded in 1947 on the estate of Kodak founder George Eastman, the father of popular photography. The museum has unparalleled collections of 400,000 photographs from 14,000 photographers dating from the beginnings of the medium to the present day.”
Text from The Paine Art Center website [Online] Cited 01/07/2009. No longer available online
Benedict J. Fernandez (American, 1936-2021) Dick Gregory with MLK [Martin Luther King, JR.] New Politics Convention, Chicago, ILL. October, 1967 1967 Gelatin silver print
Eli Reed (American, b. 1946) A Mother and Her Son at Her Home In Bed Sty in Brooklyn c. 1990 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Spire of der Dom, 1 – 52 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
The Shape of Dreams
I am pleased to announce a body of work, the second for 2009, is now online on my website.
The photographs are a sequence: one tone follows another (much like a piece of music) until the final coda. With this in mind please view the work sequentially. Below are a selection of photographs from the whole work.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Photographs from the series The Shape of Dreams 2009
“the form of formlessness the shape of dreams”
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) 9/24/52 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Navy Base, Unidentified 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Part of the French Riviera taken while Whit held me at the door! 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2009 From the series The Shape of Dreams Gelatin silver print
All the photographs from the series are now on my website.
Kay Westhues (American) CSX railroad building, Walkerton 2005
I really like this work. An insightful eye, sensitive, tapped into the community that the artist is documenting. Attuned to its inflections and incongruities, the isolation and loneliness of a particular culture in time and place. There are further strong photographs from the series on the Kay Westhues website. It’s well worth your time looking through these excellent photographs. And observing the wonderful light!
Kay Westhues (American) Man with patriotic cast, Original Famous Fish of Stroh 2005
Kay Westhues (American) Knox laundromat 2005
The Snite Museum of Art announces the opening of the exhibition: Fourteen Places to Eat: a Narrative: Photographing Rural Culture in the Midwest, opening on Sunday, May 31,2009.
Kay Westhues is a photographer who is interested in documenting the ways in which rural tradition and history are interpreted and transformed in the present day. Kay shares her intention for this series of work:
“For the past five years I have been working on a series of photographs depicting rural culture in Indiana and the Midwest. This project was inspired by my memories of growing up on a farm in Walkerton, Indiana, and observing first hand the shifting cultural identity that has occurred over time and through changing economic development. I moved back to Walkerton in order to help care for my ageing parents in 2001.
These photos mirror my personal history, but I am also capturing a people’s history grounded in a sense of place. My intention is to celebrate rural life, without idealising it.
The overall theme since the project’s inception is the effect of the demise of local economies that have historically sustained rural communities. Many of my images contain the remains of an earlier time, when locally owned stores and family farms were the norm. Today chain stores and agribusiness are prevalent in rural communities. These communities are struggling to thrive in the global economy, and my images reflect that reality.
Most recently I have focused on the complex relationship between farmers and domesticated animals. I make many of my images at Animal Swap Meets and sale barns, places where animals are bought and sold. Family farms are quickly being replaced by large-scale food production, and these events still draw smaller farmers and the local people who support them.”
Why fourteen places to eat?
“One of my biggest complaints after moving to Walkerton was that there were not enough places to eat out. Or, rather, practically no places to eat out. So I was happy when news arrived that a new restaurant was opening there. Imagine my surprise when I read a letter to the editor in the local paper against the new restaurant. The letter stated we already had enough places to eat in this town. The writer counted a total of fourteen places to eat, which included four restaurants, three gas stations, four bars, a truck stop, a convenience mart, and a bowling alley.”
Ms. Westhues studied photography at Rhode Island School of Design and Indiana University, Bloomington. She has a BS degree in Photography and Ethnocentrism from the Indiana University Individualised Major Program (1994), and an MS in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University (1998). She currently lives in Elkhart, Indiana, and is completing a five-year project photographing rural culture in the Midwest. This series is a visual exploration of the ways rural identity is defined in contemporary society.
Press release from the Snite Museum of Art Cited 20/06/2009. No longer available online
Kay Westhues (American) Chicken bingo, Francesville Fall Festival 2005
Kay Westhues (American) Patriotic hammers ($3.00) 2005
Kay Westhues (American) Parked trailer, Ligonier 2006
Kay Westhues (American) Lunch at the Crockpot, Walkerton (The Young and the Restless) 2007
Kay Westhues (American) Momence Speed Wash, Momence IL 2007
Kay Westhues (American) Mary Ann Rubio, Family Cafe, Knox 2007
The Snite Museum of Art at University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Untitled (New York City) 1929-1933 Gelatin silver print 6 1/2 x 4 7/16 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001
What a fantastic exhibition! Thank you to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for allowing me to reproduce the wonderful photographs below, many from photographers that I have never heard of before.
Lloyd Ullberg (American, 1904-1996) PSFS Building, Philadelphia c. 1932-1933 Gelatin silver print Image and sheet: 10 x 7 3/8 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1999
At the turn of the 20th century when they first began to appear, skyscrapers were seen as symbols of modernity and testaments to human achievement. Stretching the limits of popular imagination, they captured the attention of visual artists working in a variety of mediums. This summer the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Skyscrapers: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs of the Early Twentieth Century, an exhibition that traces the rise of the American skyscraper as an iconic image. The exhibition will feature more than 50 works from the Museum’s collection, dating from 1908 to 1941, which demonstrate the many ways artists chose to portray the new giants in their landscape.
Skyscrapers includes prints by John Marin and Charles Sheeler, photographs by Berenice Abbott and Alfred Stieglitz, and drawings by Earl Horter and Abraham Walkowitz. The works in Skyscrapers reflect a wide range of styles and practices, from Walkowitz’s loosely drawn “New York Improvisations” (1910) to Abbott’s luminous photograph “New York at Night” (c. 1932), which captures the dazzling allure of the city’s glowing evening skyline. The combination of mediums included in the show allows the viewer to consider the relationship between drawing, printmaking, and photography in this dynamic period.
“The visual impact of skyscrapers on the modern urban landscape is unmistakable, and for more than a century artists have been engaging with this theme,” John Vick, The Margaret R. Mainwaring Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs and the exhibition’s organiser, said, noting that the Museum’s collection includes well over 500 works related to skyscrapers. Vick added that “their distinctive contours and exaggerated scale offered artists both a chance to experiment with modernist aesthetics and a subject on which to project personal or collective ideas and emotions.”
The exhibition also offers a view into the interaction of architecture and urban development with art’s role as a form of documentation. Among the famous buildings featured are Chicago’s gothic-ornamented Tribune Tower, New York City’s Art Deco Empire State Building, and Philadelphia’s modernist PSFS Building. An atmospheric etching of a rainy nighttime scene at One Broad Street in Philadelphia by artist Allan Randall Freelon (American, 1895-1960) shows how this important intersection at the heart of the city would have appeared in the 1930s.
The towering, occasionally menacing, physical presence of these structures is a frequent visual theme in the works – whether in Howard Norton Cook’s woodcut “Skyscraper” (1929, below) or Sherril Schell’s photograph “Window Reflection – French Building” dating from 1930-1932. Horter’s graphite drawing “Manhattan Skyline” (1916) shows a row of newly-built towers thrusting skyward in strong, vertical lines and overshadowing the residential rooftops in the foreground, an image that suggests the city’s emergence as a financial and commercial giant.
Other works take a more abstract approach, exploring the visual exciting patterns created by these massive new structures. Such works include Marin’s 1913 and 1917 prints of the Woolworth Building and Herbert Johnson’s aerial photograph of building rooftops from c. 1930-1932.
Philadelphia Museum of Art press release [Online] Cited 19/06/2009. No longer available online
Earl Horter (American, 1880-1940) Manhattan Skyline c. 1916 Graphite on cream wove paper Sheet: 11 7/16 x 8 3/4 inches (29.1 x 22.2cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of Carl Zigrosser, 1953
Like many of the drawings and etchings of New York made by Horter while he lived in the city during the first two decades of this century, this view of the Manhattan skyline was shown in his first one-man exhibition at the New York gallery of Frederick Keppel and Company in 1916. It was organised by Carl Zigrosser, research librarian at Keppel, who later became this Museum’s first curator of prints and drawings. Zigrosser bought the drawing from the exhibition and donated it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art thirty-seven years later.
Wendell MacRae (American, 1896-1980) Summer c. 1930-1932 Gelatin silver print Image and sheet: 6 9/16 x 4 5/8 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001
Stella Simon (American, 1878-1973) 6th Avenue c. 1930-1932 Gelatin silver print Image and sheet: 9 1/2 x 7 3/16 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001
Allan Randall Freelon (American, 1895-1960) Number One Broad Street c. 1934 Aquatint with roulette and burnishing Plate: 11 7/8 × 9 13/16 inches (30.2 × 24.9cm) Sheet: 15 1/8 × 12 1/16 inches (38.4 × 30.6cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Thomas Skelton Harrison Fund, 1943
Sherril Schell (American, 1877-1964) Buildings on West 35th Street c. 1930-1932 Gelatin silver print Image and sheet: 8 x 6 5/16 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001
Howard Norton Cook (American, 1901-1980) Skyscraper 1929 Woodcut Image: 17 15/16 x 8 5/8 inches (45.6 x 21.9cm) Sheet: 19 1/16 x 9 3/4 inches (48.4 x 24.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of Carl Zigrosser, 1960
Sherril Schell (American, 1877-1964) Window Reflection – French Building c. 1930-1932 Gelatin silver print Image and sheet: 7 15/16 x 6 1/8 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001
Ralph Steiner (American, 1899-1986) Untitled (New York City) 1931 Gelatin silver print Image/Sheet/Mount (With Black Border from Negative): 9 15/16 x 7 15/16 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art The Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection, 2001
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) New York at Night c. 1932 Gelatin silver print Image and sheet: 13 3/8 x 10 5/8 inches Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of Theodore T. Newbold in memory of Lee Witkin, 1984
Philadelphia Museum of Art 26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway Philadelphia, PA 19130
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Fallen Oak Tree 2008 From the series Hampstead Inkjet print 27 x 24 inches (68.6 x 61cm) Edition of 5
Variations on a theme
Whether McFarland’s photographs are “straight” or composites, there always seems to an unnerving feel to them, a formal frontality that empowers the viewer into trying to unlock the photographs secret, like an enigmatic puzzle. Everything is presented front on, square to the camera, no oblique angles, relying in the straight photographs on the scale of the accumulated blocks of information, and in the composites, in the very unlikely, even theatrical, staging of the people within the mise en scène.
These are very cinematic photographs, some, literally, with their panoramic aesthetic, others built by assembling their scudding skies and stiff, neatly placed people. Too neatly placed in my opinion but that’s McFarland’s hook, his aesthetic cough which prompts the viewer to question the veracity of the image, its link to the photographs indexical reality. His multiple exposures push the boundaries of truth or dare, hyperreal solutions to a disengaged world. Personally, I prefer his straight photographs which are built on a fabulous eye, a masterful understanding of pictorial space (monumental elements held in balance) and wonderful previsualisation. You don’t need anything more.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Regen Projects for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) The Admiral’s House as seen from the Upper Garden at Fenton House 2006 From the series Hampstead Inkjet print Edition of 5
“Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Canadian artist Scott McFarland. This exhibition will feature new photographs including 3 large panorama works, smaller works from the “Hampstead” series, and introduce the new “Niagara” series.
Scott McFarland’s photography reconsiders the traditional concept of a photograph as the depiction of a single captured moment in time. Through digital means he is able to manipulate composition, colour, light, space, shape, and form. McFarland’s photographs combine multiple negatives to represent simultaneous temporalities and interweave selected elements into a cohesive whole. Several different moments are packed into what appears to be one densely constructed instant. The photographs are meticulously crafted illusions created within the formal language of documentary photography.
McFarland’s consideration of photography and the built picture was brought about by the artist’s own understanding of the artificial “nature” found in built environments such as gardens and zoos. Taking the relationship of the constructed space/constructed image one step further, McFarland has photographed a modernist architectural landmark: the Berthold Lubetkin designed penguin pool at the London zoo. Through two very distinct works, McFarland investigates the elliptical structure of the famous penguin pool vis-à-vis the elliptical / arcing motion of his camera rotating on a tripod. One photograph is an objective colour rendering where the camera has been left level while rotating; the other is a larger black and white version where the camera arcs along a non-level plane distorting and altering the curve of the structure from right to left.
The new square format photographs from McFarland’s “Niagara” series have a rough unfinished quality unlike any photographs he has taken to date. These softer focus images with odd shifts in light and glare are location studies for the large panorama A Horse Drawn Hearse, Queens Royal Tours, 174 Anne, Niagara on the Lake, Ontario (2009, below). This work depicts an old carriage business and its surroundings during the dead of Canadian winter. In this visually captivating work, a black funeral carriage contrasts against the white snow. The acreage, surrounded by newer suburban homes, evokes the question of how long can this structure resist the modern urban pressures it faces. These straight photographs presented alongside his precise digitally mastered compositions illustrate how the photographic process and the history of art and photography have always informed McFarland’s work.
“Over the last decade, Scott McFarland has produced bodies of work that engage with different aspects of photography … McFarland’s approach is both descriptive and metaphoric … The images, rich in cultural significance, express the complementary workings of conceptual and aesthetic factors all the while holding various characteristics of art and photography in ambiguous relation.”
Andrea Kunard. Scott McFarland: A Cultivated View, published by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2009, p. 12.
Text from the Regen Projects press release [Online] Cited 16/06/2009. No longer available online.
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) A Horse Drawn Hearse, Queens Royal Tours, 174 Anne, Niagara on the Lake, Ontario 2009 From the series Niagara Inkjet print 59.5 x 124 inches (151.1 x 315cm) Edition of 5
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Boathouse with Moonlight 2002 From the series Boathouse Digital C-print 71 x 91 inches (180 x 231cm) Edition of 5, 2 AP
“Boathouse with Moonlight” is an exploration of the technical advancements afforded by digital photography, created by assembling multiple exposures taken over the space of two hours under the light of a full moon. Unlike traditional photography, this image does not represent one specific moment captured at a particular site; rather, it shows an accumulation of moments that have been manipulated and layered to create a revised version of the boathouse and its surroundings. McFarland’s use of multiple exposures to produce the final image emphasises not only the duration of the photographic act, but also the many facets of the boathouse’s character. This type of building on British Columbia’s “Sunshine Coast” is disappearing with the construction of new, suburban-style retirement housing.
Text from the National Gallery of Canada website [Online] Cited 02/03/2019
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Gorse and Broom, West Heath, Hampstead 2006 From the series Hampstead Inkjet print Edition of 5
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Women Drying Laundry on the Gorse, Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath 2007 From the series Hampstead Inkjet print 29 x 45 inches (73.7 x 114.3cm) Edition of 5
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Inspecting, Allan O’connor Searches for Botrytis cinerea 2003 From the series Gardens Digital C-print 40 x 48 inches (102 x 122cm) Edition of 7
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Orchard View with the Effects of Seasons (Variation #1) 2003-2006 From the series Gardens Digital C-print 42 x 122 inches (106.7 x 309.9cm) Edition of 3
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) [Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif] 2005 From the series Empire Inkjet print
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) Echinocactus grusonii [Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif] 2006 From the series Empire Inkjet print 24.5 x 27.5 inches (62 x 70cm) Edition of 3 Private collection/Vancouver Art Gallery
This picture comes from Empire, a series on desert vegetation shot in the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. Henry E. Huntington, an art collector who made his fortune building railroads, founded the garden in 1919.
“The plantings [of the garden] are dense, and the soil is mostly hidden beneath the thriving vegetation,” writes Grant Arnold in a catalogue essay for the exhibition, “the fullness of the planting continually reminding the visitor of Huntington’s beneficence.” To many gallery visitors, however, these images of lush desert vegetation will simply be appealing to the eye.
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) The Granite Bowl in the Berlin Lust Garden 2006 Inkjet print 43 x 62 inches (109.2 x 157.5cm) Edition of 5
At first the photograph appeared to be a simple scene, one of no importance. The two young children, obviously related based on their similar physical features, seemed a bit awkward and posed, but otherwise, I thought it to be a snapshot, much like the one I took of the bowl while in Berlin. Upon learning how McFarland created this and many of his other photographs, I learned how complex of a scene this really is. McFarland uses multiple negatives, often taken over a matter of days, weeks, and even months, and combines them digitally into a seamless print. His interest is in breaking through the concept of a photograph being an image of a single instant in time and space.
A fuller narrative is created as well. With just one negative, there may only be one or two people depicted. We may just have the dog with his owner half shown, or even only half of the brother-sister group. But by overlapping the various negatives, Mr McFarland manipulates his work into a greater piece. We can now ask ourselves, why are the brother and sister so psychologically distant? Or, who is the small girl with the accordion and where is her mother? Is her mother the woman with the baby carriage? How long has that man been sleeping under the bowl? These are all questions that can be asked together because the negatives are combined that couldn’t be asked if we had just the single frame.
Scott McFarland (Canadian, b. 1975) View of Vale of Health, looking towards Hampstead 2007 From the series Hampstead Inkjet print 27 x 42.5 inches (68.6 x 108 cm) Edition of 5
With the stiff figures of a historical painting, Scott McFarland’s View of Vale of Health, Looking Towards Hampstead muddles ideas of what’s real and what’s not.
From the get-go, painting and photography have been inextricably bound together. The Pictorialists tried to make their photographs look like paintings. The Futurists, in their paintings, mimicked the blurred and segmented movement found in Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs. The photorealists created paintings whose subject was the photograph itself. And in his large-scale, backlit photo-transparencies, Jeff Wall has alluded to paintings by Nicolas Poussin, Edouard Manet, and Paul Cézanne, among others. The digital age has done nothing to diminish each medium’s obsession with the other.
This continued entwining of art forms is evident in Scott McFarland’s computer-montaged photographs, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery. So is the parallel entanglement of nature and culture. Both conditions are conspicuous in his 2006 series, “Hampstead”, inspired by the landscapes of the early-19th-century English painter John Constable. McFarland’s colour photos, shot in various locations around London’s immense Hampstead Heath, pay homage to Constable’s attraction to the same place. They also play variations on that painter’s rendering of multiple versions of the same scene, and on his open-air studies of the changing effects of light and weather. …
Over the past decade, McFarland’s working methods have changed from straightforward analog photography to the creation of highly manipulated images in which he digitally splices together multiple segments of the same landscape or structure, shot over a period of days, weeks, or even months. In both variations of Orchard View With the Effects of the Seasons, for instance, the blossoms and foliage of spring, summer, and fall are contained within the same seamless panorama.
The digital assist means that there are no constraints of time, space, or documentary veracity in McFarland’s work: he can build whatever impossible pictures he wants and they will look “real”. At least until they’re closely scrutinised, revealing incongruities of light, shadow, time, and figuration. In this sense, his art challenges our understanding of the nature of the photograph and its relationship with the truth. There’s nothing really new about this project – as long as photography’s been around, it’s been manipulated by its practitioners. Photoshop, however, has added a vast digital dimension to the darkroom antics of earlier photo artists.
Installation view of the interior forecourt of the National Gallery of Victoria showing banners for the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation photographs from the latest Winter Masterpieces blockbuster Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire from the media preview on the day the exhibition opened at NGV International, Melbourne. Thank you to Jemma Altmeier, Media and Public Affairs Administrator at the NGV for the invitation. Photographs were taken using a digital camera, tripod and available light.
Fantastic to see my friend and curator of the exhibition, Dr Ted Gott, at the opening. Congratulations on a wonderful show!
Photographs proceed from the beginning to the end of the exhibition in chronological order.
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Entrance to the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
3 panel video installation of the Catalan countryside where Salvador Dali lived. 13 minutes duration from the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Early work from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
To the left View of the Cadaques from the Creus Tower 1923; to the right Table in front of the Sea. Homage to Eric Satie 1926 from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
In the centre The First Days of Spring 1929; to the right Surrealist composition 1928 from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view with The Age art critic Associate Professor Robert Nelson at centre right and The hand. The remorse of conscience 1930 at far right, from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view with Memory of the child-woman 1932 at right from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Salvador Dalí (Spanish 1904-1989, worked in United States 1940-1948) Lobster Telephone (installation view) 1936 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jewellery gallery at the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Televisions with film installation from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation of black and white photography from the exhibition Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne with Dr Ted Gott, curator of the exhibition, with back to camera at centre Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Reproduction of Gala foot. Stereoscopic paintings 1975-1976 in an installation using mirrors that would have been originally used to obtain the stereoscopic effect Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Final exhibition space from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Final gallery space from the Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne featuring The Ecumenical Council 1960 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
National Gallery of Victoria (International) 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Opening hours: Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire is open 7 days a week and until 9pm every Wednesday from 17 June
Tickets Adult: $23 Concession: $18 Child: $11 (ages 5-15) Family (2 adults + 3 children): $60 NGV Member Adult: $16 NGV Member Family: $40
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Palma Cuernavaca 1925 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 24.4 x 16.5cm (9 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
What a privilege to be able to post these photographs that appear in the exhibition. Breathe, look, enjoy!
Marcus
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Desde la Azotea 1924 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.4 x 24.4cm (7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In the decades following the Revolution of 1910, foreign artists and intellectuals flocked to Mexico in order to experience its warm climate and lively cultural scene. They were inspired by Mexico‘s exotic tropical landscape, its ancient monuments and colonial architecture, the work of its modern muralists, and the country‘s indigenous arts and crafts. During two extended trips to Mexico made between 1923 and 1926, American photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) created some of his earliest modernist photographs, which form the core of the exhibition, Viva Mexico! Edward Weston and His Contemporaries, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Featured are approximately 45 works, among them about 30 rare photographs by Weston and selected images by Tina Modotti, Brett Weston, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Paul Strand. These photographs from the 1920s and ’30s are drawn from the Museum’s own collection, as well as The Lane Collection, which is on long-term loan to the MFA. Additionally, a compelling 1939 portrait of Frida Kahlo by Hungarian-born photographer Nickolas Muray has been lent from a local private collection. Viva Mexico! is on view May 30 through November 2 in the MFA’s Herb Ritts Gallery.
“Viva Mexico! highlights Weston’s pivotal years in this highly creative environment, which had a lasting impact on his work and inspired some of his earliest experiments in still life, landscape, and cloud studies,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. “This exhibition allows us to focus on a critical juncture in Weston’s career, and to present one of the strengths of The Lane Collection – its holdings of the photographer’s early modernist work.”
The Lane Collection, which includes gifts and loans to the MFA, comprises modern American paintings, photographs, and works on paper assembled by the late William H. Lane and his wife, Saundra B. Lane, a Trustee of the MFA. During the late 1960s, the Lanes acquired a large number of Weston’s vintage photographs, which are now widely acknowledged to be the most important collection of the photographer’s work in private hands.
“Acquiring more than 2,000 Edward Weston photographs directly from his sons was an amazing learning experience for us and we were thrilled to be able to immerse ourselves in the work of such a major artist in such great depth,” said collector Saundra Lane. “The Mexico pictures by Edward, Brett, and Tina Modotti are some of my personal favourites. These works inspired me to more recently acquire two early Manuel Alvarez Bravo photographs, El soñador (The Dreamer) and Nude, included in the exhibition, each of them a quintessentially Mexican subject and clearly made under the influence of Weston and Modotti.”
In an early biography of Edward Weston, writer and editor Nancy Newhall described Mexico as his “Paris,” the place where he greatly expanded his range as an artist. His total of more-than two years in Mexico – Weston’s only travel outside the US – offered him the opportunity to move away from his Pictorialist style, with its soft focus and ethereal, romantic qualities, toward more abstract forms and sharper resolution of detail. Heroic portrait heads, avant-garde nudes, urban views, cloud studies and landscapes, and images of Mexican toys and folk art are among the subjects he captured with his large-format camera. This period of experimentation with isolated objects also resulted in some of Weston’s earliest forays into still life, as can be seen in Chayotes (1924), a close-up of the beautiful, spiny squash arranged in a painted wooden bowl.
In 1923, Weston made the difficult decision to close his portrait photography studio in Tropico (now Glendale), California, and move to Mexico, as he wrote in his journal – to start life anew. He left behind his wife and three of his four young sons and traveled to Mexico City with his lover, Italian-born actress Tina Modotti (1896-1942) and his oldest son Chandler. Modotti ran Weston’s new studio, served as his translator and muse, and under his tutelage began to make highly accomplished photographs of her own. Together they became immersed in the vibrant community of artists and intellectuals centred there, which included painters Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Xavier Guerrero, and Rafael Salas, as well as the poet Luis Quintanilla, writer D.H. Lawrence, anthropologist Frances Toor, and journalist Carleton Beals. Although Weston and Modotti always remained outsiders looking in, the several exhibitions of their work during their Mexican sojourn helped spark a lively interest in modernist photography in their adopted country, where until this time photography had been admired mainly as a documentary tool, rather than a fine art.
“This exhibition will be a wonderful opportunity for our visitors to experience Weston’s stunning Mexican photographs firsthand, many of which are rarely seen platinum prints taken in the period just before he made his classic black-and-white images of peppers and shells,” said Karen Haas, The Lane Collection Curator of Photographs, who organised Viva Mexico! “These rich, warm-toned prints, when seen in context with photographs by his contemporaries in Mexico during the 1920s and ’30s, promise to be a revelation even to those who know Weston’s work well.”
Many of the earliest images that Weston produced in Mexico were portraits and nudes, both subjects that he had specialised in previously but now took on a very different look and feel. Soon after his arrival, he began a series of monumental portraits of friends and acquaintances, all of them shot very close-up and from slightly below eye level, their heads filling the picture frame and their features heroicised. These include Galván Shooting (1924), Tina Modotti (1924), Victoria Marin (1926), and Rose Roland Covarrubias (1926). He also made a stunning group of nudes of Modotti posing on their sun-baked rooftop patio, all three of which he titled Tina on the Azotea (1924), as well as an incredibly simple and sculptural image, Nude (1926) of fellow American expatriate Anita Brenner. The Brenner nude, along with Palma Cuernavaca (1925), Aqueduct (1924), and Excusado (1925) all share a similarly stark, abstract, and timeless quality – what Weston described as an attempt to render “the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.”
Abstract architectural details began to make their way into Weston’s work as well and he was drawn to capture light and shadow on a variety of surfaces, from the zigzag stone patterns of the ancient Ruinas de Mitla (1926) to the angled forms of the convent stairwell and skylight in San Pedro y San Pablo (1924). Viva Mexico! also showcases Weston’s experimentation with landscape photography, both urban and rural. The striking view from his studio roof is recorded in Desde la Azotea (1924), in which the geometry of the buildings below is heightened by the elevated vantage point and steeply raking light, and in Michoacán (1926), where he captures the beautifully undulating silhouette of the pastoral countryside. Much less common among his subjects from this period are some of Weston’s little-known photographs made in outdoor markets and fairs, such as Mercado, Oaxaca (1926) and Bowls, Oaxaca (1926). These open-air street images closely relate to another group of pictures, including Torito (1925), a playful little papier-maché bull, and Fish Gourd and Striped Serape (1926), which reflect Weston’s newfound interest in the vernacular Mexican toys and folk objects that he collected and lovingly documented in his studio while waiting for clients to arrive for portrait sittings. These whimsical photographs also serve as fascinating precursors to Weston’s high modernist still lifes of less than a decade later.
Over the course of her time in Mexico, Modotti rapidly went from photographer’s apprentice and model to fine art photographer in her own right. Although her career as a photographer was relatively brief, her powerful pictures from this period sometimes rival those of her lover and teacher, Edward Weston. Modotti was a rare woman in a mostly male profession, but she brought to her work a deep-seated interest in the people and the politics of Mexico in the 1920s. Unlike Weston, who preferred to work in the studio rather than the street, Modotti straddled the worlds of fine art photography and radical social activism. Her commitment to the struggles of the people can be seen in her iconic Worker’s Hands (1927), and her fascination with Mexico’s public demonstrations and celebrations is captured in Effigies of Judas (1924). She was so impassioned by these causes, in fact, that Modotti joined the Communist party and continued to work in Mexico for several years after Weston finally returned home in 1926. Before he left for California, however, Weston and Modotti collaborated on a photographic commission to illustrate a book on Mexican history and culture entitled Idols Behind Altars, which was written by their friend Anita Brenner and published in 1929. A copy of the book is among the case materials featured in the exhibition, as is American photographer Laura Gilpin’s book, Temples in Yucatan: A Camera Chronicle of Chichén Itzá (1948), which showcases her pictures of the ancient Mayan ruins taken during her two trips there in the early 1930s and mid ’40s.
Viva Mexico! also offers visitors to the MFA a rare chance to see some of Brett Weston’s (1911-1993) earliest serious photographs made during Edward Weston’s second extended trip to Mexico in 1925 and 1926 (after an eight-month-long hiatus in California). The second eldest of Weston’s four sons was only 14 years old when he accompanied his father to Mexico City and went with him to live in the house and studio that Weston shared with Modotti. Rather than the large-format camera and platinum prints that his father preferred, Brett Weston was given a 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 Graflex camera and printed his pictures on less expensive gelatin silver papers, which captured the precise detail and texture that his father admired in his work. The boy quickly fell under the spell of photography and his time in Mexico proved to be an ideal preparation for his own future as a professional photographer. Two of Brett Weston’s highly abstract architectural views, Tin rooftops (1926) and Ventilator (1926), are on view in the exhibition.
The only Mexican-born artist in the exhibition, Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002), is represented with three works, El soñador (The Dreamer) (1931), Nude (1935), and Las lavanderas sobreentendidas (Washerwomen Implied), Draped Yucca Plants, Mexico (1932). As a young, aspiring photographer in Mexico City, Bravo first met Modotti in 1927, soon after Weston’s departure. He was greatly inspired by the look and spirit of Modotti’s work as well as the Weston prints that she shared with him. Bravo is perhaps best-known for the stunning female nudes that he made over the course of his long career, but Viva Mexico! features a rare male figure study, Nude (1935). With its androgynous curves and simplified form, it clearly relates to Weston’s nudes of his son Neil made a decade earlier. Bravo’s photographs always have a profoundly Mexican essence to them, but especially during the 1920s and ’30s; they also demonstrate the influence of the European Surrealists as can be seen in the slightly unsettling, yet lovely work El soñador (The Dreamer).“
Viva Mexico! also showcases the work of American photographer and documentary filmmaker Paul Strand (1890-1976), who lived in Mexico during the mid-1930s. Although he and Weston had met in New York in 1922 and were aware of each other’s careers, their sojourns in Mexico did not coincide. The situation that Strand found on crossing the border in 1932 was very different than the more optimistic period of cultural Renaissance that Weston had experienced during the mid-1920s. Like Modotti, whose social concerns and unsentimental approach he shared, Strand was inspired to make portraits of Mexico’s indigenous peoples and the country’s dramatic landscapes. Landscape, Near Saltillo (1932) was one of the earliest images Strand shot in Mexico; taken in the north of the country on his initial trip down to Mexico City, it features the glowing white form of an adobe building set off by spiny, tall cacti and a vast expanse of sky. Also on view is Día de Fiesta (1933), a starkly simple image of three men and a child standing against a sunlit wall, which was made just prior to the production of Redes (Nets, or The Wave, in the US), his documentary film focusing on the struggles of a group of fisherman near Veracruz.”
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston [Online] Cited 03/06/2009 no longer available online
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Chayotes 1924 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.4 x 24.3cm (7 5/8 x 9 9/16 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Ruinas de Mitla 1926 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.1 x 24.1cm (7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) San Pedro y San Pablo 1924 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.4 x 24.4cm (7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina on the Azotea, with kimono 1924 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 16.2 x 23.8cm (6 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina On The Azotea c. 1924 Palladium print Sheet: 22.2 x 17.5cm (8 3/4 x 6 7/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina Modotti 1924 Palladium print Sheet: 22.7 x 17cm (8 15/16 x 6 11/16 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life, bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam, combined with steel and wire and pollen to make up your firm and delicate being.
Part of Modotti’s epitaph which can be found on her tombstone, composed by Pablo Neruda,
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Galván Shooting (Manuel Hernández Galván, Mexico) 1924 Gelatin silver print 22.5 x 18.7cm (8 7/8 x 7 3/8 in.) Mary L. Smith Fund Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Rosa Rolanda (de Covarrubias) 1926 Gelatin silver print 21.9 x 16.5 cm (8 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.) Sophie M. Friedman Fund Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Excusado (Toilet) 1925 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 24.3 x 19.1cm (9 9/16 x 7 1/2 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Tina Modotti (American born Italy, died Mexico, 1896-1942) Manos de trabajador, Mexico (Worker’s Hands, Mexico) 1927 Gelatin silver print 19.2 x 21.7cm (7 9/16 x 8 9/16 in.) Sophie M. Friedman Fund Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Tina Modotti’s closely cropped picture of a worker’s dusty hands conveys the realities of hard work. In 1923, the Italian-born film actress accompanied her lover, photographer Edward Weston, to Mexico City, where Weston taught her to use a large-format camera. She worked as his studio assistant, quickly mastering the technique and making striking portraits, close-up images of flowers, and still lifes of her own. Modotti’s compassion for the indigenous culture and political struggles of the Mexican people led her to join the Communist Party in 1927 and to focus on socially concerned subjects, using her camera as a tool to document the proud faces and weathered hands of the peasant labourers, artisans, and revolutionaries of her adopted country.
Text from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website
Screenshot
Tina Modotti (American born in Italy, died in Mexico, 1896-1942) Hands Washing 1927 Gelatin silver print
Tina Modotti (American born Italy, died Mexico, 1896-1942) Effigies of Judas 1924 Gelatin silver print
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Darwin 2009
The final exhibition of the afternoon were the ephemeral images of John Beard at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne. This was an enthralling show that I enjoyed tremendously. Beard draws in a multitude of cultural sources for his paintings often referencing painters, scientists, animals and evolution. His work has an intimate sense of knowing, a meditative mediation on the essence of the object being painted, the very presence of the thing itself. The marks on the canvas may be intuitive but it is an informed intuition that results in works that hover at the edge of consciousness. As much as the works are after images, or ghost images, they are also about the persistence of vision, the persistence of the artists vision in addressing issues of collective memory and cultural history that draw emotive responses from the viewer.
These images may be ‘on the verge of disappearance’ as an after-image but they are also pre-images as well, conjured from the mind of the artist and layered with complexity, presence and holistic wholeness. Their seduction, if I may use that word, is that they draw from the viewer peripheral memories and emotions that flit at the edges of consciousness. As Portugese curator Isabel Carlos has noted, “… Beard recreates a ‘figural’ space where the essence of the thing represented lies beyond its singular physical evidence.”1
Beard’s fragmented surfaces form a rhizomic web of dissolved pixellation, their structure almost fractal like in their linked hyper-real intimacies. These in between spaces open up the possibility of subversive commentaries that, on one level, bring a sense of disquiet to the holistic presence of the work. As Mark Poster has noted of the work of Deleuze and Guittari and which can be aptly applied to the work of John Beard,
“Deleuze and Guittari configure the social as a complex of bodily intensities in a state of continuous nonlinear movement. The logic they present is multidimensional, shifting, discontinuous. They speak of strata, assemblages, territorializations, lines of flight, abstract machines, a congerie of terms that disrupts the function of concepts to control a field through discursive articulations. Their categories cut through the normal lines of comprehension, the binary logic that governs modern social theory to present a picture of reality from the perspective of a sort of primitive life force. It is as if the earth itself were to describe the changes on its surface in the course of human history, a vantage point quite remote from the ego of the individual or from the disciplined consciousness of the social scientist.”2
Nonlinear, logical, shifting territorializations in multidimensional environments that hover below the edge of consciousness, investigations into the binary of presence / absence in the dreams of the imaginary. Powerful and poetic these works irradiate the viewer with their visceral presence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Isabel Carlos quoted in Wright, William. HEADLANDS: John Beard works 1993-2008. Catalogue essay
2/ Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, pp. 135-137
Many thankx to John Buckley Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Gorilla 2007
Installation view of John Beard’s exhibition After image at John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Hand 6 2009
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Head SP3 2004
“Beard’s paintings often convey an overpowering sense of brooding stillness, but equally this volatile effervescence of light-reverberant phenomena, where head, headland, the Adraga rock, are no longer object so much as apparition, a painted parallel existence, a material presence invoking nature’s own organic processes …
There is a distinctive sense when encountering a body of John Beard’s works of entering into a site of composure, withheld, of images silently bespeaking truths both personal and historical; hovering presences each conveying some species quality of time-less recognition.”
William Wright from the catalogue essay HEADLANDS: John Beard works 1993-2008 [Online] Cited 29/05/2009. No longer available online
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Rose 2007
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Einstein 2 2009
John Beard (Australian born Wales, b. 1943) Rembrandt 2009
![Benedict J. Fernandez (American, 1936-2021) 'Dick Gregory with MLK [Martin Luther King, JR.] New Politics Convention, Chicago, ILL. October, 1967' 1967](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/benedict-j.-fernandez-dick-gregory-with-mlk.jpg "Benedict J. Fernandez (American, 1936-2021) 'Dick Gregory with MLK [Martin Luther King, JR.] New Politics Convention, Chicago, ILL. October, 1967' 1967")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.