| Why hello |
[07 Jun 2007|11:16pm] |
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music |
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Sambassadeur - Coastal Affairs [EP] |
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Hi,
I haven't posted anything substantial in a while and probably will continue with that trend. I finished my thesis, Lovers' Discourse: A Visual and Feminist Re-Interpretation of Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse. I graduated college. I started working for a photographer part-time last week and a project I helped with should be in a medium-sized magazine next week or the week after. I can show you/tell you once it's out, if you continue to be interested. I also got a job with a photo retail place making photo albums, but I still have an interview with another photographer hopefully for another part-time job. Photographers are amazingly nice and it's very encouraging how many interested responses or supernice rejections I've gotten. I'm moving to Brooklyn sometime next month (TBD). I might start an art/photo blog after Seth's example or contribute to that one. We'll see.
Send me a comment, message, e-mail, something--I'd like to hear from you.
( Visual evidence: )
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| Selections from Winter Break, Part I |
[14 Jan 2007|05:32pm] |
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music |
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lee dorsey - the ep collection (see for miles) |
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Kiki Smith at Guggenheim
 Smith's work, which is preoccupied by body parts, ailments, fluids, and other such themes was particularly striking to me as someone who has dealt with a long list of medical problems in the past. My favorite pieces were sculptures made out of paper of people that were generally gorged open, exposed, and vulnerable. Their frailty, knowing how easily they could destruct and how tenuously they remained together, was particularly poignant.
What struck me as odd going through her retrospective was the amount of physical energy and ability needed to make these works of disablement. The exhibit made me ruminate on the many ideas I had last Winter and Spring while I was going from doctor to doctor, but my complete inability to do any photographic work.
Although that slight contradiction gave an insincere tone to some of the work, her mixture of fragility, morbidity, the female abject, with a hint of whimsy was, surprisingly, charming. Seth may have thought the weakness of the exhibit was a one-note morbid tone, but I think there is a sly humor present. Among kidney stones, you find woodland animals; next to portraits of Wolf Girl, starfish.
Tropicalia: A Revolution In Brazilian Culture at Bronx Museum of Art
I had been looking forward to seeing this exhibit for over a month, and it was not at all disappointing. Perhaps the best aspect of the exhibit was the many different sources that the pieces drew from: music, sculpture, installation, prints, magazines, and even clothing (although, notably, not many if any photographs).
 
The exhibit seems to repeatedly defy museum culture, inviting you to interact, touch, and play. It's unsurprising that the museums that it has toured are not "first tier," between the threat of audience manipulation and a large amount of "pop" media. The attitude was uniquely casual. My favorite pieces (and Seth's as well) perhaps best embodies this: two installations by Helio Oiticica that invite you to take off your shoes and walk around these favela-like constructions. Inside you find parrots, sand, a hammock, different textures and smells. The experience of walking on sand in the winter in New York City is itself somewhat invigorating, but going through the labyrinthine installations and discovering the many secrets is akin to being a child again. The pieces are rife with small spaces to rest, to hide, to read. Unlike the favelas they imitate, removed from the real context of these lower class neighborhoods, these are places to explore and discover--they regain an innocence unimaginable in that which they represent.
Unfortunately, the catalog, which does more than merely document the exhibit but also pulls together important texts and weaves a history of the movement was sold out and has already become out of print. If anyone has a lead as to where to find one, I'd be extraordinarily grateful.
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| I don't have very much to say anymore |
[21 Dec 2006|12:39am] |
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mood |
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drained |
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music |
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The Teddy Bears - Original Collection |
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My semester is over. My portfolio for grad school is all printed, and basically done. My Parreno paper is completed, and hopefully good. I've certainly become a big fan. I'm moving on to the thesis...soon. I have a stack of books like Unequal Lovers, The Language of Images, and The Culture of Love to get through. The language of love, meet the language of images.
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| Reality of a reflection of reality |
[16 Oct 2006|04:11pm] |
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mood |
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tired |
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music |
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WFMU - Special with Julia Vorontsova |
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I've been rather busy, but right now I'm home for break and I'll be living for Binghamton tomorrow. I have a topic for my thesis: a visual adaptation of Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, which, if you're unfamiliar, is like a dictionary of lover's terms. However, my version will also have a few "corrective" elements in regards to his gender and sexual politics. (You can view excerpts here: http://www.koolpages.com/almalaika/Barthes.html.)
I'm reading all there is to read about Philippe Parreno for a paper I'm going to do on his film The Sorter's Bridge. I would really like to compare it to Marker's Letter from Siberia, but since that doesn't fit the criteria of the paper, I'm getting a crash course in Godard's "radical" period and trying to track down those films. I watched one of the first Dziga Vertov group films British Sounds the other night, which was incredibly didactic, but had an interesting play between two tracks of sound that overlap and conflict. I'm trying to figure out the relationship between representation and reality.
"A movie is not reality, it is only a reflection. Bourgeois filmmakers focus on the reflections of reality. We are concerned with the reality of that reflection." -- Jean-Luc Godard
But most importantly,
Poll #846253 Halloween
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All What should I be for Halloween? Please elaborate with photos in comments.
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| This is all sounding a little too La Jetee |
[03 Oct 2006|12:58am] |
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mood |
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a little funny |
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music |
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VA - Seth's Anniversary Mix |
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Everything suddenly feels very cyclical as a senior. When I went to convocation this year, I could only really think about when I was a freshman and we sat in the balcony and made jokes. (Why are convocation lectures so mediocre?)
Everyone that I see and don't know looks like a doppelganger for someone else, the younger version that's stepping in our place. I feel like I am constantly doing double takes to assure myself that these people really are strangers and I'm still in the present. I haven't found my own double, unsurprisingly, as they are never flattering to one's vanity. I'm realizing now how much I really have changed, that I'm generally a much happier person now even though I used to identify my freshman year as the happiest because it was all so new and exciting (and I was drunk all the time, it seems). I feel like I've gotten things together and (in a terrifying way) have a very distinct direction.
And, in other news, ironically, this mystery is solved and looks a little like fate in a lot of weird, small ways:
(Gabriel Orozco, first spotted in America Photo, age 14)
Furthermore, a livejournal post that I wanted to write this summer is instead going to be my final research paper for my art history seminar. I'm totally going to score some student work copy DVDs!
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| Update |
[15 Sep 2006|02:02am] |
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mood |
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I'm sick of looking at beef st |
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music |
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Christian Marclay - Records 1981-1989 |
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I'm back at school. I moved into a house. I went to Binghamton. I have 400 pages of Robert Smithson to read for Monday (I'm about 200 pages in). Here are some photos!
This is my new ant farm:
( people pictures promised )
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| Art Art Art: Part 2 |
[04 Aug 2006|12:11am] |
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mood |
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are these annoying? |
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I went to see the Data Mining show at Wallspace for the Gerhard Richter piece (disappointing), but ended up falling in love with Dora Garcia. They had the print version of All The Stories, a collection of story tropes, movie plots, and little anecdotes that comprise every story ever told. The stories all seem familiar, you've heard them before, you've seen that movie, but there's always something off, they can't be placed. The project has evolved into a weblog, but it lacks the elegance of the huge book with only a few sentences on each page that was featured in the gallery.
430- An irresistibly attractive man with a turbulent past and an uncertain future arrives in a small town and falls in love with the local beauty. Unfortunately she is engaged to the local tycoon.
866- A rich man pretends to be poor, just to be sure that the girl he loves will marry him for who he is and not because of his money.
1671- In a wonderland inhabited by fiery salamanders and winged spirits, good fights evil in search of a life-giving talisman whose finder will rule the world.
Garcia also has several other online projects, which like All the Stories have an element of performance to them. She seems to wear her influences on her sleeves, with obviously referential or derivative content based on work by Dan Graham, Jorge Luis Borges, etc.
The New Collage show at Pavel Zoubek was very hit and miss, but had a number of gems. There was a catalog to the show, but the reproductions were pretty awful and it was expensive.
Javier Pinon does collages, mostly involving chairs and cowboys in surreal and chaotic arrangements or the very moment before chaos occurs. I can't find much online, but here is the piece I saw and another piece that's quite different from the rest of his work.
Marshall Weber has apparently had run ins with Homeland Security: Department of Publication Control, which retracted the publication of one of his books. The work that attracted me to him, however, didn't have overtly political meaning (that I picked up on), but was a seamless photocollage that destroys space yet, at first glance, looks simply like a photo. I also can't find much by him, though he has a rather interesting story and has apparently put out a lot of books. Maybe I can ILL him in the fall? This is the piece from the show (sorry it's so small) and the only other piece I could find.
Micha Laury is another artist I unfortunately can't find much about, although he appears to be a fairly big name. His jellyfish are really dazzling--they come in vibrant colors, they're huge, they hang above your head, but it seduces you just to sting you.
---
Today was my final class of the summer and although I don't think I really gained many technical skills (although I was pushed to use the ones I know a bit more), the critique was really useful. Jeff was very encouraging and positive; he thought I had a really good shot at grad school and suggested I really look in to Columbia. We talked about how to organize a portfolio, which was really helpful because that's not at all how I thought it would work. Now I just want to go shoot, shoot, shoot!
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| Art art art |
[31 Jul 2006|07:58pm] |
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music |
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Thibaudet, Jean-Yves - Ravel -- L'oeuvre pour piano s |
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I finally got myself to Chelsea. In addition to the Meow Mobile, I saw quite a bit of art, a surprising amount of which I liked.
The first show we went to was easily the best group show, Money Changes Everything at Schroeder-Romero. Although a lot of the pieces were a bit obvious with their criticism (Bush's face on a dollar bill with embroidered flames) or repetitive (weaving dollar bills together was a common theme), a lot of the work was both beautiful and nuanced in its meaning. Robin Clark's scraped dollar bills were my favorite, and seemingly everyone else's as well since they were mostly sold.
Clark's work is very delicate and through her destruction of dollar bills, she creates something else entirely. My favorite pieces create different, surreal scenes like the one above. Many were scraped to spell out appropriate little maxims like "Art is not for everyone." No, it certainly doesn't seem to be for the presidents whose faces are turned into empty masks. Clark's other work, paintings dominated by lines and out of focus photos of flowers, is unfortunately not nearly as compelling.
C.K. Wilde's collages of many different kinds of money are also quite spectacular. By using many moneys, his pieces take these mundane and often dull (and sometimes terrorizing) objects into vibrant, fanciful scenes and objects.
( more )
We saw a group show called "Best Played With a Straight Face" at Hudson Franklin, but I'm not really sure how we ended up there. I thought the show was supposed to be about radical uses of media, but it was nothing of the sort and I thought the work was pretty mediocre. However, there were a few photographs by Caroline Burghardt that I really enjoyed:
( more )
Looking through her work, it's very hit and miss, but what she really excels at are these interior details. The space is flattened and these small pieces are given heightened meaning. Her other work, mostly portraits of family and friends, seems somehow off. Her work is very similar to Tina Barney, but in the portraits, she fails to capture the same naturalness that gives us an inside glimpse to the bourgeois. Also, unlike Barney, she seems a bit more attached to her subjects.
J Bennett Fitts' photographs of pools, mostly in old motels, is really striking and of particular interest to me right now considering the project I've been working on. Although his work also looks at things that are decaying, it doesn't really look like criticism. The photographs evoke lament; the spaces were obviously once beautiful and now they've fallen into disrepair. The muted colors seem like they've faded, like dreams that never came to fruition but also haven't (and won't) go away.
( more )
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| Representing space & place |
[28 Jul 2006|07:37pm] |
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music |
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René Lussier & Martin Tétreault - Qu'ouïs-je |
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This question has kind of snuck up on me this summer, without me really approaching it. Today (just now) I watched Letters from Siberia, an early-ish Chris Marker film, which is something of a precursor to Sans Soleil. Appropriately, Siberia is "sans soleil," apparently called "The Land of the Dark" by Marco Polo, not entirely unlike the "Dark Continent," which has previously aroused this question of how space is represented through media and what the importance and effect of that is.
Marker addresses the question through a series of transitions, the way that Siberia has evolved and continues to evolve and that evolution's relation to other places. You get the first hint of this through the metaphor of the mammoth, and then it moves more literally into "the shot a film like this must include" of two different kinds of transportation passing one another, one carrying on life as it is and the other working to bring electricity to the area.
  
The narrator of my copy speaks in English and the original is in French (like Grin Without a Cat: the relation to other places is key; Siberia is not being represented to itself (unlike the Society of Spectacle known as Hollywood). The film addresses the power it has of representing what is mostly unknown directly. One "objective" sequence is repeated three times, but the narrator describes it differently each time.
Towards the end of the film, the narrator laments not being able to describe the whole of Siberia and then creates a fake newsreel that gives an overview of the geography, the history, the economy. But it ignores what the rest of the film looks at most closely: how animals and humans interact, Siberian mythology, and the sense of change and all the sentimentality that goes along with those things. The "whole" representation is as incomplete as the film's partial affinities.
     
The film also looks at other kinds of representation: the local opera, a faux commercial for reindeer with an owl as a spokesperson. Like The Last Bolshevik, Letter from Siberia is critical of a medium, but at the same time can't help but championing it (not to mention using it!).
 
 
At the end of the film, the narrator says that the images of burnt branches mean as much to him as the beautiful river.
 
I wonder how much this issue of representing place as subconsciously influenced me and my new desire to photograph New City. The photos don't really represent New City as a whole, though, they are only the burnt branches.
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| Speaking of Chris Marker... |
[26 Jul 2006|11:01pm] |
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I went to see a lot of art today, but the most surprising "piece" was in the parking garage:
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| Greetings from the Color Darkroom! |
[21 Jul 2006|09:12pm] |
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mood |
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steroidal |
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music |
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Bruce Haack - Hush Little Robot |
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Well, I did it, I got up at 7 am, got into New York at 9:30, developed my film (properly!) and then printed in the color darkroom. They let me print for free with the other grad students, so I saved a good $30. I look like a full-timer, only a bit more confused. Looking at what other people were doing, I don't feel very far off.
Afterwards I didn't make it to Chelsea due to the questionable weather, but I did go back to the ICP museum to see the Atta Kim exhibit, On Air. I really didn't like it. The photos are beautiful, meaningful, technically dazzling, and theoretically based, but ultimately they see completely divorced from any kind of personal view. "Atta Kim" is completely elusive in these photographs; there's always a point to be made and nothing to hold you to them. Once you grasp that there are thirteen exposures of each person his in Last Supper photo to "make you question, "Who is Jesus? Who is Judas?"--that's it. The photos aren't one-liners, but at the same time, they don't hold you.
Anyway, I worked on my reflections project from image/text. The more I work with it, the more I feel I should continue it and take it further.
I like how in my prints, unlike the ones that I had made which weren't as clear, Seth emerges as secondardy/dual spectator.
( more )
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| Send Copy Camera Stand To: |
[20 Jul 2006|11:40pm] |
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Today I ruined three rolls of film--the first ruined rolls I've ever developed. It was pretty traumatic, but at least I was able to reshoot most of what I had royally fucked up. I think I'll make a necklace out of the negs.
Printing was suddenly very easy today. Jeff suggested we be "generous" with our exposure and I think that's part of why printing is suddenly a 2-3 step process. Do a straight print, burn in some edges, move on to the next one.
I've also fallen in love with 11 x 14. I'll never go back to teeny tiny 8 x 10 again. I want to print bigger! Unfortunately, my scanner is too small and taking digital photos of photos isn't easy. So, my photos are going to be mysterious.
Tomorrow: develop the replaced film and print COLOR! And go to Chelsea. And get up at 7 am voluntarily...?
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| Baring it all |
[14 Jul 2006|12:34am] |
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mood |
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leica lens tomorrow! |
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music |
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Los Saicos - Los Saicos |
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My class is moving at a snail's pace. Today we developed film and made contact sheets. I didn't feel so bad, though, because there was this girl complaining how basic this was and how far ahead of it she is, but her photos suck, she developed one of my rolls in her batch and destroyed two frames, and is just generally obnoxious. (Although, I must say, I think the work that people showed in this class is the best group I've seen in that setting.) So, by virtue of her example, I was pretty okay taking it slow. Tuesday, printing for real.
( contact sheet preview )
Today I photographed more empty commercial spaces in New City, along Main St. I found an old Chinese/Japanese restaurant with the doors open and I got to explore. It really struck me how violent the move out appears in these places--things are ripped out of the wall, there are all these personal elements strewn about that almost make these places almost like homes.
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| Photographing your backyard |
[12 Jul 2006|11:34pm] |
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mood |
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reinvigorated |
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music |
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Iva Bittová & Vladimír Václavek - Bílé Inferno |
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I thought 5-10 rolls a week would be the death of me, but I did 5 rolls in about 24 hours. I primarily photographed the Bradlees building in New City. At first it started out being about the empty lot, the deserted store, etc. but it very quickly moved into the way the building has been reappropriated by nature (in particular, birds) and the remnants of these empty stores' past lives. I found a dead bird in an old deli, a warehouse cracked open (I wish I had the guts to try to shove myself underneath--maybe some other time!) with a very old Christmas flag as seemingly the remainder of the innumerable products once stocked there, and a trampled "Sorry, we're closed" sign.
It feels very odd that I'm suddenly drawn to photograph New City when I've lived here for so long and it never even occurred to me. The building suddenly looked entirely different to me. This isn't, however, that different from where I began when I started taking photographs seriously.
(1998-9?)
"So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those alone kept the human shape in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor."
-- Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
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| Days 4 and 5: The end of color, the (re)dawning of B&W |
[11 Jul 2006|07:21pm] |
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mood |
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exhausted! |
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music |
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Ludus - The Damage |
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Switching back to black and white is a bit jarring. My teacher wants us to shoot 5-10 rolls a week, which is significantly more than I normally would. But the nice part is he said my more recent B&W photos (from the fall) are mysterious and evocative. And my earlier stuff is literal and obvious. Well, I think he's probably right.
Furthermore, I finally made the commitment and got a Leica R6 body. It's in beautiful condition, and I think I've found a lens for it at a different store. My Rebel 2000, although it's trudged along quite nicely (since middle school!), is more or less a dust bowl right now. Now all I need is a light meter. And a new tripod. Look at this sexy thing.
Anyway,this is my very very latest work.
( more )
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| Days 4 & 5 |
[09 Jul 2006|08:28pm] |
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mood |
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accomplished |
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music |
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Ella Jenkins - You Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song |
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Class is over. I'll still try to be in the color darkroom at least once a week and hopefully a few hours in the B&W darkroom for my next class, which starts on Tuesday.
( toys )
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