concept plus object

Three: Twisting Images, Building Out

One of the most compelling contemporary artists I know is Brooklyn-based Kate Steciw. Kate has been producing energetic work in high volume for the past few years, and she’s dissecting the image in many ways. She transforms the photograph into object:

Kate Steciw, Death Mapping (The Mountain)

Kate Steciw, Rug Portal

She has also been busting apart photographs in two dimensions, incorporating all manner of digital trappings from advertising photography to online habits:

Kate Steciw

Kate Steciw, Apply, Applications, Auto, Automotive, Burn, Cancer, Copper, Diameter, Fire, Flame, Frame, Metal, Mayhem, Pipe, Red, Roiling, Rolling, Safe, Safety, Solid, Strip, Tape, Trap, Trappings

Kate is running full steam ahead, and shredding traditional photography along the way.

http://www.layflat.org/a-conversation-with-kate-steciw/
http://toomerlabzda.com/Site/kate_steciw_1.html

The layering and building of Kate’s individual pieces as well as her body of work brings to mind the amazing sculptor Diana Al-Hadid.

Diana Al-Hadid, At the Vanishing Point

Al-Hadid’s work is layered with references to art history, past cultures and architecture. She builds her pieces with modern construction materials- gypsum, aluminum, fiberglass- and yet they look as though they have evolved naturally, layer upon layer.

Diana Al-Hadid, Gradiva’s Fourth Wall

Diana Al-Hadid, Suspended After Image

I see in Al-Hadid’s work the same high level of energy and total commitment to the work. I also think that she is engaged with the history of sculpture and with pushing the medium forward while nodding with honor to the past.

http://www.marianneboeskygallery.com/artists/diana-al-hadid/works
http://www.art21.org/newyorkcloseup/artists/diana-al-hadid/

Two: Cutting, Bending, and Breaking the Photograph

I have a great interest in manipulating photographs beyond the two-dimensional print. This begins with abstracting images and extends to cutting, twisting and bending the photograph such that the viewer has a visceral relationship with it- engaging with the body, and not just the eyes.

Some artists who push the boundaries of the medium include Micah Danges, a Philadelphia-based artist who works in photography and sculpture. He literally cuts his Altered Landscape photographs to reveal bright colors hiding under the surface. They remind me of Emmit Gowin or Edward Burtynsky’s straight photographs of landscapes damaged by man.

Micah Danges, from Altered Landscapes

In other works, Micah transforms the photograph into an articulated sculpture.


Micah Danges, from A Few Corners

Soo Kim is another artist who scrapes and cuts the photograph, resulting in a filigreed layering of images. Her cityscapes are not only dexterous but conflate foreground with background, leaving the viewer to dip in and out of the image.

Soo Kim

Soo Kim, He looks in her direction, who is just disappearing

Gregory Michael Hernandez is another artist who makes photography flexible. He bends and shapes his prints into geometric objects, and includes site-specific work, documentation, sculpture and painting. Interior and exterior relationships invert, and the photograph as object is presented in the glass vitrine in a nod to the white cube, the museum, and Jeff Koons.

Gregory Michael Hernandez, Homestead with Landscape

Gregory Michael Hernandez, 110/105 Interchange

Anna Neighbor makes fascinating work rooted in photography but extending to sculpture, installation and video as ways of approaching visual problems. She makes a lot of great work, but I’ll feature the one image I can’t stop thinking about:


Anna Neighbor, Chewing on the Oldest Object in the Universe

It is hard to distinguish in the installation photograph, but it is an inkjet photograph of part of the solar system which the artist chewed, then pinned to the wall. It is an exuberant (or frustrated) example of physically engaging with the photograph, of controlling the medium, and of breaking the respect traditionally accorded with the perfect print.

First- 2D vs 3D

Two great artists who I have been thinking a lot about recently are Thomas Ruff and Sarah Oppenheimer. Both of these artists work with confounding our sense of dimensionality, one in two-dimensional photographs, one in “architectural intervention”.

Ruff’s recent exhibition ma.r.s. at David Zwirner actually blew my mind a little. Not because it was revolutionary or technically advanced, but because he made great use of photography as a medium. The first four photographs in the show were stereoscopic images of the surface of Mars taken by NASA, and when viewed with 3D glasses, a lovely 2D image of a 3D space becomes virtually 3D and gives you a completely different experience of the space, such that I, for one, had a visceral response. I felt transported- body in the gallery, mind and heart in outer space. It’s rare for me to really feel when in the presence of art, and it’s a valuable experience.

(Thomas Ruff, 3D-ma.r.s.08, 2013, Chromogenic print, 100 3/8 x 72 7/8 inches (255 x 185 cm), RUFTH0958)

(Thomas Ruff, 3D-ma.r.s.11, 2013, Chromogenic print, 100 3/8 x 72 7/8 inches (255 x 185 cm), RUFTH0961)

Then, Sarah Oppenheimer. She has a new and permanent installation in the Baltimore Museum of Art which admittedly plays with smoke and mirrors, but also transports the viewer. Her piece connects the second and third floors of the Museum and appears at first glance to be a two-dimensional piece on the wall. Upon further inspection, a sense of vertigo sets in when the viewer realizes that this is a portal, first of all, and a hall of mirrors second of all. The viewer can see surprising reflections of other visitors, the gallery spaces and artworks throughout the adjacent areas of the Museum.

As a photo-based artist myself, I think a lot about dimensions. Why make a two-dimensional photograph of a three-dimensional thing? Why not transform a photograph into a three-dimensional object? I do both. I like bending and shaping photographs into objects that can be experienced with the body as well as the eyes.

Introduction: Leigh Van Duzer

I am excited to get going here as the guest blogger for conceptplusobject for May 2013. I am a Philadelphia-based artist who works in photography and paper-cut sculptures.

You can see more of my work at leighvanduzer.com

In place of an artist’s statement, below is an excerpt from the best review of my work yet. Written by Alyssa Greenberg for the Philly-based theartblog.

“As a photographer, Van Duzer is a magpie, incorporating organic forms into landscapes and cutting archival prints into primal, evocative shapes. Her Photoshop creations are a digital filigree, mash-ups made from her own collection of photographs and photos found in the Library of Congress archives. A horse’s skull seems made of mountains, structural supports transformed into an abdomen; her works soothe and also generate a sense of adventure. Losing yourself in the works’ undulating details is a journey into worlds both internal and external. Van Duzer has an excellent sense of how to moderate all the textures she’s incorporated.”

Keep following throughout the month!!

Hwyl fawr! (Goodbye!)

(Envision Machine, 2011)

My month is up and I’ve enjoyed thinking and writing about some of the works and ideas that have had a big influence on me. It’s obviously been selective and I’ve tried to purposely avoid getting in to looong academic discussion, but I hope that by and large things made sense and there have at least been some elements that you have enjoyed reading/watching! Huge thanks to ConceptPlusObject for giving me this opportunity, and if anyone wants to chat further about anything I’ve posted, you can email me at cinemawork@mail.com.

Diolch yn fawr i chi am ddarllen. Hwyl am y tro.

Thank you very much for reading. Bye for now.

Jonathan

Move 10: Friedrich Nietzsche

I want the last space of my board to be taken up by Friedrich Nietzsche – an early and lasting influence on my thinking. I know that he is often still considered a controversial thinker, and is often dismissed by people who have read no more than the line ‘God is dead’ (often taken out of its context), but this does his work a real disservice as he was a profoundly life-affirming and creative thinker. His work was deeply rooted in a consideration of aesthetics, and I find his approach interesting because of the extremely broad definition of art that he propounds. For Nietzsche, art is creation in all its manifestations.

I often find myself disagreeing with Nietzsche (what better reason is there to read someone?), but it is this profoundly creative project of a ‘re-evaluation of values’ that captured my attention when I first read him. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he talks about breaking the ‘old law-tables’ to construct new ones, i.e. question everything. Is there a better lesson for an impressionable youngster?

This ‘re-evaluation of values’ is basically the essence of why I consider Nietzsche to be the philosopher of the aesthetic age, and his influence on Flusser is clear:

 All ethics, all ontology, all epistemology will be excluded from pictures, and it will become meaningless to ask whether something is good or bad, real or artificial, true or false, or even what it means. The only remaining question is what I can experience (aistheton, “experience”). (Vilem Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images)

Flusser often talks about this ‘pure aesthetic’ that exists in the ‘realm’ of images, and the need to establish new criteria for them (he even refers to this as a ‘re-evaluation of values’). According to Flusser, our current categories are meaningless and insufficient to properly critique the photographic image. The cinematic collage attempts to confront this by forcing cinema to enter a ‘zone of indifference where all genres tend to coincide, documentary and narrative, reality and fiction’ (to quote Agamben from the previous post). So, I’ve unintentionally come full circle and am ending with the questions that I posed at the beginning when discussing my work The Death of Affect. If we choose to take up the proposition that it is meaningless to label a photograph true, good or beautiful, what are the new criteria? And what of history, ethics and politics?