Lori Waxman wrote a very thoughtful review of the show at the MOCP, which appeared in last Friday's paper (8/21/09). Here it is:
Television, Nature and the News, Mediated
We live in a heavily mediatized world. Twitter keeps a running commentary on everything, e-mail and Skype encompass communication, video games replace physical play and nature herself is known through TV series like the BBC's "Planet Earth" rather than direct observation. Most of this feels obligatory and completely normal by now, not a choice but simply the way we live today, watching while the world is delivered to our screens via pixels.
But what if these mediated levels of reality were themselves subject to mediation? What if, instead of receiving them passively, we could make or re-make them ourselves?
"MP3 II: Curtis Mann, John Opera, Stacia Yeapanis" at the Museum of Contemporary Photography presents three very different answers to these questions. Art has always been about making and remaking the world through individual human perspectives, and the three emerging local photographers in this exhibition bring that role up to date.
Mann takes as his subject matter and base material one of the most ubiquitous documents of our time: the digital photograph. Culled from online auctions, photo-sharing Web sites and estate sales, these images are nevertheless not the stuff of family photo albums, but rather global news: pictures from a refugee camp in Kenya, a checkpoint in Palestine, an unnamed location in Israel, another in Beirut. The sites, identified in the works' titles, conjure breaking stories of humanitarian crises, rocket launches, security walls and endless ethnic conflict.
Mann works via a subtractive process, removing information from found images until they metamorphose into alternate landscapes replete with new tragedies and strange allegories. He does this in a three-step process, by first applying varnish to the parts of photographs he wishes to retain, then bleaching out the rest and finally adding a few faint pencil lines. What results are pictures of surreal color fields, strangely isolated people and utter violence -- burned-out skies, mutilated bodies, blasted buildings. Even the photo paper sustains injury, scraped to the point of rawness. The effect, when it works, is moving and paradoxical, as if photos of these places can't escape their combination of beauty and suffering, even when half their visual data is obliterated. When it occasionally doesn't, bad digital paintings result.
Yeapanis tackles far more plebeian stuff in her ongoing series "Everybody Hurts," in which popular television dramas provide the source material for meticulously embroidered screen shots of characters like Fox Mulder and Buffy Summers. Caught in dramatic close-ups, their familiar faces radiate seriousness, fear and concern. Meanwhile, the translation from pixel grid to cross-stitch sampler goes seamlessly, down to the stitched-on sayings. From David Fisher, the HBO undertaker: "Why is this happening to me?" From Buffy, the teenage vampire slayer: "They say if you think you're crazy, you're probably not, but I just don't know anymore." The whole provides a kind of home sweet home for today, testifying to a new kind of common ground, as well as to the comfort of vicarious living, even at the level of painful experiences.
Vicarious living occurs at another level entirely in the computer game "The Sims 2," which forms the basis for Yeapanis' multipart project "My Life as a Sim." But while the possibilities for digital life seem to promise an endless array of fantasies, the extraordinary finds little place in the segment "Life Isn't Bliss. Life Is Just This. It's Living." Yeapanis' character cleans the toilet, sits on the couch, eats a sandwich, runs on a treadmill and has the occasional breakdown. Alas, Yeapanis' life as a Sim proves just as boring and familiar as most. Monumentalizing it as art seems more collusion than critique, a succumbing to ordinary life as just that, ordinary.
Except it isn't -- or at least, it needn't be. Opera proves as much in his nature photographs of swarming birds, a small waterfall, a frozen stream, an expanse of boulders, a broken tree limb and various stumps. More or less unremarkable, none of these organic situations seems to warrant photographic documentation -- and yet each of them stands up to it, and how.
Some do so through sublime effect: The birds, countless white specks against a black sky, humble the viewer in their twinkling expanse. A few are wondrous: The stumps rise phoenix-like from snowy forest and hazy pond. Others are comic: An unattractively open-mouthed young man mars a sea of boulders, but also gives them a sense of scale. Still others are just plain strange: A golden fire burns from within a stereotypically picturesque waterfall.
Nowhere, however, is nature represented nonchalantly or plainly. Through sensitive and imaginative observation, Opera finds the extraordinary in the ordinary -- or rather, he locates the potential for it to emerge through photographic representation. The birds are printed as a negative, the stump solarized, the fire a rare geological phenomenon framed by a mundane Kodak moment.
Human perception -- active, curious, bodily -- is everywhere implicated, and the world is the better for it.
-Lori Waxman
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
today on artnet
Waiting to see Pedro Velez's mention of the MOCP on Artnet. Not up yet, but read this posted by Charlie Finch. Brilliant and dark.
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
by Charlie Finch
Don’t look now, but another art season is upon us and also the end of another art decade. It has been a decade bracketed by 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama, and, in our corner, by art world market dominance and deep insecurity.
For the art world the beginning ten years of the new millennium can be branded The Synthetic Decade, a dual meaning of artificiality and synthesis. Paradigms of identity, subject matter, instant communication and materials exploded all over the planet, to the point where notions of "movements," "styles" and "trends" became meaningless. The late Jason Rhoades is the most symbolic creator in this matrix, a man constantly enveloping one culture over another in his chaotic installations.
Indeed, chaotic installations are now the marker of biennales and whatever art fairs are left, yet, they are essentially the last gasp of studio materialism, for they have been overtaken by the seamless projection of imagery in cyberspace. The internet is awash with blogs which thrust toilet roll continuums of images at us in an orgy of delight. One can assemble a "collection" at the behest of one’s printer, slapping on the bathroom wall high quality images that would have been the envy of photographers just a generation ago.
This cyberimage proliferation has the immediate potential of obviating the need for "galleries" or "objects," because the gallery is on the screen in front of you and, in bad economic times, the competition to own objects becomes culturally vulgar. The only real threat to the Internet as the new main strip of art watching, the same Internet which is destroying newspapers, the music industry and television as plutocratic moneymaking portals, is the dirty little secret that the Internet is a centralized machine controlled by the state. The state is not benign and giving it our trust as the highway of ideas is problematic bordering on suicidal.
As sure as sin is alive in the world, a crackdown will come and it will arise out of the necessity of governments to suck the last farthing out of every one of us. When a jury in Massachusetts cooperates with Big Media to soak $675,000 out of some cyberstoners for downloading four songs, we have a real reason to worry. The logical end of the new tyranny is artists in caves scrawling on stones.
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
by Charlie Finch
Don’t look now, but another art season is upon us and also the end of another art decade. It has been a decade bracketed by 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama, and, in our corner, by art world market dominance and deep insecurity.
For the art world the beginning ten years of the new millennium can be branded The Synthetic Decade, a dual meaning of artificiality and synthesis. Paradigms of identity, subject matter, instant communication and materials exploded all over the planet, to the point where notions of "movements," "styles" and "trends" became meaningless. The late Jason Rhoades is the most symbolic creator in this matrix, a man constantly enveloping one culture over another in his chaotic installations.
Indeed, chaotic installations are now the marker of biennales and whatever art fairs are left, yet, they are essentially the last gasp of studio materialism, for they have been overtaken by the seamless projection of imagery in cyberspace. The internet is awash with blogs which thrust toilet roll continuums of images at us in an orgy of delight. One can assemble a "collection" at the behest of one’s printer, slapping on the bathroom wall high quality images that would have been the envy of photographers just a generation ago.
This cyberimage proliferation has the immediate potential of obviating the need for "galleries" or "objects," because the gallery is on the screen in front of you and, in bad economic times, the competition to own objects becomes culturally vulgar. The only real threat to the Internet as the new main strip of art watching, the same Internet which is destroying newspapers, the music industry and television as plutocratic moneymaking portals, is the dirty little secret that the Internet is a centralized machine controlled by the state. The state is not benign and giving it our trust as the highway of ideas is problematic bordering on suicidal.
As sure as sin is alive in the world, a crackdown will come and it will arise out of the necessity of governments to suck the last farthing out of every one of us. When a jury in Massachusetts cooperates with Big Media to soak $675,000 out of some cyberstoners for downloading four songs, we have a real reason to worry. The logical end of the new tyranny is artists in caves scrawling on stones.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Museum of Contemporary Photography
My exhibition at the MOCP officially opens next Friday the 17th, but it seems that the show will be on view starting Monday the 13th. Please check it out if you are in Chicago.
It was difficult deciding what to put in the show—I had to exclude some personal favorites. I finally settled on 13 images, including a new picture from this year that not many have seen.
Karsten Lund, the Collections Research Fellow, curated a small show on the third floor that accompanies the three solo exhibitions from the MP3 II project.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of my former professors from SUNY New Paltz, Francois Deschamps, is included. What’s even better is that Karsten was unaware of my personal connection with Francois. Full circle moment…..
It was difficult deciding what to put in the show—I had to exclude some personal favorites. I finally settled on 13 images, including a new picture from this year that not many have seen.
Karsten Lund, the Collections Research Fellow, curated a small show on the third floor that accompanies the three solo exhibitions from the MP3 II project.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of my former professors from SUNY New Paltz, Francois Deschamps, is included. What’s even better is that Karsten was unaware of my personal connection with Francois. Full circle moment…..
Sunday, April 19, 2009
MP3 Volume II
I am fortunate enough to be included in the upcoming MP3 II book project published jointly between the Aperture Foundation in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. The other two artists participating in the project are none other than Curtis Mann, and one of my former classmates from SAIC, Stacia Yeapanis. The books are available starting May 2. The three-volume set is somewhat a strange marriage of strategies—all three of us are operating in pretty disparate worlds of thought—although I think that’s a good thing. We are after all, living in the age of pluralism…and blogging.
All three of us will be at ART CHICAGO on May 2, signing our books and hanging out at Aperture’s booth. I believe the three photographers from the first volume will be there too. See you there.
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