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Monday Artist // Gregory Green

“if some yahoo from Brooklyn, with no technical training, can do these things then anybody can do them.”

Gregory Green earned his MFA at the School of the arts Institute Chicago in 1984, after receiving his BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Ohio in 1981. Since then his work has focused on the idea that the possibility for chaos exists ever more greatly as the tools to make bombs, computer viruses and other such weapons is ever more available to the public. Throughout his career he and his work have been at the center of a storm wherever he is shown. In his piece "10,000 hits of acid" he reproduced what that would look like creating the chemical compound and providing the recipe with all but the key hallucinogenic compound. When authorities got word that some artist had manufactured 10,000 hits of acid his gallery director was arrested and Green went into hiding until the chemicals had been tested proving he had committed no crime. With no further technical training then any other average American he has gone on to create almost working reproductions of missiles, spy satellites, and nuclear weapons. His more recent work has focused on the idea of creating a country and annexing space including the home base of the gallery that represents his work for the country's embassy.

Thursday Idea blog #10 FIne Print

In discussing my most recent developments with paul I have decided to include fine print in the bottom left or bottom center of each photograph in 10 or 12 point font.
from the wiki

The larger print that is used in conjunction with fine print is ingenuously used by the merchant to, in effect, deceive the consumer into believing the offer is more advantageous than it really is, via a legal technicality which requires full disclosure of all (even unfavorable) terms or conditions, but does not specify the manner (size, typeface, coloring, etc.) of disclosure.
Fine print often says the opposite of what the larger print says. For example, if the larger print says "pre-approved" the fine print will say "subject to approval." [1] Especially in pharmaceutical advertisements, fine print may accompany a warning message, but this message is often neutralized by the more eye-catching positive images and pleasant background music (eye candy). Sometimes, television advertisements will flash text fine print in camouflagic colors, and for notoriously brief periods of time, making it difficult for the viewer to read.
The use of fine print has become a standard method of advertising in certain industries, particularly those selling a higher-priced product or service, or a specialty item not found on the mainstream market, or involving a signed contract. The practice, for example, can be used to mislead the consumer in reference to an item's price, its value, or the nutritional content of a food product.[2]

The use of small print as seen above often directly contradicts the statements of the advertising offering full disclosure of conditions, terms, true cost and side effects. In pursuing the often negative relationship we have with advertising, fashion and participation in our consumer environment i believe the inclusion of fine print in my works to be a missing piece that has been eluding me for some time now. The relationship between the large "free with purchase" text and the fine print offers along with the image of oppression a direct link to the subject matter being considered. I intend to gather fine print from advertising over the next week before Black friday to add direct text to the photos i'm manufacturing. By including real text from advertising i feel that i am able to step out of an editorial role and better allow the viewer to consider the work without bashing them over the head with an overly revealing text in fine print.

Francis Cape Artist Lecture

Two of the above images represent the current installation titled "Waterline" currently on exhibit in VCU's Anderson gallery.

This lecture by sculptor Francis Cape began with one of his last graduate works involving cardboard boxes arranged on palettes concerning the transport of goods and their delivery methods equalized by the often present containers. His back ground is in wood work and fine restoration of several hundred year old wood work in his native England. Cape spent sometime discussing how we see and go through the process of seeing to sharing what we have seen as artists. Through his work with historic structures a key component of his work is the idea of the transience of objects. In the work Waterline and several other works within a similar vein he presents wood reproductions of the mass made "utilitarian furniture catalogue" a series of home furniture and storage pieces produced within England during world war II paired against photographs from Post Katrina New Orleans. In his piece Waterline the waynescoat represents the waterline found in the middle class neighborhoods he was shooting in. More images form Katrina and the waterline referred to in the installation are framed and hung above about head height. He works seeks to comment on the universality of the destruction caused by Katrina, it did not only happen to the most poor or the most rich but ot everyone within it's landfall.

Lecture Mary Scurlock, Diego Sanchez at the Page Bond Gallery

Mary Scurlock


Deigo Sanchez


Page Bond Gallery Nov. 17th 2009

Mary Scurlock
This work By Mary Scurlock represents a departure from her past works on paper. Working on paper for most of the past 25 years she had considered using panels but had never really explored their potential until now. She works on these panels by applying 5 or 6 layers of gesso then sanding and scratching back into the panels. Through out her process she adds layers of wax in with the oil paint and further develops the surface by way of automatic writing. Another aspect of these works is her use of a much more muted color palette. Her past worked was marked by brighter colors as well as a larger range of media used in developing her work. the images of trees follow a pattern of drawing from life and then moving in a direction more representative than realistic. She intends to continue working with these tree images and in this new direction.

Diego Sanchez
For the most part the work by Deigo Sanchez does not represent a departure from his past works. Still presenting images of the Colosseum, he has begun to add images of chairs found left out to the garbage as well as overpasses in an effort to uplift the locations and items in question to the level of importance represented by the Colosseum. His color palette is bright and his obsession with the surfaces of the work is clear as he invited the audience to touch and feel the paintings. In his process he paints complete back grounds and after considering the space decides on an images to paint over it. Additionally he paints no representational objects over the near completed works to slow the viewers assessment of the painting hoping to bring the viewer to consider the work in all of its complexity.

Monday Artist BLog// Leonard Freed

“The concerned photographer finds much in the present unacceptable which he tries to alter. Our goal is simply to let the world also know why it is unacceptable.”
--Cornell Capa (b. 1918), photographer

Freed was one of five photographers selected by Cornell Capa to shoot for and be shown in the "concerned photography" Exhibition. Freed was a long time member of magnum working in the documentary mode.

shown above is the cover of and one photo graph selection from Freed's photo series and book titled "police work". This book came 12 years after Freed's more famous work "black In White America", which had him documenting the "African American struggle for self definition in mid 20th-century America." Like many other of the magnum photography members the majority of his work following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other struggles for civil rights as well as photographing in Berlin around the cold war and the construction of the wall was through the lens of social documentary for with the goal of social justice.

SHIMON ATTIE LECTURE

I really really enjoyed the Shimon Attie lecture on Wednesday. This year's lectures have proven to be the best series of lectures i've seen in the 4 and half years of art lectures i've attended at the school.

Since leaving grad school in 1991 Attie and completed between 20-25 major works in places as disparate as Berlin, New York, Copenhagen and Amber Van. The first images shown to us were of his series of projections in Berlin circa 1991. Just several years after the fall of the Berlin wall Attie plunged into research looking for street maps and archive photos of former Jewish places of residence and businesses pre- holocaust. He went on to project these images on top of the existing structures or approximately in the same locations. The powerful images join the world of the past and disappeared with the often crumbing architecture of the time. THis work takes the images of these locations and places the visual memory of the past in the context of the current landscape.

He went on to show images constructed into light boxes that were then lowered into the Copenhagen canals. these images which show a selection of photos mixing current refugees with images of the rescued Jews of Denmark layered against images of water borne craft uses the juxtaposition of past heroism against current social ills as an active challenge to the social policies in denmark concerning immigration and refugee assistance.
I find Attie's work to be interesting as it often engages with social history and current social issues in the same work joining our memory of the past or lack there of to the current situation in a way often challenging the viewer to consider the links and to become informed about the contrast of ideas.

Attie finished his lecture showing images and video from two projects both involving still subjects on moving platforms giving both motion and stillness to the subject matter. Using a similar process in both works Attie pursues different ends with each project. in one the project exists as a way to help the community of Amber Van to reclaim their identity alongside other Welsh towns and away from being constantly defined by the mining disaster that claimed the lives of some hundred of the town's children. In the other the memory of a racetrack is illustrated through the sites artifacts and persons who were drivers, regulars and technicians associated with the site.

Contest Entry #2

REDUX CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER
http://www.reduxstudios.org/exhibitions/apply.html
general exhibition application

Monday Artist BLog// Carrie Mae Weems

will fill in soon!(willbe edited with txt i promise this s just a place holder )
http://www.30americans.com/Artist/Carrie_Mae_Weems/1.html

Contest Entry #1

“3rd Annual Naturally Nude”
Application Deadline January 22nd 2010

Ciao Gallery of Jackson, Wyoming is pleased the opportunity to participate in our 3rd annual “Naturally Nude”, an exhibition of exceptional nudes. This show is open to all artists in any mediums. Traditional renderings as well as unique interpretations. This exhibition opening takes place on Valentine's day eventing and has become one of our most popular events for the gallery.

THursday Idea blog #9

new artist statement.
i think a really helpful piece of the process to figuring out where my project is at has been having to write a new artist statement for the project to be presented after the midterm at the research presentation. It absolutely needs some cleaning up but i do feel that it has helped ot form solidify the new ideas of the continuing project.

The concept of my work is to create images that hijack the visual language of fashion photography in an effort to explore the relationship between consumers and the social and economic situation in which they act. The experience of economic coercion reaches every person that engages in the western consumer landscape both directly and indirectly. Foucault suggests that our internal relationship to coercion leads us to desire the ability to coerce. Advertising has a long tradition of working towards controlling the choices of consumers and in turn western economic powers have a history of exploiting those who produce goods. In participating in the current consumer environment the consumer is complicit in this exploitation. The youth obsessed world of fashion photography and the advertising it produces seeks to create a mental environment of desire in the viewer, thus moving the consumer to desire the objectified contents of the advertising and while asking them to engage with a system of coercion that produces the objects featured.

In pursuit of my concept I have created images that seek to use the visual language of youth targeted fashion advertising to suggest the coercive relationship that forms as a result of participation in the current economic environment that produces the goods to be sold to those youth targeted by these ads. The elements of the consumer object, the coercive object and the objectified person form a visual language that I hope will bring the viewer to question the relationship of the objects pictured and lead them to examine their relationship to those interactions.

Monday Artist BLOG // Liu Bolin

Liu Bolin
" In my photography, historical statues, costumes and architecture become symbols of that which confines us. I am expressing the desire to break through these structures. I portray subjects that seem to disappear into these structures and become transparent. The subject is released from social constructs and he is free."
from the artist statement

In the images Liu Bolin produces he makes himself become part of the back ground. the back grounds he chooses are of special significance as they embody aspects of the communist specter. trains, graffiti of mao's statements construction equipment and the pedestals of great statues never constructed form the objects with which he blends in.

It is the specter of communism that keeps the work of artists like Liu Bolin Underground to some extent. havign had his studio shut down he makes work that is both a commentary on his outsider status and feelings toward society as well as creating material images of protest against the state that surpresses his aciton.

Monday Artist BLOG // Richard Kern

Richard kern
(from the wiki)
Richard Kern (born 1954 in North Carolina) is a New York underground filmmaker, writer and photographer. He first came to underground prominence as part of the underground cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films featuring underground personalities of the time such as Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Sonic Youth, Kembra Pfahler, and Henry Rollins in movies like "The Right Side of My Brain" and "Fingered." Like many of the musicians around him, Kern had a deep interest in the aesthetics of extreme sex, violence, and perversion and was one of the leading lights of Nick Zedd's coined Cinema of Transgression.

Kern is now a photographer featured in every VICE magazine. a section called "shot by kern" regularly appears in both video and still form on VICE magazine's website.

In searching for the right color palette to add just the right amount of flash and saturation to my photographs i've been looking at photographers like Kern and McGinley its important for me to try and find the best of the photographers that ride the line between fine art and commercial work and the artists that exist in both worlds. while Kern is more known for his erotic and nude works i feel that he is recognized by the same realms as McGinley, so much so as he is featured in one of the best known fashion and youth targeted culture magazines. I've also been looking for clues as to how to more appropriately light the photographs and am leaning toward the soft whites and golden magic hour colors. maybe shooting with a flash bouncing off of a gold reflector would be most appropriate.

thursday Idea blog #8

I will definitely be reshooting for the final. while i may use a few images from my previous shoots i will be refining my process to include a tripod to secure a specific vantage point. i want that vantage point to be from slightly above and down the point of view of the person arresting the subject as opposed to the more straight on near ground level shots i've been taking. something cin between the images included at the top of this post. I think if i am making it more about the relationship to the consumer it should include slightly more about the consumer and if its relating to fashion photography i should also include more of the subject while still leaving the identity exposed only by way of the objects and materials they are wearign and choosing to show the world as their outward appearance.

Artist Blog Ryan McGinley

What interests me about Ryan McGinley's photographs in relation to my project is the often warm yet unsaturated tones of his color palette. While sometimes he will go about employing a cooler color palette such as in the wrangler ads they are always tones that are without specific spark bright flashy color. I chose to show the pictures above due to the fact that his fine art photos more often than not feature persons who are mostly naked if not sparsely dressed.

not only do i enjoy his color palette and wish to employ it further in my own, i also feel an affinity with his working method. Specifically in the project, i know where the summer goes.

“It’s really a world–you have to remember that. People look at photographs and believe them as truth and they always will. People look at my photographs and think this is real–this life exists. Even if they know that it doesn’t”

[S]kateboarding is a lot like photography because skateboarding is about making something out of nothing. You’re using the urban landscape as a playground and you’re making ideas for doing skateboard tricks–using a handrail or some yellow curb on the sidewalk–and photography is about the same thing for me [ . . . ] You have to sort of create these scenarios to shoot, these ideas to work, and you have to use the world as the backdrop for your photograph.

i like this quote as he refers to a similar working mode as my own. rearranging reality into fantastic situation that do not exist too far from the truth that speak to specific experiences.

from a Time magazine article speaking mostly to the youth centered nature of his work.
"Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley's is about freezing a stage in a lifetime. Young and beautiful is as fleeting as a camera snap--and thus all the more worth preserving."

i think it is worth noting how while he has only done a few print ads they work in the same way as his fine art works. youth centered and obsessed, illustrating an emotional state of being a young adult. there is no shift in the subject matter the fine art works the same as the advertising seeking creating attractive objects and an attractive situation all manufactured in the same method as you would find an advertising shoot executed.