All Things Art & Photography
All you need to know about every different photographic process before digital can now be found in this labor of love titled, The Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes. There is a reason they call it an Atlas… Brought to you by the very smart folks at the Getty Conservation Institute.
via http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/atlas.html
The Atlas of Photographic Processes
March means it’s Month of Photography in Denver and my Animalis Images will be on view at Visions West Gallery along with Nine Francois.
“Messengers and Promises is inspired by John Berger’s essay Why Look at Animals. In the last few centuries animals have been gradually disappearing from contemporary life. We live without them and mostly apart from nature. Animals first entered the human imagination as sacred, as messengers and promises. There was a spiritual quality to them. Our ancestors fueled their imaginations with animals and animals offered explanations to many things in the world. Today, animals and the natural world have a ghostly presence in most lives around the globe.”
Exhibition: Messengers and Promises
Anyone in a Fine Arts program in the last 3 decades would eventually have came across the work of Barbara Kasten. Seeing her work for the first time taught me that a photograph could be so much more than just a document. Part performance, sculpture, still life and abstraction – her work blends varied traditions from multiple mediums. There are many who have explored photography this way but they all owe Kasten a nod for mining this territory so well and thoroughly.
This is the first retrospective of her work at ICA and not to be missed.
Barbara Kasten: Stages is the first major survey of the work of artist Barbara Kasten. Widely recognized for her photographs, since the 1970s Kasten has developed her expansive practice through the lens of many different disciplines, including sculpture, painting, theater, textile, and installation. Spanning her nearly five-decade engagement with abstraction, light, and architectonic form, this exhibition situates Kasten’s practice within current conversations around sculpture and photography. Kasten’s interest in the interplay between three- and two-dimensional forms, her engagement with staging and the role of the prop, her cross-disciplinary process, and her new approaches to abstraction and materiality are all intensely relevant to the present artistic moment, resulting in a new generation of artists who have drawn inspiration from Kasten’s aesthetic and method.
Kasten’s work has roots in the unique and provocative intersection of Bauhaus-influenced pedagogy in the US, the California Light and Space movement, and postmodernism. Taking its cue from the multiple ways in which Kasten herself has staged her work, both in the studio and on site, the exhibition makes links between her more well-known photographic series of studio constructions and architectural interventions and her earliest fiber sculptures, mixed media works, cyanotype prints, and forays into set design. In addition, Kasten will create a new site-specific installation in the ICA galleries.
Organized by Alex Klein, the Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE’60) Program Curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication that includes a biography of the artist, new scholarly essays by the curator as well as by art historians Alex Kitnick and Jenni Sorkin, and a conversation between Kasten and artist Liz Deschenes.
via ICA and barbarakasten.net
Exhibition: Barbara Kasten at ICA
As the year draws to a close and most are listing their top 10 lists for 2014 I will leave you with what I think is one of the most profound works I have seen this past year. Part document and part performance piece, Simon Norfolk travels to Africa for the NYTimes to photograph the slow disappearance of Lewis Glacier on Mount Kenya due to the profound effects of global warming. His solution to depicting this reality of our world (quickly reaching the point of no return) is both poetic, beautiful and unnerving as he outlines the receding glacier by long exposure while carrying a torch. His description below says it all…
…”The mountain didn’t seem overwhelming or otherworldly now, but rather broken and vulnerable. As Norfolk worked, he could hear meltwater rushing down the glacier’s flanks. Standing next to that ice field, he says, was like standing next to “the exhausted remains of something that was once glorious.” He thought of nature documentaries, of scenes in which, say, a bull elephant is tranquilized by a researcher and crumples on the ground. “You can approach it now, because it’s safe,” Norfolk says. “But you feel its desperateness, as if it is opening one eye and looking back at you, saying, ‘What have you done to me?’ ”…
Simon Norfolk: The Best Photograph of 2014
The passing of one of the great photographic visual intellects who influenced a generation (and will continue to do so). As a Philadelphia local and international star Ray will be missed by so many.
He once said his goal was “a unique way of seeing,” one in which “new eyes replaced the old.” Ray did this repeatedly over the course of his long and amazing career. No one on the planet has the photographic visual acuity of Ray Metzker. He is completely unique in this respect. This is why so many of his works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (not to mention at least 20 other Museums). In the history of photography he will always remain a singular artist that truly did invent a new way of seeing.
Rest in Peace Ray. Job well done!
(Nice piece today remembering him in the NY Times here).
Ray K. Metzker 1931- 2014
