By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

Continuing the discourse on photography’s place in the fine arts, photo l.a. provides dealers from around the globe a platform for the exhibition of vintage masterworks, contemporary photography, as well as video and multimedia installations. This exciting juxtaposition creates the character that is photo l.a.

Over the last couple decades, photo l.a. has exhibited more than 300 galleries, private dealers and publishers, as well as presented more than 150 lectures and collecting seminars to the public. The continued effort to create a dynamic experience for photo l.a. patrons has not only increased a very loyal fan base, but has attracted over 11,000 interested collectors, curators and dealers of photography annually.

photo l.a. will once again host the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as the beneficiary for the opening night preview reception on January 12, 2012 from 6 - 9pm.

In addition to the continuation of the lectures, panels, book signings, and special installations, photo l.a. is pleased to announce Salon de Tableaux, an area of tabletop presentations showcasing vintage, vernacular and unique photography. Also, photo l.a. is proud to introduce photoBOOK - a forum with guest reviewers offering feedback to photographers on their book proposals.

Speakers, Roundtables and Panels

photo l.a. 2012 offers a full schedule of rountables and panel discussions with speakers and panelists such as:

Walead Beshty, Ezrha Jean Black, Stephen Cohen, Eileen Cowin, Darryl Curran, Shana Nys Dambrot, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Charlotte Dumas, Dr. Charlotte Eyerman, David Fahey, Russell Ferguson, Michael Fried, Ken Gonzales-Day, Manfred Heiting, Jeffrey Henson Scales, Lee Kaplan, Kristine McKenna, Willie Middlebrook, Moby, Weston Naef, Catherine Opie, Ed Panar, Sheila Pinkel, Chris Pichler, Charles Ray, Dennis Reed, Stephen Reinstein, Stephen Shore, Karen Sinsheimer, Mike Slack, Stanley Smith, James Welling, Colin Westerbeck, Tim B. Wride, and Lloyd Ziff.

A few of the roundtables, book signings and installations include:

• photoBOOK review 
• Photography Book Roundtable 
• Collecting Photographs: Public & Private Collections 
• Vivian Maier, Street Photographer: A Conversation 
• Photographers of the Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative

For more information and to purchase tickets click here

Location
Santa Monica Civic Auditorium
1855 Main Street
Santa Monica, CA 90401-3209
www.santamonicacivic.org

Opening Night Gala hosted by Moby
With Guest DJ Aaron Byrd (KCRW)
Thursday, January 12, 2012 6pm - 9pm
Benefiting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for programming at the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography.
For tickets click here

By   Sun, Jan 08, 2012

Highlighted by the first presentation of Divola’s large-scale Gigapan images, the exhibition will also display works from the artist’s As Far as I Could Get series, as well as a selection of work from a series not previously exhibited, Subject Observations. In conjunction with Divola’s early works currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art and LAXART, Notes on the Observer casts a tracing view to the present, bridging the decades-long concerns of time, place, and the effective manipulation of the captured image central to Divola’s practice.

Throughout his career, Divola’s work has been an address to how photography, as a medium seemingly static in its portrayal of momentary reality, can be realized. Often, as in his Vandalism and Zuma series from the 1970s, it is a reduction of the viewpoint to a particular staging of light and the painted interventions. The specified view that Divola offers in Vandalism is then two-fold in meaning: a highlighting of a past action as it is a finished image of photography. In this regard, Divola’s Gigapans makes the index of timed duration an equivalent figure to himself in the self-portraits. By using the robotic camera base and software to stitch multiple time-lapsed, discrete images into a single massive unified image, these works portray an uncanny, subtle strangeness. Light shifts in blocks of movements, in accordance to the tens of minutes it takes for the Gigapan to finish rendering. Divola, either sitting impassively in his lawn chair or staring from the hilltop through binoculars, remains figuratively unchanged through it all: Divola is sublimated into the nature of the stage. It is photography as a performative event.

Also on view is a key series from the 1990s, As Far as I Could Get. Like the Gigapans, these works are embedded in the act of performance. Divola runs from his camera set on a self-timer at 10 seconds, generating multiple shots from varying areas of urbanity and outskirts of civilization. The attitude of self-portrait is blurred with activity; it is at once a gesture of an event finishing as it is that of Divola following the self-imposed rule of capturing himself in the series. The performance of this work is reduced into a figurative focus in the little-seen Subject Observations series also on display. Using archived stereo negatives from the Keystone-Mast Collection housed at the UCR California Museum of Photography, Divola focuses a circular exposure upon the human element in the photograph, highlighting their presence in the field. The effect is a Cartesian dilemma: you are here – though as to no reason why. They are lone players magnified by Divola’s reworking of the image, into an altogether new agency.

John Divola has had numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including currently in the Pacific Standard Time exhibition John Divola: Vandalism at LAXART and Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Divola’s works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; among many others. Divola has been a Professor of Art at the University of California at Riverside since 1988.

By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

This Special Exhibition will showcase Maier’s wide range of images, from her wonderfully inspired self-portraits, and architectural views to her street portraits from New York, Chicago, and other cities, which document post-war America of the 1950s and 60s.

Obscure until her work's recent discovery in abandoned storage lockers, Vivian Maier worked as a nanny in Chicago from the mid 1950s.  Born in New York and spending part of her youth in France, Maier traveled widely in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

The black-and-white images document Maier’s unconditional interest in the human figure set against a diverse and ever-changing urban culture.  Her images are clearly of their time, and it appears that Maier may have been influenced by the work of some of her well-know peers, whose photographs were being exhibited during the period that she was photographing.

The exhibition will highlight contemporary prints made by Chicago master printer Ron Gordon, and Sandy Steinbrecher from original negatives in the collection of Jeffrey Goldstein.  Maier’s images have been exhibited in Chicago, Germany, and Norway, and are currently on view at the Hearst Corporation in New York.  She has been the subject of media coverage from CBS, BBC, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and many others.

Running concurrently at Merry Karnowski Gallery is Vivian Maier: A Life Discovered, a collection of photographs unearthed by John Maloof in 2007 at a local auction house in Chicago.

By   Sun, Jan 08, 2012

"Spending months on a 40-foot long technical nightmare for the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture started me thinking about ... working with texture and dimension. I felt that I had mastered the 2-D image and that it was time to move on to something new." Taking her inspiration from film noir of the 40's and 50's and German Expressionism, Helen K. Garber's work is evocative of the minimal black and white cinematic style. Garber uses an encaustic process to adhere her vintage negatives, printed on handmade papers, to reclaimed and salvaged wood scraps found locally in her local Ocean Park Historic District neighborhood and to finish with a fresh coating of beeswax and twine sourced locally from an old independent Venice shop. In this series, Garber has artistically found a way to reinvent her photographic library into work that is entirely new, with stronger, descriptive and expressive qualities.

This is Garber's second show with dnj Gallery. In the 2010 group exhibition, "Night Lights," her series of photographs, "Venice/Venezia," was included. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with her most recent exhibition held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin Ireland. Garber's work can be found in numerous museum collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the George Eastman House International Museum of Film & Photography in Rochester, NY and the Brooklyn Museum. Garber resides in Santa Monica and maintains a studio on Ocean Front Walk at Venice Beach, CA.

dnj Gallery will also showcase a collection of vintage noir photography by artists Brassai, Paul Almasy, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Maurice Georges Chanu, Robert Doisneau, Andre Kertesz, Jean Prevel, Geza Vandor and Sabine Weiss. Each vintage print is rare, highly collectible and selected to showcase Paris by night. Images portray from high society, the intellectuals, the ballet, the grand operas, as well as scenes from the dark, bleak side of Paris. Brassai once wrote that: "he used photography in order to capture the beauty of streets and gardens in the rain and fog, and to capture Paris by night." His iconic images, and those of his colleagues, have defined the Paris mystique.

This exhibition helps to kick off NoirFest Santa Monica 2012,  a cross-discipline arts festival celebrating the subject of Noir as a unfying theme.

For more information about NoirFest Santa Monica 2012 and a complete calendar of events click here.

By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

Gusmano Cesaretti's photographs of this era celebrated a sub-culture that had rarely been captured before. The exhibition includes twenty-four vintage, unique prints that have recently been discovered and will be shown for the first time in Los Angeles.

An Italian immigrant who moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s, Cesaretti quickly became fascinated by East Los Angeles. Inspired by the colors, people and graffiti that populated the East Side, he began to capture the vulnerability and uncensored quality of this area. Always honest when shooting his subjects, Cesaretti presents them as they are: violent, loving, confident, scared, full of life. It is this energy and conflict inherent in those who occupy the edges of society that drives his photographic investigations.

By   Fri, Jan 06, 2012

Best known for his legendary poster for the 1964 blockbuster surf film The Endless Summer and his album covers for the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, and The Grateful Dead's Skeletons in the Closet among others, John Van Hamersveld has built up a wide-ranging body of work over a career verging on its sixth decade. The iconography of his oeuvre runs deep.

Primarily known as an illustrator and designer, Van Hamersveld has been photographing for many years: “The concept of the camera as not just a piece of technology, but as a tool for visual poetry proved inspirational.” Beginning in 1974, there were a series of shows of Van Hamersveld’s photography. In 1975, Van Hamersveld exhibited T.V.LIFE. at the Fisher Gallery at USC and in 1976, another set of photos at Long Beach Museum's Bicentennial show So Cal 76. T.V. LIFE brings together this photography collection covering an important 15 year period of Van Hamersveld’s Los Angeles experiences. But it is the broader sweep of reflection that is revealed through these photographs that serves as a mirror of the social revolution in his life as an artist and of the times they capture.

By A. Moret   Fri, Jan 06, 2012

Self-taught American photographer Seth Taras carefully describes his pictures as falling more into “strains” than a “series,” thus the distinction reflects a familiar arterial line of inspiration which flows through works taken across many years and around the globe.  Whether the subjects are opulent interiors, studies of found objects on the street, or candid and often times voyeuristic profiles of beautiful people basking in the comfort of their own flesh, the photographs resist ever feeling as though they are landscapes, portraits, or street scenes rather are connected by a common “strain” of the artist’s own fascination.  The narrative for the photographs after they are taken as Taras explains he “didn’t start out creating pictures with any pretenses of conclusions.”  Documenting urbanity through an unflinching lens Taras does not aim to “capture people or environments as they naturally appear but rather ‘accurately’ interpret what the experience felt like.”  The visceral interpretation, which Taras describes in “Horizontal and Vertical Environs” where lavish interiors, vacant cathedrals, and human forms like a biker seated on a chopper are constrained within the narrow perimeters of the frame.  The scenes of urban and natural life are compressed and distorted which demands that the viewer adjust their perspective.  Taras speaks to the encroaching perimeters as a “measure of distortion inherent in some of my cameras the bend of perspective.”  He continues to admit that he is “less interested in visual ‘accuracy’ and more concerned with harmonizing the various elements to achieve an ideal in the frame by constraining chaos.” 

In a moment marked by digital photography Seth Taras follows in the tradition of using film.  Born into a family of creatives (his grandfather worked as an interior designer who created bronze and wood sculptures in spare time, while his great uncle was a renowned “Golden Age” cartoonist), for Taras art feels natural and intrinsic.  The medium of film offered Taras the opportunity to “create singular and ‘unreproducable’ pictures.” While he photographs around the world, Los Angeles and New York City represent two distinct creative opportunities as unique as the cities themselves.  Beginning to practice photography in New York City with black and white film, Taras built an extensive and private darkroom to learn the complexities, nuances and unexpected possibilities in film and printing.  He admits to the differences in his photos from the East and West Coast by describing that “New York was dominated by the time I spent taking street pictures at all hours of the night and in Los Angeles I started exploring daylight pictures in architecture, interiors and colors in a completely new way.”  While characterized by experimentation in light and darkness, the common thread that appears in the photographs is an intent desire to observe and report the world as it comes into view of the camera.

“Observations” take inventory of found objects on worn pavement and function in a similar manner that a match cut does in cinema.  By finding a connective thread in found subjects, a visual narrative of symmetry unites an otherwise disjointed landscape.  A succession of pot holes with moss growing around the perimeters, gathering rubbish, and a discarded turntable speak to artificial circles found in nature, while discarded gloves and hand prints in pavement suggest an effort for a man to leave a human mark on the Earth.  Taras even appears in several of the photographs as caught in the afternoon sun or as a reflection in a puddle of water with gathering three red pedals shaped like a lotus.  The observations point to a world of excess where a jar of crushed red kidney beans that have been partially stomped on vaguely resemble a heart, torn advertisements from penny savers and advertorials decorate gutters, and the legs of dismembered mannequins serve no use.  They are reflections of a lost childhood with a turned over scooter, pair of shoes and bib, and point to the past of Los Angeles by capturing the famed ice cream stand in the Farmers Market lined with green wooden shopping carts.

Caught in the cataclysmic moment of the past and present, it is no surprise that Taras would be awarded the Luezer’s Archive 200 Best Photographers Worldwide Prize for his brand campaign for “Known Where You Stand” for the History Channel.”  Using phantom black etched images of World War II soldiers juxtaposed with contemporary images of the beach of Normandy and a disgruntled Hitler standing beside two lovers in front of the Eiffel Tower, the worldwide campaign brought a contemporary perspective to the past that shaped our present.  Taras embraces history as he feels that “waking up everyday with a sense of nostalgia and maybe a little dread that everything we know has to end.  That notion lends itself to real appreciation of the present.”

Looking ahead Taras admits that the narrative of his artistic practice feels as though “is going according to plan.”  He continues to say that my artistic practice falls into parallel aspects of photography and writing.  I’ve written fiction all my life and over the past several years taught myself to write for the screen.”  Blending a commercial and artistic sensibility into his photography and pursuing writing movie trailers and taglines, Taras demonstrates a rare versatility that like his photos harmonizes unlikely elements.

Click here to inquire about the artist and his work

By Rex Bruce   Fri, Jan 06, 2012

Stemming from her lifelong work as a painter, Norwegian artist Pia Myrvold creates new work that branches out into a formidable interdisciplinary undertaking using electronic media as a springboard for the intermingling of forms. The pulsing, looping animations and sound are unmistakable in their musical quality, the structure of the installation utilizes large scale sculptural form and there is an architectural aspect as the viewer engages the work by walking through it. The end result is an immersive and interactive environment where the viewer encounters a multi-dimensional interface that is a product of emergent technology.

Throughout her career, Myrvold has embraced these new technological developments and integrated them into her work. She has a large opus of multi-faceted creations of hybrid “in-formations” between various forms of artistic practice—art, fashion, video, performance and interactive technology. With each new hybrid, the artist combines information in a cross pollinated sensory experience that includes intellectual as well as physical interactivity. Ultimately the artist/viewer authorship is blurred through participatory interface design.

This deep awareness of the importance of “interface” is clearly the conceptual force driving Myrvold’s work. The place where her artwork and viewer engage is not the static one-way gaze of viewer and painting. Myrvold’s interfaces blur the common boundary between art objects and their viewers such that they act together to open up the point of connection between them. In this case the boundaries explored are between the individual and the devices surrounding them, a cogent corollary for the way we are immersed in ubiquitous technologies across which data or communication flows. Indeed this work functions as an aesthetic remake of the gestalt effect of smart phones, 3D cinema, digital TV, iPads, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Netflix and the endless stream of connected gadgets that constitute bulk of our current culture.  

While engaging with “Flow” the immersive experience of emergent technologies is carefully guided by the artist. The ever-changing abstract images, rhythmic textures and chromatic structures of light are inspired by higher minded aspirations. Myrvold’s ongoing research in 3D virtual space engenders a unique mental and aesthetic awareness, as the artist plays with virtual space alongside actual physical space to illuminate what we have not been able to see in traditional media. We are not put in front of a console as is common in many interactive works; rather “Flow” builds parallel or tangent references between the realms of physical and imaginative presence.

The artist has referred to the words of Charles Baudelaire as a key to understanding this artistic process that lead to the creation of such an ambitious large-scale video installation: "Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything; the secret and intimate connection between things, correspondences and analogies."

From ideological Internet-based projects, involving input from the public to determine the specific outcome of “cyber-couture” clothing, to her implementation of advanced computer-generated programming to create ever-changing visual patterns of light, form and color, her work has always been about “interfacing.” The pinnacle of this artistic development can be seen in her projects presented at LACDA.

—Rex Bruce, January 2011

Pia MYrvoLD: Immersion opens Thursday, January 12 from 7-9pm at Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. In conjunction with Downtown Art Walk.

By   Sun, Jan 08, 2012

By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

Ray Atkeson (1907-1990) began photographing the Northwestern U.S. landscape in the 1930s. He became especially well-known for his stunning black & white images of the ski and snow country in the Western states. The early, romantic days of skiing in the West - the 1930-1950s - were a time of glamour and great excitement. Hollywood movie stars in the latest snow fashions shared chair lifts with the originators of "extreme" skiing. Skiers zoomed down the mountains with primitive equipment, relying on enthusiasm and their own brand of skill to take them successfully to the bottom.

Atkeson's photographs appear alongside his peers Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Eliot Porter and others in several collections, including Ansel Adam's This is the American Earth (1960), U.S. Camera's The Best of 1957 and John Steinbeck's America and Americans (1960).

A prolific photographer and printer, Atkeson documented these early times with a heavy, large-format 4x5 camera and photographed a rich variety of winter mountain scenery and activity. Many of his alpine photos were taken before the chairlift was invented and required ski stamina and enduring prolonged exposure to harsh winter elements.

"These photos are, at first glance, very high-quality winter landscapes. But what fascinates me is his ability to pull me into the moment, to draw me as the viewer into the scene," said gallerist Daniel Miller. Atkeson would frequently use a mechanical timer on his large-format camera. This allowed him to ski into, and become a part of, his composition.

''One photo of an ice cave in Mount Rainier is a technical triumph" was written in the 1971 New York Times review of his photography book The Pacific Coast. In 1990, the New York Times wrote that Atkeson was "Considered the dean of Northwest nature photography."

His published works include nine books, including Ski and Snow Country: The Golden Years of Skiing in the West, 1930s-1950s with text by skiing legend Warren Miller. Atkeson's work appeared in National Geographic, Time, Readers Digest, Life, Saturday Evening Post and Popular Photography. His image is on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Nov 23, 1957. Atkeson was named Photographer Laureate of Oregon in 1976, his works are in several public institutions.

By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

In 1947, the tabloid photographer known as Weegee relocated from New York City to Los Angeles. In moving west, he abandoned the grisly crime scenes for which he was best known and trained his camera instead on Hollywood stars, strippers, costume shops, and naked mannequins, sometimes distorted through trick lenses and multiple exposures. “Now I could really photograph the subjects I liked,” said Weegee of his life in Los Angeles. “I was free.”

In addition to roughly 200 photographs, many of which have never before been shown or reproduced, the exhibition encompasses Weegee's related work as an author, filmmaker, photo-essayist, and genius self-promoter. Following the photographer's lead, the exhibition documents the lurid, irresistible undersides of stardom, fandom, commerce, and publicity in mid-century Los Angeles. Weegee's 1953 photo-book Naked Hollywood provides the title and point of departure for the exhibition.

Curated by the art historian Richard Meyer, Naked Hollywood is presented in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time, a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together for six months beginning in October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world.

By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

Helen Lukens Gaut established a successful career as a photojournalist in the 1920’s, merging her love for nature, passion for motoring, and engaging writing style into pieces for numerous magazines such as Out West, Overland Monthly, Cosmopolitan, The Craftsman, Ladies’ Home Journal, and House Beautiful.  Southern California’s Evolving Landscape: The Photography of Helen Lukens Gaut (1872-1955) offers the public a first look at prints of some of the 200 negatives by Gaut recently acquired by PMH through a generous donation from Alyce de Roulet Williamson.

Some years ago, a chance meeting of a connoisseur of photography and a well-respected historian resulted in this major gift to PMH. In 2002, Richard (Blue) Trimarchi, President of Art Works Fine Art Publishing, shared a collection of negatives taken by Helen Lukens Gaut with former Museum Trustee Dr. Robert Winter. Dr. Winter was excited by the importance of the images taken by a woman photographer in the second decade of the twentieth century. The collection was purchased with a generous donation to the Museum by Alyce de Roulet Williamson. Although these holdings certainly do not comprise all of Gaut’s photography, they do reflect the essentials of her life -- especially her interests in nature, motoring, and architecture.

Helen Lukens Gaut was born in Rock Falls, Illinois. Her father, Theodore Parker Lukens, anticipating a better and healthier climate in Southern California, moved with her mother Charlotte Dyer Lukens and eight-year-old Helen to Pasadena in 1880 and immediately established a strong presence in the community.  He served as Mayor in 1890 and again in 1894. A friend of John Muir, Lukens became known as “The Father of Forestry” for his efforts related to the reforestation of California’s mountain woodlands. Helen had two children with her husband Edward Everett Jones, however the marriage did not last.  In 1905, Helen met James H. Gaut on a camping trip; the couple married the following year. Helen was deeply influenced by her father’s study of nature, but she took it in new directions. Her adventurous spirit was liberated when she purchased her first automobile and began to tour California. She also taught herself how to use a camera in order to document her travels. These combined talents and interests, along with an appealing writing style, led to her becoming a well-known photojournalist. Helen rarely published any of her articles or photographs after 1920. During this part of her life she concentrated on her love of music. Although she reputedly had a lovely singing voice, her training in music and composition, like her photography, seems to have been self taught. Nevertheless, Helen became well known for her published songs (including a 1922 song titled Pasadena), for which she usually devised both the lyrics and melodies.

By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

The sculptures are created from old clothing, fake fur, shredded rags, loose threads, plastic bags, mesh back packs and vinyl pouches that start from inner cores of layered fabric built around cleverly planned support systems. Each creature takes on distinct characteristics from overgrown snouts and large ears to disproportionate limbs and personable gestures to create one-of-a-kind breeds. Most of the subjects appear physically and psychologically vulnerable as if once desired by a child in a former pristine condition but now tossed aside to wither away in loneliness. The oversized misfits confront the viewer with a slight nod of the head or gesture of the body to disguise their repellant demeanors and allow for a closer examination of their charming personalities. For instance, the large dog entitled Dunderhead sits quietly with paws at its side leaning forward with his tongue out and ears propped upward. His eyes appear droopy as if the lids are closing shut gaining empathy from the admiration of a friend. He waits obediently for an onlooker to approach and quickly discover all of intricate fabrics and textured surfaces that shape him. Along the backside are several hanging pouches, tool belts and backpacks that form hair-like texture while much of the snout is covered in plastic with soft cotton balls, bold fabrics and stringy materials specifically clumped upon and beneath the transparent surface. The endearing quality overwhelms his presence and demands sympathy and admiration regardless of his obviously tattered existence.

The series of dog head sculptures will be presented on pedestals at different heights to enhance each creature’s gesturing and personality. Many of their faces are animated with ears projecting out to the sides and tongues hanging with anticipation. The isolated heads removed from their bodies allow for a more intimate observation of each sorrowful expression and exaggerated face. A new feature in this body of work is the use of heavy black straps, vinyl and latex that are used to encase colorful swatches of fabrics. The subjects have a robust exterior that gives way to the soft fuzzy interiors creating a metaphor for the big hearted yet formidable creatures.

By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

Mourning continues her exploration of self-portraiture through photography and mixed media photographic paintings. In previous bodies of work, the artist represented her family history by assuming the roles of her ancestors from Mississippi, New York and Ireland (she literally slipped in and out of their homes, attire and settings to create this cinematic images). Mourning turned the lens on herself and set out to discover her own identity through the assumed identities of those who came before her. With Ordinary Time, the costumes are gone, as are the far-away locales. Rather, the artist is deeply invested in the present moment and capturing her sense of time and place on film. The resulting series of self-portraits is strikingly raw, honest and filled with intensity.

Providing context to the portraits are atmospheric photographs of landscapes and abstracted objects, which connect to the artistʼs Northern California upbringing – a hazy shot of the sun setting in Bolinas, a Native American Miwok tepee at sunrise in West Marin and a shattered mirror photographed from her Grandmother’s house are among the subjects Mourning photographs.. And while this new work is clearly a meditation on the present, the past continues to haunt Mourningʼs process. In the words of the artist, “This moment is an unveiling of the present yet there is always the past walking with me.”

The show is dedicated to the artistʼs grandmother, Ruth Catherine Nelson.

By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

For Van Imschoot, the language of painting is an attitude, a series of intersecting tendencies whose far reaching cultural influence appears in a broad array of imagery enhanced by the viewerʼs own history. His paintings do not reinforce the mediumʼs spatial and historical illusions rather they testify to the linguistic possibilities of painting. Van Imschootʼs practice investigates, decidedly experimental, the point where history loses its narrative. His approach involves deconstructing an image to avoid deconstruction of facts. testing the credibility of a painting image through titles and embracing the concept of different speeds of light. Van Imschoot refuses to be suspended in the ruins of art historical lineage. Instead, he pays homage to masters such as Caravaggio, Tintoretto, El Greco, Van Eyck and Beuckelaer, by misleading the eye and disturbing the viewer's perception thus confusing, questioning, and prompting new readings of the image and welcoming new resonances. His paintings are diverse of subject matter reflective of varied source material with the intent of eluding a style.

Anarcho-Baroque is a contradiction of terms, an inversion of the historical understanding of Baroque. Van Imschootʼs use of technique, palette and subject matter reveal his interpretation and challenge the universal rendition of Baroque by infusing contemporary imagery within the paintings. Van Imschootʼs personal view of art history emphatically does not demand the viewerʼs embrace of his truthfulness, but only requests their imagination. Van Imschootʼs attention to detail and his deep understanding and respect of the history of the medium, bring the work into a modern day conversation, creating new meanings and layers within the works.

Jan Van Imschoot lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. Selected exhibitions include S.M.A.K. (Ghent), Museum of Fine Arts (Tallinn), MUHKA (Antwerp), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin) and CAC (Vilnius).

By   Mon, Jan 09, 2012

The gestures, erasures, pigmented smudging, scraping and dripping on his canvases evidence Kingston's continued investigation into the possibilities of paint. Kingston’s work is achieved through a trust of his process of getting lost in cerebral and material spaces before finding resolve. The artist slowly builds his paintings by developing and modifying ideas applied in previous layers.  At times, the paint is controlled and then allowed to find gravity, and is then contained again, creating deep veils of acrylic. Within the canvases’ hazy spaces are thrusts of color along with fits and starts of lines, doodles and sketches that conjure an aggregate of ancient , scientific, organic, industrial hieroglyphs floating, untethered in a fleeting landscape.

Kingston’s breathy, atmospheric movements of paint collect and dissipate to form organic landscape impressions, yet remain firmly planted in the language of abstraction. His soulful works of art speak to a range of emotions, and open a window into the artist’s own inner space and influences. Shifting from placid to energetic, structured to improvised, sober to playful, Kingston’s paintings are a steady, engrossing read that gradually reveal their history and resolve.

By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

In a world beset by fear, war and the specter of ecological disaster, yearning for a safe haven has become part of everyday living. Siri Kaur uses photography to suggest a poetic counter-world while acknowledging the abysmal and the uncanny lurking beneath the surface of utopian fantasies. Her images, originating in diverse locations including Iceland, New England, Alaska and Southern California, reveal an artistic practice that is deeply personal, yet universal, oscillating between anxiety and yearning for a better world. Kaur’s haunting, signature use of light betrays unexpressed desires lurking behind her subjects’ ruminative gazes, while the eerily perfect settings feel inhabited by a silent spirit. Her pictures present psychologically charged places and individuals whose emotional states teeter between despair and redemption. Other photographs remind us of a long forgotten secret confided to a friend.

Kaur’s photographs represent her stand against the relentless march of time, and an embrace of life’s beautiful and inescapably painful unfolding. Her images engage the Western canon—from the Baroque to photorealist painting, from German Romanticism to contemporary portraiture. Inspired by mysticism, spirituality, and the occult, Kaur weaves visual echoes from her past to create an evocative, dreamy universe uniquely her own in both its formal qualities and narrative themes.

Siri Kaur was born in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007. She also earned a MA in Italian Studies (2001) and a BA in Comparative Literature (1998) from Smith College. Kaur was the recipient of the Portland Museum of Art Biennial Purchase Prize (2011) and has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions and at the Torrance Museum of Art, the California Institute of Technology, the UCLA Wight Biennial, USC’s 3001 Gallery.

By   Sat, Jan 07, 2012

Most of the paintings are being lent by private individuals and public institutions, more than 150 different lenders from twenty countries. Conceived as a single exhibition in multiple locations, “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011” makes use of this demographic fact to determine the content of each exhibition according to locality.

Included in the exhibition are more than 300 paintings, from the first spot on board that Hirst created in 1986; to the smallest spot painting comprising half a spot and measuring 1 x 1/2 inch (1996); to a monumental work comprising only four spots, each 60 inches in diameter; and up to the most recent spot painting completed in 2011 containing 25,781 spots that are each 1 millimeter in diameter, with no single color ever repeated.

By Craig Stephens   Fri, Jan 06, 2012

Multi-media artist K.u.B.O. is a true chameleon having embraced painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed media work. The German born artist (now a fulltime Hong Kong resident) says his vision and inspiration stem from the Gestalt effect, the form-generating capability of our senses.

“There’s a theory that our brains are hardwired to recognize shapes and forms in even the haziest of abstractions,” offers Ashleigh Norman of Contemporary Artists' Services. “That darkened laundry pile at night became a monster when you were little and now the plastic bag in the road becomes a white rabbit that causes you to swerve just slightly. This is the Gestalt effect; the form-generating capability of our senses, particularly in the visual field.”

Norman continues, “This is the departure point from which artist K.u.B.O. takes his flying leap. He uses abstract shapes to challenge your eye-brain connection and see what you come up with. Manipulation isn’t the right word, but it’s the first one that comes to mind.”

K.u.B.O.’s work is part science part alchemy, at times stark and dense, at others light and revelatory. Of his work he says, “As a viewer, some automatic process is already starting…your brain starts to fill in and make up stories. Each viewer will have a different experience depending on the angle of the refracted light. Technically it is impossible to do full scale reproductions of my works because of this process. Conceptually, this also becomes a part of the piece, to create something, which is as uncertain as reality is itself. I love to hear the discussions people have in front of my works about what they see. This effect is mainly being created because I just go to the point where the human brain starts to combine the structures and reflections into objects and stories we seem to know. Even though we seem to think that reality is the same for all of us, it works differently with different people.”

The technical process involved in creating such intricate mixed media works requires both patience and vision. “It’s a layer by layer process which can be up to 20 layers or more,” K.u.B.O. explains. “Each layer itself is a special material mix where I steer and control the level and type of reflection and the color itself. I have developed all these materials over the last 25 years in my own lab. These unique paints and techniques are used both in my paintings as well as my sculptures. As a result, I get complex structures and reflections which change with the position of the viewer.”

When asked about his key inspiration and artistic influences, K.u.B.O. reveals an interest “in all forms of art. Although Gerhard Richter as a painter is one of my favorites, I also get a tremendous amount of inspiration from music and film.

“My main artistic influences started over 30 years ago, when I started creating art and became aware of the work of Paul Klee. Although my work is heavily influenced by the abstract expressionists, it is the continual question, ‘what is going on here,’ that influences me the most. Life is about study and questions, and the more I travel and study life, the more questions arise. My art is my way of answering that question.”

On the biggest challenge facing him as an artist nowadays, K.u.B.O. is philosophical: “Although I have been creating art for several decades now, I was never really concerned about having an audience or exhibitions. Recently, it seems the work is speaking to me, creating a pressure to be seen and experienced by others. This is the hardest challenge as an artist, to deal with the responsibility of getting the work out there."

It appears, however, that his new homeland is having its own effect on K.u.B.O.’s work. “Compared to Germany, Hong Kong is a much faster place, where often East and West collide, setting a lot of energy free. This is conducive to my way of working on paper, with a spontaneous energy in which I can make no corrections once the color is drawn. This is essentially a characteristic of quick Sumi ink drawings, which are a typical Eastern element.”

For the future K.u.B.O. says he will “listen to his work” and focus on developing an audience. “Hopefully my work can give something back."

An exhibition featuring recent photographic work of K.u.B.O. will open in the upstairs gallery of The Santa Barbara Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum on January 4, 2012 and run through March 7.

All inquiries contact:
Ashleigh Norman
Contemporary Artists' Services
1783 E Main St. Ventura, CA 93001
(805) 643-8300
ashleigh@artadvice.com

Images:

Untitled, 2011, Acrylic glass, Fuji Crystal Archive DP II glossy print with Durst Lambda exposure system, 70.8 x 47.2 inches

Artefacts from good old times No. 43, 2011, Acrylic glass, Fuji Crystal Archive DP II glossy print with Durst Lambda exposure system, 9.5 x 14 inches

Untitled No. 134, 2011, Mixed media on paper, 21.5 x 54.5 inches

Untitled, 2009, Mixed Media, 4 Panels 32.25 x 44.5 inches

By   Sun, Jan 08, 2012

From internationally acclaimed photographer Deborah Turbeville comes the first book on her highly influential visionary avant-garde fashion photography. Celebrated for her poetic grace and cinematic vision, Deborah Turbeville has produced fashion tableaux that draw the viewer into her otherworldly environments. A romantic and modernist, Turbeville bridges the boundaries between commercial fashion and fine arts photography. In this remarkable presentation, Turbeville reveals her highly individualistic point of view of fashion photography and the stories behind her photographs.

This first retrospective presentation of Turbeville's fashion photography was selected by the artist herself. In addition, she has designed the evocative layouts to create yet another masterwork. The presentation includes Turbeville's most famous photographs, among them the controversial Bathhouse series of 1975 for American Vogue with disturbingly isolated figures and her Woman in the Woods series of 1977 for Italian Vogue showing psychologically charged emotions, along with her numerous photography campaigns for labels like Sonia Rykiel, Valentino, Yamamonto, Ungaro, and Commes des Garçons, as well as commissions for Chanel and work that has never been seen before. Her most current project for Casa Vogue--Italian nobility dressed in special couture outfits--evokes Turbeville's vision of everlasting beauty.

Hall-Duncan's essay places Deborah Turbeville's non-conventional work in the context of the history of fashion photography. She discusses the important role that this artist has played in shaping contemporary fashion and fine arts photography. She also presents the broad range of disciplines of art, literature, and architecture from the past that has inspired this important artist--from the great silent-films by Eisenstein, Vertov, and Murnau and the later cinematic work of Cocteau, Visconti, Fassbinder, and Bertulucci to Diaghelev's ballet set drawings, Russian literature, and the faded palaces of Europe.

To purchase Deborah Tuberville: The Fashion Pictures click here

By   Sun, Jan 08, 2012

Artists who arrive fully formed at a young age always dazzle, and Francesca Woodman was one of the most gifted and dazzling artist prodigies in recent history. In 1972, the 13-year-old Woodman made a black-and-white photograph of herself sitting at the far end of a sofa in her home in Boulder, Colorado. Her face is obscured by her hair, light radiates from an unseen source behind her out at the viewer through her right hand. This photograph typifies much of what would characterize Woodman's work to come: a semi-obscured female form merging with or flailing against a somewhat bare and often dilapidated interior. In an oeuvre of around 800 photographs made in just nine years, Woodman performed her own body against the textures of wallpaper, door frame, baths and couches, radically extending the Surrealist photography of Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun and creating a mood and language all her own.

To purchase Francesca Woodman click here

By   Sun, Jan 08, 2012

Pilgrimage took Annie Leibovitz to places that she could explore with no agenda. She wasn't on assignment. She chose the subjects simply because they meant something to her. The first place was Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, which Leibovitz visited with a small digital camera. A few months later, she went with her three young children to Niagara Falls. 'That's when I started making lists,' she says. She added the houses of Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin in the English countryside and Sigmund Freud's final home, in London, but most of the places on the lists were American. The work became more ambitious as Leibovitz discovered that she wanted to photograph objects as well as rooms and landscapes. She began to use more sophisticated cameras and a tripod and to travel with an assistant, but the project remained personal.

Leibovitz went to Concord to photograph the site of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond. Once she got there, she was drawn into the wider world of the Concord writers. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home and Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott and her family lived and worked, became subjects. The Massachusetts studio of the Beaux Arts sculptor Daniel Chester French, who made the seated statue in the Lincoln Memorial, became the touchstone for trips to Gettysburg and to the archives where the glass negatives of Lincoln’s portraits have been saved. Lincoln’s portraitists—principally Alexander Gardner and the photographers in Mathew Brady’s studio—were also the men whose work at the Gettysburg battlefield established the foundation for war photography. At almost exactly the same time, in a remote, primitive studio on the Isle of Wight, Julia Margaret Cameron was developing her own ultimately influential style of portraiture. Leibovitz made two trips to the Isle of Wight and, in an homage to the other photographer on her list, Ansel Adams, she explored the trails above the Yosemite Valley, where Adams worked for fifty years.

The final list of subjects is perhaps a bit eccentric. Georgia O’Keeffe and Eleanor Roosevelt but also Elvis Presley and Annie Oakley, among others. Figurative imagery gives way to the abstractions of Old Faithful and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Pilgrimage was a restorative project for Leibovitz, and the arc of the narrative is her own. “From the beginning, when I was watching my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, it was an exercise in renewal,” she says. “It taught me to see again.”

To purchase Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage click here