Chasing Ice

This film was recommended by a fellow AIBer as I research portrayals of nature in photography. The film features the work of nature photographer James Balog. His images of the changing arctic landscape are breathtaking.

http://www.chasingice.com/
http://jamesbalog.com/

Exhibition Vertias II by Kaili Chun

This show features images of a perfomance installation by local artist and sculptor Kaili Chun. My current mentor, Jaimey Hamilton Faris, and her UH students helped with the installation at Waimanolo Beach. While I did not see the performance live last year, I found the images documented by Erin Yuasa evocative and somewhat haunting.

A quote by Chun featured at the exhibition:

"...The tensions that persist between western and indigenous ways of knowing and understanding the world, serve as catalysts for demarcating sculptural forms of containment that serve not only as reminders of the many ways in which each person is shapad and constrained, but as negoitiable boundaries between inside and outside, between concealment, and reveleatin. Who occupies whom? How do we move between the two worlds in which we live? Are we subject to the boundaries defined by others or do we delineate the boundaries that explicate our situations? The lines are not always so clear-cut."

Artists I'm looking at

Penelope Umbrico, http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/publications/publicationspage_aperture.html

Bruna Strude, http://www.brunastude.com
(Based in Kauai)

Roni Horn, http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/roni-horn

Paul Pfieffer, http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/paul-pfeiffer

Brice Marden, http://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/artists/brice-marden/

Agnes Martin, http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=3787

Stephen Tourlentes, www.tourlentes.com
(Based in Boston)

 Ashley Bickerton, http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/ashley-bickerton
(Based in Bali)

Franco Salmoiraghi, http://www.francosalmoiraghi.com
(Based in Honolulu, HI)

Susan Derges, http://www.susanderges.com

Artist Talk: Kosta Kulundzic’s Hawaii Apocalypse, 8/1

Article in Flux Hawaii, July 25, 2013
End of the World in Paradise

Looking forward to this artist talk on August 1. Excerpt from article:

"Kosta Kulundzic’s Hawaii Apocalypse, on display at SPF Projects until August 25, puts Saint George the Dragon Slayer, the patron saint of soldiers, chivalry, and horsemen, right in the center of paradise. This medieval legend has everything you could want: a brave hero, an evil villain, and a damsel in distress. O‘ahu becomes the unexpected setting for religious violence and comic book catastrophe."

Kosta Kulundzic’s Hawaii Apocalypse, curated by Trisha Lagaso Goldberg is currently showing at SPF Projects from July 18–August 25. An artist talk will take place on August 1 at 7 p.m.

LINK for more info:
http://fluxhawaii.com/archives/end-of-the-world-in-paradise/

Honolulu Museum of Art visit

I'm looking forward to checking out this exhibition tomorrow as it may have some ties to my current research. Hawaii: The Mythic Landscape by Stephan Brigidi Here's a quote from the Honolulu Museum of Art website:

"A connection between the natural world and human history are central to the artistic intent of photographer Stephan Brigidi. This body of work was primarily created from 1980 to 1990, while the artist lived in Hawai’i exploring and discovering the uniqueness of the islands. The deep connection to place is intended to highlight the importance of environmental and cultural stewardship. By manipulating each print, often with paint, the natural and the human world can become a place of the mythic and the spiritual."

I'm also planning to stop by the exhibition Landscape in the New World which may serve as a supplement to my research on nature, the sublime, and the new American frontier.

I hope to have time to see Little Worlds: Video Sculptures by Tony Oursler as well!

In July, I'm even more excited to view an upcoming exhibition titled Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams: Hawaii Pictures. Check out the link for more info, should be really fascinating to view depictions of Hawaii by O'Keefe and Adams.

Artist JR at Watarium Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

One of my favorite artists, French activist JR in Tokyo - what luck!
http://www.watarium.co.jp/museumcontents.html

His 2011 TED prize talk is worth seeing if you haven't already... http://www.ted.com/talks/jr_s_ted_prize_wish_use_art_to_turn_the_world_inside_out.html

My friend Kim and I were able to participate in JR's Inside Out project.
http://www.insideoutproject.net/japan/0327142259

Japan Portrait Project: Tsunami Survivor Tribute
You can see the poster falling from the sky printer!!

NY Lyric Postcard Project & The 1000 Journals Project

A friend recently sent me a link to the NY Lyric Project: http://nylyricproject.tumblr.com.  It's an interesting idea where a fan submits a lyric to the artist and an old (or new?) postcard is sent back to the fan with the lyrics hand-written on. Although I am moving away from working with postcards specifically, I appreciate how others are collaborating with strangers and using the postcard itself as a platform for exchange.

This also reminds me of San Fransisco based artist "someguy's" The 1000 Journals Project: http://www.1000journals.com/

"The 1000 Journals Project is an ongoing collaborative experiment attempting to follow 1000 journals throughout their travels. The goal is to provide a method for interaction and shared creativity among friends and strangers."

If interested, there's a documentary on this project, here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klnFtLGrKWU

Nation Branding & Wonder Beirut Project

2 articles forwarded by my current mentor Scott Groeniger. I found both interesting as I work through how to approach, understand, and reconcile representations of Hawaii and island culture. 

1. Nation Branding: http://blog.sfmoma.org/2012/10/rebrand-usa/
"So, even in this (supposedly) more enlightened age, shouldn’t we still be slightly unsettled by top-down nation branding? Why do governments need to convince through PR and promotion that they are doing a good job? Or that their state is a great place to live (or at least visit)? Shouldn’t leaders just walk the walk rather than spend taxpayer money on talking the talk? And exactly whose vision and values are we promoting here?

“Attracting tourist dollars” is the easiest line of defense for such an endeavor—let’s get the word out about how great this place is!—and when cash-poor countries are now commonplace in even western Europe, who can blame them? Isn’t the innocuous “Greetings From _______!” postcard a form of nation branding? And what’s so unsettling about that? To point, if we’re going to rebrand Thailand, who better to hire than Mr. Monocle and Wallpaper himself, Tyler Brulée, and his creative firm, Winkreative, stripping away that sleazy veneer often associated with Bangkok to reveal the more streamlined, industrious and benign paradise (complete with Euromodern styling) that really exists? Still, a question that lingers is if the campaign actually illuminates previously unearthed Thai treasures or is a whitewash sanding down of the country’s rough edges. It’s one thing to exaggerate a product’s effectiveness, another to misrepresent an entire sovereign state."

2. Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Jorige: http://hadjithomasjoreige.com/wonder-beirut/
THE STORY OF A PYROMANIAC PHOTOGRAPHER

"The story of a pyromaniac photographer is the first part of this project.
Between 1968 and 1969, Abdallah Farah was commissioned by the Lebanese State to take pictures to be edited as post cards. They represented the Beirut Central District and mainly the Lebanese Riviera and its luxury hotels, which contributed to form an idealized picture of Lebanon in the sixties.

Those same postcards are still on sale nowadays, although most of the places they represent were destroyed during the armed conflicts.

As of the autumn of 1975, Abdallah Farah systematically burned the negatives of the postcards, in accordance with the damages caused to the sites by the shelling and street fights. Abdallah used to photograph the image after each new burn he inflicted on it, producing a series of evolving images, which we call the “process”.
We distinguish two types of processes: The first, which we called the ‘historic process' follows very faithfully the events. Several battles have been documented this way among them 'The battle of the hotels' that occurred from 1975 to 1976. In Beirut. The second derives from the impacts which Abdallah inflicted willfully or accidentally to certain images which we grouped under the name 'plastic process'."

Highlights: Museum of Fine Art Boston

Entrance panel to Ori Gersht Exhibit "History Repeating"

This was a serendipitous exhibit given my semester's interest in and creation of postcards.

Entrance panel to the MFA's exhibition titled "The Postcard Age"

The exhibit showcased postcards of all kinds. This selection highlighted some interesting travel-themed cards although I did not find any depicting Hawaii.

Entrance panel to the fashion photographer Mario Testino's "In Your Face" exhibit. The walls were covered MASSIVE, vivid, intense, and wild fashion images.

Film: Rothko's Rooms

Just finished watching this documentary. I enjoyed it and learned more about Rothko's personal biography and how his ideas progressed during his life.  

Rothko's Rooms, made in 2000.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1248285/

4 Rothko Quotes:

“I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” 

“We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.”

“The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life.”

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.” 

Barbara Probst: Exposures

I've been looking at the work of Barbara Probst in relation to my current paper topic - photography's role in understanding time, reality, and truth.

In 2008, I had the opportunity to see Barbara Probst's New Photography exhibit at MOMA in NYC. I loved the work when I saw it then and now I am bridging the concepts in her work into the paper I am currently writing. In her series titled Exposures, Probst photographs the same exact moment in time using multiple cameras placed at different vantage points. The image below is an example of one diptych. I'm interested in how Probst forces the viewer to recognize photography's limitations in showing reality as a whole, yet simultaneously acknowledges that all images are, in part, an accurate replication of a specific time and place. 

In an interview posted on her website she says, “What I am interested in, after all, is not what is represented but how it is represented, the potential and the effects of representation. My purpose is to examine what photography can produce out of what was there.”
 Check out her website for more work: www.barbaraprobst.net

An informative interview on Vimeo discussing and showing an installation of her work: http://vimeo.com/8967695

Probst, Barbara. Exposure #39: N.Y.C., 545 8th Avenue, 03.23.06, 1:17 p.m. 2006.

Film: Black, White, & Gray

I recently watched an interesting 2007 documentary "Black, White, and Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff & Robert Mapplethorpe." Informative film about both characters and their influence on the photography field with numerous interviews with Patti Smith. The film also brought to attention the importance of photographic (or any art for that matter) collections - what do large bodies of collected work reveal about the collector, society, and history? In my own current work, I find this question of collecting interesting as I gather various images/portrayals of Hawaii.

http://www.blackwhitegray.com/

Photographer Ori Gersht on Beauty and Repulsion

NY Times Article: Beauty, Tender, and Fleeting Amid History's Ire
By Hilarie M. Sheets
August 26, 2012

“When the explosion happened, you had the sense that that entire building was collapsing,” Mr. Gersht said in an interview at the museum, adding that he found associations with Sept. 11 unavoidable in this context. “But someone can look at it and be mesmerized by the sheer beauty of the event,” he said. “I’m interested those oppositions of attraction and repulsion, and how the moment of destruction in the exploding flowers becomes for me the moment of creation.”

“Ori grew up amidst fear and violence in a land of stunning physical beauty and great history,” said Al Miner, who organized the exhibition for the museum, where he’s an assistant curator of contemporary art. “At the heart of Ori’s work is this intersection of beauty and violence. It’s an almost subversive approach to using aesthetics to lure a viewer into dealing with subject matter that’s very difficult.”

Film "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry"

This past week, I went to see the documentary "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" by Alison Klayman.
Film website: http://aiweiweineversorry.com/

Which comes first, politics or art? Does art evoke change? How does technology (Internet, social media, Twitter, etc) act as a medium for today's artists? This film provides an informative portrait of the Chinese conceptual artist and activist Ai Weiwei.  An inspiring quote by the artist, "I am now more of a chess player than an artist, waiting for my opponent to make the next move. If we don't push, nothing happens. Life is more interesting when you make a little effort." If you haven't already, this documentary is worth seeing.

Recent Readings: Catherine Opie & Richard Misrach

Opie, Catherine, Nat Trotman, and Russell Ferguson. Catherine Opie: American Photographer. New York, N.Y: Guggenheim Museum, 2008. 

Misrach, Richard, and Susan Sontag. Violent Legacies: Three Cantos. New York: Aperture, 1992.

Misrach: "But I've come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas. It engages people when they might otherwise look away. Recent theory has been critical of the distancing effect of artistic expression - 'create solutions, not art.' But the impact of art may be more complex and far-reaching than theory is capable of assessing. To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding alarms. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world." (90)

Artwork I'm looking at

1st comparative analysis paper is coming up due this month. I'm looking at the work of Richard Misrach and Hiroshi Sugimoto. In particular, I will be comparing the two photographs below.

1. Untitled

By Richard Misrach

2002

 49 x 111 inches

2. Seascape: Sea of Japan

Hirsohi Sugimoto

1997