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."

Big Island Selection

Last week, I had the opportunity to photograph a wedding on the Kona side of Big Island. Dustin and I took advantage of the trip and extended our stay by two extra days for creative photo adventures. Big Island's surreal lava landscape, steep cliffs, and patches of green pasture were especially interesting to explore given the current direction of my work. Since we were on the Kona side, I made a point to scope out the windmill farm by Ka Lae Point. Throughout our visit, the vog was fairly thick which I tried to embrace while making pictures. I did encounter a few moments of clear air and light which I was thankful for. As I scouted for pictures, I was particularly interested in finding strange or unusual hints of human intervention on the landscape. I find myself looking for equal parts beauty and strangeness.

Daido Moriyama

Looking forward to seeing this artist lecture by Daido Moriyama next week at University of Hawaii!

http://www.hawaii.edu/art/news+events/events/

http://www.moriyamadaido.com/english/

Daido Moriyama
Lecture: Wednesday, November 28, 6-7pm @ ART auditorium
Photographer Daido Moriyama is well known for his experimental and gritty images of postwar Japanese urban life. His Nippon gekijō shashinchō book depicts lesser known parts of Tokyo in all of their mystery, with techniques that exploit the grain of the film and offer surprising perspectives. He has over forty photo books and has shown world-wide, including a recent exhibition of his black and white photographs at LACMA (2012), and an upcoming show at the TATE Modern (2013). Moriyama’s visit will be in conjunction with the Art Department’s Framing Paradise: Photography and Tourism show, which includes his Hawaii portfolio. His visit is cosponsored by Center for Japaese Studies, Hawaii Council for the Humanities, SAPFB, SFCA, and Parc Hotel: Hospitality Sponser for the Arts.

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.

Article: On (Digital) Photography: Sontag, 34 Years Later

Great NY Times Article by A.O. Scott, Published May 6, 2011
Capturing a Single Moment of Perfect Stillness: Amid a blizzard of digital images, what is the worth of one photograph?