Posts made in January, 2010
LORENA TURNER
(Photo credit: Plastic Clock Back by Lorena Turner)
When we purchase basic consumable items, we have a perception that they are clean, untainted, absent of a history … It is generally not a part of our job description as consumers to be concerned with where the items we buy come from, and at what cost to the environment, human experience or culture.
Lorena Turner received an honorable mention in the “New Visions” exhibition for her image Plastic Clock Back, which is from her series Made in China. Turner is a photographer with an interest in “historical perception, immigration, vernacular photography, popular culture, and points where these areas intersect.” Like the other “New Visions” photographers Erik Boker and Kevin Van Aelst (see previous post), Turner finds unrestrained content in seemingly mundane consumer materials.
For the [Made in China] project, items made and enclosed in packages in China then sold in the US, were purchased, dusted for fingerprints, then photographed. The images evidence another’s touch, another human’s relationship with them.
(Photo credit: Lorena Turner. From the Made in China series.)
More of Lorena’s work can be found at www.lorenaturner.com
Read MoreERIK BOKER AND KEVIN VAN AELST
Photographers Erik Boker and Kevin Van Aelst are visual evaluators of the everyday article. Both artists use photography as a tool for manipulation and appraisal—cataloguing consumer items to make aesthetic statements about subjects like American consumption and the environment. With nearly twinned satirical wit, Boker’s series Product Dissections and the majority of Van Aelst’s work offer “New Visions” of contemporary consumer products. It is more than just the photograph but also their handiwork that defines these two artists. Their photographs become duplicable documents of their sculptural and/or illustrated constructions. Boker’s Aquafresh, Extra Fresh and Van Aelst’s Elsewhere (Tiny Sunsets) were selected for the Center’s “New Visions” exhibition.
(Photo credit: Aquafresh, Extra Fresh by Erik Boker)
(Photo credit: Erik Boker. From the Product Dissections series.)
Erik Boker’s on his Product Dissections series:
This project is an ongoing exploration of the roles of art, science, taxonomy, the consumer, the museum and institution, product and marketing, and our relationships with seemingly insignificant objects and materials that affect us daily. It approaches issues of anatomy and archaeology, while peeling back the skins of consumerism offers a revealed view within the plastic layers of what we consume—a delicate tension between death, health, and hygiene, collided with the extremities of marketing and the bold, impractical, calculated colors and titles that hold a mirror to our culture of need and our ‘extreme’ yearning for cleanliness.
(Photo credit: Elsewhere (Tiny Sunsets) by Kevin Van Aelst)
(Photo credit: Heart by Kevin Van Aelst)
For Van Aelst, his method of working is akin to Boker’s:
My color photographs consist of common artifacts and scenes from everyday life, which have been rearranged, assembled, and constructed into various forms, patterns, and illustrations … The minutiae all around us is sometimes capable of communicating much larger ideas.
Van Aelst’s photographs are currently featured in weekly installments in The Sunday New York Times Magazine supplementing commentaries by Virginia Heffernan. He conceptualized the following image for Heffernan’s piece, Articles of Faith.
(Photo credit: Kevin Van Aelst as seen in The New York Times)
More of Erik’s work can be found at www.erikboker.com
More of Kevin’s work can be found at www.kevinvanaelst.com
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SAMUEL MOULIN
(Photo credit: Hypnos by Samuel Moulin)
Read MoreI photographed the “Tornado”, this sort of turning platform, in the poorest light and colors, between two artificial lightning strikes, because at this precise moment it evocated to me a gigantic spinning plate vanishing away in the dark with it’s human content. The image of the stoic passengers disappearing in the night on board of their mad ship stroke me as an allegory of the emptiness of our times.
ERICA ALLEN
(Photo credit: Gentleman #32 by Erica Allen)
Director’s Selection: Erica Allen
Brooklyn-based photographer Erica Allen examines our preconceived notions of identity through both historical and contemporary viewpoints. By means of photographic ready-mades, Allen’s series Untitled Gentlemen features digital composite images that are constructed with “anonymous faces from contemporary barbershop hairstyle posters combined with figures from discarded studio photographs.” Due to Allen’s source material, her series touches upon themes of gender, race, and fashion.
(Photo credit: Erica Allen. From the Untitled Gentlemen series.)
The constructed “gentlemen” in the images are peculiarly intimate while, at the same time, they are also anonymous. In her artist statement, Allen discusses the relationship between her work and the viewer:
I am interested in shifting the frame of how we encounter and interpret images to investigate the meaning and construction of the photographic image. This work aims to encourage the viewer to reflect upon their own interpretation and projection of identity in the photograph.
More of Erica’s work can be found at www.ericaallenphotography.com
Read MoreGEORGE BEDELL
(Photo credit: Hatch by George Bedell)
George Bedell’s Fables series constructs inventive narratives using common household materials. Bedell’s image Hatch, from the Fables series, is featured in the “New Visions” exhibition. In his artist statement, Bedell discusses his still-lives as “raw and fast.”
Many of the images are retellings of current events, items culled from the news, seen through the lens of mythology or art history. A few of the images are about the creative process itself, hopefully looking at the artist with a sense of irony or self-deprecating humor.
More of George’s work can be found at www.georgebedell.com
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