Artist - Moyra Davey

GALLERIES

Murray Guy

http://www.murrayguy.com/current/index.html

Goodwater Gallery

http://www.goodwatergallery.com/GW01-06/GW/artists.htm

BIOGRAPHY
“Moyra Davey photographs things she encounters in her daily life—objects in her studio, books, café tables, etc., as well as objects whose primary use-value has expired, such as analogue electronics, buttons, and empty bottles. Interested in analyzing the items we accumulate and value, as well as things that exist at the margins of consumer culture, Davey fuses her personal life with her work in a photographic practice that is based largely on chance and accident. In the series Copperheads (1990) she photographs pennies she found on the streets of New York. Closely cropped in on the profile of Lincoln, each Copperhead is worn down by human use and years of circulation. Like analogue photographic technology, the pennies become devalued over time and are approaching the end of their usefulness as objects of exchange. 

Moyra Davey is a photographer, writer, and filmmaker. In 2008, she was the subject of an expansive survey at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Long Life Cool White. Coinciding with this exhibition, Yale University Press published a monograph of her photographs and her writings on photography. Davey exhibited from 1994-2003 with Colin de Land’s gallery American Fine Arts, Co., and, from 2005-2008, she was a partner in the collaborative, artist-run gallery Orchard. Her works are in the collections of numerous institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Books by Davey include Copperheads (Bywater Bros. Editions, 2010), Long Life Cool White (Yale University Press, 2008), and The Problem of Reading (Documents Books, 2003). She lives in New York.”

-Museum of Contemporary Photography
http://collections.mocp.org/detail.php?type=related&kv=8493&t=people

INTERVIEWS



QUOTES

“I love the camera itself… I thought it was such a beautiful little machine.  Just to be able to have this tool be part of your life in a way that didn’t mean by separating off your life by going to a studio... Photography meant that you could be making work anytime all the time.”

-From first video on photography

“Somehow the act of writing, then publishing these texts, and bringing my photographs into play with the text, gave me a desire to make photographs again.  So it became this sort of circularity of one thing feeding another began to develop at that point.”

-From second video on finding ideas and multiple media

I am focusing specifically on Davey's Copperhead series for my chosen images.  I find their differences to be incredibly intriguing, as at one point, these all looked the same.  They came from the same machine.  At different times of course, but the way copper interacts with the environment is beautiful and very intriguing if you pay attention to it.  In my metal work, the plates were made roughly at the same time, yet their levels of oxidation and abstraction vary from piece to piece.I have let go of perfection, and allowed mistakes and chance to play a huge role in my work, and I feel like Davey does that as well.  

Copperhead #14

1990

Chromogenic print 51 x 61 cm

Copperhead # 18

1990

Chromogenic print 51 x 61 cm

Copperhead #27

1990

Chromogenic print 51 x 61 cm

Copperhead #81

1990

Chromogenic print 51 x 61 cm

Artist - Arturo Herrera

Arturo Herrera does not seem to have his own web page, yet his work can be found at the following galleries:

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

http://www.sikkemajenkinsco.com/arturoherrera.html

The Museum of Modern Art

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=25582

Thomas Dane Gallery

http://www.thomasdane.com/artist.php?artist_id=14

Ro Gallery

http://rogallery.com/Herrera_Arturo/herrera-showroom.html

BIOGRAPHY

“Arturo Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959, and lives and works in New York and Berlin, Germany. He received a BA from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Herrera’s work includes collage, work on paper, sculpture, relief, wall painting, photography, and felt wall hangings. His work taps into the viewer’s unconscious, often intertwining fragments of cartoon characters with abstract shapes and partially obscured images that evoke memory and recollection. 

Using techniques of fragmentation, splicing, and re-contextualization, Herrera’s work is provocative and open-ended. For his collages he uses found images from cartoons, coloring books, and fairy tales, combining fragments of Disney-like characters with violent and sexual imagery to make work that borders between figuration and abstraction and subverts the innocence of cartoon referents with a darker psychology. In his felt works, he cuts shapes from a piece of fabric and pins the fabric to the wall so that it hangs like a tangled form resembling the drips and splatters of a Jackson Pollock painting. Herrera’s wall paintings also meld recognizable imagery with abstraction, but on an environmental scale that he compares to the qualities of dance and music. Herrera has received many awards including, among others, a DAAD Fellowship. He has had solo exhibitions at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, among others. His work appeared in the Whitney Biennial (2002).”

Biography from Ro Gallery

http://rogallery.com/Herrera_Arturo/herrera-biography.html

INTERVIEWS

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

QUOTES

“It’s interesting to me after I did the photographs, is that images that I thought were already finished in paper form and collages have a complete different life now.”

“Life is made of, just connecting things.  We’re not really clear about why we connect things.  Our emotional life is a very important part of this, and I think that memory is also a very important part of this. And desire. So, when looking at visual images, you could actually be informed by association only.”

“The whole tone quality is almost like graphite. It’s almost like drawing.  Usually photography is so much about perfect blacks and whites, and these are really about perfect grays.  So I’m interested in this kind of ambiguity about the images.  They are clearly fragments and they’re being juxtaposed of being forced to be put together, and yet, they’re just abstractions.  I think that there is a potential for these images to communicate different things to different viewers in a very touching way.  But that experience is not a public experience, it’s very very private, and very very personal.”

-All quotes from above videos

IMAGES

I am specifically focusing on Herrera's series of 80 black and white photographs, entitled "Untitled" (2005).

Herrera's process with his photographs is very similar to mine.  It's really up to chance, and the mistakes become the core of the piece.  It's not about the quality of the whites and the blacks, but it's about the muddy grays that make the piece.  I absolutely love the last quote I picked out from the video.  I feel like that speaks so much to my presentation as a whole, that maybe he was actually talking about me.  I am interested in Herrera's other collage work, yet I feel as if his photographs speak much more closely to what I am currently working on.

Trevor Paglen Questions/Response

Your subject matter can only be reached by a few. Do you think that this effects how the common viewer sees it? Is it approachable by all?

A lot of the places that you photograph are top secret and potentially dangerous.  How do you find these places and do you ever run into legal and safety issues when finding/photographing these locations?

Trevor Paglen's lecture was incredibly interesting.  He caught my attention from the very beginning by saying that he didn't need to read from anything, yet talked the entire time.  I feel like it requires a certain level of passion and immense interest to be able to fully communicate an idea strictly by conversation. I would describe his work as research based, objective, and thought provoking.  I became more interested in his work on photographing the secret prisons more interesting after hearing him speak.  He spoke of "being able to see something that's designed to be invisible," which is a very interesting idea to contemplate.  He also mentioned how we "sculpt the face of the Earth" which was also an intriguing statement.  I can't necessarily relate his work to mine because they focus on very different things, yet I feel in regards to my first question, that it's actually not only accessible to a few.  All of the information he found are public records, he just put forth the immense effort to figure it all out.  With the second question, he did admit that some of the things that he did were stupid and dangerous, yet the issue of legality isn't really an issue.  He knows his boundaries and what's okay and what's not okay.  He would never do the same sort of search in Afghanistan or Great Britain, but that's one of the great aspects of being an American.  Overall, I find Trevor Paglen to be incredibly intelligent and full of passion when it comes to his artwork, and I admire his want to display this information to the American public.

Idea - Permanence

–noun

the condition or quality of being permanent;  perpetual or continued existence.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/permanence

QUOTES

“There is nothing permanent except change.”

-Heraclitus of Ephesus; Greek philosopher, 540-480 BC

“The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable.  What he wants above everything else is safety.”

-Henry Louis Mencken; Journalist and critic of American life

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”

-Ursula K. LeGuin; American writer

ARTICLE

I found it slightly difficult to find an accurate article about permanence, so I had to compromise.  This article called “The Importance of being Permanent” by Winsor & Newton is about the permanence of color pigment and different types of paint.

“It’s funny to think that the materials we make and use will last so much longer than we will ourselves. Even pigments which we class as moderately durable like Alizarin Crimson will last hundreds of years untinted in oil colour.”

http://www.winsornewton.com/resource-centre/product-articles/the-importance-of-being-permanent/

Winsor & Newton. "The Importance of being Permanent." Winsor & Newton. Winsor &

     Newton, 2010. Web. 31 Mar. 2011.

The idea of something being permanent interests me in the sense that you can never change it, just maybe alter it.  This could be physically, mentally, emotionally, etc., depending on what it is.  For me, with my current project, I hope to alter the presence of the PNP paper negatives that I have of my old family photographs by introducing myself into the same process.  I will enter these scenes and become a part of, and possibly interact with the past.  But, this will be done in the darkroom on photo paper, so really, it's not that permanent.  The actual permanence of the situation will be the etched metal on the floor.

Untitled

From Edoardo Pasero’s series titled “On Permanence”

http://www.edoardopasero.com/projects/on-permanence

Artist - Jerry Uelsmann

http://www.uelsmann.net

GALLERIES

A Gallery for Fine Photography

http://www.agallery.com/

John Cleary Gallery

http://www.johnclearygallery.com/

INTERVIEW

http://jerryuelsmann.wordpress.com/interviews/

BIOGRAPHY

“A pioneer in the art of multilayered imagery, photographer Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934) is best known for his seamlessly grafted composite images in black and white. His photographs combine several negatives to create surreal landscapes that interweave images of trees, rocks, water and human figures in new and unexpected ways.

Jerry Norman Uelsmann was born in Detroit, Michigan on June 11, 1934, the second son of an independent grocer. He attended public schools and was never a particularly diligent student. During his high school years he became interested in photography as a serious vocation. Uelsmann enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1953. The strongest early influence on his creative process came from instructors like Minor White and Ralph Hattersley at the Rochester Institute. As Uelsmann put it, the most significant lesson he learned from White was that his camera had the ability not only to record images, but also that "it did have the potential of transcending the initial subject matter." As a teacher, White was concerned less with teaching the technical details of the camera-lens system than he was with using that system to transform what was seen.”

http://www.bookrags.com/biography/jerry-uelsmann/

QUOTES

“There’s a lot of source material once you have the freedom of not having to complete an image at the camera.”

“A lot of times I found that if I thought too much about the image, I’d talk myself out of shooting, or I ended up with a lot of images that I thought were okay, but not quite good enough.”

-From an interview by Chris Maher and Larry Berman, Shutterbug Magazine, September 2007

I am attracted to Jerry Uelsmann’s work for his seamless combination of negatives in the darkroom.  His scenes are very surreal, yet they exist momentarily for the viewer.  He allows different environments, people, and objects to live in a world that doesn’t exist to the naked eye.  I have been attempting to combine PNP paper negatives, combining my old photographs with new ones, allowing myself to interact on paper with the past.  And there is no one better than Jerry Uelsmann to look at for inspiration with this method.

Untitled, 1983

Untitled, 1982

Alpha Tree, 2002

Self-Reflection, 2009

Untitled, 2008

Idea - Interactive Art

“Interactive art is a form of installation-based art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some installations achieve this by letting the observer or visitor "walk" in, on, and around them; Some others ask the artist to become part of the artwork.

Works of this kind of art frequently feature computers and sensors to respond to motion, heat, meteorological changes or other types of input their makers programmed them to respond to. Most examples of virtual Internet art and electronic art are highly interactive. Sometimes, visitors are able to navigate through a hypertext environment; some works accept textual or visual input from outside; sometimes an audience can influence the course of a performance or can even participate in it.

Though some of the earliest examples of interactive art have been dated back to the 1920s, most digital art didn’t make its official entry into the world of art until the late 1990s.  Since this debut, countless museums and venues have been increasingly accommodating digital and interactive art into their productions. This budding genre of art is continuing to grow and evolve in a somewhat rapid manner through Internet social sub-culture in one hand, and large scale urban installations in the other hand.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_art

ARTICLE 

You can read Graham and Elizabeth Coulter-Smith’s article, “Art games: Interactivity and the embodied gaze” for more information on this subject.

“One of the most salient differences between fine art and new media art lies in the possibility for interactivity. Interactivity is not simply an inherent quality of new media, it also relates to a crucial ethico-aesthetic premise informing deconstructive art from Dada and Surrealism through radical art of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present. The ethico-aesthetic premise in question concerns breaking down the barrier between the viewer and the work of art and bringing art into life. More specifically the goal is to bring creativity into everyday life as an antidote to alienation and reification. Whereas new media art finds it relatively easy to devise art games that encourage creative involvement on the part of the viewer, fine art is severely hindered in its attempts in this direction by the traditional focus on the artist-genius and the transformation of the artistic product (whatever its material) into a precious object. It will be shown that creative games exist in fine art but they are for the most part designed by the artist for the artist. This is even the case with the most radical fine artists celebrated at the turn of the millennium such as Rirkrit Tiravanija who Nicolas Bourriaud put forward as a prime instance of so-called relational aesthetics.”

Abstract from “Art games: Interactivity and the embodied gaze”

Coulter-Smith, G. and Coulter-Smith, E. (2006), ‘Art games: Interactivity and the embodied gaze’, Technoetic Arts 4: 3, pp. 169–182, doi: 10.1386/tear.4.3.169/1

QUOTES

“…Embodied or performative interaction provides the viewer with a more creative mode of involvement and that this can have an emancipatory effect in the sense that it disrupts if only for a moment the hegemony of instrumental rationalism.”

Coulter-Smith, G. and Coulter-Smith, E. (2006), ‘Art games: Interactivity and the embodied gaze’, Technoetic Arts 4: 3, pp. 169, doi: 10.1386/tear.4.3.169/1

“Since the 1990s installation art has risen into prominence as a major movement in fine art and in her authoritative analysis Claire Bishop suggests that our experience of installation art goes beyond looking and reading towards what she refers to as ‘activated spectatorship’ (2005: 11). Sheeven suggests that such activated readership might inspire the viewer to ‘active engagement in the social-political arena’ (Bishop 2005: 11)…Most particularly it concerns the perception that since the industrial revolution fine art has become separated from society.”

Coulter-Smith, G. and Coulter-Smith, E. (2006), ‘Art games: Interactivity and the embodied gaze’, Technoetic Arts 4: 3, pp. 170, doi: 10.1386/tear.4.3.169/1

The idea of viewers being interactive with my work is an important aspect of my installation.  This will be my first installation, and it is necessary for viewers to walk on my fabricated floor in order for the work to be succesful.  Since this is the case, I feel as if I definitely need something on the wall to draw the viewer's eye over to the image, then realizing that they are stepping on part of the project.  I don't necessarily have a plethora of money to go digital in any way, but I feel as if walking on is interactive enough for me right now.

http://technabob.com/blog/2007/12/14/hundreds-of-box-fans-as-interactive-art/

installation by Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde

Artist - Raphael Lozano-Hemmer

http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/index.php

GALLERY

Raphael Lozano-Hemmer has his own art gallery, http://www.rafaellozano.com/

BIOGRAPHY

“Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. In 1989 he received a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.

Electronic artist, develops interactive installations that are at the intersection of architecture and performance art. His main interest is in creating platforms for public participation, by perverting technologies such as robotics, computerized surveillance or telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival and animatronics, his light and shadow works are “antimonuments for alien agency”.

His work has been commissioned for events such as the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the Cultural Capital of Europe in Rotterdam (2001), the UN World Summit of Cities in Lyon (2003), the opening of the YCAM Center in Japan (2003), the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004), the memorial for the Tlatelolco Student Massacre in Mexico City (2008), the 50th Anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2009) and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (2010).

His kinetic sculptures, responsive environments, video installations and photographs have been shown in museums in four dozen countries. In 2007 he was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel. He has also shown at Art Biennials in Sydney, Liverpool, Shanghai, Istanbul, Seville, Seoul, Havana and New Orleans. His work is in private and public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Jumex collection in Mexico, the Museum of 21st Century Art in Kanazawa, the Daros Foundation in Zürich and TATE in London.

He has received two BAFTA British Academy Awards for Interactive Art in London, a Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica in Austria, a distinction at the SFMOMA Webby Awards in San Francisco, "Artist of the year" Rave Award in Wired Magazine, a Rockefeller fellowship, the Trophée des Lumières in Lyon and an International Bauhaus Award in Dessau.

He has given many workshops and conferences, among them at Goldsmiths college, the Bartlett school, Princeton, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Cooper Union, MIT MediaLab, Guggenheim Museum, LA MOCA, Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Art Institute of Chicago. His writing has been published in Kunstforum (Germany), Leonardo (USA), Performance Research (UK), Telepolis (Germany), Movimiento Actual (Mexico), Archis (Netherlands), Aztlán (USA) and other art and media publications.”

http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/bio.php

INTERVIEW

You can go to:

http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/texts.php and download multiple interviews with Lozano-Hemmer.

QUOTES

“Walter Benjamin spoke with great clarity about the birth of modernism. For him the image is that which can be reproduced mechanically, a condition that eliminates the aural quality from a work of art. Mechanical reproduction democratizes art, popularizes it, and takes away that privileged point of view born of singularity. However, with digital technologies I believe that the aura has returned, and with a vengeance, because what digital technology emphasizes, through interactivity, is the multiple reading, the idea that a piece of art is created by the participation of the user. The idea that a work is not hermetic but something that requires exposure in order to exist is fundamental to understand this “vengeance of the aura”.”

From an interview by Jose Luis Barrios on April 20^th, 2005

“Today digital art, —actually all art—, has awareness. This has always been true, but we have now become aware of art’s awareness. Pieces listen to us, they see us, they sense our presence and wait for us to inspire them, and not the other way around. It is no coincidence that post-modern art emphasizes the audience.”

From an interview by Jose Luis Barrios on April 20^th, 2005

I love the interactive aspect of Raphal Lozano-Hemmer's work.  He allows the viewer to make the art effective.  His conversation of space and the individual is admirable, and his use of digital technology speaks very well to the 21st century.  A lot of the artists I have recently found use aspects of Walter Benjamin's writings in their work, each very different from the next, and I really enjoy seeing the variations of communication of ideas.  I will be looking to Lozano-Hemmer for inspiration on installation art and interactivity.

Third Person

Shadow Box 2 - 2006

High-resolution interactive display with built-in computerized surveillance system.

Shadow box 104.5 x 80 x 12 cm. Installation variable.

6 copies + 1 AP

Eye Contact

Shadow Box 1 – 2006

High resolution interactive display with built-in computerized surveillance system.

104.5 x 80 x 12 cm.

6 copies + 1 AP

Sustained Coincidence

Subsculpture 8 – 2007

lightbulbs, computerized surveillance system, dimmers, IR illuminators, custom software

Variable dimensions.

Close-up

Shadow Box 3 – 2006

High resolution interactive display with built-in computerized surveillance system

Shadow box 104.5 x 80 x 12 cm. Installation variable

6 copies + 1 AP