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

Kiyomi Iwata Questions/Response

In your artist statement, you note that with "working in both silk and metal continue my collaboration of two cultures, East and West."  Do you think of each material as a certain culture? Or does it change from piece to piece?

I find it interesting that most of your silk work looks rough and hard to the touch, and your metal work looks delicate and soft, which are obvious contradictions of the materials.  At what point in your silk work did you decide that you wanted to work in a "more permanent medium?" What aspect of it made you want to create sculptures of a different style?

Kiyomi Iwata’s lecture was the second craft and material studies lecture I have attended, and I must say that they are very different from the photography lectures.  A lot of what is discussed is concerned technical process and material rather than expressing overall conceptual ideas.  But, compared to the first lecture I went to, I felt as if ideas and materials blended together much more seamlessly for Iwata.  She spoke of her “life [being] interwoven with textiles,” changing her style when an aspect of her life changed.  I really enjoyed this aspect of her work, because you can then attach emotion and memories to a technical piece.  I would describe her work as technical, conceptual, and thoughtful.  She frequently stated that the material was her language, and worked through silk and metal in different techniques in order to figure out where she fit into the mix of materials, similar to trying to fit into two cultures.  In regards to my questions, the use of silk and metal referring to certain cultures varied with each piece.  She began using flattened sheet metal, physically light but visibly heavy, to embellish her silk work and make it harder to see through, creating more of a visual mystery.  I am intrigued by the flat, “open” art that she began to create.  She stated again that a big event happened, and it caused her to want to be more “open,” and began making full, flat wall sculptures instead of enclosed bundles.  Relating your life to your art and visually portraying that is an honorable aspect that I look for in artists.

Laurel Nakadate Questions/Response

In a lot of your work, you seem to be placing yourself into many potentially very dangerous positions.  Has this ever become an issue?  Or is that something that you want the viewer to interpret along with your work?  Do you ever feel like there is any exploitation involved in your work?

I feel as if the power of narrative still photography can be very strong.  Why did you decide to move away from still photography and towards film?

I really enjoyed Laurel Nakadate’s lecture.  I was introduced to her work over a year ago, in hopes to get inspiration on how to communicate with strangers.  Her methods are a little extreme for me, but I suppose if I wanted it bad enough like she did I would find a way as well.  Her tone was very pleasing, and it seemed like she was trying to have more of a casual conversation about photography and film rather than being lectured.  I feel as if the way she started out the lecture was appropriate, discussing the idea of failure and having that be okay, since she was speaking to a bunch of lost college students. I would describe her work as provocative, evocative, and clever.  She has an interesting way of studying genders. In regards to my first question, Nakadate stated that at the time of making the work, she didn’t really realize how potentially dangerous it was, yet looking back now, she would never do it again.  In regards to the idea of exploitation, I still see it in her work, yet maybe seeing the process building up to choosing her subjects, or actually, letting her subjects choose her, would remove that aspect.  But she spoke of an interesting bond between herself and her subjects, who were willing to drop their guards and make a video with her, and some she still collaborates with.  She spoke of visual fact and narrative fiction, which I believe is a very important aspect to both photography and film work.  I feel like I am more interested in her video work now after hearing her speak of it.  She began making them in grad school, in a new town without knowing anybody.  One of the most important things about making art is passion, and she became obsessed with making these videos, disregarding her social life, and created fictional relationships recorded on film.

Idea - Installation Art

INSTALLATION ART

"Installation art describes an artistic genre of site-specific, three-dimensional works designed to transform a viewer's perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however the boundaries between these terms overlap."

wikipedia.org

You can read:

From Margin to Center

The Spaces of Installation Art

By Julie H. Reiss

“Unlike traditional art works, installation art has no autonomous existence. It is usually created at the exhibition site, and its essence is spectator participation. Installation art originated as a radical art form presented only at alternative art spaces; its assimilation into mainstream museums and galleries is a relatively recent phenomenon. The move of installation art from the margin to the center of the art world has had far-reaching effects on the works created and on museum practice.

This is the first book-length study of installation art. Julie Reiss concentrates on some of the central figures in its emergence, including artists, critics, and curators. Her primary focus is installations created in New York City—which has a particularly rich history of installation art—beginning in the late 1950s. She takes us from Allan Kaprow's 1950s' environments to examples from minimalism, performance art, and process art to establish installation art's autonomy as well as its relationship to other movements.

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the effects of exhibition space, curatorial practice, and institutional context on the spectator. The history of installation art—of all art forms, one of the most defiant of formalist tenets—sheds considerable light on the issues raised by this shift of critical focus from isolated art works to art experienced in a particular context.”

 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=8533

QUOTES

"Installation art is an artwork that encompasses an extended space, it suggests that art lies not in objects alone, but also in the experience of perception....
Installation art can also be site-specific, time sensitive, interactive, environmental."


From the press release for "Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art, 1969-1996," at the San Jose Museum of Art

http://straddle3.net/context/01/010123.en.html

“Installation art is often temporary, and the physical work is destroyed or stored after exhibition; its documentation is therefore crucial.”

http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/jcamd/research/rae-2008/nico-deoliveira/portfolio_outcome04.cfm

The idea of installation art has become of interest to me this semester.  I have been struggling with it though, since I am a photographer, and a lot of the images that I am using are old family images.  Yet I feel as if for this project, I need to move away from the definite term of "photographer," and move towards "artist."  I want to install the old photographs, which are etched into metal, seamlessly into a floorboard installation to force the viewers to walk on it to emphasize overlooked relationships.

Jac Leirner

http://www.artnexus.com/PressReleases_View.aspx?DocumentID=17315

Artist - Anthony Goicolea

http://www.anthonygoicolea.com/index.html

Greg Kucera Gallery, Inc.

http://www.gregkucera.com/index.htm

BIOGRAPHY

“Anthony Goicolea (born 1971) is a New York-based fine art photographer, born in Atlanta, Georgia.

Goicolea's photographs frequently deal with issues of androgyny, homosexuality, and child sexuality. Goicolea, Cuban-American and gay, was educated at the University of Georgia and studied painting, photography, and sculpture at that institution. He holds an MFA in fine arts from the Pratt Institute. He made his debut in 1999, and now shows work with Postmasters gallery in New York and Aurel Scheibler in Berlin, Germany.

In 2005, he received the BMW-Award for Photography.

Some of his work features photographs of "pre- to barely pubescent boys" (Art in America, Dec, 2001) in elaborately staged tableau settings, commonly showing multiple boys wearing traditional private school uniforms either engaged in school-life or recreation after school — but with often transgressive and erotic twists in their activities. Of great interest in these compositions is the fact that Goicolea himself portrays all of the boys in his photographs through the astute use of costumes, wigs, make-up, and post-production editing via the software Adobe Photoshop; "always looking uncannily like a boy on the edge of puberty" (The Advocate, August 14, 2001). Therefore, despite having numerous figures in them, Goicolea's photographs are actually very complex large-scale self-portraits, and are always done in a flawlessly realist manner.

The pioneering fine-art photographer Cindy Sherman is an apparent influence on Goicolea's work, given her own extensive use of self-portraits and emphasis on sexually-charged narrative topics. Sherman and Goicolea have also had several joint exhibitions. His work can be strongly compared to similar manipulated and/or staged art photography featuring children and adolescents, such as that of Bernard Faucon, Loretta Lux, and Justine Kurland.

Recently, Goicolea has also been producing and exhibiting his drawings, which follow much of the same subject matter as his photographs. He has also published several books.”

Wikipedia.org

ARTIST REVIEW

New York Times 2007

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E2DD1131F93BA25756C0A9619C8B63

QUOTES

“Anthony Goicolea has ranged widely among photography, painting, installation and video in the 10 years he has been exhibiting, but one connecting thread has been his inclination to fantasy.”

“Seemingly based on a variety of formally posed, individual black-and-white photographs, the composite image, rendered in acrylic, graphite and spray paint on Mylar, runs across three panels, such that fragments of some of the figures are repeated from one to the next.”

Falconer, Morgan. "Anthony Goicolea." Art in America Magazine. Art in America, 3

     Dec. 2009. Web. 11 Mar. 2011. <http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/

     reviews/anthony-goicolea/>.

Anthony Goicolea's self portraiture and installation work intrigues me.  His portraits are honest, odd, and sometimes uncomfortable to look at.  They show movement and an accurate portrayal of an event, whether that be an actual event or a fantasized one.  I enjoy his installation work that includes parts of the video in the installation.  I will be using both of those aspects of his work to further my work.

All pictures are from the artist's homepage

Bed Bug

1999

20x20 Black and White Photograph

Stare Case

1998

20x20 Ciba-Chrome

Kidnap Video Installation

2005

Tea Party Video Installation

2005

Idea - Identity

"Identity is an umbrella term used throughout the social sciences to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations (such as national identity and cultural identity). The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, including the two forms of social psychology.  The term is also used with respect to place identity.

A psychological identity relates to self-image (a person's mental model of him or herself), self-esteem, and individuality. An important part of identity in psychology is gender identity, as this dictates to a significant degree how an individual views him or herself both as a person and in relation to other people, ideas and nature. In cognitive psychology, the term "identity" refers to the capacity for self-reflection and the awareness of self.

Sociology places some explanatory weight on the concept of role-behavior. The notion of identity negotiation may arise from the learning of social roles through personal experience. Identity negotiation is a process in which a person negotiates with society at large regarding the meaning of his or her identity.

Psychologists most commonly use the term "identity" to describe personal identity, or the idiosyncratic things that make a person unique. Meanwhile, sociologists often use the term to describe social identity, or the collection of group memberships that define the individual. However, these uses are not proprietary, and each discipline may use either concept and each discipline may combine both concepts when considering a person's identity."

wikipedia.org

ARTICLE

You can read Arto Mutaten's "About the Notion of Identity" for more information on the idea of identity.

“The notion of identity has been used in many different situations: we have, for example, the notions of national identity, regional identity, professional or vocational identity, personal identity, etc. Identity is an identity of something, and the identity occurs in a concrete environment. The identity consists of natural and cultural properties. Constitution of identity is bridge building between the two kinds of factors. For example, national identity is a construction of natural and cultural factors. The construction is done by human beings. This is a general structure of the notion of identity: identity is human construction.”

-Abstract from author

 Mutanen, Arto. "About the Notion of Identity." Limes 3.1 (2010): 28-38.

     Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Mar. 2011.

QUOTES

“The notion of identity is an extremely central one. Identity helps us relate to things within our environment.  Who am I? Who are we?  The answers suppose identity in one sense or another.  There is a proper need for identity.  However, this does not imply that there should be a kind of thing called identity.”

 Mutanen, Arto. "About the Notion of Identity." Limes 3.1 (2010): pg 33.

     Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Mar. 2011.

“The identity of one changes with how one perceives reality.”

-Vithu Jeyaloganathan

"Our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday. You are today where the thoughts of yesterday have brought you and you will be tomorrow where the thoughts of today take you."

-Blaise Pascal

The idea of identity is an important aspect of my project in multiple ways.  For one, your past, your family, etc., is a huge part of who you are as an individual.  Those are the things that shape you into a dynamic human being.  Your family passes on their ethnicity and language to you, and also raises you in a certain way which shapes how you act and react later in life.  This action/reaction process is also caused by your past and experiences.  Identity can also be thought of as a visual aspect.  For my project, I am dealing with the question of whether or not my specific identity is necessarily important that it is known.  Will this make my work more subjective if I am obviously present?  And if my identity isn't shown, will others be able to connect with the work and understand it?  Well, it could be slightly shown, just distorted.

http://joncrowleymusic.blogspot.com/2011/01/thoughts-on-identity-and-development.html

http://brainstorm-services.com/wcu-2004/identity.html