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.