Blogs of note: FFF and Brian Ulrich

FFF (a.k.a. FormFiftyFive.com) is a killer graphic design blog constantly updated with some really beautiful work to check out. An excellent resource for finding new artists and designers, or browsing for inspiration!


Brian Ulrich is an incredible Chicago-based photographer with a lot of work up on his site, but he also keeps very up to date on his blog... with information about exhibitions, artists of interest, readings, and other relevant bits of information... Plus he has a very extensive listing of sites for other photographers and photo related blogs! - NotIfButWhen.com

3 Shows at Grand Central Art Center

I received an invite for a show called "The Happy Show" at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. A friend of mine, Jaime Uretsky (who's work I really respect and enjoy), was included in the show and so I was interested in going to check it out if for no other reason than to encourage and support her... so I visited the GCAC website to find out details...

Well... I happened to know several other people exhibiting in The Happy Show, as well as some artists showing in a concurrent exhibition ("Spitting Images") in their main gallery! And the project room installation looked REALLY EXCITING! (Note: "Spitting Images" is the correct title for the show despite the typo on their website)

So now I had to go... and I did.

It was all enjoyable, and worth the trip...
But nothing turned out quite the way I expected.



On display: July 5 - July 27, 2008
I generally found The Happy Show... not so happy (with notable exceptions).

In general, I expected something very uplifting and whimiscal... but this seemed in short supply. One of the notable exceptions, from Jon Ginnaty and Diana Donaldson, was a rack of about 25 small ceramic puppies (as seen in the promo image above), each with a tag around its neck that reads "I will love you forever." This little installation with so many little puppy faces begging for attention, each with a promise of affection, was definitely a "Happy" highlight. Also, worthy of your time is a whimsical painting by Alyssa Cordova, and a very fun little animation/video piece by Jaime Uretsky (You'll have to look for this new work from Jaime in the front window facing the street).



On display: July 5 - August 24, 2008

Spitting Images was proclaimed to explore "unique interpretations of the photo-making process within a group dynamic"... but it seemed surprisingly traditional. Though not as unique as promised, I still felt this was over all a pretty strong showing of work by photographers and printmakers.

The real standout work of the show were a series of digital images from Neil Sharum. Utilizing his unique images (originating from nightclubs that cater to teens) as source material, he then uses digital imaging technology to merge these images together, creating the illusion of a seamless continuous space where his "cast" of very real characters appear to be interacting with one another in narratives of his own devising. In this process Neil becomes a story teller or director of sorts, creating cinematic narratives and building relationships into scenes that in truth do not exist.

Elsewhere in the show... Mark Chamberlain, Chris Moore, Sandra Green, and Mayra Alford all had strong showings of work that seemed to involve fairly traditional methods of image making. Not ground breaking, but strong nonetheless. (The work of Scott Angus could also fit into this category, but the 2 small pieces on display do not do adequate justice to his greater body of work.)

There were a few people who seemed to be genuinely bucking tradition and working in new or hybrid ways, including Janelle Morte and Leonard Correa, but I didn't necessarily find that work particularly engaging. Elizabeth Tobias as a possible exception had beautiful large scale and colorful visual representations of music... but they were at root fairly straight forward depictions of audio waveforms... (for a more innovative approach to visualizing music go see the "Sound!" work of Andy Carey, currently on display at Open Bookstore in Long Beach).

p.s. - I hate to be negative, but people need to stop exhibiting the work of Robbie Miller! His self portraits are thin on concept (sorely lacking, derivatives of Cindy Sherman and others), and from a photo craftsmanship-quality standpoint they are poorly executed prints. Yet somehow I have found his work exhibited in numerous small So-Cal galleries. (Someone has to stand up and say "NO!" when bad stuff is catching on.) STOP IT PEOPLE!



On display: July 5 - August 24, 2008
Lastly, the project room's installation ("This used to be real estate, now it's only fields and trees")... WAS EVEN BETTER THAN EXPECTED!

I can't really describe this installation by Amy Caterina. You have to experience it for yourself. Suffice it to say that it is an all-encompassing experience, very much enjoyed, and an excellent pairing to The Happy Show (or rather the whimisical intent of The Happy Show). You need to see this!

Tragically Hipster * Los Angeles

A friend of mine recently started a blog for all things cool in LA. He's invited several friends to participate as authors (including myself). I am continuing this blog as a strictly art and photo focussed site, but if you are interested in seeing a broad smattering of things that interest and/or humor me and some other friends...

Go see Tragically Hipster * Los Angeles.


Enjoy.

One Crabby Photographer

Corey Arnold photographer/crab-fisherman/artist extraordinaire...

So this guy is a legitimate friend-of-a-friend (he went to high school with a good friend of mine). And I was first introduced to his work over a year ago when my friend said... "Hey! I know that guy on TV!" while we were watching the Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch. Soon after, she found a webpage that had some of his amazing photos from crab fishing. It was cool, then I forgot.

Here's his fellow crewmates from the Rollo:


Well...
Now Corey has gone and made a name for himself!

No longer just a cool guy playing around and being goofy on a crab boat, his work has matured, and he's gotten noticed by corporate clients, publishers, art galleries, and curators!

This season The Discovery Channel hired Corey to photograph all the crab boat captains that they are featuring this season (you may have seen the billboards or and other ads). He has several current and upcoming gallery exhibitions, and he even won a major grant to help him pursue his project of photographing the modern commercial fisherman.

He recently got a new website and blog up and running where he has broken down his projects into 4 categories: Fish-work Behring Sea, Fish-work Norway, Arcticness, and Human Animals.

All his work is pretty amazing, so you should check it out.

It is beautiful:



Difficult:


Funny:


Absurd:


Joyous:


And much, much more!

Corey currently has work up at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica as well as a show in New York and some public art works in Canada.

To what else Corey is up to...
Check out his website's info page.

Also, he recently did a piece for another blog where he talked about his years long adventure getting into the industry and making it onto a crab boat (It's a good piece... you should read it).

Several great photo shows @ The Getty

Germans have ruled the (photo)world since 1929.
As evidence I present this pair of exhibitions from The Getty:


August Sander: People of the Twentieth Century
May 6–September 14, 2008


Bernd & Hilla Becher: Basic Forms
May 6–September 14, 2008

If you're into photo-art, you probably know: Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Candida Hofer, and/or Andreas Gursky. And likely you know several folks listed here: Catherine Opie, Rineke Dijkstra, Richard Ross, Chris Jordan, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Edward Burtynsky, Joel Sternfeld, Robbert Flick, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and/or Richard Avedon.

The truth of the matter is that most of the important conceptual photographers of the past 2 decades owe a major debt to August Sander and (more directly) to Bernd & Hilla Becher. Together these avant-garde German photographers pioneered a new method of using creative photography as a means of systematicaly studying their subjects. And both Sander and the Bechers had expansive life-long projects that are both socially important and aesthetically inspiring.

Sander worked in the late 1920's and through the 1930's to document all archetypes of the German every-man; and the Nazis burned his images for not buying into their agenda of racial superiority, due to his honest and uncritical depictions of all people. His expansive project of vocational archetypes laid the groundwork for the Bechers to build upon when they entered the art scene and began their own projects photographing architectural archetypes from about 1959 through to the near-present (Bernd just passed away last year).

Fortunately for you...
You can go see both of these major projects on display now at The Getty!
This is the best way to see either Sander or the Bechers' work, and to see both together is absolutely amazing!

Returning to my list above...
Gursky, Hofer, Ruff, and Struth are all German photographers who studied directly under Bernd & Hilla Becher in Duesseldorf. Collectively they have defined a distictively "Becher school" style. Subsequently this distinctive approach to photography has had a significant influence on photographers world wide, as evidenced in the work of the other ten important artists listed above.

Go now.



In other news:


Ten Years in Focus: The Artist and the Camera
March 25–August 10, 2008

Contrary to what may be suggested by the exhibition title... this is not an exhibition focusing on any singular decade of photographic works. Rather, it reflects the fruits of a decade of earnest focus by the museum aimed at deepening their collection of important photography (spanning the full history of the medium).

So in truth this exhibition represents more of a brief history of the medium as seen through the Getty acquisitions of the past 10 years. Brief and to the point. Go get schooled.

Phantom Sightings & Philip-Lorca diCorcia

First off...
I must vent...

LA museums seem to be picking up the habit of calling exhibitions "comprehensive." It seems that "comprehensive" has become the hottest buzz word to make you think that an exhibition is important.

But here's the thing...
They are not comprehensive.
I don't like to be blatantly lied to for the sake of good press.

According to several online dictionaries, the primary definition of "comprehensive" means things such as the following: "inclusive," "including all or everything," "covering completely," or "having a full view." This adjective describing such a broad and all encompassing scope should not be applied lightly, and yet just this past month both the Getty and LACMA have been touting "comprehensive" shows in the media (Getty's California Video exhibit, and LACMA's Chicano artists show).

Please people...
I could name artists excluded from each...

Let's get off the self-important inflated jargon and just call them what they are (fantastic, extensive exhibitions) without trying to declare them as so important as to encompass all that is worth knowing on a subject... that's just straight up arrogant... STOP IT!


Now... done with my rant...
...and on to the 2 shows @ LACMA


Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement
April 6–September 1, 2008

Surprisingly, my initial feeling upon leaving the Phantom Sightings show was that it didn't feel strong, cohesive, or deep; but as I was looking back in preparation for this entry, I began to feel that there was more to this show than I had initially given credit. Here's a brief rundown of what I found most interesting...

On the subject of Borders and Boundaries...
Julio Cesar Morales' stunning Undocumented Interventions paintings depict illustrations of hidden compartments in vehicles and other objects actually used by people who were caught trying to cross the border illegally. Margarita Cabrera's facinating sculptures of southwest desert flora, created out of recycled U.S. Border Patrol uniforms. Delilah Montoya's photos of abandon camps and emergency water stops for immigrants in the desolate landscape of the border region. And perhaps most intreguingly, Ruben Ochoa's What if walls created spaces which is a complicated work, but probably the most interesting project in the show by my vote (included here is documentation of his photo mural's original installation on a freeway wall, along with the remnants of the original mural, and an audio installation of sound of the mural's removal).


On the subject of Aspirations...
Some interesting projects from Eduardo Sarabia about romanticized visions of outlaws and treasure in the local folklore of some regions of Mexico. The "pimped out" Rigor Motors caskets produced by Ruben Ochoa and Marco Rios, commenting on the tendancy of some to live fast and die young, measuring success by the number of tricked out features on your custom ride.


On the subject of Mixed Identity...
Mixed personal identities as represented by the self-portrait-ish work of Carlee Fernandez depicting herself as adopting her identity from others (sorta like Cindy Sherman... but not really at all like Cindy Sherman). Adrian Esparza mixes modern art practice with traditional folk art practice in an astract yarn "painting" created from a partially unravelled traditional Mexican serape. And Juan Capistran mixes high culture and low culture in works such as White Minority where he references the strict minimalist art practice of painters (Frank Stella, Terry Haggerty), while simultaneously adopting imagery and a title from punk rock (Black Flag).


Lastly... On the subject of Cultural Critique...
Photo documentation is displayed from several performances by the influential group ASCO. And the Erased Lynchings of Ken Gonzales Day vividly remind us of an American history of violence against minorities.




Philip-Lorca diCorcia
May 23–September 14, 2008

This is a remarkably powerful show for the relatively small space allotted for it.

This covers several bodies of work by the noted photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia (aka "PL"). These bodies of work include the projects known as: Hustlers, Streetwork, Heads, Lucky 13, and Thousand. But the exhibition largely intersperses the projects (with the exception of Thousand).

Hustlers and Streetwork are older projects working in varying ways capturing fleeting moments (often vulnerable moments), but approaching the work in two entirely different ways. In Hustlers PL carefully stages these moments in hotel rooms or on the streets of Los Angeles casting hustlers as his protagonists, and in Streetwork he captures these fleeting moments in a more candid way on the busy streets of major cities worldwide.


By contrast, both Heads and Lucky 13 take a much more systematic approach. In Heads PL sets up a system by which he candidly captures portraits of pedestrians on the New York City sidewalks. Entirely unaware of the photographer's presence, isolated and captured in extraordinary detail, and thus left vulnerable to our observation, these pieces seem to quitely speak volumes about their subjects. Lucky 13 on the otherhand depicts lone pole dancers in the midst of their seductive act... but this is project is far more than just T&A (see more below)...

To round out the bodies of work included here, Thousand is a collection of 1,000 Polaroid images produced over years of PL's art and commercial practice as a photographer. Though 1,000 seems somewhat unimpressive by today's digital standards, the idea of producing and exhibiting 1,000 instant images was huge at the time of this undertaking. This collection of images displayed somewhat randomly on several shelves extending across 3 walls, produces an unparalelled peek into the working practice of a photographers. Test prints, lighting trials, camera experiments, personal moments, random points of interest, and curious textures all share equal billing as the work product of an active artist (akin perhaps to a painter's notebook of sketches).


I have always loved PL's Heads. I am facinated by the people depicted as well as the complicated system derived to capture them in their most natural, unsuspecting, and vulnerable moments. As a photographer, I am further impressed with his technical acuity in all of the remaining projects, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing so much of the "behind the scenes" work in Thousand. But honestly, most of the remaining bodies of work didn't resonate with me as strongly as Heads.... Until today....

This evening I attended an artist discussion with PL at LACMA, and while most of the discussion was entirely un-earthshattering, one huge revelation forever transformed my understanding and appreciation of Lucky 13...

Philip-Lorca diCorcia lives and works in New York. The events of 9/11 affected him deeply, but one image haunted him more than any others... The image of desperate persons diving head first out of the burning towers and flying through the air to their death. PL is deathly afraid of heights (afraid of falling from heights), and this image truly haunted him. Yet somehow, he was inspired to view these pole dancers as a related image, an allusion to flight, but infact a descent, often head first, spinning down to the floor.


Perhaps he sees these dancers as somehow reenacting the event, giving the victims' suffering a martyr's romatic allure. Perhaps by turning the violence of the original on it's head with the seduction of the latter, it allowed him to deal with the horror. PL didn't expound on this inspiration for the work... but it undoubtedly provided a compelling context to critically re-evaluate it.

Catherine Opie: Highschool Football

Catherine Opie
Highschool Football
@ Regen Projects, April 10th - May 17th

Catherine Opie has turned into a great German photographer!

Of course, I don't really mean that she is German by heritage. Rather, she is following in the footsteps of great Dusseldorf photographers such as the Bechers and (more directly) Andreas Gursky; though she has turned this eye to distinctly American subjects.

In this most recent series, Highschool Football (and in her previous Surfers series), she presents very direct structured portraits of individuals alongside images of these same persons in action on the field. The result is a decidedly tense blend of heroic masculinity, and awkwardly self-conscious youth.