Currently viewing the category:
"Artists"
In the middle of working on the Morbid Anatomy Museum, which has begun to occupy a seriously overwhelming amount of my time, I’m also making new work in the studio and finding time to work on interesting projects with amazingly talented artists like Nicole Antebi and Alex Branch.
On that last front, next weekend is the final act of Alex’s darling project, the Winter Shack. Nicole, Ben Miller, and I have worked out a fun, low-tech way to convert the shack into a giant Magic Lantern, and will be performing a moving panorama within it for one night only.
The shack has proven to be a great place for innovation and play, and I suspect this event will be more of the same.
I’m doing a piece with Becky Sellinger at the Winter Shack later this month. Look for updates, but count on there being something panoramic, something crazy performative, and something involving hot chocolate.
I’ve been working for months on a show in the gallery at 60 Wall St about the Utopian possibilities of art in an amusement park. A group show about artists and fun! It’s full of ideas that I’ve been thinking about for ages. We finally hung the show last week and there’s a public reception on July 10.
Everyone come. (Here’s the link to the evite)
A trip inside the mind of an artist.
At the same time that I’m still trying to explore this idea of palimpsests, I’ve been working on a new series of paintings. The idea came to me as I was driving back from a visit to Sigrid Sarda’s studio in New Palz. Sigrid is so interesting and her studio is such a mindfuck that I thought, “I really want to write a review of this studio visit.” Like an art critical essay. Like a meditation on my brief time inside Sigrid’s head. But I’m not really all that excited by adding to the world of art reviews I have to say. And I’m really focused on making art right now. So it seemed like the right thing to do to combine these things into one endeavor.
So a new series was born! And the first painting in that series is happily sitting in a gallery in Jersey City waiting for people to look at it. I’m very pleased about that turn of events I have to say.
I’ll get some photos of this series up as soon as I can.
So go see the show. It’s at Curious Matter, it’s called “Dangerous Toys”, and it runs until November 11.
Roger Fenton, Valley of The Shadow of Death. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
I read Lawrence Weschler’s interview with Errol Morris on the subway this morning. It’s always great to listen in on two interesting and esoteric minds conversing. I appreciated a lot of the insights they dug out of each other.
One thing that struck me though is how much public conversations about photography have changed – even in the last 5 years. Now that digital photography is ubiquitous, even non-specialists have to talk about photography with a digital twist – a shift that Morris and Weschler seem to have skipped. At this point, any conversation that’s mostly a reaction to Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes seems a little quaint to me. Not that I blame them – it used to be a lot more fun to think about photography as a special medium. Sadly, this just isn’t the same technology Sontag and Barthes were writing about. But it would be wonderful to hear these two super-smart guys talk about digital technology representing the input from light-sensing arrays and the potential of software hacks for recording different realities than the photographic ones Nicéphore Niépce and Roger Fenton recorded.
One moment in the interview that I really loved was when Weschler said, “For all the variety of your subject matter, I think you are essentially a hedgehog—and in fact a turbo-hedgehog, a pneumatic drill of a hedgehog. You just dig and dig and dig. You are like an archeologist of photography.”
