Sunday Entry: Hannah Starkey

Irish artist Hannah Starkey wields an amazing amount of control over her photographed tableaux. Every element within her scenes is carefully considered; the lighting is often cinematic, and the costumes and color schemes are rife with psychological undertones. Starkey was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1971 and earned her MA from The Royal College of Art in 1997. In her early work, she often depicted young women in relation to their environments. The arrangement of the female figures in her tableaux evokes social status as well as isolation. Her images are striking and yet subtle. The color schemes and composition in each work invite the viewer in to investigate just what is happening with the characters within. While the mise-en-scene is quite dramatic, the action of the figures is often subdued. Starkey has turned to examining constructed realities in her more recent photographs. Cold, manufactured environments are contrasted with the individuals who populate these spaces. Humanity is threated when seen against the sterile, lifeless locales of public institutions.
I admire Starkey's brilliant color choices and full exploration of the depth within the photographs. Her figures are elegantly posed and work well as psychological portraits.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/feb/15/photography

http://www.postmedia.net/01/starkey.htm

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/hannah_starkey.htm

Thursday Entry: Ambiguity

"The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space"
-Victor Turner, from The Ritual Process

Slemmons, R. (2006) "The Self Seen Double".
MP3: Kelli Connell, 48-51.

When Rod Slemmons first saw the work of Kelli Connell, he was immediately intrigued and confused by the two characters who populate every scene. The body of work in which these characters appear is a series of personal vignettes dealing with relationships. What stands out as odd, is that the two female protagonists evolve throughout the work. In some images, the women, who are both played by the same model, appear to be identical, while in others, one takes on more masculine attributes. Slemmons relates that their relationship can alternately be both homosexual and heterosexual, plural and singular. The sense of ambiguity in the photographs enables the figures to be seen as individuals, or different facets of the same being.
The author compares the subtlety of Connell's manipulated images to plays of Tennessee Williams. He sees the relationship between the two figures similar to the ambiguous relationships found in Williams' plays.
The images that I consider most remarkable in Connell's series, are the ones that hint at events preceding the moment captured on film, those which have the viewer concoct narratives. The ambiguity extends beyond the relationship between the figures and fills the entire scenario. It seems as if entire years have led up to the moments caught between the women in the photos. I strive to provide enough information in my own images, for viewers to construct their own stories.

Sunday Entry: Bettina Hoffmann

German artist Bettina Hoffmann was born in Berlin in 1964. The artist, who now lives and works in Montreal, is know for her photographic montages and video pieces. She has studied at several universities worldwide, and received her masters degree from Berlin's Hochschule der Kunste. The aforementioned montages are so well done that a trained eye is easily fooled into believing that the finished product is all from one negative. Figures are transported to new locations, and placed into tense tableaux, frequented by many characters. These re-staged everyday events are heightened to illuminate the conflict and social rank inherent in the photographs. Gesture and posture are key elements of her reworked images. In the series "Affaires infinies" , Hoffmann herself plays each character in the tableaux. The overall uneasiness of the images is intensified by the fact that all the figures share the same appearance, yet interact like separate beings. Witnessing the photos in this series, one gets the sense of a strong, underlying narrative, that is withheld from us. Hoffmann's camera alternately finds itself within the middle of the intimate scenes and at a distance as an observer.
I am attracted to the bizarre, and somewhat hidden narratives hinted at in Bettina Hoffmann's photographs. The works entitled, "Maitre et chien" display an unusual combination of grown adults acting like animals and children intermingling. Her figure placement is what originally caught my interest; she uses the confines of the photographic frame to her advantage.



http://www.bettinahoffmann.net/

http://www.optica.ca/decades/decadeng/files/2000e.html

http://calgary.urbanmixer.com/events/bettina-hoffman-may-16-2008

Thursday Entry: Spectatorship

"I saw myself seeing myself"
-Jacques Lacan

De Diego, E. (2005) "In the Meantime".
Thomas Struth: Making Time , 73-80.

This article focuses on Thomas Struth's photographic series about onlookers in a museum. Author Estrella De Diego quotes acclaimed intellectuals such as Marcel Proust and Jacques Lacan while analyzing Struth's series. At first glance, the photographs appear simple; groups of spectators gather around famous works of art. The images are immediately familiar to anyone who has wandered around an art museum before. As you spend more time with the photographs, you become like one of the photographed spectators and are eager to view what they are clustered around. De Diego, in accordance with Proust, notes, "it must be worthwhile if someone contemplates it in such a self-absorbed way". Attention alone, it seems, can be enough to validate something. The article dives into the psychology of the group; the more people are gathered around an object, the greater its importance. Those who look at a painting in a gallery both increase its significance and become a part of its history.
The idea of the spectator is one of the facets of my current series of photographs. It is amazing how an event is made more significant or relevant based on who is watching. In my series, people gather after an event has taken place. Their faces are turned towards an object or occurrence that is absent to the viewer of the photograph, yet present in the context of the image.

Tuesday Entry: Candice Breitz

South African artist Candice Breitz examines pop culture's ability to link those from all over the globe. Popular music and movies have become a way through which we can connect to others, and, for better or for worse, have taught us lessons and set examples. In her series entitled Babel, Breitz digested hours of MTV music videos and culled single syllables from famous performers. The artist broke the songs down to just the basic units of language, and was left with looping videos of the musicians singing "pa", "ma", and "no no". These early words are recognizable in numerous languages. Breitz describes these clips as "mechanical and brutal" reiterations.
In another series, Breitz linked classic pop love songs through personal pronouns. Almost every romantic ballad contains the words "I" and "you", as a place for listeners to enter their emotions into the songs. She selected videos of The Carpenters, Olivia Newton-John, Annie Lennox, and Whitney Huston singing their well known hits, but reduced down to just the aforementioned pronouns. Breitz positioned two monitors, each playing a video of the same performer, right across from each other. While one monitor sings "I" and "me" the opposing screen wails "you". The viewer is caught between a romantic battle waged by two voices of the same musician.
I admire the way Candice Breitz respects the material which she is working with. She mentioned the artist's responsibility to free the material from its original context in order to make it his or her own. Her videos feel both familiar and alien all at once. What we are experiencing goes well beyond the original purpose of the source matter, yet it is all performed by familiar faces. You can clearly tell that Breitz is a fan of the original music and movies from which she samples, as evidenced by her recent series dealing with genuine fanatics.

Sunday Entry: Rineke Dijsktra

Photographer Rineke Dijsktra was born in the Netherlands in 1959. Like Anna Gaskell, Dijsktra has been awarded the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize. Her artwork deals with transitions and transformations, and often features the same subjects photographed over periods of time. In her famous series entitled Beaches, adolescent bathers stand on the shore between the ocean and the safety of their towels and dry clothing. The subjects are classically posed, and all attention falls upon their slight gestures and self-conscious posture. Dijsktra's young subjects stand in limbo between childhood and adulthood as well as between the water and dry land. The photographer leaves the background minimal, so as to not distract from the central figure. In keeping with the theme of transition, Dijsktra elucidated the change that occurs in young people after serving their country in Israeli Soldiers. The series of portraits show young men and women before and after their time as soldiers, and highlights the changes that occur in the way they present themselves.
I am most interested in the sense of liminality in her photographs. The adolescents in Beaches are clearly between great changes: they are photographically captured on the threshold between innocence and the responsibilities of maturation.


http://www.rinekedijkstra.net/

http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/permanent-collection/artists/dijkstra/

http://www.popphoto.com/americanphotofeatures/4602/a-conversation-with-rineke-dijkstra-more-real-than-reality-page2.html

Thursday Entry: Unexpected

"In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation"
-E.A.Poe

Burnett, Craig. (2005) "Everyday Fantasies and Impossible Realities".
Jeff Wall , 45-63.

This essay turns to photographer Jeff Wall's penchant for creating scenes of the unexpected, framed within a well known area or composition. Wall is unique for photographing meticulously orchestrated tableaux as deftly as his un-staged documentary shots, which are both imbued with the same sense of mystery and fantasy. A simple image such as "The Crooked Path" which, just as the title suggests, features a well trodden path twisting through wild grass, can be just as effective as his more elaborate ones. Unlike Wall's "The Giant" or "Dead Troops Talk", the documentary-style shots are not enhanced with digital technology. In "The Giant", a naked elderly woman of enormous size stands amongst the unfazed inhabitants of a city library. Digital technology was used to great effect to make the woman appear seamlessly in the environment. The artist is wise enough to allow his bizarre subject matter to issue forth through a variety of different techniques.

Wall's ability to return to similar themes in disparate processes and lights has really intrigued me. He refuses to deal with, what he calls, "the spectral" in one consistent manner. So many emotions are on display in works like "Dead Troops Talk". It is refreshing to see his sense of humor in the face of such a dour subject.

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Sunday Entry: Philip-Lorca diCorcia

American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia plays with the connections between documentary and staged photography. The artist, who was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1953, has exhibited images that seem to have been captured effortlessly, yet have taken hours to choreograph. In one instance, a shot of his brother reaching into a refrigerator was staged over and over again, in an attempt to feign the appearance of real life. At the other end of the spectrum, diCorcia's recent series, "Heads", which features vignettes of people on the streets of New York, was created instantly as the pedestrians unwittingly passed his strobe lights. The images in this recent series appear to have been painstakingly composed. He is interested in the concepts of alienation in a large crowd, vulnerability, and the loss of innocence inherent in the young people he encounters. diCorcia teaches at Yale, where he received his MFA in 1979.


www.lacma.org/art/ExhibdiCorcia.aspx
http://www.lacan.com/frameXIV9.htm
www.davidzwirner.com/artist/115/

Thursday Entry: Aberration

Aberration

"It is part of what we regard as awful, dreadful, and terrifying"
-Sigmund Freud

Stahel, U. "Thick Skinned and Ambiguous: Uncanny Beauty, Uncanny Familiarity and Uncanny Everydayness" Uncanny (1999).

In her essay, German author Urs Stahel analyzes the work of five contemporary photographers, whose artwork embodies the spirit of the supernatural and aberrations from daily life. Stahel explores the etymology of the German word "unheimlich", which roughly translates to the Engish word "uncanny" and explains just what, according to Sigmund Freud and other famous minds, qualifies as uncanny. Each of the featured artists (Vanessa Beecroft, Anna Gaskell, Dana Hoey, Natacha Lesueur, and Wendy McMurdo) employ the idea of the uncanny to different effect. The book includes vivid tableaux of children encountering doppelgangers, unusual, sinister events occurring amidst familiar scenery, and other bizarre scenarios. The author connects these images to a sense of fear associated with the unknown, and the discomfort we experience when we are removed from familiar surroundings.

This essay has helped to articulate and enrich some of the deeper themes I have been exploring. With the current series that I am creating, events unseen by the audience, but witnessed by the characters in the photographs, disrupt daily activities and force the figures into a standstill. The occurrence of the supernatural amidst the safety of familiar surroundings continues to fascinate me.

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