Sunday Entry: Pertti Kekarainen

Photographer Pertti Kekarainen, along with Aino Kannisto, Ville Lenkkeri, and Elina Brotherus is another gifted artist to belong to the Helsinki School of Art in Finland. He was born in 1965 and continues to explore the concepts that he developed while in graduate school. Kekarainen originally studied both sculpture and painting, and began applying his skill in those areas to photography in 1993. His series of interiors entitled, "Tila" deals with the idea of space, three-dimensionality, and focus. While these images are devoid of people, centering instead on interiors and perspective, another recent series, which bares the same title, "Tila" depicts figures moving in and out of a white room. The figures are cropped closely, so that much of their bodies are out of frame, leaving their shadows at the center of the photographs. These shadows stand in for the figures and represent the ideas and conversations the characters are involved in. Without the aid of digital manipulation, the artist adds colored dots to the images, which are reminiscent of apparitions in early spirit photography. The figures are both absent and present at the same instant. Kekarainen presents these color photographs at full scale and hangs them low on gallery walls so that viewers can fully interact with the figures and interiors.

I hope that my artwork progresses in a direction similar to that of Pertti Kekarainen's. The absent subject is the focus of my current series of photographs, and I love how, in this artist's work, the shadows are more fully realized than the figures. The veil of colored dots within the images add another layer of intrigue and complexity that works extremely well.


http://www.helsinkischool.fi/helsinkischool/artist.php?id=9021


http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5132959

http://www.artnews.org/gallery.php?i=384&exi=11088

Sunday Entry: Aino Kannisto

http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5132966

http://www.m-bochum.de/artist_image.php?aid=66

http://www.women2003.dk/artists.php?id=46

Photographer Aino Kannisto is another talent to have graduated with her Masters from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland. Kannisto was born in Finland in 1973 and makes "constructed pictures", carefully staged color tableaux, which feature the artist herself. She compares her photographs to literature, more specifically to short stories. Each image stars Kannisto and captures moments both dramatic and intimate. The image, "Untitled (Woman in Water)" presents a tense moment as a woman raises her head above the surface of a lake; her face is pained and vulnerable as her eyes scan her remote surroundings. In another tableaux, called, "Untitled (Classroom)", the artist sits alone at the back of an unpopulated schoolroom. The pale blue desks and chairs complement the mood of the subject, who stairs off to the side, lost in thought. Kannisto's presence in each image helps to create a narrative between the disparate scenes and each photo seems to have its own backstory.

Aino Kannisto begins planning out each scene by creating sketches and writing short stories. She writes out a script of sorts for what must occur in the scene and what has led up to that specific point. I always start off with small sketches of how I'd like my photographs to be composed before shooting. I think this type of directorial preparation allows for precise expression of your original idea, and permits the photographer to worry less about the actual compostition on the day of shooting, since it has been considered beforehand.

Sunday Entry: Thomas Demand

Photographer Thomas Demand was born in Munich, West Germany in 1964. While at Goldsmiths College in London, he studied sculpture and pioneered an ingenious way to incorporate his love of sculpture with the medium of photography. In his studio, Demand re-creates locations he finds in newspaper photographs using cardboard and paper. His full-scale re-creations depict politically charged environments, which are not always recognizable to the pubic. Demand photographs the scenes he creates, and then destroys the model; the photographs are the only record of the work. Despite the enormous amount of work the artist puts into each re-creation, the images lack specific details once viewed up close. This intentional lack of detail is to emphasis the gap that exists between reality and fiction. In Demand's "Bathroom Image" the viewer finds a seemingly innocuous scene, in which a pulled- back shower curtain reveals a bathtub still filled with water. Demand based this photographed model on a press photograph of a hotel bathroom where German politician Uwe Barchel's body was discovered. He continues to work with this concept and his images include both elaborately created interiors and exteriors. The Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of Demand's artwork in 2005.

I admire the quiet suspense in each image. Once you learn about Demand's concept, your mind begins to wonder about the events that once filled these iconic scenes. Although our processes of art-making are clearly different, I am inspired by the way he can create a tableau by hand, using only cardboard, and elicit such a powerful response from his audience.

http://www.thomasdemand.de

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2005/demand.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/arts/design/04KIMM.html

Sunday Entry: Laura Letinsky

Canadian photographer Laura Letinsky draws inspiration from classic Renaissance paintings. She was born in 1962 and did not start taking photographs until her late teens. While at the University of Manitoba, the artist wanted to study painting but did not have the necessary prerequisites for the class; she had to take a photography course instead. She became enamored on the idea of making a photograph, instead of just taking one, and furthered her studies at Yale, where she received her MFA. Originally, Letinsky's artwork captured intimate scenes between couples. She captured private, sexual scenes, which eventually featured the artist herself, until she was awarded a Guggenheim Grant and was able to study in Rome. Surrounded by such a fertile atmosphere, Letinsky began to study Renaissance paintings closely, and was particularly interested in Leonardo Davinci's "The Last Supper". After noticing the importance of the food on the table in that painting, Letinsky began to stage photographs of just tables spread out with food, their dinners having left halfway through a meal. Even without people in the images, their is a distinct sense of their presence. The food left behind is often devoured halfway, as if the tables were still inhabited. The lighting in these scenes is cool and "angelic".

What I find so powerful about these scenes, is the way the viewer has to imagine just what situations took place at these meals, and why they were left in such a state. The absence of people in the series is striking. Laura Letinsky's I did not remember I had forgotten series was recommended to me because of a series I made last year, which featured a similar sense of absence. I created a series of tableaux featuring the remnants of child's birthday party. One of my scenes is similar to Letinsky's in that it depicts an abandoned meal of cake and ice cream. All of the young revelers have gone and left fallen decorations and wrappings in their wake.




http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/laura-letinsky/index.html

http://www.houkgallery.com/letinsky/letinsky1.html

http://www.mouthtomouthmag.com/letinsky.html

Sunday Entry: Anne Hardy

British artist Anne Hardy constructs fantastic environments before her camera in her studio. She was born in 1970 in the UK and received her MA in 2000 from The Royal College of Art. Unlike most artists, who endeavor to find unusual places to photograph, Hardy starts from scratch and builds her own surreal interiors, with full knowledge of how she wants to shoot them. For the artist, the process begins after she finds an object that inspires her; she then starts from scratch and builds a room within her studio that would accommodate said object. In many images, her constructed environs are cluttered in an obsessive manner. There are groupings of similar objects and bizarre numbers placed within the room, in an attempt to catalog its trappings. The viewer is left to image who inhabits these spaces, and can construct narratives with the clues Hardy has left in the rooms. These large scale tableaux are notable for never containing the people who inhabit these spaces; the scenes are left, ready for their eccentric owner's return.
Of the tableaux I've seen, I am particularly fascinated by the one titled, "Drift". Perhaps it's all my experience with creating and destroying leaf piles in my youth, but her image of a command center buried within a great drift of leaves sets my mind spinning. The lighting in the scene is provided by, in the context of the image, the sun above the leaves. This scene triggers a host of bizarre stories about the necessity for such a room or who would be obligated to station it. It is this sense of mystery that has kept me making photographs, always trying to exercise the viewer's dedication and imagination.



http://www.anne-hardy.co.uk

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

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/jan/11/photography.architecture

Sunday Entry: Elspeth Diederix

Conceptual artist Elspeth Diederix is Dutch, yet was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1971. Diederix and her family moved often, living in Africa, Columbia, and the Netherlands because her father worked for the Dutch embassy. She graduated in 1995 from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and was awarded the Prix de Rome in 2002. Her interest in photography was a result of being exposed to such amazingly disparate landscapes as a child and her interest in art history and painting. Her photographs are infiltrated with elements of the fantastic. In an image titled Virginia, a woman submerges her face into a duckweed covered pond; her simple, yet bizarre action reminds viewers of a traveler's entrance into a new, unknown world. Unsettling events occur in common surroundings. Diederix plays with strange effects of light and shape in her work, yet uses no digital manipulation. The artist often resorts to suspending objects from clear fishing line to create different environments.
I first came across Elspeth Diederix's work when looking at a collection of the Prix de Rome winner's artwork. I was immediately taken aback by an image of a woman dipping her fingers into a cup of coffee at a cafe. The woman's nonchalance is unsettling; her face and body posture suggest that nothing out of the ordinary is occurring. If might just be that she is fishing a spent bag of tea out of her cup, but the image set my imagination aglow. The same sense of the fantastic is alive in all of her photos. I appreciate her work all the more knowing that she creates all of the effects in camera. I always try to stage everything exactly before the camera so that those posing in the composition have a sense of the atmosphere of the completed image.




http://www.betterwall.com/bnr.php?bid=102

http://www.elspethdiederix.com/

http://cms.dordrecht.nl/dordt?nav=inedmEsHaKpPkCdCaGDzHGRI

Sunday Entry: Erwin Wurm

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/2007/01/erwin_wurm_at_cristina_guerra_1

http://www.kopenhagen.dk/interviews/interviews/interview_erwin_wurm/


http://www.galerie-krinzinger.at/kuenstler/wurm/wurm_ar_fr.html

Conceptual artist Erwin Wurm was born in Bruck, Austria in 1954. He came from an artistically diverse background, which saw him experiment with painting, performance art, sculpture, and photography. In his more recent work, Wurm has been critiquing the self-satisfied nature of society. He is well known for his bloated sculptures of suburban houses and vehicles. In addition to social critique, Wurm has commented on the art world by making sculptures in which famous art galleries, such as New York's Guggenheim, in a state of deflation. The galleries, like the houses and cars before, have become soft and flabby with complacency. The artist often presents photographic prints of his performance art, believing the photographs themselves to be sculptures. In an especially intriguing series, entitled Instructions on how to be politically incorrect, Wurm photographed people in socially unacceptable situations. In one image, a woman leans in and spits in another woman's cup of tea, while looking at the lens. In the same vein, another image in the series depicts a man with his head buried in a woman's sweater. Wurm's humor can be seen throughout his work.
Erwin Wurm's photographs have a distinctly absurd flavor to them that demand all of the viewer's attention.The images are slyly staged, yet have a real sense of spontaneity to them. I love the mysterious qualities of Wurm's photos; each one leads the viewer in multiple directions.

Sunday Entry: Seung Woo Back

Seung Woo Back, who hails from Taejon, South Korea, created a two part series of photographs which finds fabricated miniatures juxtaposed with real-life locations. In the series "Real World 1" the artist visited Aiisworld Amusement Park in Seoul and photographed their miniature versions of world landmarks. Back included the South Korean buildings behind the model cities to accentuate his main theme of the culture clash between the East and the West. It is difficult to discern any differences between the modern buildings at first. After careful inspection, it becomes clear that the structures in the foreground are fabrications due to their streamlined appearance. The city of Seoul becomes a spectator, as it looms behind the miniature buildings. Back's images have a brilliant, surreal quality to them. In some views, icons from different cultures overlap and compete for a space within the frame. The World Trade Center stands near the London Bridge, and traditional Asian ships drift in the waters nearby. "Real World 2" is equally powerful. The large color scenes, set in real life locations, are populated by little toy soldiers. The images are strikingly beautiful, and it can take some time before the viewer notices the presence of the soldiers. Against their surroundings, toy men are dwarfed, and their battles are rendered insignificant. This latter series relates more to the individual forming his own identity separate from that of the larger group. I admire how Seung Woo Back can create such a statement about culture by adjusting the lens, allowing Seoul to creep in behind. The city, as well as the country, are unwitting spectators in this series.


www.artrabbit.com/features/features/september_2007/abandoned_protocol

www.foiltokyo.com/gallery/eg/past/realworldexhibitioneg.html

www.english.ganaart.com/exhibition/2008062/biography.02.html

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

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

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

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/

Sunday Entry: Anna Gaskell

Contemporary artist Anna Gaskell considers herself a "photo-based" artist rather than a photographer, because her images rely on all different types of media. Gaskell, who was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1969, draws upon film, literature and paintings to create her color tableaux. She is often inspired by literature and creates a series of photographs and short films to investigate its deeper themes. The artist's literary influences include Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Several themes are recurrent in her work, including duality, the supernatural, and the insidious qualities inherent in childhood activities.
Gaskell earned her MFA from Yale in 1995 and was awarded the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize in 2000. Her artwork in featured in numerous publications and books, including "by proxy", "uncanny", and "half life".
During my research, I had difficulty finding a homepage for Anna Gaskell, but have included several links to collections of her artwork.

www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/halflife/
www.guggenheim.org/new-york
www.postmedia.net/999/gaskell.htm
www.postmedia.net/999/gaskell.html