Artist: Anna Shteynshleyger

I'm really drawn to the work of Anna Shteynshleyger. In a way I feel like her Siberia series captures what I am looking for in my own work. She captures a scene in ways that it imbue it with a kind of bleak feeling, a sense that things could and should be better. In her land scapes there are a number of things or objects that have been left by humans and because of that I feel like there was someone there to remember it.

Example works:




Bio:

EDUCATION:

2001 MFA Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT

1999 BFA Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD

SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
2010 Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL (forthcoming January-February)

2005 Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, NY (catalogue available with essay by Tim Davis)

2004 Museum of Contemporary Art (12x12), Chicago, IL (curated by Dominic Molon)

2001 MFA Thesis Exhibition in Photography, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT

1999 BFA Thesis Exhibition,The Whole Gallery, Baltimore, MD

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS AND SCREENINGS:

2007 Loaded Landscapes, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL

2006 The Lie of the Land, Murray Guy Gallery, New York, NY

2006 Adventura: Photography of Unexpected Places, Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, NY

2006 New Trends in Chicago Photography, Version Fest, Chicago, IL

2005 Into the Woods, Thomas McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL

2004 Frozen in Ligh, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL

Art Basel Miami Beach, Jacob Karpio Gallery, Miami, FL

Museum of Contemporary Photography: work on loan as part of the Midwest

Photographers Project, Chicago, IL

SELECTED GRANTS/ AWARDS:
2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship

2008 Illinois Art Council Finalist Award

2006 Illinois Arts Council Finalist Award

Quote:

"There is a challenge inherent in her pictures, and an invitation: Here is what I don’t have, she seems to be saying. Here is what I imagine you do have, which I will possess, however briefly, from the safe distance of an observer behind a lens. Here I am, forever on the outside, pressing my face against the glass of your life — as you are doubtlessly doing to mine." ~JESSICA REAVES

Review/ Interview:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/arts/design/22cncanna.html

Artist Website:
http://www.shteynshleyger.com/index.php

Gallery:
http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Intro.Anna-Shteynshleyger.609.html

Idea: Past

Quotes:
One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.
~Oscar Wilde

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald

annotated bibliography:
Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past. 3rd ed. Cambridge,Ma: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print.


The past is paramount to my ideas and my project. I can really relate to the Fitzgerald quote because in looking backward I have almost come to wish that I hadn't. In the beginning I thought I was looking for things from my past because they were something better or purer than the present. But now looking back has become a negative thing to me. I see the past and I can't recreate it by visiting these places where I have such strong memories. It only makes me struggle with not wanting to think about it because I can't get the high points back and I can't help but dwell on the lows. It's possible that focusing on these aspects of memory and the past might be the direction that my project needs to go in.

Artist: Daniel Gebhart de Keokkeok

I'm interested in Daniel Gebhart de Keokkeok's "The Days Off" series because I think his project has a similar feel to my project. He's not dealing specifically with memory but rather he's covering diverse subject matter, but doing it in a way that the project still holds together. This is something that I am working on myself because I have lots of different types of imagery associated with this project and I'm struggling to reign it all in and sequence it in a way that it will be cohesive. I also like that he is traveling and combining images from different areas into the same series, I'm planning a trip to North Carolina this coming weekend and I'm interested to see how the images will blend with the shots I have from the Richmond area.

Artist Bio:
2006 Photographer in Vienna / Austria
2007 moved studio to MQ (Vienna)
2008 Internship at Magnum Photos (NYC)
2009 Jury member at Tirolissimo
2009 married to Lara de Koekkoek
2009 Phootcamp (San Francisco / CA)
2009 reportage for Spot On Wien (Tokyo)
2009 represented by Kanyl (Sweden)
2010 moved studio to Studio65 (Vienna)
2010 represented by Daniel O' Gorman (Ireland)
2010 Jury member at Tirolissimo

"He has taken pictures of everything from pillowfights in New York to men sleeping in their cars in tokyo."

"the hunter and collector in me told me to collect images of nice moments. It made my life more intense and I started to see small and beautiful things that I didn’t recognized before."








Artist Interview:
http://www.radarzine.com/foto/2010/05/07/veckans-fotograf-vecka-18-%E2%80%93-daniel-gebhart-de-koekkoek/

http://www.jenriks.de/interview-with-daniel-k-gebhart/

Artist Representation:
http://www.danielogorman.com/main.php

Artist Website:
http://danielgebhart.com/

Lecture: Julika Rudelius

Interesting Quote:
"Well, I think you have to be a pretty good psychopath to be a successful visual artist."

Three Words:
Sociological, Tricky, Meticulous.

I thought it was really great that she prompts the actors through ear pieces as a way of directing. It's a really smart but tricky way to get them saying and doing exactly what you want without it being obvious. I liked that it allows her to run the camera in long takes and capture everything without stopping.

I thought that "Rites of Passage" the piece about politicians and the "Charismatic Leader" was extremely powerful. The rotating camera work as well as the predatory circling of the older men around the younger gave such an incredible sense of tension. Even with only seeing part of the work it was intense to feel that building tension.

Overall, I enjoyed the lecture. Rudelius work with social commentary is very strong and I thought it was a great mix of being entertaining and thought provoking. I wish we had been able to see more of her work or see some of it in it's entirety. I understand wanting to be so meticulous in your work's presentation, but at a certain point it needs to become more about letting others see it and less about your control of it. It was extremely frustrating from a presentation stand point to just be getting into a piece only to have her stop it and say she couldn't show it like that. I think VCU is partially to blame for the choppy and unpleasant qualities of her presentation. I mean I don't think I can remember one lecture where there hasn't been some sort of technical problem. In the future it might be a good idea to have someone designated to help the artist setup and preview their presentation so that fixes don't have to come on the fly at the time of the presentation. Not only do these technical problems ruin the artists presentation but they make the school look bad. It seems to me that if there are always problems with presentations then it might become more dificult to continue to get such high profile and highly respected artist to come and give lectures.

Idea: Laughter

Video:


Quotes:

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter. ~e.e. cummings

Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant. ~ Washington Irving

Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. ~Joseph Addison

Text:
Provine, Robert R. Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2000. Print.

Laughter is a truly amazing thing. It's something that is utterly human and in many ways is universal, but at the same time every individuals laugh is different. What we laugh at why we laugh are different. But, it is a common thread. I am interested in trying to find things like this to tie my life together with the experience of the viewer. I have so many unique memories that involve laughter but I feel like if I can capture something of those memories people could relate to it.

Artist: Blake D. Ogden

Okay, so I somehow managed to save this post as a draft instead of actually posting it Monday, but here it is.

I found Blake D. Ogden's work through Review Santa Fe with his project In My Grandmother's House. I think this project is really fascinating and it's something that I wish I could do. This ties in directly to my ideas of exploring places out of memory or the past. I think that part of my interest in going in search of the past or places of memory is driven by the fact that on both sides of my family, the houses I grew up in as "grandma's house" have sold and I'm no longer welcome there. It's very strange to be utterly familiar with a place have so many memories there and yet you can't actually go there. Something else that I think is really great about this work is how it doesn't seem limited to one type of shot. The content and compositions are all over the place, but they still function as a whole. This is something that I'm struggling to deal with in my work because it is definitely all over the place but I want it to be cohesive.

Quotes:

"Blake Ogden’s upcoming photography exhibition... is both personal and public, capturing his family’s history while aiming to explore the overall passing of time(Erekson)."

"the interiors are suffused with natural and artificial light that plays upon smooth delicate surfaces while creating a wealth of shadows, reflections, and translucencies. Here, everything is just so, as the artist seeks to fight time by capturing beauty before it disappears(Capasso). "

Artist Bio:
Blake D. Ogden received a BA from Bennington College with a major in Painting and Printmaking in 1995. While enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he began serious work in photography. Photographs from his series In My Grandmother's House have been displayed in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 2005 his work was featured in the group show Pretty Sweet: The Sentimental Image in Contemporary Art at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park of Lincoln, Massachusetts. In 2008 his image My Mother Was An Only Child was on view at the Biennial at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. His work has been published in Stephen Perloff's Photo Review and Plates to Pixels magazine.

Images:






Interview/Review:
http://www.artreview.com/profile/BlakeDOgden
http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/142059.html

Representation:
http://gallerykayafas.com/

Artist Website:
http://www.ogdenpictures.com/index.html

Citations:
Stoneham Theater exhibit explores universality of family relationshipsBy Kristin Erekson/CorrespondentFri Mar 27, 2009, 09:00 AM EDT

Capasso, Nick. "Pretty Sweet: the sentimental image in contemporary art." (2005): Web. 4 Oct 2010.