Faces in the Mob

Korean artist KwangHo Shin recently made a colorful splash in the art world when he mysteriously posted his portfolio online, and little else. The young artist is based out of Yeongdeok, South Korea and studied art at Keimyung University. His work primarily focuses on people and their emotions, portrayed largely through abstract strokes of paint. What often pops through his wildly moving colors, are his subject’s expressive eyes.

Chorelation

Everytime I see a group of people in dark clothing and masks I immediately think Eyes Wide Shut, don't you?  

The fantastic, mass-oriented, fine art photography of Claudia Rogge really takes me there. The German photographer shoots individual subjects, and then digitally arranges them to create a sense of mass participation and performance. Here are a few of her most striking images.

The Night Ride

Gas flaring on the yellow platform; voices running up and down;
Milk-tins in cold dented silver; half-awake I stare,
Pull up the blind, blink out - all sounds are drugged;
the slow blowing of passengers asleep;
engines yawning; water in heavy drips;
Black, sinister travellers, lumbering up the station,
one moment in the window, hooked over bags;
hurrying, unknown faces - boxes with strange labels - 
all groping clumsily to mysterious ends,
out of the gaslight, dragged by private Fates,
their echoes die. The dark train shakes and plunges;
bells cry out, the night-ride starts again.
Soon I shall look out into nothing but blackness,
pale, windy fields, the old roar and knock of the rails
melts in dull fury. Pull down the blind. Sleep. Sleep
Nothing but grey, rushing rivers of bush outside.
Gaslight and milk-cans. Of Rapptown I recall nothing else.

~ Kenneth Slessor

Dangerously close to nothing

Exploring the works of one of my favorite photographers, Francesca Woodman (1958-1981).

"More than thirty years ago, Francesca Woodman jumped to her death from the window of a Lower East Side Manhattan loft. A photographer, she was prodigious and original; she had been a star pupil at the Rhode Island School of Design and a contemporary of the Surrealists in Rome. She left behind 800 negatives and 120 published images, which later would multiply into nearly 500 and comprise one of the most stunning— and studied—oeuvres in American photography.

She was 22 years old when she died.

Woodman, like Sylvia Plath, is inseparable from her suicide. She disappeared into her fragmentary,
hallucinatory, black-and-white (but seemingly all grey) images, which were mostly of her (mostly nude) self, but never of her whole self. Something, often her face, was always obscured: by a shard of paper, a cloud of hair, a wing of light… She used long exposures to capture objects that were no longer there, or maybe never were.

Even in the “real” world, she was never fully present. She did not relate to the contemporary moment, loved mostly Victorian or Gothic literature, wore only vintage clothing and could not even pretend to understand pop culture. She has been called a feminist, but she was not political or aware enough to be a feminist, and felt guilty about it; her best friend said so, and also that she had the most intense girl crushes. She loved women, although she was ambivalent about being one of them. She was infatuated with the writer Gertrude Stein and obsessed with the photographer Deborah Turbeville, whose work—along with Duane Michals’ and Miroslav Tichy’s—most directly precedes (and now seems to echo) Woodman’s.

“The subject of her self-portraiture,” writes Chris Townsend in the definitive 2006 Phaidon monograph Francesca Woodman, “is provisional and contingent, losing itself at the very moment that it is defined.” Had she stayed alive, the chance that she would have become a prominent figure in the art world is small. She was not like Cindy Sherman, the great self-portraitist; Sherman was pop-savvy and posed safely in costume, never truly naked or vulnerable or afraid. Woodman liked to dress up, but she could never be anything more than herself and, in fact, she appeared to be less—sometimes much less, dangerously close to nothing.

The ending is unhappy, but how could she have lived? Her talent and her capacity for seeing was so
extraordinarily bright that she herself felt only a shadow of it."

This is an extract from an article written by Sarah Nicole Prickett, posted on January 19, 2011 at 11:23 am for Dossier Journal. 

General Purpose Legends

Invisible Horses

”Once upon a time there was a girl who had 7 invisible horses. People thought she was crazy and that she in fact had 7 imaginative horses, but this was not the case. When autumn came the girl spent a whole day washing all her clothes. She hung them on a string in her garden to let the gentle autumn sun dry them. Out of nowhere, a terrible storm came and its forceful winds grabbed hold of all her clothes and all seven horses. The girl was devastated and spent all autumn looking for each horse spread around the country, wrapped in her clothes.”

Photo project by Ulrika Kestre.

Formless Circumstance

All busy in the sunlight the flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them in formless circumstance.

 Love Itself ~ Leonard Cohen.

Waterfall

I do not ask for youth, nor for delay
in the rising of time's irreversible river
that takes the jeweled arc of the waterfall
in which I glimpse, minute by glistening minute,
all that I have and all I am always losing
as sunlight lights each drop fast, fast falling.

I do not dream that you, young again,
might come to me darkly in love's green darkness
where the dust of the bracken spices the air
moss, crushed, gives out an astringent sweetness
and water holds our reflections
motionless, as if for ever.

It is enough now to come into a room
and find the kindness we have for each other
-- calling it love -- in eyes that are shrewd
but trustful still, face chastened by years
of careful judgement; to sit in the afternoons
in mild conversation, without nostalgia.

But when you leave me, with your jauntiness
sinewed by resolution more than strength
-- suddenly then I love you with a quick
intensity, remembering that water,
however luminous and grand, falls fast
and only once to the dark pool below. 

~ Lauris Dorothy Edmond

The Skywhale

Patricia Piccinini's maternal  "Skywhale" divided opinion when it visited our shores recently as part of the centenary celebrations of our nation's capital, Canberra. Piccinini stated that her "aim was to create a being that was massive and wondrous and that exists somewhere between the impossible and the unlikely"

I was a big fan. What a fantastic object to photograph. 

Celebrity Two

What a great image of the inimitable James Spader. I'm a fan of his work.  

And Tilda. What can I say about Tilda? She is exceptional. 

Blood and Skin

Hers is the face I see when a certain mood moves in. She's moving through me even now. My lady of the various sorrows. 

~ Nick Cave

Shapes in Space

I love architecture, that's no secret. But more than the objects themselves (beautiful though they are), it's the negative space ie: the space and shapes around the objects that I love to enjoy most. 

And where space and form meet? It is as though a kiss. 

"How did it happen that their lips came together?... A kiss and all was said."

~ Victor Hugo