Paul Salveson

I found Paul Salveson's work via Fjord's relatively new Artists' Space gallery. His ritualistic look at the commonplace ephemera that fills our lives is refreshingly lighthearted and self-deprecating. In his statement, Salveson proclaims:

"In my photographs, I aim to worship objects I encounter every day, and present them as rebuilt icons with ambiguous purposes. I utilize details in my environment, and frame them to create simplicity and unfamiliarity. The obsessive arrangement of the pieces of my world allows for a reinvention of their purpose and meaning. The process of my photography is suffused with ritual, centering around transformation and re-presentation. When I encounter a certain desirable situation, place, or object, I collect it either physically or mentally. The combining of these logged items results in an event which is photographed meticulously until a formal balance is met. Implicit, but consistent and unyielding rules dictate the composition of my works."











All Images © Paul Salveson

European Month of Photography: Berlin 2008

The month of November marks the European Month of Photography, a continent-wide, month long celebration of all things photographic. Exposure Project member Anastasia Cazabon is in a group show entitled The Sheath of the Self at Photo Edition Berlin. The exhibition explores "the artistic portrait, in its physical, social and psychic presence." The number of exhibitions in Berlin alone is quite daunting, but the quality of work, from what I saw, is quite high. Some of the artists on view include:

Diane Arbus, Jan Banning, Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Angus Boulton, Mona Breede, Tacita Dean, Julia Fullerton Batten, Paul Fusco, Nan Goldin, André Kertész, Yotta Kippe, Oliver Kunkel, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Marroquin Winkelmann, Ryan McGinley, Hans W. Mende, Boris Mikhailov, Man Ray, Simon Roberts, Frank Röth, Sebastian Stumpf, Hiroshi Sugimoto, André Villers, Andy Warhol & Erwin Wurm

The European Month of Photography Berlin 2008 has a comprehensive website with descriptions of all the shows in the festival, not to mention a section with listings for special events and artist lectures. For anyone who happens to be in the Berlin area, or just in Europe for that matter, I would highly recommend taking advantage of this festival.

Splendid Isolation I, 2007

Image © Mona Breede

Natascha Libbert's Men At Airshow & Waterland

Dutch photographer Natascha Libbert e-mailed me yesterday to share some of her recent work. I particularly gravitated toward her series' Men At Airshow & Waterland, both of which, in their own ways, address "the manner in which we give form to our world." Her images strike a fascinating balance between detachment and compassion. This seeming paradox is incredibly hard to achieve, but the results are quite compelling when rendered with the precision and juxtapositional quality of Libbert's best images.

There is an overwhelming amount of work on Libbert's website, however, in addition to the two series' mentioned above, I highly recommend Seemingly Insignificant & Sportsfields.













From Top To Bottom:

Top 3 images from the series Men At Airshow

Bottom 3 images from the series Waterland

All Images © Natascha Libbert

Martha Rosler's Bringing The War Home (1967-1972) & Bringing The War Home: House Beautiful (2004)

Martha Rosler's two series' Bringing The War Home (1967-1972) & Bringing The War Home: House Beautiful (2004) explore the intersection between war imagery and domestic representation. The first series appropriates images from the Vietnam War, while the newer series pictures the Iraq War. Critic Jerry Saltz contributed this criticism in regard to Rosler's series':

"Four decades later, Rosler turns out not to have changed the look of her own work at all. In 'Great Power,' her current skin-deep effort at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Rosler tries to turn back the clock to her glory days, essentially remaking the Vietnam series. Only now she’s inserting images of models into pictures of the Iraq War.

Clearly, there are parallels between the two wars, and activist art is valid. But Rosler lapses into simplistic nostalgia and undermines her older work while basically making pretty war porn. The only thing her work says is that fashion designers and women who like to shop caused two wars."











From Top To Bottom:

Red Stripe Kitchen

Tron (Amputee)

Cleaning The Drapes

Photo-op

Red & White Stripes

Gladiators

All Images © Martha Rosler

Our Elected Hope For Change...

A Time For Change...

On a day that likely will foreshadow the fate of American policy, not to mention our global credibility, I would like to genuinely wish Barack Obama the best of luck in today's election. The political stakes have never felt higher, at least in my lifetime, and the change that this country so desperately needs is finally in our hands if we choose to elect it. For anyone undecided about casting your vote, I strongly encourage you all to do so in an effort to protect the citizens and integrity of this country.

Barack Obama, Sprinfield, MO, 2008

Image © Tim Davis

Daniel Everett's Departure

Daniel Everett's series Departure is part of the burgeoning tradition within contemporary photography that focuses on the exploration of the alienating, utilitarian landscape. These anonymous, often formless spaces, when depicted in photographs, begin to negate the time and social space that they are a part of. This is largely because the functions of these spaces is obscured by their anonymity. Everett's images bring to mind Robert Smithson's theory of sites and non-sites. Many of the spaces in these photographs strike me as non-sites. Seemingly artificial and ambiguous constructs which juxtapose sites that provide authenticity and context.

Everett's photographs are both beautiful and unnerving. The authoritarianism of these spaces, however, exert upon the images a kind of ahistorical cynicism. David Giles, in his essay Camera Vacua, notes: "By selecting especially generic spaces and relegating historical cues to the perceptual and emotional perimeter, the photographer constructs an image that obviates this usual act of remembering." This is the same sensation, or lack there of, that Everett's photographs produce. This lack of history gives one the feeling that these utilitarian spaces have reached an aesthetic plateau in which any difference will increasingly become harder to discern.











All photographs from the series Departure

All Images © Daniel Everett