Congratulations RISD MFA Photo Grads!!
I want to write and congratulate all the RISD MFA Photo grads, as well as the many other grads with whom I’ve worked over the past two years, in their successful thesis exhibition. The work looked beautiful, and seeing your accomplishments made me proud to have been a part of your journey.
The Graduate Thesis Exhibition features work in a wide range of media created by the 194 master’s degree candidates in RISD’s 16 graduate departments graduating on June 1. The show in the RI Convention Center runs through June 1, 2013.
The mysterious bravery of my friend Scott Lapham
When I read the below facebook post by Scott Lapham this morning my heart was filled with joy. Scott is one of the first friends I made in Providence, and I have followed his work, both as an artist, and as a leader at AS220, for many years. I find a great deal of wisdom in his words. That he can trace his own circuitous path, and find, from a place of hardship, the ability to give to others is something really valuable.
Being a firm non believer in fate, I still do believe in mystery. It has been a mystery to me how a kid who really got the snot beat out of him on a reglar basis ended up teaching photography to incarcerated juveniles. It is also a mystery how I have found myself mentoring so many young men when the whole idea of manhood has been such a confusing and negative topic for me since I was aware that the idea even existed. When I learned that we were having a son I groaned at the vision of him enduring the agression and bullshit I had to growing up as a guy. I would like to thank the Alchemy program for working with the male students and staff at the AS220 Youth program for walking us through the metaphors of ancient myths and how they pertain to growing up as a guy in an urban neighborhood today. How cool it would have been to have had a similar experience when I was young (even though my neighborhood was woods and fields)? My son will be better off for it. Last night, when I couldn’t sleep I imagined the Boston Marathon bombers having their isolation, aggression and energy channeled at an earlier age toward society and not against it. I don’t pretend to know everything, but I do know it is possible they could have benefitted from experiences like this too. We know how it turns out for those who don’t. Thank You Alchemy, Kwame, Shelton and Kwame and all the he-ros, her-ros both students and staff at AS220 Youth. – Scott Lapham
The latest addition to my library collection: John Schabel: Passengers
John Schabel: Passengers. (2013. Twin Palms Press. 8 x 10 Inches. 73 Duotone Plates. 84 Pages)
I first saw Schabel’s analog prints (an obsessive series of photographs taken between 1994 – 1996) at the 1997 Whitney Biennial, and have long thought about them. I was thrilled to discover that Schabel’s collection has been published in a beautiful book titled Passengers by Twin Palms Press. For this series, Schabel photographed across the runway tarmac using a telephoto lens to capture images of airline passengers awaiting takeoff. The resulting works underscore a liminal moment in travel – the passengers are neither at home nor at their intended destination. The lack of text in the book and the tight framing provided by the airplane windows further decontextualize Schabel’s subjects. The analog process (the framing of the airline windows reminds me of early photographic practices such as the daguerreotype), combined with the impossibility of repeating this project due to today’s airport security restrictions, points in an elegiac way to modes of travel irrevocably altered and to aspects of photographic practice itself.
Red Eye Curatorial Class at RISD mounts second exhibition: SX-70
The Red Eye Gallery Class
The Red Eye Gallery Class I teach is an interdisciplinary course that balances the logistics of curating with critical thinking and analysis. Our second exhibition, SX-70 | Christopher Scholz Photographs |1976 – 1978, has been conceived, curated, designed, and installed in collaboration with Christopher Scholz.
SX-70 | Christopher Scholz Photographs | 1976 – 1978
The body of work on view in the Red Eye Gallery was made by Christopher Scholz with a Polaroid SX-70 camera in the mid 1970’s. Today, Scholz is a practicing architect in New York City. His collection was brought to our attention by his son Nic; member of the Red Eye Gallery Class.
When asked what drew him to the SX-70 Polaroid camera, Scholz responded “It was a cool camera when it came out…I wanted to shoot in color, and it gave me a print that I could hold. As soon as I started shooting with it, it changed my way of seeing. I feel strongly that the tool the photographer uses has a great effect on the way the photographer sees. Different cameras have different qualities….and those meld with the photographer’s vision. That’s what happened with me with the SX70 Polaroid camera.”1
Scholz was attracted to scenes that he observed in his daily life (television images, landscapes, cars), finding in them unusual lighting conditions, compositions, or narrative potential. Through careful framing, Scholz points our attention to the less obvious details that surround us everyday, highlighting soft curves, rough textures, brilliant colors and intersections of various materials and forms to create a new way of seeing the familiar.
Scholz initially placed his Polaroids in an album to protect them. The structure of the album required him to group four Polaroids together on each page. As curators, we have chosen to retain Scholz’s original groupings whenever possible.
In addition to the framed groups of four, particular images have been enlarged. The shift in scale creates a rhythm and allows the viewer to contrast the Polaroids with larger prints that highlight the smallest of details, which normally go unnoticed.
Viewing Scholz’s photographs offers a rare, refreshing and inspiring experience: the privilege of encountering the innate object quality, patina, and color shifts in a series of original Polaroids.
Curators: Scott Alario, Forest Kelley, Jeannie H. Lee, Jillian Matthews, Julia Min, Kaveh Nazemoff, Elliot Romano, Nic Scholz, Arnold Wong, Kun Wu
Instructor: Lisa Young
1 Christopher Scholz interviewed by Nic Scholz, February, 2013
Work on exhibition at Abron Arts Center: DECENTER: An Exhibition of the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show
My work has been included in the Digital Gallery Website portion of DECENTER: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show. There is also a gallery exhibition, featuring the work of additional artists.
Curated by Andrianna Campbell and Daniel S. Palmer, DECENTER: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show celebrates the legacy of the Cubist paintings and sculptures in that historic exhibition by featuring a group of 27 emerging and internationally recognized contemporary artists who explore the changes in perception precipitated by our digital age and who closely parallel the Cubist vernacular of fragmentation, nonlinearity, simultaneity, and decenteredness.
Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, New York, NY
February 17 – April 7, 2013
Find out more at decenterarmory.com.
New Work at RISD Biennial Faculty Exhibition, 2013
Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design/Chace Center
February 22- March 17
Opening reception February 21st, 6-8pm
If you are in town, I’d love to see you at the opening!
Gross, 2013
Using a digital camera, I photographed a china lamb as I rotated it 360 degrees. In the darkroom, I exposed photo paper directly to the LCD screen on the back of my camera, creating a series of 12 paper negatives. The negatives were placed in a non-sequential grid and 12 unique contact prints were made. With 12 lambs per page, and 12 prints, the total number of lambs is 144, or one gross. There is a desire to locate these “lost lambs” in some kind of spatial order. However, any perceived pattern is really the result of chance. Gross is produced through a combination of structure and accident, pushes the limits of legibility, and engages multiple modes of photographic capture and output, creating a post-digital analog photographic project.
Recent vintage finds
A fantastic blow mold sheep to add to my flock, a winter landscape by a talented paint-by-number artist created using only six colors, and a mysterious life size Xerox cat.
Some reading I’ve been doing
Recently I’ve been reading and viewing “The Free World/Artist Unknown,” a double-sided book featuring the work of John D. Monteith and Oliver Wasow. Monteith presents webcam images grabbed from the stream, frozen, and organized into typological themes. Wasow presents analog photographs taken in the 20th century that have been uploaded to the web, and, in turn, downloaded and recontextulized by Wasow. Each artist engages collecting, editing, and repositioning particular classes of images they find on line within the (analog) structure of the book. Their repositioning produces a kind of surplus meaning that allows me to engage in making my own connections, critique, or just fantastically wander in their (necessarily) incomplete but gloriously encyclopedic image archives.
(NAME) publications
Edited by Oliver Wasow and John D. Monteith
artist unknown – the free world
2011
Hard cover
9in. x 6in.
260 pag.
$20.00
Deja Vu
A friend recently snapped this shot in New York and sent it to me as an homage to my piece Beloved Object, Day and Night. The double tree, double trash, and street splatter really make this photograph.
