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openingnightposts · 1 year ago
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the-joy-of-knowledge · 1 year ago
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Becoming an Intelligent Woman
My Dears,
There is no greater goal than being a fine woman who is intelligent, kind, and elegant. As much as we all want to be described with these adjectives, it takes a great amount of discipline to get there. It is very doable only if you are ready to put in the work.
Here are steps you can add to your routine in the next 4 weeks that will make you 1% more intelligent than you were before. This is a process that should become a habit not a goal. It is long term, however, I want you to devote just 4 weeks into doing these steps first and recognize the changes that follow.
Watch documentaries: This is the easiest step, we all have access to Youtube. Youtube has a great number of content on art, history, technology, food, science etc that will increase your knowledge and pique your curiosity. I really did not know much about world history especially from the perspective of World war 1 & 2, the roaring 20s, Age of Enlightenment, Jazz era, monarchies etc but with several channels dedicated to breaking down history into easily digestible forms. I have in the last 4 weeks immersed myself into these documentaries. Here are a few I watched:
The fall of monarchies
The Entire History of United Kingdom
The Eight Ages of Greece
World War 1
World War 2
The Roaring '20s
The Cuisine of the Enlightenment
2. Read Classics: I recommend starting with short classics so that you do not get easily discouraged. Try to make reading easy and interesting especially if you struggle with finishing a book. Why classics? You see, if you never went to an exclusive private school in Europe or America with well crafted syllabus that emphasized philosophy, history, art, and literary classics, you might want to know what is felt like and for me this was a strong reason. Asides that, there is so much wisdom and knowledge available in these books. In these books, you gain insights to the authors mind, the historical context of the era, the ingenuity of the author, the hidden messages, and the cultural impact of these books. Most importantly, you develop your personal philosophy from the stories and lessons you have accumulated from the lives of the characters in the books you read. Here are classics to get you started:
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Candide by Voltaire
Paradise lost by John Milton
3. Study the lives of people who inspire you: I dedicate one month to each person that fascinates me. I read their biography (date of birth, background, death, influences, work, style, education, personal life) For this month, I decided to study Frank Lloyd Wright because I was fascinated by the Guggenheim Museum in New York. I began to read about his influence in American Architecture (Organic architecture, Prairie School, Usonian style), his tumultuous personal life, his difficult relationship with his mentor (Louis Sullivan), his most iconic works etc. By the end of the year I would have learned the ins and outs of people I am inspired by through books and documentaries. Here are other people I plan to learn more about:
Winston Churchill
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Ada Lovelace
Benjamin Franklin
Helen Keller
John Nash
Isabella Stewart Gardner
Caroline Herrera
Ernest Hemingway
Catherine the Great
Ann Lowe
My dears, I hope you enjoyed this read. I cannot wait to write more on my journey to becoming a fine woman. I urge you to do this for four weeks and see what changes you notice. Make sure to write as well, it is important to document your progress.
Cheers to a very prosperous 2024!
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i'm not gonna do a big year in review post like i did last year because on a strictly numerical level (a) i probably technically failed most of my resolutions and (b) i don't actually have the data because one of the ones i definitely failed was logging my habits to keep up, which i stopped doing in september when work got crazy and never picked back up. still ultimately i feel good about how things went down, generally. i didn't quite make this the year i got back into reading but i read more than i had the year before for sure, and i saw a lot of movies, most of them interesting or enjoyable, and some other art, too (the jenny holzer installation at the guggenheim, the ibsen play starring jeremy strong). i definitely listened to way more music. i got so good at hydrating by the end of the year that now i feel off if i drink less than 100 ounces a day lmao. i don't think i hit a 50% workout rate but i had a june that took working out off the map for several weeks and then when i tried to get back into it at the level i'd been doing before it sucked and i needed way more rest days for a long ass time; lesson learned for the future, and right now i feel like i have a good routine going. steps was kind of a similar story but this fall was pretty successful (having a zillion clients all over the goddamn city was helpful in that regard). i do want to be more proactive about it on a day to day basis because i do think it might help me sleep to hit that 10k or so (and i think it helps with soreness too, preventatively and amelioratively, which spellcheck says is not a word but should be!!) but i'm feeling more and more like flexibility is the name of the game in some things so while i will be tracking them daily/weekly/monthly this year, i will ultimately consider it a win if i get to december 31 with 3,650,000 behind me.
i fell off on logging and journaling, and never really got a handle on doing mobility work or meditating, but i finished the year feeling like while on the one hand it was nice to know i had enough structures in place to make it through my busy season a little on edge but never really losing my mind, i also felt like ignoring these things completely for a while ultimately as i look back drew my attention to why i wanted to make space for them in the first place; the morning routine stuff is where i get it together enough to check in on my life, process some stuff, and make adjustments as necessary; doing some kind of mobility stuff, even if it's just hitting the foam roller at bedtime, is just physically necessary if i want to keep working out the way i have been working out and i have to stop acting like i can have one without the other.
i decided for 2024 i didn't need to set a guideline around internet use the way i had in 2023, just an intention to be mindful, and, um, well that was a huge failure but an instructive one; again, lesson learned (and it's actually crazy how much even a guided 5 meditation in the morning alters my basic instincts for the rest of the day about when i want to Scroll). i didn't floss........ i should floss.
i did okay with doing Life Tasks semi-regularly and the attitude of "20 minutes Task Time per day" was helpful in some ways but didn't address the Giant Ever Growing Backlog Of Tasks I Have Been Putting Off For Months To Years, which suggests a need for a new approach; this year i'm gonna try a tip i read somewhere to plan out your tasks on a weekly basis, including scheduling them, not just throwing them on a "weekly to-do list," and aim for 5 a week. i gave up on 20 minutes of digital tidying per day and i think the answer there is just to not set a minimum above the minimum, so to speak. if i delete 5 emails or unsubscribe from 1 thing that counts.
i don't know how i wound up doing with my goal to have One Human Connection Per Day (At Least Half The Days Of The Year) but i had a lot of fun this year and i am finishing it feeling in many ways still awkward and neurotic but more connected and secure than i was a year ago, and feeling almost overwhelmed with how true it feels to say "my life is full of doing fun stuff with people i like" after all the years i spent convinced this was completely impossible for me to achieve. this year i don't think i'm going to slot this into my daily habits, partly because sometimes multiple things happen on one day or i text someone to initiate plans-making on the same day someone texts me, partly because the advice i saw about doing stuff also recommend task-batching and i think there may be some utility to that here as well, and partly because well i do have a schedule that is incredibly variable by week and season and this past fall for example i'm not sure i could have handled much more in september/october than free store + one fun thing a week which is more or less how it shook out for a while there. i also don't think i'm going to set a number because, well, i feel good about it right now. i do want to set a non-quantifiable intention to keep getting a little braver about forging new connections or deepening ones that are shallow but seem promising (serial killer way to say "making friends" sorry i am still in some ways quite Insane about this topic, the prime locus of my insanity for many years), and within that specifically to keep getting better at going to local stuff even when none of my closest local friends are going to be there as my security blanket lol. this year early on i finally texted someone i knew from pantry biz with whom i had exchanged mutual "we should hang out sometime" sentiments and it turns out that they're one of those people where once someone else makes the first move they welcome you in a lot so that the "hey, wanna catch a movie or something?" text i sent while deep breathing (because i am Insane) wound up leading pretty directly to a bunch of other incredibly fun 2024 memories, which is like almost irritatingly on the nose as a life lesson but otherwise very nice. relatedly (to texting that stresses me out because of my Problems) i want to get better at texting people back in a timely fashion and also at being more impulsive in a positive way about sending texts when people are on my mind.
the two things i feel real regret over this year are the reading thing and also writing... not a great year for writing, although i can at least look back on i would say three newsletters i'm proud of and one fic i was very glad to complete. i also did... okay... at contributing at the singles jukebox now that We're So Back on a monthly schedule. but i wrote basically nothing other than the occasional blurb after sometime in may and that feels bad and also suggests i need to find some way to integrate writing more reliably into my routine. i don't want to set a word count goal because part of what's going on is that i have some projects i'm picking away at that are more demanding of planning & brainstorming & slower more considered writing than my usual (beloved!) genres of Blogging and Fanfiction but i do think it needs to be quantifiable because ummm otherwise i simply will Not. so i am thinking this is a daily goal too. same goes for reading and in that case i do think i can set an outcome goal, which is 50 books.
ok well i guess this wound up being a year in review post anyway lmao. whatever it's capricorn season it's my time to shine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! neatened up resolutions post for my own ease of reference incoming shortly
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uwmspeccoll · 11 months ago
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Another Wood-engraved Feathursday
JOHN MCWILLIAMS
Now here's a couple of intense fellows! The print is entitled Sparrow Hawk by South Carolina artist and engraver John McWilliams (b. 1941). The print was selected for inclusion in the Fourth Triennial Exhibition 2020-2022 of the American wood engravers society, the Wood Engravers’ Network (WEN), and this image is from the catalog for that traveling show.
McWilliams's work is inspired by Lowlands flora and fauna, so it seems a little odd that he would choose as his subject the Eurasian Sparrow Hawk (Accipiter nisus) rather than the American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), which is so common to his native habitat. Both species are used in falconry. Nevertheless, both offer something for the engraver, and we enjoy how McWilliams's Sparrow Hawk looks like it's about to take a bow.
John McWilliams received his BFA and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is Professor/Director Emeritus of Georgia State University Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design. He has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in photography. Today he maintains a studio in McClellanville, S.C. He counts as his inspirations the work of Albrecht Dürer and the German expressionists, the illustrations of Rockwell Kent, and the graphic novels of Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel. Of working in wood, he writes:
Woodcuts and wood engravings . . . have held much fascination for me. . . . The process of developing an image into a woodcut or wood engraving gives structure to my life. . . . It is such sweet irony that, although the act of creating gives my life structure, it nevertheless produces an enigma, a puzzle that others may interpret through their own lives. There are no easy answers. Such is life.
View more Feathursday posts.
View other posts with engravings from the WEN Fourth Triennial Exhibition.
View more engravings by members of the Wood Engraver’s Network.
View more posts with wood engravings!
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ljblueteak · 1 year ago
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Richard Hamilton Swingeing London 67 poster and Beatles 68 poster
Text from Andrew Wilson's Swingeing London 67
The [Beatles] poster, described by Hamilton as a 'give-away' print, was the result of a fairly complex design process that took about two weeks to complete, with daily visits from Paul McCartney, the one Beatle who worked directly with Hamilton on the project and who had prior knowledge, through[Robert] Fraser, of Hamilton's work--he had earlier bought one of the Solomon R. Guggenheim (1965) screenprints from the 1966 exhibition of the series that he had helped hang.
This relationship gave Hamilton the freedom to develop his idea for the poster and the whole design project without interference from the other band members, Yoko Ono, or the record company.
The poster shows George Harrison, John Lennon, McCartney and Ringo Starr as distinct individuals. This is in sharp contrast to the individual John Kelly portraits, in which the similarities of pose, gaze, and lighting, conforming to the aesthetics of of a record company's publicity department, portray them as members of a band.
The seemingly casual pinboard aesthetic by which these informal photographs were arranged was determined primarily as a solution to crucial design issues (echoing his decision to order the collage for Swingeing London 67--poster as newspaper columns, with headline at top left).
The sheet had to be folded three times in order to be inserted into the square album sleeve, and this obliged Hamilton to approach it as 'a series of subsidiary compositions. The top right and left-hand square are front and back of the folder and and had to independently stand as well as be a double spread together. The bottom four squares can be read independently and as a group of four. They all mate together when opened up and used as wall decoration.'
The top left-hand panel is what is seen first, and it presents the songwriting duo of Lennon and McCartney. Lennon is shown in blue light, singing. The image has probably been taken from a television screen, and the attendant distortion and blue glow are unflattering.
The image of Lennon overlays the bottom right corner of an equally unusual portrait of McCartney in a bathtub, his head half submerged, soapy suds giving him a halo. Running beneath the two portraits is a fabricated contact strip that includes an image of Lennon in front of one of his wall drawings; the band in a recording session...in which they are, unusually, playing brass instruments; and a colour image from the recording of 'Hey Jude' (1968).
This sense of fragmentation, of hidden codes and messages, echoes both the 'guarded privacy and locked rooms' and the 'disturbing, dreamlike darkness' that have been identified in the album, inviting the fan to imagine the band members' private worlds, and hinting at the beginning of the band's disintegration.
The dominant image of the poster's top right panel, opposite Lennon and McCartney, is of George Harrison. This portrait casts him in a mystical, otherworldly and contemplative light, with the right side of his face obscured and out of focus....
There are very few collective photographs of the band: playing in recording sessions or in filmed concerts; with Harold Wilson after they had each received the MBE; and a sequence of them doing the 'business' as they re-sign their contract with EMI.
Instead, the poster emphasizes the individual activities of John, Paul, George and Ringo around the time of the collage. Starr is shown with his co-star from the film Candy (1968), Ewa Aulin, and also dancing with Liz Taylor (wife of his other co-star in the film, Richard Burton). Lennon is shown becoming the working-class hero. Yoko Ono appears just twice: in a self-portrait by Lennon of the naked couple, and in an image of a naked Lennon sitting cross-legged in bed talking on the phone, as its stretched cord cuts her out-of-focus head in two--cancelling her identity.
Of the band, it is McCartney who emerges as the poster's dominant figure. Hamilton has said how The Beatles contains 'arcane touches which only The Beatles' more intimate associates were likely to smile at,' and yet such details--such as the doubled image of a shut door or McCartney 'pole dancing' both naked and clothed--are not at the cost of the poster's legibility. At its centre is the reverse of a photograph, a gift to one of the band, bearing a lipstick imprint and a groupie's imploring words: 'I love you.'
In all this, Hamilton's fundamental aim for The Beatles was that it should reach a large audience and be as accessible as the cover design was remote. This was not a new subject for Hamilton. My Marilyn had already adopted, three years earlier, the motif of the publicity photograph and the manipulation of celebrity image as a subject. What is different here is Hamilton's direct participation in popular culture: The Beatles, like Swingeing London 67--poster, shows him not only constructing work with a subject that revolves around the manipulation and production of pop celebrity imagery, but also inserting these works into the mass circulation of popular culture.
--Andrew Wilson. Bold mine.
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justforbooks · 10 months ago
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Richard Serra, who has died aged 85, was a remarkable cultural figure – a sculptor who belonged to the generation of American minimalists, was associated with process art and made experimental films, yet evoked something of an earlier, more heroic age. The critic Robert Hughes described him as “the last abstract expressionist”.
Although this statement stretches the point, Serra’s interest in the processes of sculpture led him to some extravagant gestural acts that belie the severity of his grand public commissions. Weight and Measure, made in the early 1990s for what is now Tate Britain, exemplified his austere side, with its massive steel forms designed to counter the building’s overbearing classicism. However, some of his other works, such as the twisting, “torqued” structures installed at the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 2005, are positively baroque.
Curled around an existing sculpture, Snake, that was commissioned for the museum’s opening in 1997, these steel works, dominated by ellipses and spirals, articulate spaces in which the gallery visitor can wander. They are monumental enough to take on Frank Gehry’s grandiose architecture, but, with their patinated surfaces and curved forms, also have an intimate, sensual quality. Above all, Serra’s sculptures create a remarkable interaction with the public and a strong experience of gradual discovery – hence the installation’s title, The Matter of Time.
His works have proved popular with curators, but are not confined to museums. They have appeared in settings as diverse as the Tuileries garden in Paris, the Federal Plaza in New York, and the Qatari desert, attracting responses from intense admiration to a public inquiry. One of his sculptures, Fulcrum, was put up in 1987 at Broadgate outside Liverpool Street station in London. It manages to combine monumentality with fragility, made of weathered steel plates that appear to support each other precariously.
He was born in San Francisco into a family that provided a foundation for his later career as a sculptor in metal. His father, Tony, who was from Majorca, was a pipe-fitter in a naval shipyard. His mother, Gladys (nee Fineberg), who was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Odessa, used to introduce her son as “Richard, the artist” and was, later, touchingly enthusiastic when he began to make his way in New York. Serra himself laboured in steel mills during his time as a student and subsequently, in 1979, made a compelling film, Steelmill/Stahlwerk, about German workers in the industry.
Serra began his studies in 1957 at the University of California in Berkeley, graduating from the institution’s Santa Barbara campus with a degree in English literature. He followed this in 1961 with a three-year course in painting at Yale University, New Haven – a period in which he also worked as a teaching assistant and as a proof-reader for Joseph Albers’s book Interaction of Color (1963). At Yale he encountered such luminaries as Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella, before winning a fellowship that took him to Europe in 1964.
In Paris, Serra was profoundly impressed by the sculpture of Constantin Brâncuși, but in Florence the following year he continued to paint, producing coloured grids in timed conditions controlled by a stopwatch. It was only with his first exhibition, at the Galleria La Salita in Rome in 1966, that he made a definitive move away from painting, filling cages with live and stuffed animals.
After moving to New York in the same year, Serra initially survived by setting himself up as a furniture remover, together with his friends, the composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Serra’s artistic development at this time was rapid, moving from experiments with rubber, fibreglass and neon tubing to the metal sculpture for which he became renowned. He soon began his long-term association with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, in whose Warehouse annex he was photographed in 1969 throwing molten lead at the wall with a ladle.
In the same year Serra refined this procedure by splashing the metal against a small steel plate stuck into the corner of Jasper Johns’s studio. The “castings” produced when the lead cooled down were rough, expressive forms, but this project also inspired Serra to create more impersonal pieces, in which metal sheets were wedged into the angles of rooms, leaned against each other or pinned to the wall by lead pipes. His emphasis on objective phenomena – mass, gravity and other physical forces – can also be seen in his remarkable experimental films.
In Hand Catching Lead (1968), the hand is in fact the artist’s but it is shown disembodied, trying to grasp rather than cast pieces of falling lead, which it drops or misses altogether. The repetition of this fundamentally pointless act gives the film a serial quality, akin to the celluloid process itself.
Serra’s engagement with the cutting edge also led him to work with the land artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt. In 1970 he assisted them with Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake in Utah and, after Smithson’s death in 1973, Serra helped to complete Amarillo Ramp in an artificial lake in Texas. His own site-specific sculptures included Spin Out: For Bob Smithson (1972-73), in the park-like surroundings of the Kröller-Müller Museum at Otterlo in the Netherlands. Here the three converging steel plates interacted with each other and their environment, exemplifying Serra’s aim that “the entire space becomes a manifestation of sculpture”.
The 1970s was a difficult decade in Serra’s life. In 1971 a worker was killed in an accident during the installation of one of Serra’s sculptures outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. His five-year marriage to the artist Nancy Graves ended in 1970, and his mother’s suicide in 1977 was followed two years later by the death of his father. However, in that decade he also met his future wife, the art historian Clara Weyergraf, with whom he collaborated on Steelmill/Stahlwerk. Clara was also to play a vital role in shaping his sculpture, as well as giving her name to Clara-Clara, a powerful, curvilinear work that was installed in the Tuileries garden in 1983. The history of this piece exemplifies Serra’s problems in making site-specific art, since it was originally intended to feature in a show at the Pompidou Centre, but at a late stage was deemed to be too heavy.
Clara-Clara’s travails were minor in comparison to the controversies surrounding Tilted Arc, a sculpture 36 metres long, set up at the Federal Plaza in Manhattan in 1981. Condemned for being intrusive, a magnet for graffiti artists and even a security risk, it was eventually removed in 1989, four years after a public hearing in which a majority of witnesses had advocated its preservation.
Despite this setback, Serra’s career continued to flourish. He had two retrospectives, in 1986 and 2007, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which also devoted a permanent room to his monumental work Equal (2015), as well as major exhibitions at home and abroad. He showed frequently with his gallery, Gagosian, in London, New York and Paris, most recently in 2021.
In 2001 he received a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale, in 2015 the Légion d’honneur in France and, three years later, the J Paul Getty Medal.
During his latter years, Serra became heavily involved with public projects in Qatar, above all the four steel plates, rising to over 14 metres and spanning more than a kilometre, erected west of Doha in 2014. Known as East-West/West-East, the work engages spectacularly with its surroundings, the gypsum plateaux of the Brouq nature reserve in the Dukhan desert. Serra himself described it as “the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done”.
He is survived by Clara.
🔔 Richard Serra, artist, born 2 November 1938; died 26 March 2024
Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?
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mybeingthere · 1 year ago
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Park Seo-Bo, a key figure in South Korea’s Dansaekhwa Movement, died this month at the age of 91.
Born in 1931 in North Gyeongsang, a Japanese-occupied region of South Korea, to a family of eight children, he pursued training in traditional painting at Hongik University in Seoul. In 1950, his education was interrupted when he was drafted to serve in the Korean War.
“There was no food, no job opportunity, everything had gone back to ashes; all conventional values and ideas were laid naked and bare.” the artist said in a 2008 interview with the New York Times about the affects of war on him and his peers. He looked at painting as self-referential. “For me, painting has become a mere tool and method to cleanse and purify myself,” he said.
Park Seo-Bo is one of the leading figures in contemporary Korean art, widely acknowledged as the father of the ‘Dansaekhwa’ movement. Encompassing works from the 1970s to this year, this exhibition at White Cube West Palm Beach serves as an introduction to Park’s influential practice, as well as being the first opportunity to see his work in the US since it was shown at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in 2019.
A series of vividly coloured ceramic works made in the past year reveal an artist continuing to innovate into his nineties. In collaboration with a master ceramicist’s studio, Park has worked with wet clay in a similar manner as he has previously when he is manipulating the wet pulp of hanji paper, a medium he uses in other works. For this group of works, successive layers of wet clay slip are pinched and pushed line by line into long, parallel ridges, and, after firing and sanding, contrasting pigments are then carefully applied to the furrows and peaks of the fired surface. This latest evolution of technique and introduction of a new material is true to the energetic, naturalistic materiality and tactility that characterises Dansaekwha.
Park’s use of traditional Korean hanji paper, hand-made from mulberry bark, an earlier innovation dating from the 1980s, is represented here by exceptional large-works in subtle shades of grey-black and in blazing, vibrant red. The remarkable durability of hanji has ensured the survival of some of the most ancient scriptures of Buddhism in Korea and is integral to the structure of daily life, including being used in wall coverings and door panels. To Park, the material not only offered endless opportunities for experimentation but represented the connection between his work and the natural world which he had begun to regard as essential. When applied on to a canvas backing and soaked with water, the hanji reverted to a pulp that could be pushed and scraped into sculptural forms.
Park mixes pigments that further evoke connections to nature, as well as to personal memory. The black works have the deep, matte darkness of the charcoal and soot that built up in layers around the artist’s childhood hearth, while the vivid red was inspired by the maple forest in autumn foliage around Mount Bandai near Fukushima in Japan. Within the compositions, smooth rectangular areas or ‘windows’ of single colour offer a textural contrast and a ‘breathing hole’, to let the mind rest.
Several exceptional works from the 1970s testify to the epiphany that was to prove so formative to the development of Korean minimalism or ‘Dansaekwha’. Park calls these ‘Myobop’, a word taken from the Chinese characters ‘to draw’ and ‘a method’, which has been translated by the French term ‘Écriture’ (writing). Centring on an exploration of drawing within painting and on the union of action and spirit, they reflect a consistent approach, one that is inextricably linked to time, space and material; concepts that underpin all of Park’s practice. In these works, mark-making becomes akin to breathing and emptiness is achieved through reduction, a process that Park has termed “forgetting the self”. Executed within a single sitting, harnessing an energy flow through meditative action, they combine technical skill with mental focus, within a defined period of time. This method reflects that, for Park, the making of art is rooted in a spiritual methodology, drawing on Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist philosophy as well as the Korean tradition of calligraphy.
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longlistshort · 2 years ago
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Andrew Edlin Gallery is currently showing a collection of rarely seen works by artist Beverly Buchanan. It covers her years as an abstract expressionist painter in NYC and her later work inspired by the rural South.
The gallery’s press release gives a really good history of this wonderful artist-
The first section of the show features the artist’s abstract paintings and works on paper from the 1970s, alongside post-minimalist sculpture from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The second section introduces a later, more personal side of Buchanan’s oeuvre, her colorful depictions of flowers and small folk-inspired assemblages created during the same period as her well-known “shacks.” A number of the works in the show, many of which were part of the artist’s private collection, have never been shown.
Though Buchanan wrote about her love of “making things” from an early age, it wasn’t until 1971, when she began taking evening classes taught by African-American painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979) at the Art Students League in New York, that her career as an artist took off. Abstract still-lifes that she made in Lewis’s class in 1972 are displayed here for the first time. That same year, her paintings were included in a group show at Cinque Gallery, a nonprofit space co-founded by Lewis and Romare Bearden (1911-1988), which showcased the art of emerging minority artists.
Having witnessed demolition sites in Harlem and SoHo, Buchanan evoked the visual erosion of architectural facades through what she dubbed her “Wall” paintings. In 1976 she presented a selection that she called “Torn Walls” in a two-person show titled City Walls at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. In his New York Times review, David Shirey described the show as “indisputably a tinderbox of a display that will cause sparks to fly” and “the kind …one sees more regularly at the Whitney Museum and at some of New York’s avantgarde galleries.” Three of these paintings are being shown for the first time since that exhibition, forty-seven years ago. The show also includes a monotype, small studies, and a large painting from a series she titled “Black Walls.” The latter was originally featured in Shackworks, a seminal exhibition that opened at the Montclair Art Museum in 1994 and traveled to nine other institutions from 1994-1996.
By the late 1970s, Buchanan was further exploring the aesthetics of architectural decay through sculpture, i.e., cast concrete assemblages, made from pieces of stone, brick debris, clay, and cement mixtures. She arranged these works in clusters on the floor, documenting them with photographs, and exhibited them, notably at Truman Gallery in New York in 1978, and at the feminist artist cooperative A.I.R. Gallery in 1980 in its groundbreaking show Dialectics of Isolation, curated by Ana Mendieta. Some of the small black terracotta works on display may be considered as studies for these larger assemblages.
After moving to Georgia in 1977, Buchanan became increasingly interested in making what she referred to as “environmental sculpture,” artworks that mimicked exterior surfaces and were also site-specific installations that were allowed to decay over time and become part of the surroundings. Most notably, in 1979 she completed Ruins and Rituals (also the title of the Brooklyn Museum retrospective from 2016-2017), and in 1980 Marsh Ruins, with funding from a Guggenheim Fellowship. To construct the three mounds that comprise Marsh Ruins, Buchanan produced her own tabby cement. Composed of the lime from burned oyster shells mixed with sand, water, ash, and other shells, tabby is what colonial settlers used to build structures in coastal Georgia, the location of Marsh Ruins. In her zine “Making Tabby for Brick Sculptures,” Buchanan documented the labor-intensive process of making tabby, a task that in the eighteenth century was typically delegated to enslaved workers. Two smaller iterations of these structures, with bits of oyster shell showing in the concrete, are laid out in the show alongside four other examples of her cast concrete assemblages. Though little is known about their exhibition history, we do know that the artist placed these cast concrete works in her garden in Athens, Georgia. They retain stripes of the green, blue, black and earth-toned paint with which Buchanan initially covered them. The faint outline of her signature “B.B.” is also visible.
Buchanan’s later work is intimately linked to her natural surroundings and folk art. As a native Southerner, she drew on memories from her childhood as well as the lush Georgian landscape and yard art of local self-taught artists. A passionate gardener, Buchanan produced vivid oil pastel flower drawings and small assemblage works. She loved to rummage through thrift stores collecting marbles, wedding toppers, and beads, to create what she referred to as her “Christmas trees,” and “spirit jars,” her take on memory jugs, a prized Southern Folk Art form. Buchanan was particularly moved by a visit to folk artist Nellie Mae Rowe’s home in Fayette County, Georgia, and reminisced: “Being at Nellie Mae Rowe’s home was like being engulfed in a magic forest of her work because every surface had a mark from her hand and the simple chewing gum works made you never take gum as just chewing gum again.” A distinctive chewing gum jug and pin are also included in the show.
This exhibition closes 5/13/23.
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contentment-of-cats · 1 year ago
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Women being female in public and their autobiographies
Jada Pinkett-Smith. Not someone I am normally interested in other than her autobiography popping up on my reading recommendations. It's the kicked-hornet-nest buzz of rage that accompanies being female in public surrounding her autobiography - unread as it's not my cuppa. I can't speak to being black and female in public, so I will stay in my female lane here.
People hate women being women in public unless it is for consumption. Ms. Pinkett-Smith did not spill the tea. Or at least she did not spill the right type or quantity desired about her marriage and the insides thereof.
Not just men, but women will rip other women to shreds over something as trivial as shoes. Women are patriarchy's most effective enforcers, after all. It doesn't matter who the woman is, if she doesn't stay not in her lane, but in the box that people want her in, then there's going to be trouble. Perhaps this is especially true for famous women - not just celebrities famous for being famous - where they are also expected to serve the tea. People want gossip, revelations from private lives, they want it wet and juicy, titillating and salacious. A woman has to justify her presence in public by serving up her most private self in order to justify her presence at all.
It's no different for women who are not celebrities. Take as an example Susan Gubar, author and distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University. I am currently reading her 'Memoir of a Debulked Woman' - about her 15-year journey with ovarian cancer and her remission. She has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities. Susan Gubar is extensively published, and her work 'The Madwoman in the Attic' is one of the (I hate to say it) seminal works of feminist literary study.
One of the dominant criticisms I hear of her autobiographical works concerning her experience with cancer is that she is 'intellectualizing' her experience, as if a woman's experience with one of the most horrifying, terrifying, traumatizing diagnoses and treatment processes needs to be emotionally bled all over the page. As if sharing her experience in a way that is comfortable, relatable to herself and her life experience is Wrong. Doesn't it relate to the female experience that has Kardashianized women's lives, even the smallest actions, for public consumption?
The definition, according to Merriam Webster
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Intellectualizing what is happening to me is one of the only ways I have stayed passably sane, but as women are supposed to be in touch with their emotions, supposed to be emotional creatures, intellectualizing our situations is a coping strategy barred to us. It's affiliated with dissociation, a removal of one's psyche from a given situation - and considering cancer, that situation is pretty fucking horrifying. Facing death, we are expected to be brave and noble, emotional, floundering until taken by the hand and led through reason as a child through a museum. There are plenty of times during treatment and post-surgery that I was at the breaking point, but those are my private moments, in my nest of blankets and holding my cats.
When did intellectualization become a bad thing? Isn't it a good thing to approach a possible life-ending event with all the pragmatic and intellectual capability at one's disposal? Isn't it a good thing to adapt and make Terror into Tuesday? Yes, I have CPTSD - medically related, diagnosed and on my medical record along with my previous depression and anxiety. Am I going to write about it?
Of course. This journal is my sloppy autobiography, my being female in public, a stream of consciousness with fandoming and cat pics. I am not the academic powerhouse of Professor Gubar, nor the celebrity as Ms. Pinkett-Smith, but I am a women with a brain.
Intellectualize on, my sisters.
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xprojectrpg · 2 years ago
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Moment of Awesome - Megan Gwynn/Pixie:
Ever the artist, Megan has some interesting questions for Matt Murdock.
"Boss, can you feel different colours?"
Megan was reorganizing her desk space, having recently returned from a month-long artist residency in Spain. She held a pair of small, framed textile squares - one that she had made, and one from a village in Zaragoza - deciding where to place them.
Pausing his podcast and removing his earbuds, an act that was more performance than required since Matt's enhanced hearing meant that he didn't really need to remove them to hear her clearly. "Excuse me?" he asked, more for time to have a mental reset than a real need for clarification. "Feel...colours." Taking his glasses off, he rubbed the bridge of his nose before replacing them.
"Sorry if that's a weird question. As an artist dependent on a narrow band of frequencies, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to interpret the world in a different way. I just spent a month designing fabric. But without sight, does this particular vibration called 'red' feel distinct?" Megan ran her fingers over the red vines flowers and vines forming a repeating pattern over a white and gold background in one of the textiles. But of course different areas had taken in different amounts of pigment and it wasn't truly two-dimensional, even without counting the embroidered detail.
"Ah," Matt reached out, taking the piece to run his fingers over it lightly, "no. Vibration...I don't have synesthesia. I feel the variation in the embroidery and can make out the pattern, but colour doesn't have any sort of differentiation I can detect. Maybe if I could see and had enhanced vision, things might be different with wavelengths of light, but...not as things are now," and if he could see suddenly, he suspected he wouldn't know how to process the input from his eyes, it had been so long since they'd worked. "It is a nice pattern though."
"Thanks, I made it! I picked up some Spanish, too." Megan was practically glowing with energy. "I feel really inspired after my trip, so thanks for letting me take the month off! I'm thinking of organizing an art show later this year at the mansion, want to come? Or if you have any ideas on how I can make an art show more inclusive and special to mutants, I'm still working on the details."
"Absolutely," Matt agreed, wanting to be supportive. "And art can be inclusive, you just have to get a little creative. Pun intended. Check out the...Moma? Or the Guggenheim? I forget which one, but they have great interactive options for the blind if you call ahead," he hadn't been in years, but it was one of those memories that stuck out because he had been so against going, determined to have a terrible time, then had really, really enjoyed himself and discovered that sometimes, art was pretty damn awesome.
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k00280184 · 2 years ago
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Marilyn Minter
When we were given a choice of artists to research, I immediately zeroed in on Marilyn Minter. Her work was suggested to me by Sylvia for the movement brief, but didn't end up suiting my concept, so I was glad to get a second chance to look at her work.
Minter's work tends to follow themes of sexuality and eroticism. She wanted to oppose the overly perfected and refined beauty that dominated the media, especially the fashion world. I read this article talking about her thought process and artistic approach.
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Her work juxtaposes the beautiful with the disgusting - makeup, heels and lewd gestures paired with spit and dirt. I like how she shows people as they are, wrinkles, acne, stretchmarks and all, while elevating her subjects with meticulous and glamorous sets.
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citylifeorg · 11 days ago
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Works & Process Announces Buena Vista Social Club New Broadway Musical by Marco Ramirez with Saheem Ali, Patricia Delgado, and Justin Peck
January 26, 2025 at 7pm The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents the Buena Vista Social Club, the New Broadway Musical, by Marco Ramirez with Saheem Ali, Patricia Delgado, and Justin Peck, on January 26, 2025 at 7pm at the Peter B. Lewis Theater, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128. Tickets start at $25 and can be purchased…
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tenaciouspostfun · 12 days ago
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Works & Process
The Guggenheim and Theater.
By Robert M Massimi. ( Broadway Bob).Published about 3 hours ago • 3 min read
Robert M. Massimi.
Works and Process put forth two shows at the Peter B. Lewis Theater: "Going Dark" and" AlgoRhythm". "Going Dark" blended music across Jazz, Brazilian, Soul and Funk. The numbers were based off of street life and the direction went towards just that; at times the actors were chatting one another on stage , at other times the talented musicians entertained the audience with cool, breakthrough tunes.
The music was blended with Tap dance; the Tap not only enhanced the show, it brought the music to the forefront. The dance to the music was well choreographed bringing the "Street" fun to the music; after all, what is "Street" without good music and dance?
Like "Algo", "The Sole's House" had several stories inside the music. In "Sole's House" the story was based as a theme on Jazz clubs as well as music that is played in the cities across the country. From Washington Heights to various areas in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, New York, the "Street" scene has been big since the 1980's. People dance and play/ listen to music in groups and enjoy the different dance to the many genre's of music. This has created many singers and dancers throughout the 80's and 90's, even today.
"Sole's House" gives the audience what creativity can bring when music flows freely. The band is able to improvise and adapt to the different sounds and melodies that they play. A keen eye can pick that up with the ever changing lighting as a backdrop... the lights change the mood as the music changes.
The nexus of this first act is that the band covers many years within forty minutes... the band when it is full on Jazz hits the New Orleans scene, the West Village landscape. As a time period, it could be the 50's or even today. The Brazilian flavor could be the Islands as well as "The Heights". The Funk and Soul is entrenched in the 70's, however, it still resonates today like it did then.
"Sole's House" is an excellent creation and re-creation of what a new sound can bring and out of it, creating new talent that brings forth that sound. The theater group gives us forty minutes of this flavor and mood of these select sounds.
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AlgoRhythm .Kwikstep and Rockafella.
This side of the performance was based on was based on "Boggie" which was a takeoff on "What's Popping" or "Popping", a California creation. Under "Popping", a dance movement that was made popular by Michael Jackson. Many of the dance genre is robotic. The dance contort their bodies to an individual sound. Jackson was a master of this dance; from his famous "Moon Walk" to his sharp robotic movements, Jackson's dance style was as famous as his songs.
The thirty minute performance had different scenes against the backdrop of dance. We get a subway scene that was famous in the 80's and 90's. Many dances entertained the people waiting for a train. With "boom boxes" loud, the dancers would dance to the music in the hopes of tips. As new dances became popular, the street dancers would pick them up and that form of entertainment lasted for a good twenty years. Many of the dancers dressed like Michael Jackson as his popularity soared.
One of the scenes was particularly powerful: the fluid dance started with two dancers in a classroom learning science only to put that science theory into dance. The two bantered about the stage to a hard beat that had the audience moving to the music.
While the two different performances are somewhat works in progress, the two different shows were very engaging with subtle meaning. The second show were actors from the Bronx where the "Boggie" began, hence the "Boggie Down Bronx" meaning. The evening at the Guggenheim was fun and enlightening and worth seeing!
Michael Jackson, The Guggenheim, New York City, California, California Fires, Gavin Newsome, LA County, Los Angeles.
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About the Creator
Robert M Massimi. ( Broadway Bob).
I have been writing on theater since 1982. A graduate from Manhattan College B.S. A member of Alpha Sigma Lambda, which recognizes excellence in both English and Science. I have produced 14 shows on and off Broadway. I've seen over700 shows
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therumpus · 27 days ago
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The Mini-Interview with Didi Jackson
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by Tiffany Troy
The book cover of Didi Jackson’s My Infinity (Red Hen Press, 2024) is gorgeous. It is a cropped image of Dove No. 2 by Hilma af Klint, a Swedish abstract artist and mystic. The collection contained within the cover—like the cover art—is exactly like the blade the moon makes when it wobbles like a scythe in the night sky. Its speaker, Didi Jackson, a professor of creative writing at Vanderbilt University with a talent for ekphrasis, bemoans platitudes and generalizations, and calls our attention to the name of things in the difference between the ovenbird and the wooden thrush. I admire how My Infinity undergirds a yearning for the intangible phosphorescence of life amidst and in the aftermath of grief. In this way, it balances the foils of the possessive “my” and the ever-expansive “infinity,” as the mood modulates between the exquisite pleasure and blindness of intimacy and the keen observation of how all the light will be smaller tomorrow.
Didi and I conducted this interview via Google Docs over the course of a month as the academic semester ramps up for Didi, and I am struck that the insights that became her answers appeared in the quietude between book tour readings and classes. Below we discuss dualities in the first poem, “Witness,” learn about Didi’s creative process, and end with her hope of what poetry can achieve. 
***
The Rumpus: You begin with the poem, “Witness.” How does it set up the poems that are to follow? What I noticed was an obsession with twoness: “the birch leaves shimmy,” “clap[ping] at the sun with their gilded hands,” which is then compared with the ancient catacomb frescoes; the pair of ruffed grouse; the goldenrod and milkweed; the secret of the Green Mountains and the speaker, the secret-keeper. 
Didi Jackson: I love your observation of dualities. I chose the poem “Witness” to open the collection for many reasons. I feel as if it sets the tone for the book. It incorporates the beauty of the natural world while signifying its ability to occupy a space of pain and sadness. That might be the “twoness” you are picking up on. It amazes me that daily we live amidst immense splendor and deep sorrow. I circle back to that over and over again in my collection. Hilma af Klint was also fascinated with dualities. She explored various dual binaries throughout her career including those of gender, life and death, and lightness and darkness. So, it seems fitting to open with a poem that also is steeped in such oppositions. 
I also believe, as a poet, it is my ultimate calling to operate as the eyes (and ears and a mouth) for many different women. I act as the witness for my younger self, for a woman artist who was overlooked in the canon of art history, for my student who was murdered by her partner, for a friend who died too early. In the way I know best, I am making a record of these and other events so to somehow keep these stories alive and to better understand the struggles of women.
Rumpus: What was your writing process like? Let’s start with the Hilma af Klimt poems, a sequence of which was featured in BOMB Magazine. 
Jackson: When I visited the Guggenheim in 2018, I attended the exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s various series of paintings titled Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. It was one of the highest (if not the highest) attended exhibition in the museum’s history. People lined up around the building and the museum hours were extended. But I didn’t start writing my “Hilma poems�� (as I call them) until much later. I think “The Swan No 1” is one of my earliest poems of the series which I wrote in 2020 during the pandemic.
I taught art history for almost ten years and so I am particularly drawn to ekphrasis. My process  for writing this collection involved purchasing the exhibition catalogue and a few volumes of the catalogue raisonné of af Klint’s work and staring at the images for hours. I searched for what was familiar in her abstract art; something for me to hold onto and incorporate into images in my own work. I additionally visited locations in Sweden that would have been important to her. I was able to see the Stockholm Cathedral, a site she visited often on holidays with her family when she was young. I also drove to the island of Munsö where, as an adult she built a studio (that is sadly no longer there.) Both the architecture and landscape of Sweden informed my choices of words and images for my poems. In order to bridge the distance between us in both time and place, I braided my own childhood geography of Central Florida with that of her Swedish environment. Despite her notoriety as an abstract artist, af Klint trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, painting, among other subjects, landscapes and botanical studies. These early images certainly found their way into her abstract painting and eventually into my own poems. 
Rumpus: Turning next to other poems in My Infinity, did they come to you immediately or gradually?
Jackson: The subjects of my poems emerge slowly, though the images I use might be immediate. In my poem “The Burning Bush” the small, invasive tree that I use as a symbol grew at the corner of our house in Vermont. And I added it to the poem immediately after staring out our window as I received the news of Brianne’s murder. Its bright red leaves stuck with me and became an imprinted association with her unspeakable and untimely death.
I like starting my poems with a strong image and allowing that image to shift into a metaphor or simile of some kind that then supports the design of the rest of the poem. I love that you call the images that come back to me “apparitions.” What a wonderful way to think about how images appear (or reappear) into my consciousness from seemingly out of nowhere. How fitting considering the spirits and seances that inhabit this collection.
Rumpus: There are couplets, one-stanza poems, and poems where the caesura is freely deployed. Could you speak to your use of poetic forms? 
Jackson: When reading a collection of poetry, I am happy to encounter a variety of forms. As a matter of fact, I just finished reading Paisley Redkal’s West. In it, she moves through such an exciting selection of poetic forms: a contrapuntal, sonnets, ekphrasis, couplets, snaking or meandering lines, long columns, lists, and persona poems to name a few. Each turn of the page is like opening a new present. I want that same feeling for my own readers. But, I should say that I don’t believe in the arbitrary use of form. Or variety just for the sake of variety. Denise Levertov said, “Form is never more than a revelation of content.”  For me, this is also true when writing poems that engage with visual art. I take the elements of the art (line, shape, texture, color, space, value, and form) into consideration when building a poem. I want the poem to, in some way, aesthetically model the painting, even if it is only on an intuitive level.
Rumpus: Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with your readers of the world?
Jackson:  Wow! Let me see. I encourage readers to take some time to get to know the paintings of Hilma af Klint. I’m not sure when they’ll be in the United States again. I hope it might be sooner than later. Also, beyond the poems about visual art, this collection is filled with an affinity for and a close observation of the natural world. Recently, I decided to take a year-long class to become a Tennessee naturalist. I recently moved to Tennessee, and I didn’t want to write about my new environment without taking the time to learn about it. Google is good, but it is also kind of cheating.  I encourage everyone to come to know all that is immediately around them. Urban wildlife is a topic many authors are thinking about now. Certain species have adapted to a landscape we have manipulated for our use. But there are so many species that are suffering for the same reason. The voiceless doesn’t just include the human world. As poets, as witnesses, we can be that voice.  
***
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote. She co-edits Matter with Darius Phelps.
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prakash047 · 1 month ago
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The Visionary Work of Gregory Crewdson
The Visionary Work of Gregory Crewdson
Gregory Crewdson is a very well-known American photographer born in 1962, whose works mix the feel of dreams and haunted nightmares. He is known for his cinematic photography style, full of mixed stories in a single frame. One of his best photography series is Beneath the Roses which was exhibited in 2003 and 2008. This series is the best example to explain his style and visions. Those pictures are not just pictures, they were captured in detail and make you feel like a movie set. The photo size is 48X60 inches, which is hugged, and displayed in the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art, a very prestigious venue.
I loved one of his artworks Untitled (Ophelia) from 2001. In the picture, a lady is lying down on the living area floor, she is half-soaked in the water. It reminds me of the story of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The room is in dim light and water reflection is perfectly marked. This represents my mood of mystery, sad, and quiet. He creates this scene as a final output which is the mind-blowing product. He puts a lot of effort into setting an entire setting, using movie lighting and every detail during post-production. These images will create a lot of questions in your head. What will be the story behind this scene? Who is this woman? How did she end her life? This is the perfect visual story. He is putting so many emotions in a single frame. I was inspired by how lighting, detailing, and composition help to execute your ideas and create the story.
Crewdson turns his daily activity into something extraordinary which makes his specialty. He is inspired by the filmmaker David Lynch, and the artist, who were specialists in creating a scenic environment for theater, but his photos stand as a part of their theater. Producing a series Beneath the Roses is not his solo work. It’s a teamwork and effort, like actors. Lightman, set designer, costume designer, and so many crew members. He uses collaborative art form in his photography with many layers.
If you want to know more about him and his style, you can follow his official website (www.gregorycrewdson.com). Also, there are great articles about his process published in the New York Times and The Guardian, and his own book Gregory Crewdson: Beneath the Roses. They offer you to watch Crewdson work closely. I suggest everyone who might be or might not be from the art background, you will learn from his ability to create your own stories in a beautiful way.
image link: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/158461/untitled
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vihvid · 1 month ago
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3- Rodrigo Valenzuela
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Rodrigo Valenzuela is a well-known photographer and multimedia artist working in Los Angeles. He was born in 1982 in Santiago, Chile. He has a background in sociology and philosophy and his work dives into topics of labor, identity, and social conflict, often including aspects of performance and sculptural combination. Rodrigo currently works as an Assistant Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA, demonstrating his simultaneous dedication to artistic activity and education.
Rodrigo's art includes photography, film, and the installation process with a focus on Latin American modernism and industrial aesthetics. Afterwork is one of his more notable works, creating strange, monochromatic compositions out of studio debris, such as scaffolding, pipes, and cinder blocks. These pieces point out the contradiction between the stability of industrial structures and the passing lives of laborers, using the human absence to create a feeling of isolation and resilience.​ Despite not using any color and just space, he creates almost an abstract photograph that encapsulates you.
Rodrigo's brilliance in visual storytelling has earned him noteworthy awards, including the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. His works have even been displayed in venues such as the New Museum in New York, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, and worldwide galleries, cementing his place as a transformative voice in contemporary art.​
Rodrigo works are brilliant in their own way yet personally they are too meticulously posed rather than a natural photo. Due to most of his pieces being in black and white, it limits his range of the emotions/thoughts he can invoke in you.
References:
https://photographmag.com/reviews/rodrigo-valenzuela-new-works-for-a-post-workers-world-gallery-at-bric-house/
https://www.lightwork.org/archive/rodrigo-valenzuela-american-type/
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