Shani Peters

As I was researching an artist I came across Shani Peters. I've seen one of her installation pieces at MOCAD and I was very intrigued. It just happens that her father, Dr.Peters is one of the professors that opened my eyes to the current social injustices we encounter today. In Shani's Installastion titled Re-Program she uses two iconic black families, The Huxtables and the Evans as a surrogate to talk about common social and economic issues that are common in most black families. 

RePROGRAM episodes 1-10 from Shani Peters on Vimeo.

Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux-Enya Moran

"354 is a photographer’s collective, with two photographers, both working in advertising and in architecture. We became partners in 2009 to develop projects together and to broaden our visions about photography. We now work with many different architecture offices and advertising agencies. Our studio is located right in the center of Brussels."  http://354.be/about

The two artists that I have been looking at are Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux. They created this series called Box. Each scene is made from cardboard boxes and dollhouse miniature furniture. These images are very surreal and a bit disturbing. You get a sense that these are perfect homes, but in each image there is a imperfect thing, like a fire or a car crashed through the wall. What is so great about these images is that the figures in the images seem almost to not be phased by what is happening. these images are showing the imperfections of life and that is what I want to create with my work. Each one tells its own story without telling you the whole story. 

 

Rodney Smith

Rodney Smith is a photographer who appreciates the subtleties in film and looking at things from a classic photographers point of view. He calls himself a traditionalist and someone who places people inside of landscapes. He never uses special effects.

There is something about his work difficult to discuss using words. However, the word "timeless" keeps coming up and again for me. There is detail and simplicity in his process. I really enjoy looking at his work for the photography aspect on its own. His composition and perspective on life is amazing. It's clever. It's different.

http://www.rodneysmith.com/portfolio

Jacinda Russell

i came a cross a new artist over the last couple of weeks that has sparked a interest in that she has done some work with obsession and the obsessions that people have. She is currently an assistant professor at Muncie Indiana. She got her BFA in Boise, at Boise State University and her MFA at University of Arizona in Photography. She likes to transform objects into self portraits, the objects take on a representation of the people and the places.

http://jacindarussellart.blogspot.com/2011/03/tales-of-obsession-from-cigarette-pack.html

http://jacindarussell.com/home.html

Tryee Guyton

http://www.heidelberg.org

http://wdet.org/shows/craig-fahle-show/episode/heidelberg-project-founder-honored-through-jazz/

http://www.tyreeguyton.com

He feel he is a artist that is striving to be a part of the solution yet some think he is a creator of a eye sore and have resorted to burning down his work. A man that draws attention to some of the blite in Detroit area and uses found items to make a point with his crations has lately been in the new again as his creations now for the second time in a month have been burned to the ground. A project that has been there for well over 27 years and has inspired many other artist, and has been a backdrop for countless photos is now under fire as arson burn it to the ground.

He studied art at Marygrove College and at Wayne state University he told a teaching position there in 2007 he has had his work displayed in Australia and and at other  international  areas he also has been represented by the Detroit Art Institute. His grandfather was a recognize internationally as a artist. 

Enrico Natali

http://www.enriconatali.com/index.html


I recently went to a book signing for Enrico Natali's 1968. Natali documented the shift from industrial Era of Detroit before the rise of racial tension. His style feels very similar to Gordon Parks and naturally I was drown to this.
When he spoke he talked about reality only existing to the individual through perception. Enrico also said that he wasn't searching for anything and he didn't plan this, it just happened. This work is exactly the kind of sentiments that I'm looking for in my future work ironically starting in Detroit.
In Natlis new work he walking around with a DSLR snapping at random and later cropping in. He believes that the universe will work in disfavor and that exciting and intriguing to me because I believe the same.

http://www.kwangholee.com

"The Threads that Bind us includes a series of original works in which "woven material" is clearly of fundamental importance, turning out to be crucial for instilling identity and character on certain objects and for evoking a vision of how the practice of weaving fibres opens up to meaningful interpretations. A thread, which is a flexible, non-extendable structure, is what allows operations like sewing, embroidery and weaving to be carried out, age-old creative practices which, even though they have very definite and unmistakable roots in craft tradition, turn out to still be valid realms of exploration for assessing new or innovative solutions. As well as reviving an old-fashioned and universally practised craft, the use of threads and yarns for the modern-day manufacturing of objects is also a very up-to-date and original means of expression, giving new meaning to key terms like "knot" and "stitch" and metaphorically evoking the concepts of "weave" and "web". The designers have been selected by the curators and invited to take part in the Exhibition through the design and implementation of an unpublished work. "

this is part of his Prophets & Penitents series

He was born in 1981 in Seoul Korea.  He majored in Metal Art & Design at Hongik University, and graduated in February 2007. He currently lives and works in Seoul. He started working this way because of his grandfather who liked to collect things and turn them into tool or peace of functioning things and he kept them around the house. Kwangho remembers walking over all his grandfathers inventions in the home he grew up in and the stuff he collected.

Xavier Chassaing

This is an artist who's video I came across and very much was drawn to for a number of reasons.

1) The camera movement through a space is done in a way that was smooth and seductive.
2) The time-lapse element and light treatment + focus + motion (screen projection) stands out for being unique.
3) The music and slow build-up is stunning once you see the whole thing through.

This short film is really the essence of that "something extra" I've been looking for. It's this technique that gives rise to ideas to come for what I'm continually working on. The fact that this is all possible without thousands of dollars and special effects is pretty amazing to me. A way to combine the real with the unreal, a way of creating possibilities.

More shorts and some commercial work of his can be seen at http://www.lestelecreateurs.com/directors/xavier-chassaing/

https://vimeo.com/3114617

As the website MOTIONOGRAPHER writes about Xavier:

What looks like film is in fact 35,000 photographs with a mix of 3d mapped projections. Being a young director, Xavier doesn’t have the facilities and financial backing that a commercial piece will grant. Instead he had to work under what he calls “the classic dogma which is ‘What can you do with what you have…’” I think this sums up Xavier’s process pretty well. Here is what he had to say to me about his technical process for Scintillation:

What I have was an apartment, a small DSLR camera, a small computer and a small videoprojector. I also made a contraption who looks like a motion control but with the particularity of moving extremely slow who allowed me to take sequences of pictures with long exposure. (1frame per second, with 1 second of exposure). Even the best camera can not compete with this kind of sensitivity if they shoot at normal speed. So, I did everything myself from the 3d animation that I project on object, building the machine, the editing etc..

Michael Northrup

Michael Northrup is an American photographer who has consciously and with extreme precision and dedication steadily documented his family, friends, and personal sphere through photographs beginning in the 1970's.

These photos are incredibly recognizable for me.  They are my family, they are your family.  They are everyone you've ever met or no one you've ever met simultaneously.   My interest in family, the anatomy of family and personal space, the notion of home and the cherished (sacred) are all displayed here through seemingly simple photos which you might find looking through your grandmother's attic on a September afternoon; breeze and dust illuminated in the light between the slats on the tiny window.  This is nostalgia, but it is also a longing for a nostalgia that doesn't exist.

This family doesn't belong to me.  These friends don't belong to me.  These memories don't belong to me.  But somehow they do.  I feel like they're mine and that's the most interesting part of his work to me.  The impossible reconciliation between images that have nothing to do with me and the extremely personal effect they create in the viewer.

I'm really interested in nostalgia, manufactured memory, displaced memory, personal and private space vs. the public sphere, and also the inherent feeling of being a spy, a voyeur into someone else's life story.  The emotion that this creates is an odd and eerie combination that I try to create in my writing as well as photography that I've been working on where I focus on my immediate, most coveted and sacred spaces and people, but where I also try to incorporate an element of "unreality" or hyper reality which aims to suggest the concept of how we define "home" "family", other words and language that evoke "safe" while at the same time evoke strangeness or the unrecognizable.

Lori Nix-Enya Moran

Lori Nix is from Kansas; she received her BFA from Truman State University and received her MFA from Ohio University.  Her work is all miniature and done right in front of her camera with no digital manipulation. Nix blurs the line between realism and illusion by taking what seem to be real moments and adding a misplaced element. Her work in based on her memories.  I think that her images work so well because there is an element of normality and also an element of disturbance. You can tell that her work is miniature but the detail in all her works prove to show that she is trying to tell us a story, making us forget that they are miniature.

http://saracwynar.tumblr.com

 Sara Cwybar

"SARA CWYNAR uses collage and re-photography to make composite images that resemble old advertisements or stock photography. Cwynar is interested in the feelings generated by dated commercial images: with time their visual trickery fails, their seductive power wanes. Her works highlight how the once familiar becomes foreign; how the fetishized object can lose its luster; how glamour can deflate.”

She is a New York based artist who who works in a collage style. She was Canadian born.

I love the way she fills the photos with the stuff. Even though she is trying to replicate old advertisements and that she does a beautiful job at photographing the items.

nicholas kahn & richard selesnick

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, both born in 1964 are mixed media photography/installation artists who have been collaborating since the late 1980's as Kahn/Selesnick.  They create fictional place, history, and narrative through elaborate photo-collage, photography, painting, artifact and dramatic staging.  Each series is constructed as a novella, a piece of time, usually based on an actual event, however manipulated and cut using mash/ups of images that evoke in the viewer the feeling of a hidden place that has just been discovered, that we have stumbled upon out of a dream.

They create histories.  In 2007 the pair released their project entitled Eisbergfreistadt, which consisted of the creation of a fictional iceberg turned into a principality off the coast of Lubeck, Germany.  Every detail was accounted for in this exhibition including producing architectural models, period clothing, and even creating currency and bank notes to further the sense of the "reality" vs "non/reality" that pervades every aspect of their work.  

Kahn/Selesnick give the viewer the sense that nothing is really "real" in the contemporary world; we are all just models of an earlier past, copies or in a sense, floating with no idea of who we are or where we came from.  Their photos create worlds, destroy seemingly absolute fact, and most importantly ask us to question the concept of "history" and "our history" as a whole.  What relationship do we hold to the past?  Why is this necessary?  

We are assaulted with these absolutely stunning, surrealist, massively detailed and interesting works yet the emotion that we experience is common and easily understood.  I particularly enjoy the question that is asked, is begged to be answered, when we view these works.  I am left with a sense that I have never learned anything.  That everything I know to be true is a lie.  Yet at the same time there is an undercurrent of whimsical innocence and playfulness that allows me to be alright with this state of unknowing.