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.

 

Kihinde Wiley

http://www.kehindewiley.com/jamaica_pages/W_Graham_Robertson.html

Kehinde Wiley was born in Los Angeles, CA. He received his BFA at San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from Yale University School of Art. 

His work focuses on the modern idea and even the reality of minority image. His paintings submerge a figure dressed in westernized garb into a fabric-based pattern relevant to their culture.  This formal pattern in conjunction with the figure is contrasted even further by the poses drawn from historical paintings. The highly saturated paintings feel very confusing upon approach. I remember walking up to one at the Metropolitan and being overwhelmed by the juxtaposition of regal sentiment with the sticking urban figure. Then questions started to present themselves. This work represents duality in a very ambiguous and successful way.  It also takes on a lot of historical content with the poses he choses to reference. This strategy is interesting to me being that these works are from all over the world but seem to hold a constant statement, which I find very powerful. The content reminds me a lot of Yinka Shonibeare

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Philip Jarmain - American Beauty

Canadian photographer Philip Jarmain has been very busy since 2010 documenting abandoned buildings in Detroit with emphasis on the 20th century architecture. His work is presented at the Meridian gallery in San Francisco and features 20 large format size prints which are 4x6 ft and 5x7 ft tall.

He recently won Luerzer's Archive 2014/2015 Top 200 Photogaphers Worldwide for his "American Beauty" series. "These are the last large format architectural photographs for many of these structures" says Jarmain.

See more of his work at http://philipjarmain-americanbeauty.com/

Woodward Presbyterian

East Town Theatre Exterior

Belle Isle Aquarium

I am drawn to Philip's work because he captures the essence of these places. The fact that he is using a large format camera puts him above all the hobbyists' doing this for fun, in my opinion. He is approaching these as a form of genuine documentation I believe, contrary to many native Detroiter's fascination with "ruin porn." On a technical note, I enjoy how everything is in focus and the images are clean. It's important for me because in my own work I want everything to look as good as possible, as smooth as possible.

On a side note, it is curious how this series was shown in San Francisco but not in Canada or Detroit. Perhaps there is some resistance from showing off these kids of images locally?

Andrzej Mitura

this artist photographed two men in Warsaw that made a living in collecting trash, scrap and sold it to make a living.
i have looked on a few websites to find more about this photographer but have not been able to find information on him.
i do love the way he give a glimpse into the two men life and their living conditions.

http://jasonpatrickdeleon.com
this sight direct you to go to another web site which is one that tells you of a U of M professor and his venture to document and catalog stuff or items of undocumented worker or migrants who come a cross the Mexican border and leave their mark or a piece of their self behind.The way that we touch the environment as we pass through it. Like some of the artist that i reviewed for my artist research paper they were interested in how color or the excess of something affects us as individuals so to do individuals affect what they have past through. This is a different twist collecting things in that this professor and his students collect these items and tag them and try to learn about what or why someone would risk their life to come to a country that they think or feel will give or has plenty, and that they just want a small part of the prosperity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwhbWikqlkw

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/bios/jason-de-leon/