the winter issue of frieze gave me loads of inspiration. besides the great article on luigi ghirri's work the issue also introduced me to barbara kasten. i find architectural sites captivating.
francesca woodman's retrospective opens in march at the guggenheim here in nyc. the show began its tour at the sf moma in november. i'm eagerly awaiting the opening.
to tide me and you over, friend, photographer, artist, elli chung has created a beautiful little homage to woodman. she's posted her images over at her blog, paris and other places.
i cant get viviane sassen's pictures out of my mind since seeing them last month at moma's new photography show. the museum included images from sassen's parasomnia series.
this morning i was thinking about how a photograph can be a sculpture and sassen's images came to mind.
the transformation of her subjects from real, grounded entities to elements in service to the image is striking.
i just fell a little bit in love with street style again.
everybody street will hopefully show at the seaport museum this winter.
friends and all around smarty-pantses, hannah jayanti and jeremy haik, are flexing their filmmaking prowess & making a documentary film about the phantom tollbooth.
the project needs your support -- if you are a lover of literature, documentary film, or just plain old creative arts, please take time to visit the project's kick-starter page and donate!
from the website about the film:
The Phantom Tollbooth turns 50 this year, and we've joined Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer, Milo and Tock, and a host of authors, critics, teachers and kids, to celebrate the classic 1961 children's book, by making the definitive documentary film about this beloved work of the American imagination.
seen via hey hot shot.
when i saw the above copy of a public space at spoonbill & sugartown i purchased the journal immediately. an image of awkward, exhilarating flight covers the journal jacket. about his attempts at flight, tom pope shares from the interior jacket flap:
I guess I can be looked at as the suit-wearing absurdist who makes art fun. The suit is my character. I can bring humor to the art, or I can rule it out. If I rule it out, the viewers will bring in their own anyway. You can't stop humor coming into art. I like the idea of embracing it.
So the idea of scale, of people walking up... if someone came up and joined in that would be extremely exciting. It would make it for me. It's about chance and the idea of possibility--things happening that are out of my control, that I don't know about until the film has been processed.
Once you see the photo, things start falling into place. Then the viewer comes into it and created a narrative: How did I get up there? Am I falling? Am I suspended? Am I defying gravity? I offer the materials, the raw materials. The viewer brings the rest.
the first semester of graduate school a small revelation came to me, "this is not about succeeding; this is about failing." fast-forward to now, two years later. i'm heading into my final year of graduate school & feel really, really (too?) comfortable with failing. comfortable with my images not working, people not understanding what i am trying to say with them. comfortable with them being a little mute, a little dumb. comfortable with the process of making, trying, failing ... succeeding?
i'm not alone with this perspective. my classmate raul recently sent an email with the title, "failure is the path to success," requesting footage of his table cloth pull -- his contribution to our spring salon this year.
