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.
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.
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this week has been all prep for my departure from nyc for the next month and not nearly enough time in the studio making. i was able to get to the studio for the afternoon yesterday but focused most of my time there writing. i'm researching for a paper on artists who create during, or in response to, personal illness. i'm curious about what that type of work looks like, or if it 'looks like' at all.
there was one photographer i came across in my research whose work surprised and, well, kind of shocked me. mary eleanor browning in the early 1950s photographed her own hysterectomy. while doctors operated on her body, browning photographed the surgery through a mirror placed above the operating table. madness.
an abridged version of the orginal essay by peter palmquist can be found online in the archives of women in photography as well as a few of browning's images.
