John D'Agostino's The Treachery of Images » experimental http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress Critical Discourse on Contemporary Art Tue, 28 May 2013 18:02:02 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 The Contemporaries http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/the-contemporaries/ http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/the-contemporaries/#comments Sat, 23 Feb 2013 16:56:37 +0000 John D'Agostino http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/?p=603 A selection of 40 of today's most innovative contemporary artists, from emerging luminaries such as Matthew Brandt and Jordan Eagles, to masters such as Susan Derges and Barbara Kasten.

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]]> The CONTEMPORARIES
A Selection of Today’s Most Innovative Contemporary Artists matthew_brandt1 CHIARA9 BESHTY BRANDT BREUER CHIARA COLVILLE Walead Beshty has long used photography as a
tool to explore the social and political conditions of our material culture. More recently, the material conditions of photography itself have spurred his continuing investigations of the gap between the physical world and the image world. Matthew Brandt produces contextual works that employ a process-based approach, in which the output often includes physical elements of the subject itself. Re-framing traditional landscape photography of the American West, the artist concurrently recalls traits of early color film photography. Marco Breuer (b. Landshut 1966) is a German photographer known for his radical approach to the medium. Much of his work is undertaken without the aid of a camera, aperture, or film, being instead produced through a combination of photogrammic, abrasive, and incisive techniques. John Chiara photographs the landscape using long exposures that negate present activity, but at the same time record the photographic event. His practice is part photography, part event, and part sculpture – an undertaking in apparatus and patience. Christopher Colville, b. 1974, is a conceptual and experimental photographer. He uses many different techniques to obtain his photographic works. For his series Dark Emanations he placed dead squid in containers where they emit gaseous clouds of phosphorescent light as they decay. Walead Beshty @ Wikipedia matthewbrandt.com Marco Breuer @ Wikipedia lightdark.com christophercolville.com         DERGES  DESCHENES  DR. LAKRA  DUMAS  EAGLES Susan Derges, (English, born 1955) is an internationally recognised photographer specialising in camera-less photographic processes. Her Under The Moon series involves working with photographs of the moon and combining these with water and branch patterns exposed to sound vibrations. For several years, Liz Deschenes has explored the technical apparatus of photography—its materials, equipment, and processes. Her resulting body of work is both critically self-reflexive and lushly beautiful, hovering between photographic images and three-dimensional art objects. Dr. Lakra is a tattoo artist living and working near Mexico City. His art involves embellishing found images and objects—for instance, dolls, old medical illustrations, and pictures in 1950s Mexican magazines—with macabre or tattoo-style designs. Marlene Dumas (born 1953), South African born artist and painter who lives and works in Amsterdam. Stressing both the physical reality of the human body and its psychological value, Dumas tends to paint her subjects at the extreme fringes of life’s cycle, from birth to death. Jordan Eagles is a New York based artist who uses blood as his primary medium to create works that evoke life, death, body, spirit, and the Universe.  The works become relics of that which was once living, embodying transformation, regeneration, and an allegory of death to life. susanderges.com  miguelabreugallery.com  Dr. Lakra @ Wikipedia marlenedumas.nl  jordaneagles.com            EATON  EHRLICH  FUSS  GOWIN  GRAF Jessica Eaton (b. 1977) makes several exposures rendering up colours unconnected to any solid object. Her most-recognized series is “Cubes for Albers and LeWitt,” for which she utilizes multiple exposures of cubes to explore the layering and blending of primary colors. Ron Ehrlich’s paintings combine the very American dynamic of action painting with the Japanese aesthetic of wood-fired Bizen ceramics. His remarkable surfaces are made from recipes of oil, wax, lacquer, shellac, porcelain and marble dust, fused together sometimes with a blowtorch into a lustrous finish. Adam Fuss is best known for his contemporary photograms of moving light, live creatures, and organic things. His work is often about the discovery of the unseen, and universal, ephemeral themes like life and death.
 Emmet Gowin has exhibited for four decades, focused often on his own wife Edith. Perhaps less widely known are his lush gold toned salt prints on handmade paper, which have continued to push new territory in his remarkable career. Bryan Graf (b. 1982) combines black and white film, ambient light and colour negatives for striking results with unusual hues. Reminiscent of light leaks and double exposures, Graf’s mesmerising  patterns of light take the landscape genre and combine it with process-driven manipulations. jessicaeaton.com  ronehrlich.com Adam Fuss @ Cheim & Read Emmet Gowin @ Wikipedia  bryangrafstudio.com            GUEORGUIEVA  GUYTON  KHAN  JENSEN  KASTEN Iva Gueorguieva’s complex abstract paintings are awash with color, movement and texture. Layering cut fabric, paper and paint on the surface of the canvas to create seemingly chaotic compositions, she notes that the action of creating is for her a way of thinking about space and time. Wade Guyton (b. 1972) is an American artist who makes paintings, even though they are often prints from an Epson printer. Guyton’s purposeful misuse of new technology results in beautiful accidents that relate to daily lives now punctuated by misprinted photos and blurred images on today’s computer screens. Drawing on diverse cultural sources including literature, history, art, music and religion, Idris Khan (b. 1978) has developed a unique narrative involving densely layered imagery that inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration. Bill Jensen has remained  constantly searching within his practice, forgoing the comfort of signature subjects to focus on the process of making a painting. His works point to a synthesis of experiment, emotion, and mood within a single picture. Barbara Kasten has been creating inventive and influential images for more than 40 years. Pushing the boundaries of the photographic, her painterly and sculptural studio based practice is known for its experimantation, inventiveness and theatricality. Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe Wade_Guyton @ Wikipedia Idris Khan @ Wikipedia Jensen @ Cheim & Read
Kasten @ Artnet            KEEVER  KEYSER  LLOYD  MARTIN  MAZAL Kim Keever’s photographs are created by meticulously constructing miniature topographies in a 200-gallon tank, which is then filled with water. These dioramas of fictitious environments are brought to life with colored lights and the dispersal of pigment. Rosy Keyser (b. 1974) explores abstract painting of all sizes, from the small to large. Her work mixes found collage materials with painterly techniques: raw, playful and physical. David Lloyd collages together images, as one would compose a letter. His paintings are weathered and stained in a cherished way, like postcards that have been forwarded through all the post offices of the world. The fascination behind Lloyd  Martin’s paintings lies in their balance between the constraints of a formal grid,  and their rhythmic movements within. Despite a strict adherence to a set of parameters, his works continue to push in new aesthetic directions. Ricardo Mazal’s work explores the process of visual perception as it takes form in consciousness. His paintings depict the passage of time, leaving their residue to dissipate in space like a still photograph of a speeding object blurred to abstraction. kimkeever.com Keyser @ Artnet  thehouseoflloyd.com  lloydmartinpainting.com  ricardomazal.com      NARESslalem  PARLAbrooklyn-street-art-jose-parla-bryce-wolkowitz-gallery-jaime-rojo-03-11-web-2    MULL  MUTU  NARES  PARLA  PURANEN Carter Mull (b. 1977) creates pictures through a process of re-photographing and altering existing images.  His works intertwine multiple mediums to question our conceptions of the world. Kenyan-born Wangechi Mutu is an artist whose sculptures, works on paper, and installations explore gender, race, and sexual identity using collage and assemblage strategies that create provocative juxtapositions of the female body. James Nares’ paintings seek to capture the very moment of their own creation, frequently made in a single brush stroke, recording a gestural passage of time and motion. Jose Parla’s paintings incorporate calligraphy into pictures that resemble distressed city walls and graffiti. His is a stylistic blend of expressive painting and calligraphic abstraction that evokes musical and topographic overtones. Fascinated by museum collections of older paintings, Jorma Puranen focuses on to the paintings’ surface and light reflections, drawing our attention to the photographic process itself and the complexity of the gaze. Carter Mull @ Wikipedia Wangechi Mutu @ Wikipedia  jamesnares.com  joseparla.com  Puranen @ Artnet          QUINLAN  RAFFERTY  REAFSNYDER  ROSSITER  RUFF Eileen Quinlan has become well known in recent years as one of a cohort of photographers who have been disassembling the layered apparatus of photography (light, subject, optics, chemistry, bytes, the material image) and finding new means of expression. Usually appropriated from mainstream cultural sources, Sara Greenberger Rafferty (b. 1978) re-photographs the results of allowing the inks of imagery to bleed. Her work is inspired by a myriad of sources including TV, performers and photographs. Michael Reafsnyder’s paintings burst with color and joyous, frenetic energy. Drizzled, smeared, scraped, scuffed and slippery swipes of wet, acrylic color engulf the canvases like nontoxic spills. Alison Rossiter elicits found and latent imagery (left by fingerprints, moisture, humidity, or accidental exposure) from expired photographic papers without the use of a camera. Thomas Ruff works in series, creating defined bodies of work whose subjects include empty domestic interiors, appropriated interplanetary images from NASA, abstractions of architecture, computer-generated Pop imagery, and obscured pornography.  eileenquinlan.com  sgrstudio.info  michaelreafsnyder.com  alisonrossiter.com Thomas Ruff @ Wikipedia        TILLMANS    RUIZ  SALAVON  STEZAKER  TILLMANS  WELLING Paul Ruiz is a painter living and working in Melbourne, Australia. His work is  informed by visual analysis, drawing and painting of the human figure. Jason Salavon is noted for his use of computer software of his own design to manipulate and reconfigure pre-existing media and data to create new visual works of art.
John Stezaker re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968),   a German photographer whose diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations. James Welling has been exploring the gap between photographic referent and image for nearly 40 years in his experiments with the continually evolving technologies and materials of the medium.  paulwruiz.com  salavon.com John Stezaker @ Wikipedia  tillmans.co.uk  jameswelling.net

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]]> http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/the-contemporaries/feed/ 0 Jessica Eaton: Spectral Geometries http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/jessica-eaton-spectral-geometries/ http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/jessica-eaton-spectral-geometries/#comments Sat, 23 Feb 2013 16:40:20 +0000 John D'Agostino http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/?p=778 Jessica Eaton's work is a form of visualisation, rendering up colors, forms and effects unconnected to solid objects. It is full of surprise.

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Jessica Eaton: Spectral Geometries
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Jessica Eaton, cfaal 109, Archival Pigment Print, 2011.

 

 
An artist friend once told me that when you don’t know what you’ll get back, that’s when you know you’re finally onto something.

Jessica Eaton says she likes to make images that surprise her, and they certainly do to us as well.


Eaton is part of a cadre of young photographers who experiment with and exploit the technical effects of the photographic medium with ingenuity, daring, and delight. (For more, see The Contemporaries, including Matthew Brandt, Christopher Colville or Bryan Graf). Her images are not visible to the naked eye, but rather exist in the realm of the photographic, often created in camera with large format film. In her “Interpolation Dramatizations” and “RGB Weaves” works, she is similarly using analogue process to symbolize digital algorithms.

Eaton often takes several exposures at a time, rendering up colours, forms and effects unconnected to any solid object. She may not know exactly what she will get back till the photographs are actually developed. Perhaps her most-recognized series is “Cubes for Albers and LeWitt,” for which she utilizes multiple exposures of cubes to explore the layering and blending of primary colors.

Jessica Eaton, cfaal 260, Archival Pigment Print, 2012

Jessica Eaton, cfaal 260, Archival Pigment Print, 2012

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WORDS BY: John D’Agostino

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In a sense, her work quite literally then is a form of visualisation. It is this facet in the end that I think makes her practice the most intriguing, as she takes the medium of photography from one of presumed documentation to rather one of imagination, mystery and vision.

Jessica Eaton, cfaal 254, Archival Pigment Print, 2012.

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Jessica Eaton is represented by M+B in Los Angeles and Higher Pictures in New York. Her website is:  www.jessicaeaton.com

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]]> http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/jessica-eaton-spectral-geometries/feed/ 0 Re/Mix! – Innovators, Appropriators & Copyright Criminals http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/remix/ http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/remix/#comments Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:20:34 +0000 John D'Agostino http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/?p=282 Oft-times an overlooked & misunderstood tradition, the art of sampling historical source material into new works of art and music is a rewarding, sophisticated and ingenious practice rife with departures, ruptures & contradictory possibilities.

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Re/Mix!
Innovators, Appropriators & Copyright Criminals

A New Course by John D’Agostino
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Cornell Remixes Bronzino: Joseph Cornell, Medici Princess, 1952-54,  Angelo Bronzino, Portrait of Medici Girl, 1542. Oft-times an overlooked & misunderstood tradition, the art of sampling historical source material into new works of art and music is a rewarding, sophisticated and ingenious practice rife with departures, ruptures & contradictory possibilities.
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Joseph Cornell, Medici Boy, 1943.
Wood box construction using elements from Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy, ca. 1500.
Raw material for artists to re-combine can be found literally anywhere, from archaic media, vinyl records, and trash, to photographs or finished works like painting. Challenging, subverting, co-opting, even re-inventing mediums, the Re-Mix in assemblage art, collage, Hip Hop music, photography and more is a tour de force of creative practice in the 21st century, encompassing an entire spectrum of originality (or lack thereof), from one-dimensional Appropriators, to Hackers, cover artists and mashups, to entirely new, emergent digital artforms.Featured artists include: Joseph Cornell, Romare Bearden, Yves Klein, Vik Muniz, Thomas Ruff, John Stezaker, Louis Comfort Tiffany, E.J. Bellocq, Dr. Lakra, Idris Khan, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Wangechi Mutu, Marcel Duchamp and Kehinde Wiley, among many others.
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Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Acrylic on canvas, using an original publicity still of Marilyn Monroe from the film Niagara, 1953.
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Louis Comfort Tiffany, At the New Circus, ca. 1894. Favrile stained glass, using Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s watercolor At the Nouveau Cirque, 1892.
Re/Mix! will employ the art of sample-based Hip Hop as the quintessential paradigm for the visual artist. From the very first DJ’s of the South Bronx employing turntables and a mixer, sampling in Hip Hop music is the foundation of the genre. Much like their visual counterparts, its most innovative practitioners exemplify a selective, three-dimensional and highly sophisticated synthesis of old material into new, from producers like Prince Paul, DJ Premier and Da Beatminerz, to acts like De La Soul or Beastie Boys, to those that sample their own sounds, such as Portishead.
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Enrique Gomez de Molina, Rhinoplasty, 2010. Hybrid taxidermy sculpture, using jewel beetle wings, peacock feathers and buffalo horn.

 

 

 

 

John Stezaker, He II, 2008. Photo collage, using old film portraits.

Course Schedule

Week 1: The Innovators

Featured Artists:

Joseph Cornell · Andy Warhol · Romare Bearden · Kurt Schwitters · Yves Klein · Laszlo Moholy-Nagy · Louis Comfort Tiffany · John Stezaker

 

Week 2: The Appropriators

Featured Artists:

Roy Lichtenstein · Marcel Broodthaers ·Sherrie Levine · Claes Oldenburg · Cindy Sherman · Vik Muniz · Jeff Koons · Banksy

 

Week 3: Copyright Criminals

Featured Artists:

Danger Mouse · Shepard Fairey · Da Beatminerz · Richard Prince ·Prince Paul · Hank Willis Thomas · Beastie Boys · Cory Arcangel

 

Week 4: The Bricoleurs

Featured Artists:

Jacques de La Villegle · Max Ernst · Wangechi Mutu · Conrad Marca-Relli · Robert Rauschenberg · Robert Heinecken · Marcel Duchamp · Dr. Lakra

 

Week 5: The Hackers

Featured Artists:

Alvin Langdon Coburn · Thomas Ruff · Adam Fuss · Walead Beshty · Lucas Samaras · Wade Guyton ·  Marco Breuer 
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This course is currently in development for venues TBA 2013. For more information, please contact John D’Agostino. 

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]]> http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/remix/feed/ 0 Promiscuous Visions: The Hackers At The Heart of Photography http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/promiscuous-visions/ http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/promiscuous-visions/#comments Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:16:34 +0000 John D'Agostino http://treacherousimage.com/blog/wordpress/?p=303 Photographers have been hacking into the medium of photography from its very inception. Confined not just to the world of computers, "Hack Value" describes the creative ethos of an artist interested in fully exploring a System to stretch its capabilities, as opposed to an ordinary user, who prefers to use the system as originally designed.

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Promiscuous Visions:

The Hackers At The Heart of Photography

A New Course by John D’Agostino

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Mario Giacomelli, Marche Countryside, ca. 1954. “Ma Bell is a System I want to explore.”

-Captain Crunch, legendary Phone Phreaker.

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Man Ray, Rayograph, 1925.


Photographers have been hacking into the medium of photography from its very inception.

Confined not just to the world of computers, “Hack Value” describes the creative ethos of an artist interested in fully exploring a System to stretch its capabilities, as opposed to an ordinary user, who prefers to use the system as originally designed, and learn only the minimum necessary. From the first ‘Phone Phreakers’ who whistled into telephones to make free calls, to the Apple I, a bare bones circuit board designed to be re-configured, Hackers of all different genres enjoy exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of experimentation, innovation, cleverness, finesse and brilliance. Susan Sontag once characterized the nature of photography as a promiscuous vision, a way of seeing that is not faithful to a single Modus Operandi or material, but rather, promiscuously seeks out divergent technologies, media, and new ways of making images.
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Matthew Brandt, From the series Rivers, Lakes & Reservoirs, 2010. C-Print soaked in source water.

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John Chiara, 8th at Hooper, 2003. Dye Destruction Photograph.


Photographic Hackers delight in solving artistic problems in unanticipated ways. A short list of these innovations include camera-less photograms and the threat of abstraction, multiple exposures, liquid spills, scrapes and solar burns, cameras without film or lenses, printmaking with literally anything but silver halide or ink (from breakfast cereal to body fluids), bizarre print surfaces from leaves to cloth to canvas, or using energy sources to make exposures, such as heat, cold or radiation – even the motion of live animals such as bees or snakes.This course will investigate many of the novel solutions that the most creative photographers employ to deconstruct and re-configure the idea of the photograph. Each week, students will participate in this experimental process by reverse-engineering a different component part of the photograph, re-imagining elements taken for granted, and deepening their understanding of the more dynamic ways photographs can evolve and innovate.
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Kim Keever, River Keeper, 2003. C-Print made with fishtank diorama.

 

Eileen Quinlan, Yellow Goya, 2007. Folded chromogenic paper.

 

 

 

 

 

Course Schedule


Week 1: Dégredés

Featured Artists:

Joseph Nicephore Niecpe · Marco Breuer · Lillian Bassman · E.J. Bellocq Curtis Mann · Edmund Teske  · Jacques Villeglé · John Chiara · Chris McCaw

 

Week 2: The Threat of Abstraction

Featured Artists:

Man Ray · Jaroslav Rossler · Barbara Kasten ·Roger Catherineau · Laszlo Moholy-Nagy · Walead Beshty · Aaron Siskind · Frederick Sommer · Eileen Quinlan

 

Week 3: Printers, Painters & Pictorialists

Featured Artists:

Mario Giacomelli · Jan Saudek · Alvin Langdon Coburn · Wade Guyton · Lucas Samaras · Robert Demachy · Matthew Brandt · Matt Saunders · Henry Peach Robinson

 

Week 4: Fire & Ice

Featured Artists:

Adam Fuss · Susan Derges · Yves Klein ·Hiroshi Sugimoto · Jorma Puranen · Kim Keever ·Wilson Bentley · Dupreez & Jones · Christopher Colville

 

Week 5: Digitalis Hybrida

Featured Artists:

Thomas Ruff · Jason Salavon · Andreas Gursky ·Idris Khan · Andreas Gefeller · Carter Mull ·Richard Misrach · Aziz + Cucher · Loretta Lux

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This course is currently in development for venues TBA 2013. For more information, please contact John D’Agostino.

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