The Photographic Object at the Photographers Gallery 24th April - 14th June 2009

 

  1940 – 2008, from the series Second Hand Portrait © Maurizio Anzeri

The internationally renowned artists in this exhibition use stitching, cutting, piercing and punching to explore the ambiguous space between two and
three dimensions.
Dissatisfied with the conventional function of photography as a surface that reproduces the external world, these artists test the materiality of their medium. Through a variety of distinct propositions, this exhibition traces an eclectic journey from the potential of photography to exceed its medium to relishing its hermetic and decorative function.
Artists include Maurizio Anzeri (Italy, b.1969), Walead Beshty (UK, b.1976), Annette Kelm (Germany, b.1975), Gerhard Richter (Germany, b.1932), Alina Szapocznikow (Poland, 1926-1973), Wolfgang Tillmans (Germany, b.1968), Andy Warhol (USA, 1928 - 1987) and Catherine Yass (UK, b.1963).
Sculptor Vanessa Billy has created a related installation in the ground floor Project Space titled Surfaces for the mind to rest or sink into. For more information and images of the installation click here.

Scanner Darkly

RADIOLOGY ART

This is a CT scan of a barbie doll. Surprisingly, she has a rather detailed skeletal structure, most extensively present in the legs. Note the knee and hip joints. She has a prominant "rib cage" seen best in the movie below. She also has a prominent skull giving her that famous high-cheekboned face.
THE PROJECT
In the summer of 2007, artist and medical student Satre Stuelke started the Radiology Art project. Dedicated to the deeper visualization of various objects that hold unique cultural importance in modern society, this project intends to plant a seed of scientific creativity in the minds of all those inclined to participate.
METHODS
Stuelke acquires the images on an older four-slice CT scanner that is used for research. Most scan parameters include a 120kV tube voltage, 100mA current, 0.625mm slice thickness and interval, 1:1 pitch, 1.25mm beam collimation, and a speed of 1.25mm/rotation. The resulting DICOM images are then processed in Osirix software on a Macintosh iMac computer. Colors are assigned based on the varying densities of materials present throughout the object. Depending on the spread of densities within a particular subject, black or white backgrounds are chosen. Images are further processed in Adobe Photoshop for proper contrast and balance.

The Mane Story

The hairstylist Acacio da Silva and photographer Julian Wolkenstein have given us a genuine funny (fashion?) moment with their humanized horse portraits.

Even if the artists didn’t have a concrete reason nor commission to, well how shall we put this “give horses a good hair day”, photographer Wolkenstein commented that occasionally, “it’s important to do personal projects just for fun, not to sell anything”.

Don’t be fooled however by the images ridiculous side – according to the artists the concept is to reveal the human obsession with refining the best parts of the body.

Once the team decided to use horses as their models, attention was placed on their manes, adding bizarre, astonishing and unique extensions. “Apart from casting horses and preparation work which took a few months, each horse took a full day to shoot” they told a U.K newspaper.

Julian Wolkenstein
Acacio da Silva

Dryden Goodwin

These larger scale photographs are the first in an on-going series sharing the method of tracing the face and head with a compass with the smaller scale Capture (2001) series. The Cradle series presents these individuals in life-size proportions.

The scale of the photographs offers the viewer the opportunity to examine at close quarters the intricacies of the scratched line. In each of these works the figures are caught at a moment of seeming introspection and focused thought; the poignancy of these moments counterbalances the mundane nature of the urban context they are in. The gesture of mapping their faces with further lines could be construed as an act of violence yet has a paradoxical tenderness and intimacy as the web of lines forms a cradle to hold their particular features and expressions. These markings are an attempt to elevate the individuals above the street in which they have been spied.

Dryden Goodwin

Emily Richardson

Nocturne (2002) 16mm Film

Ori Gersht - Pomegranate

Lisa Oppenheim | Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans' (2007)

Killed Negatives: After Walker Evans (Cow and Bucket), 2007
Two Hand printed black and white, and color photographs
9 6/8 x 12 1/2 inches each

Lisa Oppenheim’s work constitutes an archaeology of visual culture. She brings the hidden, under-appreciated and repressed into view, and in the process reveals an ordering of things that goes beyond our commonplace responses. Her work ranges from damaged negatives from early 20th century news stories, personal photographs posted on ‘Flicker’ by soldiers serving in Iraq through to the constellation of the day and location of famous historical media stories.

Her show at STORE, titled ‘The Making of Americans’, nods towards Gertrude Stein’s novel of the same name. In the opening paragraph, Stein writes: ‘Sometime there will be an ordered history of everyone.’ This notion, although somewhat conspiracy laden, points towards Lisa’s interest in pulling apart and reconstructing visual languages to understand how aspects of visual cultures and histories are produced.

With this in mind, the exhibition is divided into three parts, each providing a visual representation of something distinctly American. In ‘Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans’ (2007), Oppenheim uses Walker Evans’ unpublished photographs from 1938 found in the National Library of Congress. Evans was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to document depression era rural America. These negatives are ‘killed’ because they had holes punched through them to prevent publication. Oppenheim printed them and conceptualises the holes as a space of potential contemporary interpretation.

In a second series of works, ‘Multicultural Crayon Displacements’ (2007-8), Oppenheim visually deconstructs a set of colours produced by Crayola termed ‘Crayola Multicultural Crayons’. Crayola’s ‘Flesh’ colour was re-named ‘Peach’ in 1963 in response to the Civil Rights Movement, and similarly ‘Indian Red’ was changed to ‘Chestnut’ in 1999. This photographic series playfully underlines the way the notion of ‘colour’ is culturally constructed – both through the physical process of early colour photography and through the almost invisible social shifts that shape the consumer’s view of the world.

The final work is a 16mm film of what looks like the moon disintegrating into abstraction. Oppenheim repeatedly photocopied an image of the moon taken from the earth at the time of the first Apollo landing. With each photocopy the image becomes ever more degraded. She then filmed each image in series and we see the eventual dissolution of an image that always signifies both more and less than on first sight, a move that is essential to Oppenheim’s working strategy. As the artist herself notes. ‘My interests lie in the tell tale expressions of contemporary life which are often overlooked...not from the moment itself, but rather the gestures and remainders of the forgotten.’

Store Gallery Press Release

Untitled, (Chair) 2009

Christo & Jeanne-Claude - Revelation Through Concealment

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park,
Riehen, Switzerland 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz, ©Christo 1998

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz, ©Christo 1998

Statement:
The temporality of a work of art creates a feeling of fragility, vulnerability and an urgency to be seen, as well as a presence of the missing, because we know it will be gone tomorrow.

The quality of love and tenderness that human beings have towards what will not last - for instance the love and tenderness we have for childhood and our lives - is a quality we want to give to our work as an additional aesthetic quality.

Georges Rousse | Space & Time

In Georges Rousse, we see an actor in search for another mode of spatial experience, based on his critical analysis of space. A sensibility of deconstruction emerges in these settings, in the tension between inside and outside, between floors and ceilings, between direct and reflected sights, in this aesthetic of chaos, confusion and imbalance.
Isabelle Alzieu in "Georges Rousse : Plasticité des espaces déconstruits" in Espaces transfigurés - À partir de l'oeuvre de Georges Rousse, PUP 2007

Grey Area | Danny Treacy

2002, 150 x 200 cm, Archival Photograph. Edition of Five.

A Grey Area is not a restricted Area. It may be entered freely, the only condition being that one now is free to do so. There is of course a line which must be crossed, but one that is not thin, like a tape or ribbon. Its breadth, or distance is more an agreement, a complicity, more unspeakable than unspoken. It is not a physical line, one that may be walked across, or through, or stepped over. It is sensed rather than seen, primary sensation which evidences the line - and which keeps most out - being fear. At best it is climbed through or crawled under on all fours. It is often accompanied by a bad smell. It is a psychological line which has become a distance, but one that is still somehow flattened to a plane of sorts, a field (force field) which repels at a distance beyond the visible.

These are all sites of prior or potential brutality, real or imagined. Anything that can be imagined may quite likely have occurred and continue to occur as these spaces continue to exist. Treacy renders these spaces visible in two ways; he paints them grey and then he photographs them. The grey looks cool, intelligent, almost chic, but I would argue that this appearance is part of the subversive nature of the project. The opposite of clinical becomes critical in grey, as though become a politicised form of a medical condition, a fucking with forensics. Treacy is driven to these places by the urge for the project. (It is the experience of any photographer to increasingly find himself able to overcome all kinds of trepidation for the photograph). He reveals these sites by painting over them, leaving in his wake, in the world, a secretive, yet ultimately absurd (theatrically, philosophically), series of grey painted areas. If one were to draw back from the frame of the image, one imagines an edge which is as roughly painted as the edge of the image is tight. They are lost, unfit places, abandoned even by Treacy himself, having been sought out, served their purpose, once again discarded. One might seek out these actual locations but success would be unlikely for most who might read this text. You'll know it when you get there though: it smells bad and is painted a shade of milked grey, already peeling away at the edges.