Last week of November Presentation

A 15-20 minute organized powerpoint or PDF class presentation of your work. The presentation must meet the following criteria:

1. Include all images related to your senior portfolio project with titles. At this late stage in the semester, at least 5 - 8 related images from this semester should be included. If you are continuing a project from last semester, then please feel free to include the strongest images from the previous semester in addition to your new images.

2. Provide three words to describe issues/concepts your work this semester addresses (e.g Body, Aggression, Gesture, Identity, Deterioration, Family, Memories, Grief, Migration, Sexuality, Space, Utopia, Network, grotesque,etc.). Please provide a brief 2-4 sentence definition/explanation of each word (project these words and definitions for class to read as you explain them).

3. Present 3-5 contemporary artists (1970-present) and/or critics, historians, or psychologists that you believe represent/illustrate your three issues/concepts. Please provide a minimum of 2 digital image examples and /or quotes from each influential person (for all images provide title, year, medium and for quotes please provide a citation). Also provide a 3-4 sentence explanation as to the reason you feel this particular individual's work or ideas relate to your work and concepts/issue you are illustrating (project explanation to class).

Do not repeat the same artists or thinkers to illustrate different concepts/issues.

Let's recap:

A proper presentation should examine a minimum of 9 to 15 influential artists/thinkers (3-5 for each of the three words being used to describe your original senior portfolio work's conceptual basis). Two examples from each artist/thinker must be projected (images or quotes). A 3-4 sentence explanation of why you think each influence (artist/ thinker) illustrates one of the three concept/issues must also be provided (project explanation for all to read).

4. A 5-6 sentence artist statement that must include your three issues/concept words


This presentation is intended to support and explain your current research as well as bring to light the conceptual progression/ growth of your series this semester. It is to be handled in the most professional manner possible. Practice your presentation before coming to class. Please use the appropriate file sizes and formats for digital presentation on a Mac computer. An average presentation should have at a minimum 30 slides/ pages of imagery and information revealing the conceptual basis of your senior portfolio project. If you have trouble with your files the day of the presentation or there is any indication that you are unprepared, you will be asked to stop your presentation early and we will move to the next person. If you want to practice in the room the week before, please send me an email.

9:30 AM Tuesday Crit, Work Week, Friedrich Lecture

Hello Senior Portfolio,

Tomorrow we will have morning critique starting at 9:30 AM. There will be three people presenting. The afternoon class will not be meeting but I will have open office hours until 1 pm.

Thursday will be a workday for both classes. Keep in mind that you are required to attend Su Friedrich's lecture at 2 pm -- 535 Bowe St.

Tanyth Berkely

(born 1969) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY Berkeley was born in Hollywood, CA. She is best known for her portraits.[1] Her subjects have included transgendered women,[2] buskers[3] and people she met on the subway in New York.[4] She has been included in the Museum of Modern Art, New York's prestigious "New Photography" series of exhibitions (2007 exhibition) as well as exhibitions at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art and two solo gallery exhibitions at Bellwether, New York. Her work has drawn comparisons to Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget and Lisette Model.[5] Berkeley received her MFA from Columbia University in 2004.

Gallery

Midterm Grades

Midterm Grades

Most grades have been posted on blackboard and the official university system. The grades are based on a grade weighting formula that best represents what your final grade would be if the semester ended now. All grades will be complete by end of Sunday 10/28. I suggest looking at Blackboard to see how your grade is weighted with a + or - .

Those of you that have not shown for final critique have been given a midterm grade based on what you would currently have if you get an "A" for this item. Your grade will be changed accordingly after next week's crit.

I advise all students that have low Blog/Research grades to begin making extra entries that present serious research efforts and/or critically review on campus lectures. Many students are getting behind in attending on campus events and writing a review.

Please begin preparing entries to the VMFA and the American Photo Contest ----- You must provide proof of entry on the blog. Take a picture of the addressed envelope and the materials to be included (slides, prints, etc.) and post the images on the blog.

I would advise all students with a grade of an F or D to setup a meeting with me and/or consider withdrawal.

Paul

Richard Billingham : Slacker Aesthetic

Richard Billingham's photographs of his family in their Birmingham flat, published in the book Ray's a Laugh 1996, are a stark, painful and often humorous study of the relationships within his own family. They encapsulate many of the critical questions relating to the position of the observer in relation to the observed. Billingham was no intrusive 'outsider' bringing unequal power relations and a set of expectations to project onto the subjects of his photographs. Rather, the photographs offer a privileged 'insider' view, testifying to his empathy and tenderness for his subjects.

Gallery

Fishtank Video

Berni Searle

Working with photography, video and film, Berni Searle’s lens based installations references ongoing explorations around history, memory and place. Born in Cape Town (1964) she completed her BA in Fine Arts (1987) and her Masters Degree (1995) at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She currently lives and works between New York and Cape Town.


The moment in which one is "about to forget" is also the moment in which one remembers. As the title of Berni Searle's exhibition suggests, this work looks at the intermediate space of memory where a sense of return and a sense of loss are simultaneously invoked. The process of forgetting entwines both the presence and absence of memory, and, in between, a series of gradually fading after-images of people and events that linger in the mind.



Searle uses a handful of small black and white photographs of three generations of her family as the point of departure for a metaphoric and poetic reflection on a fractured past. Grandparents, parents, siblings and friends appear and disappear in the photographs because Searle's family, like many of its time, was divided by internal schisms around religious differences as well as by contradictory acts of racial classification and reclassification. Over the years, contact between individuals was severed: a matriarch cut off contact with her daughter, sisters were isolated and divided, siblings were separated and only saw each other rarely.

In Searle's video installation and prints, silhouettes of groups of family members in the photographs, cut out of red crêpe paper, float in warm water. Their colour bleeds as the water ebbs and flows, the figures become transparent and residual, and the structured and defined shapes slowly losing their form amidst the swirls of red ink. Our personal associations with this elegiac and enigmatic imagery are myriad.



Cape Town born and based, Searle graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art with a Master's degree in 1995. In 2005, Searle has been selected to exhibit at the 51st Venice Biennale in June, on the exhibition Always a little further, curated by Biennale co-director Rosa Martinez. In September she will exhibit a selection of video works at the BildMuseet in Umeå, Sweden. And in November the USF Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, Florida, will host a solo museum show of new commissioned work. As part of this exhibition, Searle will work with the Graphicstudio, a distinguished artist workshop at the University of South Florida, to create editioned prints. She is also included on a group exhibition, A Kind of Magic - The Art of Transforming at the Museum of Art, Lucerne, Switzerland, running from August to November.

Remember to Attend -- Mandatory

Su Friedrich
Thursday, November 1, 2007
2 pm
Bowe Street 535

Scott McFarland

Scott McFarland's work reconsiders the traditional concept of a photograph as the depiction of a single captured moment in time. Through digital means, his photographs combine multiple negatives to represent simultaneous temporalities within a single image. Several different moments are folded into what appears to be one densely packed instant. McFarland photographs the same location in the same scale and perspective over a period of time and employs digital processes to seamlessly interweave selected elements into a cohesive whole. The photographs are meticulously constructed illusions created within the formal language of documentary photography.



McFarland's photographs illustrate the possibilities of foregoing the technological and phenomenological limitations of single exposure photography. In each image, small clues such as inconsistent shadows and out of season fauna and foliage demonstrate the ability of digital technology to manipulate composition, color, light, space, shape, and form. This pictorial conception of photography as a built picture was brought about by the artist's own considerations of the artificial nature of built spaces, such as those found in gardens and zoos. In these constructed spaces, there is also a disruption to the natural pattern and order of things. In McFarland's work, the viewer's understanding of what they see or think they see is challenged. Fundamental questions concerning the relationship between time and space arise and one is left wondering and imaging what is real and what lies beneath.






"McFarland, by melding several temporalities of one subject in the same photograph, denies photography's homogeneous time, commonly conceived as an instant. Rather, he explores photographic space as positively linked to time as duration and succession, in the lineage of nineteenth-century photographic experiments. In doing so, he considers the notion of representation as an intensive, rather than a repetitive, mode, not copying but presenting an object in its complex spatial and temporal realities. McFarland's photographs fascinate in their comprehension of what a space is. They also offer a multi-layered consideration of photography's representational potential."
(Vincent Honoré. Vitamin Ph New Perspectives in Photography, published by Phaidon Press Limited, New York, 2006, p. 182)

Erwin Olaf

Artist Site

Shimon Attie

(American, b. 1957)

Mulackstrasse 32: Slide Projection of former Kosher Butcher Shop (1930), 1993

On Via della Tribuna di Campitelli. On Location Slide Projection, Rome, Italy, 2002

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Concerned with questions of memory, place, and identity, Shimon Attie gives visual form to both personal and collective memories by introducing histories of marginalized and forgotten communities into the physical landscape of the present. The Writing on the Wall project (1991-1993) took place in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, the Scheunenviertel neighborhood. There Attie projected slides made from pre-Holocaust photographs of the neighborhood’s Jewish residents and shops in the same (or sometimes nearby) locations where the original images were taken. He then photographed the resulting scene. A woman from the past looks out the window of a building now scrawled with graffiti. A pigeon shop with cages stacked on the sidewalk is restored to an otherwise empty street. The life and industry suggested in the projections of the past strike an unexpected counterpoint to the crumbling facades and apparently abandoned places of the present.

Using modern Rome as his backdrop, in The History of Another (2001-2002), Attie projected fragments of historical photographs of Roman Jews onto the city’s ruins and excavation sites. The resulting pictures conflate three distinct historical moments, that of ancient Rome, Roman Jews at the turn of the century, and modern Rome with its new construction and continual efforts to conserve relics of the past. By projecting historical photographs onto ruins and also including in his frame elements of contemporary Rome, Attie creates an environment in which time becomes visible and compressed rather than invisible and expanding, like our normal perception of time. Dividing our attention carefully between three moments in the human history of this place, he implies that history might not have anything to do with time, but might be better thought of as a continuous, repetitious loop that contains both stone ruins and, less tangible, human presence.

At the Coliseum (Looking towards the Arch of Titus), on-location slide projection, Rome, Italy Lambda photograph 40 x 50 inches Edition of 3

Born in Los Angeles in 1957, Shimon Attie lived in Europe for seven years before moving to New York in the fall of 1997. He has exhibited widely in both the United States and Europe, including shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; and the Jewish Museum, New York.

Need Prints for Pollak Display Cases ASAP

Hello Seniors,

I need to get prints for the open house this weekend. I want to exhibit prints that have not yet been in the cases. Please help me out. The cases need to be filled Thursday.

Can anybody help?

Paul

Critique Dates Extended 10/23 - 10/25, Mandatory Submissions, Mandatory Lectures

Senior Portfolio Artists,

The next two weeks will be work weeks. I will have open office hours and will be available for meetings upon request. Please get ready for your crit and prepare materials for the two mandatory shows that I am requiring all students to submit entries Mandatory Submissions. Remember that you must have proof of submission to these two contests. This Thursday I will be more than happy to help any student prepare digital slides.

Critique dates are being pushed to 10/23 and 10/25. As a result of this push, all students must have 5 finished prints. As I have mentioned in previous posts, please consider all facets of the work (scale, technique, clarity, concept, research etc.). Present your best work.

Here is the order of students showing:

Tuesday 10/23

9 Jacquelyne Pierson
9:25 Oscar Contreras
9:50 Matt Harvey
10:15 Shanna Jackson
10:40 Shanna Merola
11:05 Amanda Meyer

Lunch

12 Amalia Berner
12:25 Jessica Cambell
12:50 Shawn Chamberlin
1:15 Jessica Coleman
1:40 Rachel Craddock
2:05 Karl Elchinger



Thursday 10/25

9 Jessica Oriole
9:25 Kathryn Parker
9:50 Adrianna Pellegrini
10:15 Rachel Albright
10:40 Meaghan Pugh

Lunch

12 Reid Fallow
12:25 Kristen Jensen
12:50 Candice Christiansen
1:15 Maha Patel
1:40 Erin Ramon
2:05 Laura Saunders

All students must attend the following two events so please make arrangements now:


Department of
Photography and Film

2007-08 Visiting Artists Series
___________________________________________________

Lecture Dates
(AFO Bld Rm. 535)

Kate Gilmore
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
2 pm

Left: My Love Is An Anchor. 2004, 7 minutes 5 seconds (DVD). Edition of 5
Right: With Open Arms. 2005, 5 minutes 39 seconds (DVD). Edition of 5


Su Friedrich
Thursday, November 1, 2007
2 pm

Misty Keasler

Artist Website

Deep East Texas

____________________________________________________________________

Misty Keasler’s Japanese Love Hotels

Photography of highly charged spaces devoid of human presence is almost a genre in the history of the medium. Make a list: W.H. Fox Talbot’s library, Roger Fenton’s “Into the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” Eugene Atget’s unbearably lonely park trees. But Misty Keasler’s records are significantly different. They are about sex, the ultimate manifestation of presence and absence. I’m here, you’re there, we’re together, we’re suddenly, mutually absent. When we enter Keasler’s spaces, we become implicated in fantasies, rather than being simply absorbers of visual facts. We are forced to be imaginatively active rather than neutral observers.

Keasler has assigned us the job of imagining these spaces occupied with all kinds of interesting sexual activity.

Japanese love hotels originally were used by young couples who needed some time alone living in close quarters with their parents. They now cater to a wider variety of needs and have become extremely inventive. The people using the love hotel rooms are looking to be stimulated and defined by their surroundings. But the space of the room also must coincide with something they bring in their imagination, some of which is based on conventions of Manga and 19th century pornographic Ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

Keasler has assigned us the job of imagining these spaces occupied with all kinds of interesting sexual activity. While pornography was one of the very first uses of photography, it suffers from being an imagination sedative. It shuts down invention for the sake of the inescapably literal and explicit—just like photography in general. How much nicer it is to fill in the shackles and other devices while quarantining the urge to judge these places as sites of neurotic behavior.

So how do we reconcile the most immediate and quintessentially animal behavior of sex with our humanity that has been perceptually impaired by photography?

So how do we reconcile the most immediate and quintessentially animal behavior of sex with our humanity that has been perceptually impaired by photography? The past thirty years have produced volumes of writing pointing out that photography has established a new kind of sex between a virulently rapacious media and innocent bystanders—us. Artists like Keasler understand that photography is better at dancing around the edges, the waiting rooms of experience, than looking directly at the action.

— Rod Slemmons
from Love Hotels (Chronicle Books), 2004

Misty Keasler was born in Houston, Texas on April 28, 1978. Keasler graduated from Columbia College Chicago with honors in 2001. She received the 2003 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor prize from the Center for Documentary Studies, was named by Photo District News as one of the “25 under 25 up-and-coming American photographers” in 2003, and was made an artist in residence at University of Dallas, Texas in 2005. Keasler’s work has been collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan. A book of the Love Hotels photographs was published in February 2006 by Chronicle Books, with essays by MoCP Director Rod Slemmons and award-winning author Natsuo Karino. Keasler lives and works in Dallas, Texas.

About the Critique

Prints are required for the critique. Consider it a formal crit that demands attention to detail and confidence. You must present your best work in its current state of evolution. Technical aspects as well as concept will be judged. Please consider print quality, scale, methodology, research, et cetera. Also address any concerns or ideas that have been highlighted in your meetings with me.

You are not committing this work to the future. You are committing it to the present. This is a checkpoint that should be taken quite seriously. Attendance is absolutely mandatory.

Paul Shambroom

Police SWAT, Camouflage, 2005

Markle, IN (pop. 1,228) Town Council, 7/21/99, 1999

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Paul Shambroom has spent the greater part of the 1980s and 90s creating two series of photographs, both of which document specific, uniquely American manifestations of political action. The first, Nuclear Weapons (1989-2001), presents the highest and most hidden levels of power in the United States by documenting the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal. The second, Meetings (1999-2003), is a study of grass-roots democracy in action – elected civic leaders interacting at municipal and community meetings throughout the United States. These two series, though seemingly at separate ends of an abstract spectrum of power, raise questions, when considered together, about the disjuncture between local action and federal process. As far as they exist as documents, Shambroom’s photographs provide us with visual access to restricted, out-of-the-way places. Although it is tempting to reduce the poles of power represented in the two series into binary oppositions of anonymity/specificity, abstract/specific, and powerful/weak, these are overly simplified readings. Shambroom questions the illusion of hierarchies of power, and ultimately posits a more optimistic possibility: that power and responsibility exists in the individual, whether within, in spite of, or parallel to totalizing discourses. In this respect, Shambroom’s work can be read as a provocative call for personal and collective change.

In November of 2004, after three years contemplating a response to the events of September 11th, Shambroom began photographing U.S. training facilities, equipment, and personnel involved in preparations to combat future terrorist attacks. The Security series visits large-scale training sites like New Mexico’s “Terror Town” and Texas’ “Disaster City,” and features portraits of first responders clad in hazmat suits, military gear, and specialized equipment. The confident stances of isolated figures against picturesque backdrops enhance the heroic mood suggested by the nearly life-size canvas prints, but with individual identity obscured by masks and visors, the tone is ultimately more ambivalent than romantic.

Working as an artist and photographer since the mid-1980s, Paul Shambroom studied at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He has exhibited extensively at galleries and museums, with works shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Shambroom’s works are also held in the permanent collections at the above museums, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Museum of Contemporary Photography presented a mid-career retrospective of his work in 2003. Shambroom currently lives and works in Minnesota. (text from MCA)