New Orleans, PhotoNOLA and Prospect.2

So many changes occured post Katrina, one of which was the formation of The New Orleans Photo Alliance. It has grown in leaps and bounds since 2006, offering many wonderful opportunities for photographers including juried exhibitions, workshops and educational programs. They also offer an annual photography festival, PhotoNOLA. It is a great organization to belong to, run by a passionate group of artists.


I attended PhotoNola a couple of years back and am returning for the Benefit Party and Print Auction, having donated Burn No 45 to the event. Many people are involved to create this fabulous weekend which includes portfolio reviews, workshops, lectures, and alternative process demonstrations, a true labor of love. Its location can't be beat and any excuse to return to New Orleans is good enough for me! I will be basking in the music, the food and the art...and oh, did I mention Prospect 2?

Dan Cameron Introduces Prospect New Orleans from Newgray on Vimeo.

Francesca Woodman on Self Portraiture

I am taking a short digression from featuring some Chicago artists because there was very interesting article in the New York Times art section on Sunday on Francesca Woodman which featured her parents, both artists in their own right, and how they have gone about working with her archives. I had started a blog post on her last April but it somehow got squirreled away.







Woodman worked from a place of unconsciousness and total surrender. Her life was cut short at the tender age of 22 and some of her images fore shadow her untimely death...raw and riveting.




video posted on You Tube by Arteensilencio

The Morning News

check it out...The Morning News

Maggie Meiners ~ Exposed Under Cover

Ever wonder what it would be like to do a series of self portraits? Take a look at what Maggie Meiners has done in her series I Am Who You Want Me to Be. The photographs are so well seen, direct and incredibly compelling.


In her words...

"This is an on-going series of self-portraits that began with an examination of the many roles I play, both assigned and elective. The works detach from the traditional notion of portrait in two ways. The square format allows each work to occupy a space separate from landscape or portrait, just as one’s own experience; environment and appearance map our identity. In addition, the exclusion of the face removes individual identity suggesting that while I possess unique particulars, the role of the any individual is multi-tiered and complex.





Every individual has aspects of their life that they would prefer to deny or disguise. Here, each vignette is unapologetically filled with the accoutrements of my day-to-day life. Cindy Sherman and her commentary on the representations of women in society have certainly influenced me. Yet these works remain personal observations commenting on my own experience, while nodding toward the multiplicities that comprise the totality of every contemporary woman.


My previous work has, even at its most abstract, dealt with specific places, experiences and forms. I am largely self-taught, and as my practice developed, I believe that I had to gain a better understanding of my self. I am an individual, and I am also a wife, mother, consumer, athlete, daughter, sister, and cook, to name a few. Yet, as an artist in an unexpected socio-economic construct I am often a novelty. Looking clearly and unapologetically at these various roles has afforded me a larger view of the human condition; and an awareness of the self we expose and the self we keep private."


Here are a few images to prime us for the upcoming holidays!







You can see Maggie's work up close and personal at the Zia Gallery in Winnetka, IL

Art Fox ~ Walls @ Chicago Cultural Center

In the next several works I am planning on presenting some work of a very talented group of Chicago photographers. I hope you enjoy it! Art Fox currently has work up at the Chicago Cultural Center in his first solo show. He helps us to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.



In Art's Words...

"How, Why, When, and Where: Walls"

"After food and clothing is shelter. Shelter means walls. Even our great cities are made of walls. The lucky dwellers have four and a roof; the unfortunate borrow one as haven from wind, rain, and man. But think China. Think Berlin. Walls keep you out and they keep you in. And ever since the petroglyphs they are blackboard, mural, signboard, journal. Cold and flat but the very mark of mankind. Walls tell us about people."









"I have always been a collector of the common unappreciated objects of art which fill our world. Ever since childhood I have squirreled away curious rocks, fossils, seeds, odd pieces of wood, or manmade objects, for their colors and contours. Walls are a fusion of the natural and the manmade, and like these smaller things, also present fascinating abstract patterns and textures. Street artists may have used them as a canvas worthy of preservation. Walls are too big to bring home, but they are patient and will wait for me, until the light is right or the car moves on. They are forgiving of depth of field and shutter speed. They are also a convenient stage-set, upon which we can view the people around us. I see myself as a collector of light patterns reflected off the walls of our world."







Here is a review from photo critic, Michael Weinstein from the New City Art

"Shooting in lush, muted color, Art Fox continues the modernist tradition of wall photography pioneered by Aaron Siskind, and redeems the ruins, as Siskind put it, by capturing the enthralling blend of textures, splashes of paint, pock marks and blistering lettering and rust that bedeck weathered surfaces that can exert a hypnotic effect. Fox’s images range from straight representational shots to nearly pure abstractions, the latter of which are the most successful by virtue of our ability to concentrate on composition and color to the exclusion of everything extraneous. Fox reaches the perfection that Siskind sought of besting abstract expressionist paintings in “Wire and Wall,” in which the involving cracked and striated gray concrete surface is broken by a vertical swathe of red, orange and yellow paint within which a rigid black vertical line (the wire) sections off the composition."


Through December 21 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington

Pushing the Boundaries of Photography ~ Greg Halvorsen Schreck on The Art of Fixing a Shadow

If you are interested in what is new in photography, be sure to check out the work of Greg Halvorsen Schreck. His work is nothing short of amazing. It is just a matter of time before this goes mainstream. Greg is a Chicago treasure.




in Greg's words....

"Lambertian photographs are digital photographs made out of wood. There is no pigment, ink, or emulsion that define them, nor are they projected images. Rather, the photographs are formed by light and shadow as it rakes across the surface contours. The science of the images is based on Lambert’s Law, from 1760. The equation calculates the diffuse reflection intensity of a surface based upon the angle of illumination and the angle of observation. Programmers have used Lambert’s Law to render objects realistically in 3-d computer programs. Mark Woodworth, a friend, an industrial physicist, coded Lambert’s equation into a software program that translates grayscale pixel densities into angular surface changes that can be milled on to a wood surface. Each photograph combines around 96 separately machined pieces of wood viewed from the side. In normal room light, the images can barely be perceived. They look like a peculiar chunk of wood; maybe something is carved into the surface. Illuminated properly with a single light source, the wood magically transforms into a black and white photograph."




"The poetry of each portrait comes from their concave quality. The photograph is hollowed out of the wood, a subtractive process. So the sitter leaves a space behind, an absence. That absence is reminiscent of the shadow that symbolizes the origins of art, when the Corinthian maid traced the shadow of her beloved the night before he left for war, so she could remember him. As a result of this myth, both art and photography have been described as “fixing a shadow.” John Berger speculates something similar as he reflects on one of his drawings, “What is a likeness? When a person dies, they leave behind, for those who knew them, an emptiness, a space: the space has contours and is different for each person mourned. This space with its contours is the person’s likeness and is what the artist searches for when making a living portrait. A likeness is something left behind invisibly.”

Greg teaches photography at Wheaton College and has his work up at the Schneider Gallery in Chicago until December 31st. His work is extraordinary and must be seen in real life to fully appreciate it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

gratitude |ˈgratəˌt(y)oōd|
noun
the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness