2012-01-30
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Photographs from the series Homage to Wilson A. Bentley by Yuji Obata.
I’ve been to New York City four times in the last year, most recently last weekend. Having finally ticked off most of the major exhibition spaces, this time I visited some of the smaller Chelsea galleries, and this was the best discovery.
As Liz Danzico quoted earlier today,
Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a farmer who would live all his life in the small town of Jericho in Vermont, gave the world its first ever photograph of a snowflake.
Obata takes that as a starting point, but goes further. As the Danziger gallery’s biographical notes say,
Like Bentley, Obata was obsessed with the challenge of doing something no one had done before – in his case photographing snowflakes in freefall rather than on a flat surface without digital or any other manipulation. It took Obata five years to achieve but his breakthrough resulted in the capture of pictures that allow the snowflakes to relate to each other in space and size, creating dynamic compositions and scenes. Obata chose the location to shoot the series, in the mountains of Hokkaidō, based on its history as the place where Dr. Ukichiro Nakaya did research that led to his invention of artificial snow.
The reproductions here (taken from James Danziger’s blog) give you an idea of the beauty of the photographs, but if you’re in New York between now and the 25th of February, it’s well worth visiting the gallery to see the works in person.
(Also nearby: Weegee’s Naked City and Vivian Maier next door at the Steven Kasher Gallery; Damien Hirst’s Complete Spot Paintings at the Gagosian; and, at the Mary Boone gallery until the 4th of February, Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds. All are worth at least popping in to if you’re in the area.)
2012-01-27
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From the series A Tale of Obsession: David C. Nolan and Marilyn Monroe, by Jacinda Russell, June 2011.
2012-01-09
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It’s probably a bad sign that I can tell the places where that is the A-Z and the places where it deviates.
2012-01-01
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The Ballard Of Halo Jones, 2000AD Prog 451 (1986), artist: Ian Gibson
2011-11-14
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(via buzz)
2011-08-15
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16 Aerial Views of Houses from the “Night Sun” Series by David Deutsch:
All the photographs in his extensive Night Sun series are aerial images shot at night from a helicopter hovering some four hundred feet above the ground. A Los Angeles native, Deutsch surveyed the city’s vast suburban sprawl, illuminating the ubiquitous flat-roofed bungalows and faux-Spanish villas with a bright police searchlight.
From the Night Vision: Photography After Dark exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
2011-07-27
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The work of art in the age of Googled reproduction:
I don’t want to call these digital objects “image economies,” I want to call them something like Google Clusters. Or maybe Pergoogles: These are iconic images — per Google.
Even that is a bit of a cheat, because obviously Google is responding to the specific words I choose. (The title of each image here corresponds with the search term I used; I didn’t use quote marks in my searches.) It’s easy to capture “Mona Lisa,” harder to see what Google makes of Warhol’s iconic soup can, or Michelangelo’s David (see below).
Nevertheless, I’m rather pleased with the results, all in all.
I’d love to see all these printed crisply, and very large, and displayed in a high-ceilinged and white-walled gallery. Or museum. After all, I think a case could be made for these as “digital readymades,” a term whose origins I don’t know, but that I’ve read applied to the“Photoshop Gradient” pieces by Cory Arcangel. Those are supposedly one-click affairs, and the ones I’ve seen I quite like. (Though I’ve only seen them online.)
(via krislane)
2011-07-15
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Saatchi Online Artist: hugh o’conor; “Parliament Hill”.
Nice enough, but why is it reversed?
2011-07-06
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From a Guardian gallery of Cy Twombly’s life in pictures, The Rose III, 2009, exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The artist’s death was reported today. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.
