Events

You All Fell For My Act – Open Now

September 7, 2011 — 4 Comments

Opening Night at MAMA

You All Fell For My Act is now up at Media and Moving Art in Rotterdam. There was a last minute addition to the show. Ai Weiwei was added to the show just before it went up. The reception has been good. I have four pieces in the show. They are Megan, Heidi and John, Lexi, and Sady. They are the full size versions and were mounted for the show.

Once again, the artists included in the show are Ai Weiwei (CN, 1957), Kalup Linzy (US, 1977), Kim Nuijen (NL, 1984), Jamie Warren (US, 1980), Renée van Trier (NL, 1983), Evan Baden (US, 1985), Mark Callahan (US, 1971).The show will be up until October 16, 2011.

Paraty Em Foco Workshop

July 18, 2011 — Leave a comment

Advertisement for Paraty Em Foco

In September I will be traveling to Paraty, Brazil to participate in the Paraty Em Foco Photography Festival. I am quite excited as I have never been to South America. I am hoping there will be some time to see Rio, and I will bring my Polaroid camera along for the ride. I will be there for the entire festival, which runs from the 21st of September through the 25th. I will be involved with two events while there.

First, I will be giving a lecture about my past and current work. I am excited because this will be the first that I get to speak in public about my third series. I am mostly in the planning stages at this point, but hope to be a little further by the time the festival rolls around. There will also be an interview section to the lecture. The interview will be conducted by Felipe Russo, a young Brazilian Photographer. His blog can be found here.

I will also be giving a workshop during the festival. I didn’t want to do a shooting workshop. Mostly because shooting is a very small part of any project for me. Plus, I think it would be pretty boring to stand around and watch me shoot a staged image. So instead I will be focusing on how to research, write about, and plan an extended body of work. Then, after that work is created, how to market it and get it shown around the world. The workshop has already sold out, however, I believe we will be adding more spots as there is still some demand. That was somewhat of a surprise to me.

The image above is the first advertisement for the Festival, whose topic this year is “The Future”. More info can be found here.

McKnight Fellowship Talks

July 15, 2011 — 1 Comment

Over the last two Thursday evenings I have attended the talks given by the current holders of the McKnight Fellowship for Photography.

In the past, the Fellowship exhibition and talk came two years after the Fellowship had been awarded, even though the Fellowship only lasted a year. In the future, the Fellows will exhibit their work and talk about it at the end for the Fellowship year, which is much more appropriate.

Scott Stulen from mnartists.org

This year, the new organizers (mnartists.org) decided to hold two simultaneous shows and talks so that they could catch up. That means that there were eight artists giving their talks this year instead of the usual four. The Walker hosted these talks over the past two Thursdays.

Out of all eight artists, I found Paul Shambroom’s recent work the most intriguing. I was a big fan of his Meetings series from a few years ago. He has always had a political twist to his work, which I think is why I am drawn to it. However, what was of particular interest to me was how he researched his current project (Shrines) and how similar it was to what I had done for Technically Intimate. Paul was searching for pieces of military technology that had been bought and placed in public spaces. These were done mostly as memorials. He was interested in the idea of using a weapon of destruction as a memorial to those who had died in war, as a result of weapons very similar to those that were memorializing them.

Paul Shambroom

Understandably, he did not want to drive all over the country searching for interesting sites to photograph. So he used the vast resource that is the Internet. He would search on Flickr for photos that had been taken of military memorials. He would then use Google Earth to check out the site before he visited. He also used Google Earth to map out all of the locations for possible photos.

Paul Shambroom

What is interesting to me, both with Paul’s research and my own, is that a vast majority of the project is actually research done online, then a small part of the project is the actual shooting, followed by some post production and printing. Without the Internet, my own work would not be possible (because my subject matter would not exist) and Paul’s would have been much more difficult to have made.

The current exhibitions of McKnight Fellows include: Paul Shambroom, Lex Thomson, Carrie Thomson, Monica Haller, Chuck Avery, Amy Eckert, Gina Dabrowski, and Karl Raschke. The exhibits are being held at Midway Contemporary Art and Franklin Art Works and are up until July 24th.