L E N S C R A T C H: November 2010

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Kevin Thrasher

Kevin Thrasher's images have a wonderful combination of unsettling charm. He has a knack of finding moments and locations that while normal and natural, also leave room for alternate interpretations. Born in Birmingham, Alabama and now living in Richmond, Virginia, Kevin received his BFA from East Tennessee State University and his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He had a long list of exhibitions in 2010 including the forthcoming Collectors Guide to Emerging Art Photography published by the Humble Arts Foundation in NYC.

Photography seemed like the only option that I wanted to pursue in school. I wish there were a more glamorous way to talk about the choices that led me to photography, but photography was the only thing that I ever thought I really wanted to do over a lifetime. Photography made sense. Making photographs is a way for me to go out into familiar or unfamiliar places and discover things. I like going out and getting lost in a new place and making pictures there. The world is an awfully interesting place and you can make work where ever you are.

His series, Common Ground, looks at how we interact with the natural world, and the series Brown's Island is a work in with similar themes but focusing on a specific place.

There is no pristine landscape. There is only the land that we have. We got to nature or other more socially controlled spaces to enjoy ourselves. Recreation takes us from our own backyards, to other places where we can connect with nature or experience moments of leisure.

The photographs exist in between accepted ideas of landscape and these newer more controlled spaces. People are making the best of the spaces that they have access to. Many of the locales often sustain the idea of community where people are drawn together for mutual purpose. We have come to accept these interstitial spaces as our nature.

Images from Brown's Island

Monday, November 29, 2010

Patrick Millard

Patrick Millard thinks about photography in totally unique ways. Growing up in Michigan, and now living and teaching in Pittsburgh, Patrick is making photographic work, new media, and sound projects that address ideas about media, digital culture, technology and the interactions that human beings have within their own synthetic environment. He writes an interesting blog, Formatting Gaia, where a recent post explored the idea of web based creativity: Can working in virtual communities be more effective than face to face cooperation? Patrick has a host of exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe this year and next, in addition to an artist-in-residence at Syneria Ranch in Santa Fe in January.

I thought it best to let you read Patrick's biography directly from his site:
In 2008, Patrick began to show his work inside the virtual simulation world Second Life; exhibitions that advance beyond two-dimension work and expand his ideas of simulation, virtual reality, and the synthetic future where the physical object gives way to its virtual counterpart and its presence is valued entirely for its idea rather than its place in space.

This transition toward a more prominent virtual presence as an artist eventually led to the inevitable. In 2009, shortly after becoming a regular exhibitor in the virtual environment, Patrick embarked upon his first photographic series that used the environment and society of Second Life as its subject matter and conceptual theme. Virtual Lens is an artistic and anthropological investigation into the life of the avatar, landscape of the sim environment, and experience of the virtual world. Patrick continues to photograph and exhibit his portfolios as well as spend time with fellow avatars in Second Life.

2010 brought a new role for Patrick as the curator of several exhibitions. He has curated exhibitions for The VASA Project's Online Gallery and Turing Gallery in Second Life that reflect upon digital culture in the world today. Topics such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, renewable energies, gene therapy, cyber culture, and other posthuman and transhuman philosophies are the focus of these exhibitions.

During the month of June, 2010 Patrick was artist in residence at the Biosphere 2. During his time in residence he began work on photographic, sound, and digital media portfolios. These efforts have yielded a fully developed photographic portfolio of the Biosphere 2 structure and an album to be released on Innova Recordings in 2011. The unique condition of Biosphere 2 attracted Patrick to the residency. As a natural environment that was hermetically sealed and self-sustaining while simultaneously being powered by more than two acres of machinery, the B2 environment played on Patrick's continuing theme of organic and synthetic mergers.

Images from Formatting Gaia, Stage l

Formatting Gaia: The cycle between human beings and the natural world has been transformed into a new formation that inspires intricate modes of transmitting and receiving information. Through the development of modern technologies human beings have begun to unfold the possibilities of telematic and cybernetic systems of communication. Earth is no longer a simple exchange of biological entities, but a more complex system that employs digital signal to mediate our existence within it. These images explore an alternate version of the human existence than what we have know it to be in our short history.

Images from Formatting Gaia, Stage II

Images from Formatting Gaia, Stage III

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Mark Hogencamp

I'm always drawn to the offbeat outsider, and found the following story wonderfully interesting. This may not be new to you, but it was to me.

Jeff Malmberg has created a film, Marwencol, about artist/photographer Mark Hogencamp,"a former alcoholic who was beaten into a coma after a night at a bar." On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was attacked by five young men in a Kingston, New York, parking lot. The assault left the ex-navyman, carpenter, and showroom designer in a coma for nine days; he emerged with brain damage that initially made it impossible for him to walk, eat, or speak. State-sponsored physical and occupational therapy helped him regain basic motor skills. But after less than a year he discovered that without insurance, he could no longer afford it. Determined "not to let those five guys win," Hogancamp turned to art as a therapeutic tool. It wasn't the first time: Before the attack, he had filled sketchbooks with intense and accomplished drawings relating to his struggles with alcoholism. But now, a shaky right arm and impaired hand-eye coordination thwarted his efforts.

There is an interesting interview with the director in Filmmaker Magazine. For a list of where the movie is playing, go here.

Frustrated but resolute, Hogancamp reached further back into his creative past. He began by revisiting his childhood hobbies of collecting toy soldiers and building painted models. Commandeering a pile of scrap wood left behind by a contractor, he constructed "Marwencol," a fictional Belgian town built to one-sixth scale in the backyard of his home. He populated it with action figures and dolls representing Word War II personages like Gen. George Patton, as well as stand-ins for himself, his friends, and his family. Finally, he dusted off an old camera and began using it to capture staged events ranging from pitched battles between occupying German and American forces to catfights in a town bar. Through these exercises, Hogancamp sought to regain the capabilities that he recalled having had before the attack.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Gregg Segal

My friend, Honey Lazar, sent me the work of Gregg Segal, and I was at once impressed with his animated and original website. Gregg received his BFA in photography at the California Institute of the Arts and a Masters in dramatic writing from NYU. He resumed his photography career with "a story teller's sense of theme, irony and penchant for drama--seeking that key moment that is about to--or has just-occurred. If the moment works, the resulting photo is like a single frame movie." Gregg works in all aspects of the photography world blending editorial, commercial, fine art and documentary photography.

Gregg has many terrific series and I am featuring Remembered: The Alzheimer's Project where he has used projected childhood images juxtaposed with portraits of the victims of this insidious disease.

Remembered: The Alzheimer's Project: For people with Alzheimer's, the past becomes the present. Distant memories shift from background to foreground. To illustrate the past's prominence, I've included it in each picture--in the form of a projected slide image.

Prior to the shoot, I looked through photographs from the subject's family albums and chose an image or two of them as a child, teenager, or young adult. During the shoot, I'd project slides of these images: the older person shares the frame with their younger self. The younger self is layered over the present, occupying an equal part of the moment.

The most wrenching part of witnessing the dissolution of a loved one is that you have them whole in the same moment that they're gone. That simultaneity of have and losing, that nostalgia, is at the heart of Remembered.

We have a tendency to look at an older person and forget who they once were. Often, we have a hard time picturing old people as ever being young. I want you to look at these pictures and be reminded that the people here loved, married, were vibrant, passionate: they lived life fully.

It's hard for many of us to live in the present. We're constantly re-evaluating what we've done or projecting ahead. Rarely are we in the moment the way some with Alzheimer's are.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Lenscratch FAMILY Exhibition

Aline Smithson, Thanksgiving 2009

First of all, I want to extend a big thank you to all that participated by submitting your personal response to Family--it is a wonderful collection of familial moments and insights into more personal terrain.

I've written a couple of pieces on Family, one for Too Much Chocolate and one for Fraction Magazine. It's a huge part of my photographic image making and one that, I think, connects us all in a profound way.

I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving, or for those of you outside our borders, a wonderful holiday season. If you see something that moves you in the exhibition below, drop a line to a fellow photographer. Don't forget to submit to The Favorite Photograph You Made in 2010, due on Dec. 27th. This will run on New Years Day.

It gives me great pleasure to present the 2010 Lenscratch Family Exhibition!

A big congratulations for Bernd's new baby daughter:
Bernd Reinhardt, Lena's Little Feet, Los Angeles, CA