SURFIN' - PT. 1

Here is some cool art I've come across surfin' the net these past few days.

LIU BOLIN
Bolin explores humanity's fundamental alienation from the animal instinct that equips other organisms with the ability to survive.


ROBERT HUNTER
Sweet UK-based illustrator with a really nice, whimsical eye.

I especially recommend checking out what he's scanned from his sketchbook, so lovely.

STACEY ROZICH
Rad stuff coming from this SF/Seattle illustrator, striking images of a strange folktale past.

JOHN KENN
I'm really digging this guy's most recent drawings-- monochromatic little renderings finely wrought on Post-It notes. They're very Edward Gorey-esque, not quite as unsettling but still a bit dark and certainly just as peculiar.

RECENT GALLERY VISITS

Within the past couple weeks I've seen a lot of neat art.


Ever impressive are the newest works by the terrific Alexis McKenzie, which I had the pleasure of viewing up close and personal at Park Life Gallery (where I also happen to intern). I've been a big fan of Alexis' work ever since coming across her artist interview on Fecal Face.

Alexis' collage pieces serve a curious blend of images of Victorian restraint and those of unfettered flora and fauna, creating these wonderfully fantastical surrealist dreamscapes where lovely women grow fish tails and seashells sprout from their skulls. This show was especially interesting in that it was almost entirely text-reliant. Save for one larger piece, all of the collages spelled out different phrases -- "Never Be Sad", "True Love", "Just This Once"... Not only were the works a marvel to look at just in terms of the precision and attention of detail used to clip out each image, but it was super fun to try and decipher what the words spelled out.


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I also stopped by 49 Geary Galleries a little over a week ago.
Fraenkel Gallery has usually got some pretty great work but I was more impressed by the photos in the backroom, namely a couple of Diane Arbus shots and 3 E.J. Bellocq prints that were so interesting to see in person. Having those scratched out faces but a few inches away from my own was really powerful.


Jack Fischer Gallery was showing some interesting work by Lora Fosberg. I was especially intrigued by her colorful sound wave spectrums, full of idioms and expressions familiar and alien, sad and funny, contrived and painfully sincere. Lora states in her artist's statement that "The work is attempting to bring the viewer into a place where I am able to disarm them with imagery allowing them to regress back to a particular memory; a specific moment forever embedded in the brain......whether it be truth or a complete fabrication of the subconscious, the memory has created it nonetheless."



My favorite work currently being shown at 49 Geary would have to be Kathryn Spence's wonderful installations at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery.

Kathryn makes these incredible models of animals out of random found materials -- things like newspaper, beanie baby bits, and fabric scraps from used clothing. Her pieces raise interesting questions about the relation between the man-made and the organic. They are also adorable. I took some photos of them on my Olympus which I hope will turn out well.


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Finally, I visited SFMOMA to check out the recently opened Richard Avedon retrospective as well as Robert Frank's "The Americans".
Avedon's work is outstanding. He had a magical way of using the portrait to capture both artifice and frankness. Even the most posed of his portraits can be totally telling of the subject's character, the way he or she wanted to construct his or her image saying just as much as a more candid shot would.
As much as I love Avedon, however, I left the exhibit feeling slightly underwhelmed. My main problem was not so much with Avedon's work as it was with MOMA's presentation of it. I'd already seen the grand majority of the photos in person during a visit to another Avedon exhibit in Paris last summer, and I feel the Parisian curators definitely had a keener sense of how to present the images powerfully. For instance, in Paris, Avedon's photos of working class Americans were shown in a room painted completely black from floor to ceiling, these massive, striking, black-and-white images illuminated on the walls surrounding, totally spellbinding you, whereas the MOMA exhibit just sort of had a winding labyrinth of overall white-wall gallery space. In any case, the MOMA visit was beneficial in that I did see a handful of shots I'd never seen before, and I was happy to give second thought to some of the images previously viewed in Paris. The image below in particular struck a new chord with me, James Story, coal miner, looking to me almost like a blue-collar Jesus -- the way coal had mixed with sweat to form blood-like trickles on his forehead, all he was missing was a barbed-wire crown.

While I may have had a few misgivings about the Avedon exhibit, I was completely floored by Frank's "Americans".
Frank did a brilliant job at organizing his sprawling photo essay on Americana into several pointed critiques on contemporary America's icons and values, unmasking the disparities in American society and the hypocrisy of its leaders. I can only imagine what kind of uproar this would've caused at the time of the book's release, and I'm totally tickled at the thought of it. The sequencing of the exhibit was super powerful, juxtapositions of images often producing more compelling results than the singular photos themselves. I highly recommend a visit.

That's about it for this long-winded blog entry. Go check out these galleries and exhibits for yourself!

A METROPOLITAN OPHELIA

"He is much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody"

On May 1, 1947, 21 year old Evelyn McHale plunged to her death, leaping off the Empire State Building and leaving these words scrawled, and then crossed out, on her suicide letter. 86 stories and four minutes later, photographer student Robert Wiles snapped this photograph of her lifeless corpse. There is no blood, there are no mangled limbs. Her nylons are ripped and lace her ankles together in dancerly contortion, her face is made up and her fingers daintily gloved, as her immobile body lies cradled in a bed of glossy black limousine.

"Dying is an art, like everything else." - Sylvia Plath

RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD

Ralph Eugene Meatyard easily fits into my top favorite 5 photographers of all time, so it's difficult for me not to make a post comprised solely of his pictures, just because there are so many great ones to choose from.

In his lifetime, Meatyard was an established optometrist in Lexington, Kentucky, married with three children, president of the P.T.A., and coach of the basketball team. This wholesome family man image at first appears incompatible with the darkly atmospheric photographs he took in his free time during the weekends. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that it's precisely this seemingly picturesque lifestyle that informs Meatyard's unique artistic vision.

Meatyard reveled in theatricality: his photographs were clearly staged, often employing images of family members and friends in monster masks posing in abandoned mansions and farmhouses or picket-fenced backyards, actors in a southern-gothic drama about those living in the suburban sprawl. The most obvious example of this is his magnum opus, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, a photo-series of grotesque masked figures strolling through suburbia, inhabiting the ordinary, everyday world as if even in their abnormality they belonged.

Meatyard's work seems to use this juxtaposition of the placid with the peculiar to make a comment not so much on suburbia itself but rather the interior dramas of those who live in it, metaphysical contemplations on American identity -- what it is to be other, to be similar, to be young or to grow old... These questions of selfhood are never clearly answered. At the same time that Meatyard opens the viewer's eyes to these haunting self-interrogations, so too he clouds their eyes.

Meatyard, like other artistic greats (particularly those featured on this blog, ha ha ha), died young before he hit it big. While he was alive, he never really received recognition outside of the photography world, and found himself disappointed that he never made a significant impact on any large-scale audiences. Rather than mourn the sort of tragic implications of such unrecognized talent, I'll just post some more photos.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN

Working most prolifically between 1975 and 1980, Francesca Woodman left behind a legacy of haunting black-and-white photographs that question notions of female identity, depiction of the female form and the human anatomy, relations between artist and spectator, author and subject, reality and representation...


Woodman's photographs reflect a veritable patchwork of influences ranging from Dada and Surrealism to Gothic Horror, as lone female subjects, often nude, contort their bodies, faces obscured or blurred in motion, in seemingly decrepit or abandoned spaces. However phantasmagorical or unreal the atmospheres created in these photographs are, there is something distinctly anchored in reality about the subjects of Woodman's work (perhaps due the corporeality and tangibility of the nude female figure) which allows for thematic implications that ring true in both an everyday, realist sense as well as on a more metaphysical, spiritual level.


What resonates most for me in Woodman's work is her complete and utter submergence in the artistic process in order to fully explore this idea of female identity. Woodman herself was both photographer and subject in many of her photographs, bearing all both literally and figuratively -- literally in the sense that she presented her naked body to the viewer, figuratively in the sense that once you become object of your own art, there's no backing down: your work is completely personal (really you become your art) and your own problems, vulnerabilities, insecurities, et al. become the very foundation of the artwork which you present to the public to be gawked at and scrutinized.


In fact, even when she wasn't the subject of her own photos, she often employed look-a-likes and doppelgangers who maintained (albeit to a lesser extent) this level of personalization (Now that I think of it, really reminds of Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar...) Speaking of Plath-ian undertones, unfortunately, perhaps as a result of this total exertion of herself into her work, Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22. Years after her demise, her work would finally come to be the subject of the attention it deserves, with a number of posthumous books published and exhibitions traveling across the nation. To this day, Woodman's surreal depictions of troubled young females continue to haunt and inspire art critics and plebeians alike -- unsettling, spectral apparitions of the female selfhood that float in and out of the collective consciousness, hovering over us all like Esther Greenwood's Bell Jar.