this is another web journal about art, photography, science, politics and some other things. I am curious but sometimes i am also bad at spelling. by Jon-Phillip Sheridan
Flak Photo continues its 2010 program by partnering with Center to feature work from 25 artists taking part in Review Santa Fe, an annual juried portfolio review for photographers who have created a significant project or series and are seeking wider recognition. This year's conference was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico June 3-6, 2010.
Flak Photo highlights work from 25 of this year's 100 visiting photographers, weekdays through Friday, July 9, 2010 and includes images from Adam Ekberg, Maureen Drennan, Allison Grant, Sarah Palmer, Chad States, Manjari Sharma, Amber Shields, Brad Wilson, Sophia Wallace, Justine Reyes, Isabelle Pateer, Cesar Lechowick, J. Gilbert Plantinga, David Leventi, Sarah Christianson, Jon-Phillip Sheridan, Hector Mediavilla, Carl Wooley, Michael Sebastian, Alix Smith, Emily Shur, Gloria Baker Feinstein, Jason Reblando, Katrina d'Autremont, and Michael Forster Rothbart.
Formally the Santa Fe Center for Photography, Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing meaningful photography to a national audience. Center supports photographers by bringing exposure to worthy projects and series and provides opportunities for fellowship among members of the photographic community.
Andy Adams, the publisher, picked most of my favorite photographers from Review, so it is quite an honor to be included in this group.
"In the act of producing a picture there is always a form of “construction” going on. Whether it’s the framing, the lighting, or the positioning of the subject. As time passes, we have a better understanding of these constructions, and their successes and failures become more evident.
As social interactions take place more and more with the screen and the virtual, I find that there is a desire for physical interactions and I play with the possibilities and limitations of those interactions."
- Marlo Pascual
2. John Divola
"The psychiatrist and theorist Carl Jung speculated that human beings have a biological propensity to form certain mythic structures that he called archetypes. In his personal writing he describes the existence of a collective human consciousness. Rather than Jung's idea of a psychic inheritance, a collective unconscious may be something that humanity is in the process of implementing. While one might suggest language itself is the beginning of collective identity, contemporary visual culture shifted the abstraction of language to a realm of shared experiential specificity.
We have extended the externalization of memory in the form of digital databases and we have interwoven representational experience with direct experience to a degree where we can no longer distinguish the basis for our conceptions of reality. Furthermore, there no longer appears to be much individual appetite for interrogating the difference. When I think about Manhattan, and I have been there many times, I cannot clearly identify the source of my conceptions. These conceptions are based in direct expe rience, Manhattan as background in TV detective fictions, or numerous other representational sources. It never really occurs to me that I should make a distinction as to the sources on which I base this image of place. Whether from direct experience of the world or direct experience of the physical evidence that constitutes photographic representation, visual experience and memory gradually focus these impressions on a condition of equivalence. Memories of my actual experiences with any particular city must compete with a relentless stream of representations of Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Memories of walks in nature are intermixed with that familiar stretch of desert highway that I see continually repeated in automotive commercials."
White Noise, 2007. Horizontally stretched lines of video tape, electric fans
Simple and quietly mesmerizing, Zilvinas Kempinas' screen of "white noise" was one of the superstar of the shows. Seen from afar, the screen vibrates and sounds like the fragmented black and white pixels of an untuned video source. As they move forward, visitors realize that the screen is an opening into the wall stretched with horizontal lines of videotape vibrating in the currents of air created by fans. Unlike a magic trick which looses its spell as soon as the artifice behind it is revealed, White Noise gets more fascinating the closer you get to understanding it.
"Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies."
Black Rain is sourced from images collected by the twin satellite, solar mission, STEREO. Here we see the HI (Heliospheric Imager) visual data as it tracks interplanetary space for solar wind and CME's (coronal mass ejections) heading towards Earth. Data courtesy of courtesy of the Heliospheric Imager on the NASA STEREO mission.
Working with STEREO scientists, Semiconductor collected all the HI image data to date, revealing the journey of the satellites from their initial orientation, to their current tracing of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Solar wind, CME's, passing planets and comets orbiting the sun can be seen as background stars and the milky way pass by.
As in Semiconductors previous work 'Brilliant Noise' which looked into the sun, they work with raw scientific satellite data which has not yet been cleaned and processed for public consumption. By embracing the artefacts, calibration and phenomena of the capturing process we are reminded of the presence of the human observer who endeavors to extend our perceptions and knowledge through technological innovation.
Ideas, artists, new friends, old friends, the events of the last two weeks, so on and so on. Hopefully I will get to it all over the next couple of days.
1: the act or result of curving or bending :bend 2: change in pitch or loudness of the voice 3 a: the change of form that words undergo to mark such distinctions as those of case, gender, number, tense, person, mood, or voice b: a form, suffix, or element involved in such variation c:accidence 4 a: change in curvature of an arc or curve from concave to convex or conversely b:inflection point
"Homage to Michael Snow's environmental sculpture 'Blind'. The film proposes analogies, in imitation of 3 historic montage styles, for three perceptual modes mimed by that work."
3. Paul Sharits
Installation view of Paul Sharits, "Shutter Interface," (1975, four-screen 16-mm loop projection with four separate sound tracks) at Greene Naftali Gallery, 2009.
4. ANTHONY McCALL
Between You and I”, 2006 by Anthony McCall. Vertical solid light installation, two video projectors, two haze machines.
"In his seminal work Line Describing a Cone (1973), the British-born artist Anthony McCall began with a small dot. On a wall he projected a small white circle that slowly grew to a circular line suspended in midair, then to a conical sculpture made of light. The work, the first of his "solid light" films, captured both the illusion of movement in film and the substantial corporality of sculpture."
This installation extends the perception of an image out into space. It does so by expanding the image into seven planes or registers, which are designed to bracket the viewer's body as they walk through the space. A type of image-room is created within the physical room as the viewer is able to walk between these parallel image planes. Yet these different images are just different manifestations, reflections or refractions of a singular expanded image.
The first register is the mirror on the back wall of the space, this mirror acts as a window or portal that literally doubles the space from which the projector's image emanates. The second register is the back wall itself, which receives the biomorphic, liquid-like reflection off of the gel material which is used as a screen. The third register is the back of the screen, and the fourth register is the front. The fifth register is the opened mirror box structures. And finally the sixth and seven registers are the over-projections or spill images that fall on the floor and the top of the front wall. These two final registers are the original transmission of the image, the middle having been interrupted by the screen structure. These final registers act as a floor and ceiling for the body's interaction with this image room.
The projector mirror and the mirrors in the screen structure--as far as the waves and particles of light are concerned--create deep wells of space or holes in the fabric of the space of the room. This part of the installation is transgressive as it willfully disorients the viewer, but paradoxically
this also provides one of the main aspects of seduction. Some other simpler means of seduction created by the mirrors are the infinity effect and the kaleidoscope effect. These latter effects ground the piece in nostalgia but also add a bit of elementary school science lab irony. Finally I would like to point out the two different mirror effects, the non-distorted first-surface mirror that extends the length of the projection, which is more analogous to a metaphysical or science fiction-like portal in space, vs. the distortion created by the second-surface mirrored boxes, which is analogous to our subjective experience of the world, that is seeing "through a glass darkly".
The screen structure is the inflection point, the interruption of the projector's transmission. It is literally the container for the image light--a type cage or fine netting that can hold light. But then the structure becomes its own transmitter, projecting the image-light forward, reflecting the image into infinity and--in its ultimate transformation--reflecting backwards, diffracting the waves of light, disrupting the Modernist and Euclidean grids of logic within the images and turning them into seething tendrils of organic shapes that both mimic bodily functions and airplane flight patterns. This inflection point sends the image out centrifugally but it is also centripetal as the viewers attention is always brought back to its center. Transmitting, for we obviously live in an era structured around transmitting, transmitting and receiving, downloading and uploading, bits, ones and zeros--transmuting.
And then there is the film itself, its own matrix of bits, its own binary code. It is a morse code where we again find the modernist grids dissolving and resolving through the film's movement, diffraction and fractal-like patterns. Though these are abstract, geometric-patterned images an organic pulse is interspersed with the more mechanical stutter. This is a film built with history, German experimental film, Stan Brakhage's "Index of Light", the structuralists Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow. This is Modernism designed to be disrupted and transmitted by the inflection point of the screen structure.
There is also irony in the choice of materials. The over-arching goal is to create a room of image light, similar to what a cathedral does with stain-glass windows--though my cathedral is an intimate transcendental experience, as it is a small room. Still, here I am making the material immaterial, but I am doing it with fundamentally cheap stuff. The film is made with air conditioning filters and plastic sheeting--the film is not even a film, it is digital video, edited with generic software with a simple click of a mouse. The screen structure is prefab metal shelving, common photographic material and extruded acrylic; the light, a home entertainment device. We live in a world structured with prefabricated material, but we can make magic out of this stuff.
This is a video of Jon-Phillip Sheridan's graduate candidacy exhibition installation. The piece was titled "Inflection" and consists of a sculpture made of acrylic mirrors and metal framing, drafting paper, rosco gels, a video piece, a projector and a mirror.
A quick update on what I will be doing over the next couple of weeks . . . well next month. First I will be heading out to New Mexico to attend Review Santa Fe.
This is a juried event and this will be the first time that I have attended. Here is their blurb:
About
Center’s Review LA is a two-day photographic event that provides photographers a platform to network and share work with one another and with photography professionals.
Photographers are invited to present their work to those who can provide guidance for bringing their work to a larger audience. Meetings with esteemed gallerists, editors, agents and more provide photographers of all levels with networking opportunities and career advancement.
Spring semester was like a triathlon. Teaching, raising a baby, candidacy, and some intense family matters made this one of the busiest four months of my life.
But now there is some blue sky and some time to take care of lose ends.
"At first glance, John-Philip Sheridan¹s photographs seem unnatural or at least artificially manipulated, or even wrong. The intense saturation of light and color lend them an eerie, otherworldliness. One begins to question the absence of people, and ponder the possibility of an unseen alien presence. All of this is, of course, entirely inferred and imagined, since the images are simply quite beautiful, and really quite normal on close scrutiny. Yet, in subjecting his views to a prolonged light exposure, Sheridan manages to reveal hidden dimensions in the ordinary. Under the prolonged gaze of Sheridan¹s lens, melting snowbanks, benches, lawns, and industrial buildings, yield their inherent magic."
Other than miss-spelling my name its a great little article about the art scene in Richmond; including the innovative and energetic work that is going on at the VCU School of the Arts.
"In my photography, I am curious about the awakening of a sense of place, and how this relates to an opening up of perception, like one’s eye adjusting to the dark. Shifting around the edges, I collect an accumulation of visual impressions to articulate traces of human interactions with their surroundings: borders define interiors, debris outlines the invisible."
Interestingly, my work this semester has gone completely abstract and is looking vaguely like the work featured on Ruimteruis . . . not nearly as complex or as interesting . . . yet . . . but there are similarities.
Namely, exploring architectural structures and the potential for light to create a sense of mass.
Nothing dramatic and it is really a tiny tiny blurb, but I link to it to remind myself of projects and collaborations I want to do in the future.
"Along the gallery's west wall, photographer Jon-Phillip Sheridan has constructed an untitled environment, where one of his luminous industrial images hangs above poet Kimberly Philley's "Truck Stop Love Letter," laid out on a formica-topped table."
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