123cantwait

Flak Photo

2010-06-28T11:34:00.002-04:00

Residual #31, Summer, Crozet, Virginia, 2005, Photo © Jon-Phillip Sheridan

Today one of my images has been published in the great photography web journal Flak Photo.

This is part of Flak's Review Santa Fe series:

Review Santa Fe 2010 | The Point of Great Photography

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.

Terrible Love

2010-06-27T15:48:00.002-04:00

Matias Duville

2010-06-25T21:13:00.002-04:00

. . . is good.

Artists and Things I Have Been Looking at Part 2

2010-06-24T12:23:00.005-04:00

1. Marlo Pascual

"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."

-John Divola

3. Zilvinas Kempinas

Tube, 2009. Magnetic tape, plywood. Installation view, Lithuanian Pavilion, 53d Venice Biennale, June-November, 2009

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.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/04/one-of-the-major-downsides.php

4. Semiconductor

Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo

"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 from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

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.

Black Rain installation from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

I Have A Lot To Write About

2010-06-14T16:44:00.001-04:00

Maureen R. Drennan Adam, 2008

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.

Artists And Things That I have Been Looking at Recently, Part 1

2010-06-14T16:36:00.002-04:00

1. Diffraction

2. INFLECTION

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

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inflection

3. Hollis Frampton

NOCTILUCA

Snowblind

"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."

Inflection (point), Again, this time with statement

2010-06-14T15:57:00.002-04:00

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.

Inflection Installation

2010-05-31T03:29:00.005-04:00

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.

Here is the projection piece:

Review Santa Fe

2010-05-29T01:08:00.002-04:00

Direct Object #15 ©Jon-Phillip Sheridan 2010

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.

Here is my listing on the Center's website:

http://visitcenter.org/index.php/center/review_artist/1004/1973/

After this I will be in attendance at the Look3 LookBetween series.

Then I will be a having an solo exhibit at The Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in July.

Pretty busy couple of weeks . . .

School Is Out, House Cleaning

2010-05-27T11:48:00.001-04:00

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.

Looking through my CV I was reminded of a nice little write up about my work in dart international magazine

A Stir in Richmond, Virginia by Steve Rockwell

Here is the bit about me:

"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.

Very Cool Blog Features My Work

2010-04-12T15:29:00.000-04:00

PYTR75

Two of the pictures used:

Text of mine quoted:

"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."

link to post:

http://pytr75.blogspot.com/2010/04/jon-phillip-sheridan.html

I am really digging the stuff that is on this blog and Pieter Van den Dorpe runs another very cool blog featuring what looks like his own work:

Ruimteruis

and a cool tumbler:

http://pytr75.tumblr.com/

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.

A Little Blurb About Me From a Long Long Time Ago

2010-03-17T10:12:00.002-04:00

Residual #36, ©Jon-Phillip Sheridan 2010

I was doing a search for myself the other day . . . everyone does that right?

Anyway I was doing this search and I discovered this little review about a show that I was in a while ago:

"The write stuff: SSG spreads the love"

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."

That is all.

Even More Parking Lot Movie Stuff

2010-03-13T20:47:00.000-05:00

Meghan Eckman's movie is taking off.

This time The Parking Lot Movie is featured on NPR's All Things Considered

And they feature even more of Jon-Phillip Sheridan's pictures:

Not bad . . . this blog is becoming all Parking Lot Movie, all the time.

Pretty OK

2010-02-20T01:13:00.001-05:00

Drift from mustardcuffins on Vimeo.

The Parking Lot Movie, Again

2010-02-06T15:02:00.000-05:00

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Meghan Eckman's movie will be premiering at that prestigious South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival .

Nothing more to really say about this because it is obviously pretty amazing.

Here's the blurb about her movie:

“It’s not just a parking lot, it’s a battle with humanity.” “The Parking Lot Movie” is a documentary about a singular parking lot in Charlottesville, Virginia. The film follows a select group of Parking Lot Attendants and their strange rite of passage. Something as simple as a parking lot becomes an emotional weigh station for the American Dream

I made the photos for the poster.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

VMFA Fellowship

2010-01-23T22:55:00.001-05:00

From 123cantwait

©Jon-Phillip Sheridan 2010
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I just won a VMFA Fellowship Grant

Also, see here

and here

And

Some other artists who won this year:

Greg Stewart. I really like his work.

Stephen Vitiello. A great artist and a great teacher.

Kevin Everson Also a grerat artist and a very very cool man . . . I will find out next year if he is a good teacher, but from what I have heard, he is.

Hey Hot Shot Blog, Again!

2009-12-01T19:27:00.000-05:00

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Direct Object #03, Fall 2009 ©Jon-Phillip Sheridan
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This blog has been silent once again . . . grad school, teaching, and baby rearing is taking up all of my time . . . alas.

But good news for me, I am fortunate enough to have one of my brand new pictures featured on The Jen Bekman Gallery's blog Hey Hot Shot!

This is what they say about me:

"Today we take a look at contender Jon Sheridan. Jon makes a syntactic analogy with photography in his series Direct Objects: "In language, the verb acts upon the direct object. Here, the interventions of my photography act upon the direct objects in the picture," he says. Using a "forensic" approach, Jon seeks out quotidian items found at construction sites, loading docks and smoke-break corners. These Direct Objects are lit and grounded to emphasize that favorite quality of cultural theorists, their "thingness." Here, this impermanent coffee cup emerges as a uniquely sculptural object among the hard, angular wall and electricity boxes.
We wrote about Jon's series How to Fix a Campground here on the blog during the last round of competition, and you can also see more at his website."

Growing Urban Habitats

2009-09-18T11:09:00.000-04:00

I have 10 photographs in this book that was just published--along with other photographers, including Todd Hido.

The pictures are from a job I did for the Charlottesville Community Design Center way back in 2005--check them out they are a fantastic orgainzation.

The CCDC sponsored an international architucre contest for a Habitat for Humanity development project.

See this article about the books release in Dwell.

"Growing Urban Habitats is a field guide to smart, dense development, a tool as useful to the architect as the real estate mogul. Surveying a broad swath of international development, this book draws and expands upon Urban Habitats, an international design competition launched in 2005 by the Charlottesville Community Design Center and Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville. Noted (and Dwell-approved) firms like Anderson and Anderson, David Baker and Partners, Lloyd Russell and Pugh and Scarpa, all get their due here, as well as dozens more. From urban habitats to urban habits, peruse tomorrow’s housing models today."

PS. Special thanks to Jane Fisher, the director of CCDC, for getting me a copy so quickly! It really is a beautiful book.

This Blog Sucks

2009-09-18T10:58:00.000-04:00

Well, its true . . . blogging is difficult. So appreciate those who are good at it!!!

Making a good blog obviously requires a good writer, but it also requires a mind that can think fast and quickly get to the heart of whatever issue is grabbing their attention.

It also requires a careful hand.

Usually, my thoughts take a long time to cook, and I can sometimes talk and write in long looping digressions . . . compounding this is the fact that I now have habits of information consumption that make it difficult for me to linger on one topic.

So it goes. But I will not give up. One day I figure this thing out, and use it as a platform for my thinking.

Blurb's Photograph.Book.Now

2009-09-10T22:47:00.001-04:00

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My book, Of Cats And Fish, has been awarded an honorable mention in Blurb's self publishing book contest. See the winners here

Head Judge:
Darius Himes - Radius Books

Judges:
Dana Faconti - Blind Spot
Dr. Anthony Bannon - George Eastman House
Vince Aletti - Critic
Kira Pollack - NY Times Magazine
W.M. Hunt - Hasted Hunt Gallery
Platon - Photographer
Jodi Peckman - Rolling Stone
Karen Hangsen - Rizzoli

Later this weekend I will write a little bit on what went into making my book and what it's about.

Plus, please check out my good friend Billy Hunt who was also awarded an honorable mention.

Oh

2009-09-10T22:27:00.000-04:00

by the way . . . I forgot to mention that I am now in graduate school.

VCU photography and film and I am having a great time.

200 Electric Guitars Can't Be Wrong

2009-08-28T17:54:00.000-04:00

My Fool Heart

2009-08-28T16:54:00.001-04:00

My friends Jeff and Lucinda Martin of Take It, have just made a film, My Fool Heart .

It's quite an amazing production, but I will let 'em speak for themselves:

"MY FOOL HEART is a feature-length independent film starring Jim Waive and the Young Divorcees. Filmed in Charlottesville, Southwest Virginia and Nashville, the cast includes DR. RALPH STANLEY and legendary guitar-maker WAYNE HENDERSON. The film's story involves two killers who arrive in town from London to kill Jim Waive. It is a comedy and, of course, there's lots of great music. The film also includes the music of SARAH WHITE, THE ROGAN BROTHERS, DOCK BOGGS, and a host of other fine country and Americana-roots performers."

A note of interest, Jim Waive & The Young Divorcees played at our wedding . . . and, all though I might be a bit biased, it was definitely the best wedding ever! I'm not kidding, follow the link and check out their music. Here is a vid of Jim playing by himself:

Two interesting things about the film: first, it was shot exclusively with a Canon 5D Mark 2--which if you don't know is a fancy Digital SlR that also happens to double as a HD video camera (and one of the cameras I shoot with); second, most of the actors in the film are not professional actors . . . including me.

Urbanscreen

2009-08-25T21:08:00.000-04:00

These are pretty amazing . . . I can only imagine what it might be like to view them in person!

The content is a little bit too . . . "theater company", if you know what I mean?

Anyway, thanks to Joey Tombs for pointing these out to me.

PS. If you watch these in the full screen mode make sure to turn the HD on.

CORRECTION: if you want to watch these in HD, double click the video and it will take you to Vimeo.

JUMP | media facade | urban screening from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

555 KUBIK | facade projection | from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

Spiegelbilder - Videoinstallation from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

Video installation "Spiegelbilder" TEST from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

Creigh Deeds, Democratic Primary Election Night Victory Party

2009-08-07T13:35:00.000-04:00

In June I had the good fortune to be hired to photograph Democratic candidate for Virginia governor Creigh Deeds' primary election night "Victory Party". The 50/50 chance that the "Victory Party" will actually be a "Victory Party" adds a very interesting tension to such events. I lucked out. Creigh is a great guy and I wish him all the luck in the world in the general election.

Check out my Flickr page to see more

All Images © Jon-Phillip Sheridan 2009