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
Showing newest posts with label Things About Me. Show older posts
Showing newest posts with label Things About Me. Show older posts
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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."
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
Posts
