Best Ever: Concrete, Tearducts, & Rib Bones

Impossible to re-live the intimate seconds you were once allowed you wanted more and you didn’t want more of the addiction you never gambled on never tasted knew you should’ve let your body crumble in lust and foreplay giving in giving in, no resisting of it, No turning back now.

Her eyes are open, where are Yours-

The Man at Work

Alexander Bagrat: No Objective but to Arouse

"There's no objective, there's no message, there's absolutely nothing."

Three. 114x145cm, Acrylic on Canvas, 2008

As I passed by the Licht Feld Gallery's space at Scope Art Fair this year, I couldn't help myself to getting lost in the darkness (and light) Bagrat's paintings exude... I felt the chaos of gore and unrelenting obsession. I photographed the thickness of his works, the shadows in the textures which later I learned came from a tireless process of glueing and unglueing. Fitting for the artist's self proclaimed lack of objective- because doing and undoing is the natural process of living; life by no means demands an there be a "meaning," these are created by us as we look upon our past, our finished projects and to the future, wherein we choose to do, or undo. And it would be a scary thing for anyone to live a life without meaning, so for an artist to proclaim there be "no message" in his art, I find that very brave and honest.

We create to satisfy ourselves First, we do what turns us all On-

What comes out requires no explanation.

The King (detail). Oil on Canvas, 130x195cm 2008

The King (detail). Oil on Canvas, 130x195cm, 2008

Crazy Horse. Two Pieces b. Oil on Canvas, 130x195cm, 2008

Jeunne Fille (detail). Acrylic on Canvas, 114x155cm, 2008

Untitled, Acrylic on Canvas, 195x130cm, 2009

Princesse. Acrylic on Canvas, 114x195cm, 2007

SCOPE & PULSE NYC 2010

I waited until the last day, like the procrastinator I am, and stopped by both Pulse and Scope Art Fair in the same day. Last year I really enjoyed Scope, and this year was definitely no let down, Pulse however was a disappointment; lost somewhere between the dullness of the Armory show and the contemporary vibes of Scope.... 

ART FAIR HIGHLIGHTS : PULSE

Enrique Gomez de Molina’s hybrid creatures @ SPINELLO GALLERY

(Above) Small portion of Angelo Musco's Aranea, (Below) Detail of 'Aranea' @Carrie Secrist Gallery




Brian Drury's Feast with Dean Project (Gallery)
(Above, a section of Untitled (feast) and Below, detail of (feast))

ART FAIR HIGHLIGHTS : SCOPE




Shot during a Performance Piece (artist unknown at this time)




"The King" Alexander Bagrat; 26 year old Painter (above; entire painting not shown)(detail below)

Wandering down a hallway towards a separate space, I passed this quote by Diane Pernet, it was only on my way out that I read it and smiled in appreciation for her words:

It was down this hallway that three artists (designers) were featured, one of which was the work of Sandra Backlund, a woman whose work is unmistakable.

Necklaces by Graham Tabor & Miguel Villalobos

www.one-onehundred.com

(All photos taken by myself at both art fairs on March 6, 2010)

Individual write-ups on these artists will follow. (excluding Angelo Musco and Sandra Backlund,  whom you can find already noted in my blog)

Stanley Donwood: Love by Definition

"We loved each other so much that sometimes it hurt, even when we were close. I wanted to be her and she wanted to be me. Sex never felt complete, and afterwards we talked carelessly about easy subjects to avoid discussing the ache that bruised us both. So one day, in the kitchen, she cut me and I cut her; gently, slowly, too easily. It was the knife we used for onions and our tears were painful but expectant. We dripped the blood into coffee mugs, then bandaged up and went to bed. We fucked and there were stars but we saw different constellations..."

read the rest and explore other words at
S L O W L Y D O W N W A R D

Antoine D'Agata: Möbius Strips of Secret Selves

"From the pit of the Empty heart, the empty dark..."

 

"I don't protect myself, I let things come close to me... I can't help it."

 

"I try to distance myself from a certain type of documentary photography that often avails itself of symbols that are too easy to read and assimilate in order to present a complex reality in a balance that is endlessly discussed over and over between photography as an instrument of documentation and photography as being completely subjective. It isn’t the eye that photography poses on the world that interests me but its most intimate rapport with that world." Antoine D'Agata

"D'Agata spares us nothing, and he spares himself nothing... (He) even includes himself in some pictures, as if to show that to leave oneself out would be a delusion."

"My desire is never a mistake, Fear is the mistake."

Jon Edwards: The Fourth Kind

 

 

 

 

 

Chris Jordan: Screams of Concern

Chris Jordan uses his creative talents as a political voice. His works should invoke a horror within yourself and our nation's addictive consumption and lack of responsibility for our actions against the environment.

In his newest project, "The Message from Gyre," shot at Mitway Atoll in the North Pacific, Jordan photographed the bodies of rotting albatross birds who had apparently died from eating the toxicity found in our everyday waste. These are the contents of their stomach free of exaggeration.

"Every year tens of thousand of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking."

 

 

I strongly urge you to take a closer look at the project entitled:

Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait  

Each image portrays a specific quantity of something used in the U.S : 28,000 42-gallon barrels (two minutes use); 426,000 retired cell phones (one days buildup); 83,000 Abu Ghraib prisoner photographs, equal to the number of people who have been arrested and held at US-run detention facilities with no trial or other due process of law, during the Bush Administration's war on terror...

The photographs create the raw substance of the numbers, making the numbers more personable as opposed to simply reading about it.  

Below:
"Depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world's oceans every hour. All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean. "

 

8x11 feet, in three vertical panels

Zoomed:

  Zoomed further:

 

Hans Bellmer and His Therapeutic Dolls

Much of the time we are fascinated by what is unable to be had. Particularly though,  the most interesting results can come from obsession. Whether beautiful or morbid, a common theme seems to remain within the world of secret curiosities; those considerably taboo areas...

"Hans Bellmer, whose photographs of his own creepy motile doll-sculptures consciously recall several centuries of carnal mechanics and stalled desire, seems to have understood the ultimate sterility of the whole project."
(Brian Dillon)

La Poupee (The Doll) 1935-6, Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Inspired first by the work of Oskar Kokoschka, Bellmer's first doll projects culminated after three legendary experiences: An attendance to Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in love with his lifelike doll Olympia), through an erotic obsession with his young and beautiful cousin Ursula, and in receiving a bundle of sentimental childhood toys from his mother.

Bellmer gained from these events a compulsion, in his words, "to construct an artificial girl with anatomical possibilities...capable of re-creating the heights of passion even to inventing new desires."

 

Milles Filles (A Thousand Girls) 1939

His expressions of obsession and desire through unattainable 'young maidens' in the 1930's are not so different from today's one track Real Doll industry. Throughout the similarities in subject matter, undeniably there is an Art to what Bellmer has done in his blatant use of Freudian concepts to exploit his own desires and self-consciousnesses, satisfying visually that artist's thirst to share, create, and expose our fixations available for the public's endless interpretations..

 

 

Unica Bound, 1959

Plate 12 of Les Jeux de la Popee (The Games of the Dolls) 1949

"Bellmer's photographs of the ball-jointed doll establish sinister, narrative tableaus, with new emphasis on the doll's environment: outside the studio, the doll becomes a dramatic character, often the victim of an unseen tormentor, in domestic interiors, basement, hayloft, or forest."

She "only had life in so far as one projected it into her... [she] understood she was reserved for despair."

"The power of these photographs often resides in the coexistence and confusion of the perverse and the banal".... for what where would we be in our minds be if the 'confusion' portrayed about the deviance in 'normal' sexuality was actually plainly expressed....

Read more into the psychological references in his work HERE.

Below: La Poupee (The Doll), Maquette for 'Les Jeux de La Poupee. 1938