Lenscratch

New article on Lenscratch about my series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art." Aline Smithson writes,

"It's hard to ignore a statement like: "I am interested in the changing perspectives of the photographic medium, how images are viewed and understood through the technological advances in photography and the help and hindrances this begins forth into our contemporary culture." It's pretty clear from her statement that Melinda Gibson is looking at photography in a new way. Her images are wonderfully complex and layered, and allow us to question reality."

See more here: http://www.lenscratch.com/2011/08/melinda-gibson.html

Behind the Scenes

Behind the scenes in Berlin, as HUGO by Hugo Boss launch their Spring/Summer Collection 2012 'Poetic Tailoring.' Your get to see the beautiful garments for both Men and Women that were inspired by my photomontages from the series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art." This body of work is being published as a Limited Edition Book with a Special Edition of just 33 handmade by me! Don't miss out on the opportunity to purchase one of the books, contact me for details.

HUGO by Hugo Boss SS12

Some very, very exciting news......

Hugo Boss took over Berlin's River Spree in early July to debut their Spring/Summer 2012 collection with a major fashion show. Entitled "Poetic Tailoring," the show is inspired by the young British photographer and artist Melinda Gibson, whose work in collages of textures, surfaces and images has caught the eye of art enthusiasts. Translate that to the clothes and you can expect minimal and graphic silhouettes in a sleek palette of silver, white and black with pops of grenadine.

Read more and watch Eyan Allen talk about his inspiration:

http://www.hugoboss.com/us/en/blog/eyan-allens-vision-for-springsummer-2012/

http://youtu.be/tnndSWmECIs

Sponsorship

I am excited to announce that my first book, The Photograph as Contemporary Art is to be published in the winter of 2011. The book presents all 33 unique photomontages alongside their textual counter parts in a Limited Edition publication with a print run between 250-500.

The Limited Edition publication is a high concept book with every copy uniquely handmade and numbered. The Special Edition of 33 are made exclusively by me and are numbered, signed and dated.

This is an exclusive opportunity to support the publication. A small pre-sale of the books is available for investors. The Limited Edition publication is priced at €65.00 and the Special Edition of 33 at €125.00. By investing in this publication you will be thanked for your support and your name will appear in the book.

You are among the first to hear about this project and your support is highly valued and appreciated. Many thanks for your support and pleased don't hesitate to contact me if you wish to be involved.

Contact me at melindajgibson@gmail.com

Dummy

I had a lovely delivery on Monday...... my first book dummy! It arrived early on Monday morning from Kummer & Herrman in Utrecht. As I opened the package very carefully what I saw was a truly wonderful book, so beautiful I can't quite explain how excited I am about the forthcoming publication. All I can say now is that we are working very hard and plans have been put in place to launch in the winter of this year! The book will be a limited edition with a small print run and each one will be handmade. For now that's all I can say, keep watching for more visuals and opportunities of how you could be part of the project.

Les Recontres d'Arles 2011

So I have been back for over a week now and have been very busy arranging things for my forthcoming publication, but before I get very involved in that process I felt it important to digest all that was seen in Arles over the festival opening.

Having not been to Arles before I wasn't too sure what to expect, but I knew that it would be full of great exhibitions, weather, company, food and not forgetting regional wine. I must say that it really did live up to everything I had heard about the festival. The production and organisation that goes into this is quite unbelievable, with so many exhibitions, projections and publication stands you have a wealth of beautiful imagery to look through and be inspired by. The spaces used are vast, industrial and stunning, really emphasizing the beauty of the works on show.

Particular exhibitions that I found very interesting where the Discovery Awards, and I am very pleased to hear that Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse won with their work South Africa, nominated by Artur Walther. The Mexican Suitcase was an incredible, historic exhibition detailing the found negatives, in fact three small boxes containing nearly 4,500 negatives, from Robert Capa, Chim (David Seymour) and Gerda Taro that span the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939.) This exhibition of contact sheets and enlargements from the archive were extraordinary and really brought significance and nostalgia to a time where film is rarely used. This juxtaposed against the rather talked about show, From Here On was a great contrast adding humour and ridiculousness to an ever developing medium. I must add that I found this show a bit repetitive, with some great pieces, but many we could happily leave. I was slightly disappointed by this as I had been very much looking forward to this show, maybe that is in itself quite telling and that the entire point of this exhibit is its wastefulness, ridiculousness, anticlimax and temporality.

The New York Times exhibition was wonderful, documenting the wonderful array of commissioned artists over the past 30 years for the magazine. With artists ranging from Thomas Demand to Simon Norfolk to Paolo Pellegrini each exhibit showed the tear sheets, imagery and in some cases the correspondence between Kathy Ryan and the artist. This was amazing and I found the letters between parties often the most interesting part.

All in all it was a great trip with an added bonus of exhibiting with FOAM, which was fantastic. If you can get to Arles then you should for a great adventure with wonderful and inspiring works.

http://www.rencontres-arles.com/A11/Home

The Bourse Du Travail

So I am back from Arles, if not a day later than I had anticipated. Apparently very late nights and early morning flights just don't mix very well! At least I had a great night though and the FOAM party was lovely.

Before I write a detailed account of what I saw, was inspired by I wanted to post about the surprise exhibition/ projection that my series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" was part of. This work was being presented with FOAM "What's Next" at The Bourse du Travail and I only realised when I was informed through a friend of mine during the week! What a great surprise it was, I felt very humbled to see my work in such a wonderful surrounding and with such great company - this was by far, one of the highlights of the trip.

Amsterdam-Utrecht-Arles

I have been somewhat busy over the last few weeks and realised that I have not posted much new work, or in fact much at all! I must apologies for this, but I have been working on something which has taken much time, but is very, very exciting indeed.

It all came together yesterday in my initial meeting over in Utrecht, a place only 30 minutes outside Amsterdam, with beautiful architecture, wonderful culture and without all the tourist! I went to have a meeting with Kummer & Herrman, a wonderfully conceptual design company, producing amazing books like WassinkLundgren's "Toyko Tokyo" and working on exhibition catalogues for the likes of Paul McCarthy and working on many other intriguing projects. If you haven't yet guessed what I was doing over there....... here it is, I am producing a book!

The book will be about the series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" and is going to be fantastic. I can't divulge much now, but watch this space for updates, imagery, meetings and more importantly launch dates and times!

Now after that excitement, tomorrow I am off to Arles. Hope to see many of you out there in the glorious weather and you might even get a little glimpse of what is to come visually with regards to my forthcoming book.

http://www.kummer-herrman.nl/

Non Conforme

So as the hot, sunny weather continues it reminds me of where I am headed at the end of this week, to the south of France for Les Recontres D'Arles Photographie - I can't wait! The 2011 edition is titled Non Conforme, (Uncertified) and deals with the changing perspectives of photography, with key exhibitions like "From Here on" curated by Martin Parr, Erik Kessels, Clement Cheroux, Joan Fontcuberta and Joachim Schmid. There is a host of great events and many, many exhibitions, but something I am very much looking forward to are the events by FOAM Museum, as they bring their 10th Anniversary Project "What's Next" to Arles, along with the beautiful weather, the wonderful wine and fantastic company!

See more here: http://www.rencontres-arles.com/A11/Home

Boo Ritson

As it is such a lovely summery day today, it felt appropriate to draw your attention to something I did a few years back as I just found the print the other day again. The image above is called "Pin-Up" (it's me) and is by the artist Boo Ritson, I am sure many of your have heard about this artist but if you have not here is a little bit of information about her process.

"Boo Ritson depicts characters and still lifes drawn from her own imagined narratives merged with borrowed Americana. For each piece she paints her subject in a thick emulsion and then has the scene photographed whilst the paint is still wet. The resulting image sits somewhere between painting, sculpture, performance and photography."

Being covered head to toe in emulsion paint is quite an experience, something that was very fun and odd all at the same time. Her process uses photography to record, capturing those moments just before everything is washed away; I think it's a very interesting take on the medium. More information about Boo Ritson and other works can be found here: http://www.poppysebire.com/artists/Boo_Ritson.htm#

Transcript

The image above is by Jeremy Hutchison and is titled "Transcript, 2008" a performance that is every word he said on 21/01/2007. I found this body of work after I saw Hutchison's piece "Blown to Brits, News of the World, 20th March 2011" at Art Sensus. I wanted to find out a bit more about the artist as the approach and theories behind his work, I found to be very insightful and inspiring. Trained in linguistics, his relationship with text is deep routed and provides an intellectualism, at times with a hint of humour. This body of work I found to be very stunning and other projects worth mentioning are "Wet and Wild, 2009", "The English Tourist and the Oslo Agreement, 2009" and "Katrina, 2008" which is a image caught on a 110 film camera, found buried in dirt after Hurrican Katrina.

See more of Hutchison's work here, http://www.jeremyhutchison.com/index.html

History Painting Now

This image above is "Muzzle Flash, 2001" by Sarah Pickering and was part of a group show curated by Nick Hackworth, "History Painting Now" at Art Senus which closed last Saturday 4th June. I attended a curator’s talk on the closing day where four of the seven artists were present and discussions took place around the relationship between Art and Power, the shifting boundaries of the photographic medium and the "war of imagery."

If you didn't get to the talk, or see the exhibition, below is part of a text about the exhibition written by Nick Hackworth. It really was a great show and the works were beautiful, bringing forth very interesting questions about the role of photography within warfare and how disentanglement, a discontenting with the 'traditional' methods provides much more.

"In History Painting Now, seven artists (two of them combined in a duo) based in London and Paris are brought together. Their work addresses war and weaponry and their depiction. Tellingly and intelligently, the relationship of all the works to both power and what might be very crudely be termed ‘the real’ is elliptical, evasive even. Were an equivalent group of artists assembled two centuries ago, when History Painting was the preeminent cultural expression of the ideological requirements of the nascent Nation State, the gallery would be full of heroic depictions of encounters during the Napoleonic Wars.

Here, now, more than a century after Modernism re-cast the role of the artist -from a servile handmaiden articulating the instrumental demands of societies’ elites, to a heroically subjective and critical consciousness adrift in a hostile world - instead of the figurative and the idealized we are presented with abstraction, negation and self-conscious artificiality. Instead of the illusion of proximity and presence offered in another age by History Painting and today by the media, our mediated distance is underlined by the work.

In doing so these works acknowledge that the only space in which Culture can contend with Power without being instantly overwhelmed is the realm of thought, in which, after all, ideology is constructed. In not overreaching themselves, in being in awe of Power, which is necessarily terrible, these works allow that which is not seen, that which remains un-depicted to remain the monster that it is."

http://www.artsensus.com/artists/group-show/exhibitions/history-painting-now.html