"Don't Worry Everything Is Going To Be Amazing"

Well what I can say that this doesn't already! As we are nearing the end of this year and heading into 2012, I think this is such a perfect way to starting thinking about the year ahead. Much has happened this year and I want to take this opportunity to whole heartedly thank everyone who has supported my practice and given me many amazing opportunities that I have excitedly taken too. The New Year is promising to be a very exciting one also, with my book being released in March/April and many exhibitions planned throughout, which I will of course keep you updated with.

But I want to thank you all for your continued support and wish you a very wonderful Christmas and an amazing New Year, see you in 2012!

href="http://www.anothermag.com/current/view/1636/Dont_Worry_Everything_Is_Going_To_Be_Amazing">http://www.anothermag.com/current/view/1636/Dont_Worry_Everything_Is_Going_To_Be_Amazing

Photo50

I am very excited to announce that 5 works from the series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" are part of the Photo50 exhibition at the London Art Fair in January 2012, other contributing artists include Michael Wolf, Esther Teichmann, Joy Gregory to name a few . The show is curated by Sue Steward and is called "The New Alchemists: Contemporary Photographers Transcending the Print." Below is the text for the exhibition.

"This year, Photo50 opens up a spectrum of contemporary photography from the analogue to the digital. This selection of work by twelve photographers focuses on different ways of representing an image and it reveals the broad range of processes involved in image-making. I label them ‘alchemists’ because the term resonates with the ancient practitioners of photography, the experimenters with chemicals and paper, the pioneers of ‘writing with light’ which is what photo-graphy literally means.

Many images in this exhibition were produced through analogue processes and reveal surprising similarities with their digital counterparts; many mingle the two. There is also the changing assumption that the photographic print is the finished object, the ultimate goal of production. But it is no longer necessarily the end-point; the printed paper is enduring the transformation, partially destroyed or decorated, re-built to take on a new dimension – and becoming an original art work in its own right.

The works in Photo50 highlight the richness and diversity of photography today. It’s almost impossible now to define ‘photography’ because of its porous nature and its convergence with painting film and craft, demonstrated in this exhibition. It is a vast art form - and London is a hub for these significant, beautiful, seismic changes."

Read more here: http://www.londonartfair.co.uk/page.cfm/Link=58/t=m/goSection=15

Tacita Dean

I have been meaning to post about this beautiful show currently on at the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern that I went to see two weekends ago. I can honestly say that is a truly stunning, tender, visualisation of what analogue film means to an artist. The darkened Turbine hall is lit up with the central column of 35 mm film, changing, developing in terms of colour, shape and emotion. In some ways it's very reminiscent of the act of processing film, silent, soft with marks that appear then disappear. The film is incredibly beautiful and very inspiring.

As Tacita states, "I chose to make an experimental 35 mm film inside the camera, and so revive spontaneity and risk. I wanted to show film as film can be, and use no post-production other than my normal editing process and the grading that happens in the lab..... I found its rhythm and metre from the material itself, relying not only on the images I had, but on what is normally considered waste: the picture fading at the tail end of a roll, the shimmering metamorphosis of a colour filter change.... "Film" is about film, and in the end, I let the material's intrinsic magic be my guide."

Tacita's film is on from 11th October 2011 until 11th March 2012 at The Tate Modern

Hong Kong Stickers

So as my feature in PHOTO+ is published in South Korea, the Asian promotion is spreading as my Pre-Sale flyers are put up in Hong Kong! A very special thank you to a certain someone who braved the Chinese authority and posted these around HK, more photographs to follow shortly. I think it is also very important to say a very special thank you to Kummer & Herrman for making such an amazingly successful flyer.

See more of their work here: http://www.kummer-herrman.nl/

PHOTO+ Magazine

Usually December is packed with me preparing for Christmas and winding down for the holidays, well this year it is completely the opposite as I am preparing for what is going to be a very busy year for me next year, I can't wait!

But to start off this December I have an 8 page article in a fantastic South Korean Photography magazine called PHOTO+. The article features my series "The Photograph as Contemporary Art" with a written text and eight images. It is great to see the body of work so far reaching. Above is how the features reads and what a great cover for a magazine!

See more here:http://www.iphotoplus.co.kr/v2/current.php?Sub=current&lang=k

Secret Postcards

As its the RCA Secret Postcard sale tomorrow, I wonder how many people are hoping to find themselves a bargain buy, maybe a Tracey Emin, Grayson Perry or Anish Kapoor for only forty-five pounds. Well whether I brave the crowds tomorrow morning and head down to Kensington Gore is yet to be decided but here are my favourites.

See more here: http://dams.rca.ac.uk/res/sites/RCA_Secret/

Promotion

So as I posted already about bill stickers, here is some more examples of the very great sticker promotion! It spread all around Paris, from Saint Germain, Pigalle right through to the Palais de Tokyo, while looking up at the Eiffel Tower. What has happened now is it seems to be spreading across the water right into London. A very big thank you to a certain individual who posted on a post box - perfect! Keep looking around London, they are going to start appearing more and more.

Bill Stickers

So I have now returned from my trip to Paris, Paris Photo, Off Print and Nofound which really was an excellent trip, filled with much laughter, great work, wine and fantastic company. I will post later about what went on in Paris, which exhibitions I saw, the overall debrief of the trip. but first a lovely little image that shows off the flyers that my designers made for the pre-sale of my publication, coming in early 2012.

I collected the package from my designers Kummer & Herrman on Friday afternoon at Le Bal, a lovely little exhibition space with an incredible cafe serving some amazing food. I was very excited to see what they were like and they are truly fantastic! You can peal off the middle section of the flyer, so it was only right to promote the book in the correct fashion, spreading the word around Paris with the stickers! A special thank you to everyone who participated, very funny indeed! The image above is a little taster of what, where and how they look.

Paris, Off Print, Pre-order Publication Leaflet

As it is getting very close to Paris Photo now and I am arriving in Paris on Thursday I felt you should see what I have been planning! My wonderful designers Kummer & Herrman have been very busy producing my pre-order publication leaflets. I will be in Paris Photo on Friday day and Off Print pretty much the rest of the time, with a little trip to the Nofound Photo Fair.

Please get in touch if you would like a pre-order card as they really are beautiful and really start to show you what the concept of the book is going to be. I will also have the Book Dummy which you might even get a glimpse of too. See you in Paris!

NPG

As the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize opens tomorrow night, I thought it only right to draw your attention to my good friends work, Tina Hillier, whose portrait of me has been selected for the exhibition, very exciting! This portrait was taken in early January 2011 in Turku, Finland. To see more of Tina's work see here: http://www.tinahillier.com/

Hijacked Artists Announced

The final selection of artists / photographers for Hijacked v.3 AUS / UK have now been announced and I am in very, very good company. UK Artists include Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Seba Kurtis, Trish Morrissey, Simon Roberts and WassinkLundgren to name but a few.

See here for the other artists and for more information: http://bigcitypress.com.au/blog/

The British Journal of Photography

"The Photograph as Contemporary Art" series is now published in the new October issue of the BJP in the portfolio section. The publication is ten full colour pages and the opening text is by Simon Bainbridge. The above pictures are a few of the pages in the article.

Simon Bainbridge writes, "If Melinda Gibson’s photomontages look familiar, don’t be surprised. A flash of Ed Burtynsky here, a slice of Juergen Teller there, they are all made up of elements of some of the major works of the 1990s and 2000s, culled from the pages of The Photograph As Contemporary Art. Written and edited by Charlotte Cotton (former curator at the V&A and LACMA, and now creative director of the UK’s National Media Museum), it is one of the key texts for students starting out in photographic education. Which is precisely why the 26-year-old, who graduated from London College of Communication in 2006 and is now a visiting lecturer herself, chose to use it."

See more of the article online and inprint: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2103858/photograph-contemporary-art

Harpers Bazaar

Very nice article in Australian Harpers Bazaar about my inspiration for HUGO by Hugo Boss's SS12 collection "Poetic Tailoring" in the October issue 2011 - 3 Artistic Licence. They talk about Eyan Allen's thoughts after the show quoting him,

"It's definitely a very artistic-inspired collection....There's such a strong link between art and fashion and when you fuse them together you end up with something quite interesting,' explains Allen who drew his inspiration from British artist and photographer Melinda Gibson. She does beautiful abstract collages and when I saw her exhibition, I was very excited by it and a lot of the prints on the womenswear are inspired by her own collection."

Helsinki, KUVU, Turku

I am back from my trip to Finland, and it was as beautiful as I remembered but a lot warmer than when I was there back in January! I flew into Helsinki and stayed for a couple of days, then travelled onto Turku to see the "Alice in Wonderland Exhibition."

Helsinki was as wonderful as ever and I couldn't believe the difference the warmer weather makes to a city, many more people and a cafe culture I hadn't seen before. I met up with some friends from the Finnish Museum of Photography and went for an excellent, traditional Finnish meal at the fantastic Sea Horse, some say this is the authentic Aki Kaurismaki Helsinki experience, the interior is stunning and an atmosphere to match, many thanks to Anna-Kaisa and Tiina! As I wondered around the city, there was an abundance of antique shops with truly beautiful things, and lovely little bars, the image above demonstrates the lovely little/ and rather large finds you can seek out.

Then onto KUVU, (The Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts) to lecture. What a great environment to study and with a small department of only 200 students across all the Fine Arts, the students are very lucky! Then it was onto Turku.

I arrived in Turku to see the exhibition and take some more installation shots when there was now more than 6 hours of daylight! The show looks great and it was lovely visit the places I had been before and not forgetting to act as a tour guide for my parents. The trip was very enjoyable and what a great end, sitting drinking wine in one of my favourite restaurants Tintå , a stunning little Finnish wine bar overlooking the Turku River, great food, great wine and even better company - thank you!

http://www.seahorse.fi/ and http://www.tinta.fi/

BJP iPad App

"The Photograph as Contemporary Art" is now available on the BJP iPad App which was released on the 7th September - Issue one, Autumn 2011. My series is in the Portfolio section, to see a taster of the article read below:

Simon Bainbridge writes, "If Melinda Gibson’s photomontages look familiar, don’t be surprised. A flash of Ed Burtynsky here, a slice of Juergen Teller there, they are all made up of elements of some of the major works of the 1990s and 2000s, culled from the pages of The Photograph As Contemporary Art. Written and edited by Charlotte Cotton (former curator at the V&A and LACMA, and now creative director of the UK’s National Media Museum), it is one of the key texts for students starting out in photographic education. Which is precisely why the 26-year-old, who graduated from London College of Communication in 2006 and is now a visiting lecturer herself, chose to use it...."

Read more here: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2103858/photograph-contemporary-art

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

Contacts

As the months fly by, I continue with my project "Little gifts" and realised that I have been making much imagery but haven't really been sharing or showing anyone. The image above is one of the 11 contact sheets that I have from shooting the objects that remain. These contacts have become more interesting than the individual shots on the film of roll as they document a repetitiveness, an obsessiveness of photographing the same objects time and time again, trying to get that perfect shot, when what it is I am looking for is lost. I feel this documented process is something very revealing and should be shown in its basic form. I still need to finalise this part of the project but there is something very powerful about photography being seen as a way to think, to grieve and to process.

Films

"Fuji Fujicolor Reala, 100asa, Troubled Land, 1984, from the series Films, 2011" pictured above is a new body of work by Paul Graham currently showing at Anthony Reyolds Gallery, but it does close on 4th June, so it's the last week to see this extraordinary body of work.

Graham's series "Films" is rather simple in its process but excels in aesthetics by questioning the very structure that makes the medium what it is and has been. The press release explains, "While examining his work of the past 30 years for the major survey exhibition arriving at the Whitechapel Gallery this month, Graham became enraptured with the base material of his craft and began to reflect upon the physical substance with which his images were made. Scanning the negatives for the exhibition, he began also to scan the blank film ends and unexposed frames from each body of work. What Graham gathered in the process he saw as a 'negative retrospective' of his practice. These luscious and beguiling abstract images are nothing more than greatly enlarged images of raw emulsion, the colour dye clouds formed in the exposure and development of film."

The images are presented in a small, classic manner that reflects the beauty of the imagery and the nostalgic element to the work. This series is very beautiful and has very successfully brought together nostalgia and abstraction in a highly considered and thoughtful examination of the medium.

http://www.anthonyreynolds.com/home.htm

The Bunkier Sztuki

One of the many highlights at the opening weekend of Photomonth Krakow, but one that really resonates in my mind was the Alias. Survey exhibition at The Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery where Broomberg & Chanarin gave a talk about the concept behind the curation. What was very interesting was the reasoning behind the use of installation shots instead of the original pieces for all the artists’ works in the exhibition. Originally from the constraints of budgetary requirements, came this new use of imagery, installation photography being propelled to a new level, seen worthy as a gallery exhibit in its own right.

Each piece was a copy of the original. None of the artists in the exhibition existed; rather the works existed as copies of the fictitious , anonymous, experimental and alternative personas that each artist in the exhibition had wished to inhabit to produce work outside the realm of reality. As you walked through the exhibition you had a little book detailing the biographies of the artists, all of which were fictitious. This itself could be seen as an exhibit as when you viewed the pieces you spent much of the time reading the text, trying to work out what was truthful, or even more interestingly, knowing nothing was truthful but believeing what you read. One image, which really demonstrated this beautifully for me, was a piece showing Gillian Wearing’s exhibition at Maureen Paley I believe. This installation shot, blown up to over 60 inches and printed as a poster then installed into the gallery perfectly posed the questions; what makes a photograph photography, who is the artist – does it matter, what’s the notion of the original and where is the medium headed?

For me, this survey, incomplete as it said it was has propelled forward some very interesting and exciting concepts surrounding the notion of what constitutes the medium in this changing time. Broomberg & Chanarin have created an opening, a space whereby questions that need answering, but are hesitantly suggested, or more commonly not mentioned at all, come into play. Interesting times, there is a space here, I wonder who takes it to the stage.

Read more here: http://bunkier.art.pl/en