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