Paul Pincus: Favourite Photograph #79

Friday, June 20, 2008

Favourite Photograph #79

Angela Strassheim stages painstaking portraits of her evangelical family. She photographed her dead grandmother in her casket and her brother-in-law combing his son's hair before a mirror. They're surreal pictures, candy colored and strangely loving.

- Michael Kimmelman (The New York Times)

*Please Click On Image (Below)

Angela Strassheim: Untitled (Father and Son), 2004, from Strassheim's series Left Behind

Strassheim comes from a born-again Christian family in Minnesota. According to the exhibition’s press release, the title Left Behind refers not only to the “unsaved” souls left behind after the Rapture has transported the faithful into heaven but also to “the memory and evidence people create that outlives them." Portraits of the artist’s family are juxtaposed with images of domestic narratives, inspired by childhood and adult experiences.” The press release adds that Strassheim’s “obsessively careful compositions and lighting” were developed from her experience as a certified forensic photographer.

- Thomas Micchelli (The Brooklyn Rail)

3 comments:

heidi said...: spooky.; June 20, 2008 5:07 PM
Nikolás de Lioncourt said...: oh a bit scary.... hehe; June 20, 2008 5:08 PM
PopMuse.com said...: that photo is gorgeous. beautiful and scary. the kids are so fearful.; July 7, 2008 12:37 AM

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Louise Bourgeois' Spider @ Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006

Murakami's My Lonesome Cowboy

$Murakami\$
Not everything he did is cute. As is common in the Okatu and manga world, there is sometimes a pervy undercurrent of nerdy sexual obsession. Some short videos on a plasma screen show a CG character - an adolescent alien boy with no hair, a huge head, and beady eyes - obsessing over the uniformed Japanese schoolgirls in the midst. In one piece, he returns home after school and lying in bed he remembers a girl classmate and as a result his (plaid?) pants poke up. His face gets a look of confusion and horror. Other fabricated mannequin-like sculptures (My Lonesome Cowboy) show a manga boy spurting a massive steam of jism out of his hard on. - David Byrne (www.davidbyrne.com)

Ryan McGinley's Dash (Delivery), 2002

"This is a typical night in 2002 for me. Dash Snow on the horn with our dealer. The couch he’s sitting on used to belong to me and my roommate Teddy. We gave it to him as a housewarming gift when he moved to Avenue C with his then wife, Agathe Snow, a bunny named Gary, and a parakeet named Sergeant Slaughter. The couch was rumored to have a missing bag of blow lost in it. One night we tore it up like archaeologists looking for a precious artifact. We never found it. A few years later Dash planted a tree in the hole we dug out of it and sold it as a sculpture to Charles Saatchi." - Ryan McGinley (Vice)

Tim Davis' Un Coin d'appartement, 2004

Some may frown on Tim Davis' photographs of famous paintings. For one thing, it appears that his camera's flash intrudes upon and harms each masterpiece. However, the artist doesn't use a flash at all, instead relying on the light provided by sources within the museums where the works are housed. Davis shoots them from angles that accentuate the available light and then creates prints that reveal the physique of the paintings. The added beams of light modify our sense of these mostly familiar images. In certain pieces the light reveals texture (the aged paint cracks in Corot's Evocation of Love); in others it alters the figures (notably the child, now resembling a specter, in Monet's Un Coin d'Appartement). - Omar Sommereyns (Miami New Times)

Takashi Yasumura's Sliding Doors, 1998

Anthony LaSala: What is it about his images that captured your eye? Yossi Milo: The quality in composition, color and subject matter of Takashi Yasumura's work initially captured my eye. The artist prints his work by-hand and does an extraordinary job with producing very color-saturated, captivating prints. There is something that is distinctly Japanese and contemporary about his work that allows his work to stand out as pieces that are both aesthetically beautiful and relevant. - Anthony LaSala (Photo District News)

Karen Kilimnik's The Matterhorn at night, dreamland, 9pm, 3am, Zermatt, 2007

Drawing correspondences between romantic tradition and consumer culture, Kilimnik's work brings a haunting and contrary sense of beauty to contemporary art. The world of the ballet and childhood, romantic painting and pop music, icons of film and fashion, signs of witchcraft, time-travel, and murder comprise an imagery that has been culled from the historic and recent past into an unsettling present. In a world where the forces of nature, youth, and terror, have taken awesome hold, Kilimnik's art rematerializes a quest for the romantic sublime. - Ingrid Schaffner (Institute of Contemporary Art | University of Pennsylvania)

Pamela Talese's The McKean and The Firefighter Rendezvous at the Navy Yard

Pamela Talese's small, quietly observed works, painted from life, honor the plein-air tradition that many assume to be dead by turning to industrial subjects and pushing the style slightly toward documentary photography. Fittingly, they record a dying phase of New York history: the piers, buildings, cranes and docking equipment of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, along with tugboats, fireboats and ships in and out of dry dock. The subjects have all seen better days, but the images are not nostalgic. And despite the paintings' documentary aspect they clearly could not be photographs; they record places of honest work in part by exemplifying it. They are carried by an unforced accuracy abetted by a subtle color sense and straightforward surfaces that are neither finicky nor juiced up. - Roberta Smith (The New York Times)

Phil Collins' Young Serbs (Bojan), 2001

The artist Phil Collins often works with documentary formats, and has made several bodies of work from within international 'trouble spots'. KultureFlash spoke to him about Young Serbs, his renowned photographic series. Young Serbs consists of strangely intimate portraits of men and women lying in the grass. KultureFlash: Why did you choose to portray them lying in the grass? Phil Collins: I was thinking about the tyranny of recent representations of Serbs, the way photojournalism had cornered the market like a bully. I was thinking about the representational field and those who lie either inside or outside it. I was thinking how Keats wrote fairy-tales at the time of the Poor Law riots, and yet how for him this might also have been a political strategy. To look away from the spectacular and to employ quite simply the lush, the beautiful, the luxurious. What could this mean? I wanted to create an intimate situation (for when else do we see someone lying down?) because intimacy, I was figuring, was one of those values denied by reportage. Ambivalence. Tenderness. Accusations. Invitations. So as well it was written as a kind of love letter. Or more specifically I wanted you to fall in love with them. Or lie with them. Like a shoddy pimp would. Or an evangelist. - (KultureFlash)

Beate Gütschow's Untitled (S_13), 2005

A rising star within the contemporary art circuit, Beate Gutschow has taken a wealth of analog images around the world, which she then converts to digital and stores according to their location. Each work is a composition created from the layering of between 30 to 100 pieces, taken from her extensive catalogue and arranged into a panorama. In her second body of images 'S', Gutschow moves from the seemingly idyllic to post-apocalyptical scenes of urbanity. Her shift to black and white photography signifies the transition to a bleak world-view, and a look into what the future may have in store. Although the interface between the combined images is flawless, there is often a contradiction within Gutschow’s use of light and shade, giving her work an almost sinister edge. - (Wallpaper)

Faile's Nothing Lasts Forever featuring Bunny Boy

Manuel Bello: Who is the bunny boy and what is the history and what the fuck is he doing to that rabbit? Patrick Miller (Faile): It is one of those things where it is really to each his own. That it is just one of those images that's best left as a mystery. It's always been something that we always turn back on people and say "what does it mean to you?" And on that we have heard a ton of different things. The best one being, there was this little boy walking by with his dad while we were shooting some of the sculptures and the young boy says "what is that little boy doing?" His dad responded, "I don't know." The boy then whispered in his dad's ear, "I think he's telling him a secret." For us that was a new one and there was just something so innocent about it, coming from such an honest place that made it really special. So again it's whatever you want it to be. - Manuel Bello (Fecal Face)

Jason Kronenwald's Gum Blond XLVIII (Britney Spears) featured in Just Britney

"We just couldn't get enough of all things Britney this month, so Friday night we decided to head out to Steven Corfe and Thairin Smothers' Just Britney art exhibit opening party at the World of Wonder gallery in Hollywood. The list of attendees included legendary former New York club kid James St. James; Vincent Gallo, who decided he didn't want his picture taken but offered to take a picture of us instead ("Why do you want my picture, I'm just an old man," said he); working supermodel RuPaul, as well as snot-nosed YouTube sensation Leave Britney Alone Guy. The show featured glorious pieces commemorating the troubled singer, like Jamie Boling's Snake Charmer and Jason Kronenwald's Gum Blond XLVIII, which was made up entirely of chewed up bubble gum." - (Defamer)

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