ANNE COLLIER

Posted on 2016-04-18

Anne Collier presents a body of new photographs that expands upon her ongoing inquiry into the nature and culture(s) of photographic images, exploring questions of perception and representation and the mechanics of the gaze. In addition to her now signature visual ‘motifs’ of the open book, images of women posed with camera equipment, and photographs of analog vinyl recordings, Collier introduces a new series of images: tightly cropped and dramatically enlarged works from a series collectively titled ‘Women Crying’. Sourced from album covers released between the late 1960s and the early 1980s these new images present a gender-specific consideration of staged and manufactured emotion.

Negotiating autobiography, nostalgia, and manifestations of pop-melancholia, Collier’s work considers the tensions between her employment of an often-forensic photographic objectivity and the highly subjective and emotive content she typically focuses on. Collier’s photographs invariably depict existing objects that incorporate photographic imagery: e.g. images, books, calendars, posters, and album or magazine covers. Often focusing on sexualized or emotionalized images of women, posing with or without cameras, close-ups of the human body, and recurring images of the eye, Collier does not necessarily consider her resulting images as a form of appropriation, rather she thinks of them as a form of still-life photography, making reference to both technical and commercial (advertising) photography. Collier shoots these found and second-hand objects in the context of the studio. There is little or no artifice at work in these images. The lighting is invariably clear and neutral, the exception being the tightly cropped and dramatically enlarged images of crying women taken from vintage album covers, where the idiosyncratic qualities of the original printed matter is both privileged and amplified.

Opposite – Album (Detail), 2016

Exhibition runs through to May 15th, 2016

Anton Kern Gallery
532 West 20th Street
New York
NY 10011

www.antonkerngallery.com

  

GUIDO MOCAFICO – BLASCHKA

Posted on 2016-04-18

Italian still life photographer Guido Mocafico’s fascination with Leopold and his son Rudolf Blaschka’s glass models of marine invertebrates and plants is revealed in his most recent series Blaschka. It has been Mocafico’s longstanding dream to photograph these masterpieces that took Leopold (1822-1895) and Rudolf (1857-1939) Blaschka a lifetime to create, and to pay homage to their unparalleled dedication to their craft with his photographs.

The Blaschka family made their objects of invertebrate animals (jellyfish, snails, sea anemones, corals, hidroids, starfish, sea-cucumbers, squid, seaslugs and bivalves) and plants only on commission for the study purposes of institutions at the time, mainly in Europe and North America, and they were not sold to the general public. It has been a difficult process for Mocafico to gain the authorization to photograph the objects; most museums do not display the models and they are extremely fragile. Mocafico pursued the largest Blaschka marine invertebrate collections in Europe (London, Liege, Strasbourg, Utrecht, Vienna, Dublin, Geneva) in order to have the most complete approach to the subject, and eventually was granted access by the museums’ curators to photograph the ‘hidden treasures’ in his own unique style.

Opposite – Carmarina hastata stage 4, 2014

Exhibition runs through to May 24th, 2016

Hamiltons Gallery
13, Carlos, Place
London
W1K 2EU

www.hamiltonsgallery.com

  

SON OF SAUL

Posted on 2016-04-18

Winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and Golden Globe, Son of Saul is Hungarian director László Nemes’ impressive debut feature, a courageous and unflinching reimagining of the Holocaust drama.

Saul Ausländer is a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners forced to assist in the machinery of the Nazi concentration camps. While at work, he discovers the body of a boy he recognises as his son. As the Sonderkommando plan a rebellion, Saul vows to carry out an impossible task: to save the child’s body from the flames and to find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.

In theatres April 29th, 2016

www.sonofsaul.co.uk

  

LAKE HAZE – I.L.Y.T.

Posted on 2016-04-11

Lake Haze steps up for the second release from Lama. Four tracks spanning bongo drum centric drum workouts, crunching machine beats and eerie synth pads.

lamaedicoes.bigcartel.com

  

JOHN ANGAIAK – I’M LOST IN THE CITY LP

Posted on 2016-04-11

This track is from John Angaiak’s record “I’m Lost In The City,” reissued by Light In The Attic Records.
I’m Lost in the City (1971) is the sole vinyl LP offering from Yup’ik singer-songwriter, John Angaiak. Born in Nightmute, Alaska, in 1941, Angaiak began playing guitar at a young age, quickly learning the basics before serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. Stationed in Vietnam and far away from home, Angaiak forged an astute outlook on his region, his country, and the world itself. Upon his return, Angaiak enrolled in the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where he became active in the preservation of his native language as part of the school’s Eskimo Language Workshop.

Inspired by the program’s work and a friendship with music student Stephen Halbern, Angaiak recorded I’m Lost in the City, a project that helped to document and promote the previously oral Yup’ik language into a written one through a series of songs. Each side of the album, which showcases John’s intimate vocal and guitar style, shares a part of Angaiak’s culture and history: Side One is sung in Yup’ik, while the material on Side Two is delivered in English. Both are equally emotional, deeply personal and extremely affecting.

lightintheattic.net

  

MARIUS BERCEA – (ON) RELATIVELY CALM DISPUTES

Posted on 2016-04-11

For this new body of work, the artist expands his subject matter well beyond the depictions of Romanian landscapes and nostalgic scenes that he is best known for, broadening the scope of investigation recorded onto the canvases to include commentary on the global state of affairs, internal dialogues about authentic identity, and ruminations on the overbearing excess of utopian rationality as expressed through constructed environments. While elements of previous bodies of work still remain integral to this new series, most evidently his use of figures amid architectural features, Bercea allows these paintings to transcend locality.

Informed by the dramatic shift from a longstanding communist rule to a capitalist consumerist system he experienced while growing up in Cluj (located in the Transylvania region of Romania), the paintings on view point to an internalization of the signs and tendencies of two opposing aesthetic regimes. As the disparate dichotomies converge on the canvas, they produce a wholly hybrid territory that moves beyond identification with geographic space. Instead, the paintings act as dialogical platforms where Bercea speaks to the cacophony of contemporary life, where vaguely reminiscent architectural motifs are draped in the tattered vestiges of mid-century modernist ideals, and scenes are overrun with the exuberant entropy of vegetation. Here, Bercea presents a postmodernist Arcadia where a sparse population of nondescript pastoralists commiserate among morose landscapes and overzealous flora. These convoluted signs obfuscate any association with any real locale. It could be anywhere and nowhere.

Exhibition runs through till May 15th, 2016

François Ghebaly
2245 E. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles
CA 90021

ghebaly.com