Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon, From the Series, Contraband, 2010

Shot over five days for the book and exhibition, “Contraband” — of items detained or seized from passengers or express mail entering the United States from abroad at the New York airport. The miscellany of prohibited objects — from the everyday to the illegal to the just plain odd — attests to a growing worldwide traffic in counterfeit goods and natural exotica and offers a snapshot of the United States as seen through its illicit material needs and desires.

Taryn Simon (born February 4, 1975) is an American artist. Simon’s artistic medium consists of three equal elements: photography, text, and graphic design. Her practice involves extensive research, in projects guided by an interest in systems of categorization and classification. She is a graduate of Brown University and a 2001 Guggenheim Fellow.

Simon’s photographs and writing have been the subject of monographic exhibitions at institutions including Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012); Tate Modern, London (2011); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2011); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2008); Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2004); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2003). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2011 her work was included in the 54th Venice Biennale.

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“Looking at where figurative painting is today, there is more room for creativity and imagination.”

1 February 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Exhibitions Main No Comments

Go Figure, Curated by Eddie Martinez, 6 October – 13 November, 2011
Dodge Gallery, New York

People say “painting is dead” and within that figure painting is mummified. Since painting began, we have used the figure to let people after us know that we existed before them. This is clear when we look at cave paintings wherein the “painted” people and animals and other symbols represented life. Looking at where figurative painting is today, there is more room for creativity and imagination. Take for instance the approach of artists in this show from Erik Parker’s weirdo psychedelic melting faces to Jamison Brousseau’s take on the figure represented by R2D2 from Star Wars. Gina Beavers current approach to the figure looks like studies that would have been done by someone enrolled in the “art students league” in New York City in the 1950’s. Another interesting component of the work in this show are the materials used and the execution of the works. For example Allison Schulnik’s technique is to use paint sculpturally to create her figures. She lays on thick impastos, whereas Daniel Gordon uses photography and collage to manipulate the look and feel of his work, often leaving the figures disfigured and mangled. Denise Kupferschmidt’s drawings evoke a re-imagined historical feel with paired down, Egyptian-meets-sci-fi characters.

Featured Artists:
Joshua Abelow, Derek Aylward, Gina Beavers, Brian Belott, Katherine Bernhardt, Jamison Brosseau, Ted Gahl, Daniel Gordon, Joseph Hart, Denise Kupferschmidt, Jose Lerma, Erik Parker, Allison Schulnik, Michael Williams

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Michael Schmidt, Lebensmittel (Food)

9 February 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Michael Schmidt, From the series, Lebensmittel, 2006 – 2010

Michael Schmidt is one of Germany’s most important social-documentary photographers. Although he works in series, each photograph stands as an autonomous work in its own right. When the photographs are seen together in a book or an exhibition, connections between two pictures give rise to a third, as Schmidt explained in an interview with Dietmar Elger in his book Irgendwo.

In his Lebensmittel series (2006–10), Schmidt confronts photography with its painterly qualities in 177 photographs. The work’s all-too-perfect patterning makes it look like a naturalistic painting and manifests an immaculate production process. While using the documentary form of investigative journalism, Schmidt succeeds in capturing the social reality, hybridity and poverty of the food industry in a way that is neither accusatory nor dismissive. Schmidt is not concerned with finding a clear, self-sufficient aesthetic form. He opts neither for pure confrontation with the monstrosity of reality, nor for escapist visions based on abstraction. Instead, in his work, the aestheticized landscape becomes a mere region, a building is just architecture, a still life is simply an arrangement of objects.

Schmidt was born in east Berlin, but his family crossed to the west before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. He trained as a policeman, at his parents’ insistence, before taking up the camera in 1965 to document the streets, buildings and people of west Berlin. He later told an interviewer: “I could also make photos somewhere else; I just wouldn’t know why.” Schmidt was self-taught, and his early series, including Stadtlandschaft (Urban Landscapes) (1974-75) and Berlin, Stadtbilder (Berlin, Urban Images) (1976-80) mapped out the city in which he lived in a semi-documentary way. In 1976, he founded the Werkstatt für Fotografie (Workshop for Photography) in Berlin, and invited several leading American photographers, including William Eggleston and John Gossage, to teach there.

In the following decades, his approach became more impressionistic. He would shoot thousands of frames for each project without thinking too much about the end result, which would emerge later out of rigorous editing. Increasingly, he was drawn to series over single images, atmosphere over documentary representation.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/28/michael-schmidt

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Christopher Kane Fall 2016, Ready To Wear, London

30 July 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion No Comments

Christopher Kane, Ready To Wear, Fall 2016, London

“Our mum used to embarrass us when she picked us up from school wearing one of those plastic rain hats,” said Tammy Kane, Christopher Kane’s sister. The very private world of the Kanes and their memories of growing up outside Glasgow in the ’90s will always inform Christopher Kane’s work. The Kanes suffered the loss of their mother a year ago, so the salute to Christine Kane was there at the beginning of the show, transformed into tied-under-the-chin plastic rain hats—the work of Stephen Jones. But searching for a linear trail of clues to make sense of how Kane processes ideas into clothes is never all that helpful. Briefing a crowd of journalists after the show, the designer spoke about reclusive hoarders, an outsider point of view, somebody living behind her own psychological bars. “She doesn’t know how to get out. She’s stuck.” Kane finds beauty in that manic predicament. “Things are so normal these days,” he shrugged. “So why not think out of the box?”

Really, the thing to watch a Kane show for are the creative fusion points where he produces something we’ve never quite seen before, trophies of fashion that you know on sight you’d urgently like to make your own. To this pair of eyes, that electricity hit halfway through this collection. The section of asymmetrical black tailoring, jackets, and scarves fringed with ostrich feathers in red, green, and faded pink had an off-hand elegance that would cause a mayhem of envy walking into any room. There would be no regrets spending the money on one of these: They had the quality of long-term classics a woman could—yes—hoard in her wardrobe to bring out again and again.

What else? Nearly ten years on from his neon body-con debut collection, which consisted of one tight (in both senses) statement, Kane is backed by Kering and has many commercial categories on the go and to show. The tubular Swarovski sparkle-mesh “bolster” necklaces the Kane siblings made for that original 2006 show continued as lanyards dangling sunglasses, or were whipped into whorls as big glamorous brooches around faceted stones. Crystal-dangling alphabet charms were pinned along necklines and scattered across skirts. A part of the show that involved haberdashery ribbons and scraps of fabric samples was also available in the form of one of Christopher Kane’s zip-top envelope clutches. All these came under the heading of little accessible things young girls can afford to show off with. A new gothic-type “K” logo on a beige sweater also seemed aimed at keeping a young audience engaged, which Kane needs to do to keep his brand hot.

Treading that line between reasonably affordable novelty and luxury is a really tough balancing act now—and obviously, that doesn’t just apply to Christopher Kane. On the elevated side, he can do a gray mink coat now, and the complex party dresses he’s made a name with are just as weirdly sexy—like the ones made from alternating stripes of tan pleather and sheer black lace that started the show. But the pressure to encompass it all, all the time, is a strain for every designer when the whole fashion environment is in upheaval. The underlying narrative of a woman in a disturbed mental state that came through Kane’s show today is easy enough to link with so many of this season’s other creative excursions into surrealism. It’s a mad world out there.

Source: Style.com.
Text: Sarah Mower, Style.com.
All images belongs to the respective artist and management.

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T293 Gallery, Naples and Rome

6 April 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Galleries No Comments

Established in 2002 in an historical building of the Neapolitan centre, in Via dei Tribunali 293, T293 has always been characterised by a keen awareness on artistic practices that are both experimental and conceptually relevant to the current discourse in the field. First conceived as artists’ space dedicated to the support of emerging artists, in 2006 T293 changes its organizational status and starts operating as a company managed by the founder Paola Guadagnino and the independent curator Marco Altavilla, who joined as co-Director.

With the new organization, new purposes have been added, expanding the gallery’s mission towards a more international approach and a more incisive curatorial attitude. With the firm intention to honour its roots while also mainting an international status, in 2010 T293 chooses to be headquartered in Rome and to become a benchmark in the contemporary art sector, both nationally and internationally. First located near to Piazza Navona, it then moves to via Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, few minutes walking from the Colosseum, where is still located.

Addressing an audience that is simultaneously cosmopolitan and qualified, T293 cultivates a professional network characterised by the high professionality of its members. In order to achieve its primary goals, since the very beginning of its activity T293 has presented groundbreaking projects at international art fairs such as Frieze London, Frieze New York, MiArt in Milan, Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel-Art Statements, where in 2008 has been awarded the prestigious Bâloise Art Prize (with a solo show of Tris Vonna-Michell).

Its eagerness in finding what is new in the contemporary artistic scenario has allowed T293 to be the place where today’s most interesting artists have had their first solo shows. The artists T293 represents always achieve international recognition as testified by their activities in institutions such as Tate, Palais de Tokyo, Museum Fridericianum and La Biennale di Venezia among the others. More recently, T293 has inaugurated new, successful models of collaboration with other professionals, hosting within its walls a programme of artistic residencies as well as innovative curatorial projects conceived together with other galleries and institutions.

Willing to nurture the development of contemporary art and visual culture through different generations of artists, T293 showcases that which is the excellence in the contemporary art field not only through its far-reaching exhibitions programme, but also with the support of projects and publications that act as catalysts for the development of fresh ways of seeing and contextualizing contemporary art.

http://www.t293.it/gallery/

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Book: Dag Nordbrenden, Rub With Ashes

20 September 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Books Culture Main No Comments

Dag Nordbrenden, Presentation of the book, Rub With Ashes, 2012

Dag Nordbrenden is a Norwegian artist working with photography. His work explores different concepts and genres of the medium. His book Rub with Ashes is a compilation of photographs of recent years, and reflects Nordbrenden’s nomadic lifestyle.

The photographs are rooted in a documentary tradition, and the book combines snapshot observations with more loaded, still life-oriented scenes. A diversity of themes are being played out where motifs are mixed together; landscapes, details of interiors, scenes from after a fire, museums and monuments, and some of his meetings with stray cats in Istanbul. Many images show milieus from different parts of the world, social gatherings and local events, which can be viewed in global perspective.

The book dwells at the individual, more autonomous photograph, and how these images influence each other in combinations. By interweaving the lyrical with the more political, Nordbrenden creates a space where different subject matters start communicating with each other.

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