Ballad of the Lost Photographer

10245353_281179712059798_3750090978238332320_nI made a slide performance this weekend at saracrown’s exhibition and event in Chelsea. The slides are from a huge archive of work by, what I guess, is an entertainment photographer, working in NYC in the late 70s and early 80s. From Studio 54 to a hotel Star Trek convention; Chic, Parliament Funkadelic and Sister Sledge; Grace Jones performing with a tiger; rollerskating in the park; Liza Minelli’s wedding aftermath attended by Andy Warhol and Liz Taylor; a Shriner’s parade in Times Square, and Divine. The glory, glamour and excess of the late 70s in NYC is a bit melancholy-inducing to behold in these gentrified times.

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Karl Erickson, Tamar Ettun & The Moving Company (Tyler Patterson, Tina Wang, Lyndsey Eugene, Maia Karo, Adrian Galvin & Guest: Lisa Park), Kimberly Ruth, Rachel Stevens, Jody Wood and No Hope aka Hedonic Treadmill (Elisabeth Smolarz & Jan Wilker)

sarahcrown opens in Chelsea and presents an event of six-minute multi-media performances by Group 6.0 members exploring the temporal duality of eveything and nothing.

opening May 10, 2014
@SPAZIO 522
526 West 26th Street, Suite 522, Chelsea NY

OPENING RECEPTION
May 10, 5 – 7 pm
(performances start at 5:30pm)

BRUNCH
May 11, 12 – 6pm
(with special performance by Jody Wood at 2:30pm)

EXHIBITION
May 10 – June 1 (by appointment only)

The exhibition is part of West Chelsea Artists Open Studios.

Color Studies / Body Radio

A couple weeks ago I visited Parson’s Hall Project Space in Holyoke, MA, a gallery in an old industrial building owned, renovated and occupied by Torsten Burns and Kari Gatske. The renovations are beautiful and there was a great turnout for the opening in the project space. I finally had an excuse to make a piece I’ve been mulling over for months: Color Studies (After Albers) for the show, Body Radio, which shares the space with the launch of the Strange Attractors compilation.

A few years ago a friend found a 40+ snapshots “in a dumpster” of a bunch of business men in a hotel suite, with a stripper in the 80s or early 90s. Following the logic of Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square color studies I made formal paintings from the shapes in these images using gouache. I was attempting to organize a dual way of perceiving these images – the perceptual and formal color relationships (“chromatic interactions”) should merge with the curious social dynamics and power relations of the scene.

Visible Evidence 18

This August I will present my orphan photo archive project The Family Analog at the Visible Evidence 18 conference hosted by NYU, along with some musings about late 20th century theory on photographic archives vs. ideas on instantaneous online archives or image commons, contemporary “system(s) of accumulation, historicity and disappearance…,” the uncanny, semantic categorization, searching, sorting and filtering.

One Hour Photo

I’m tickled to be a part of the conceptual photography exhibition One Hour Photo at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC. (More about One Hour Photo on FB)

You can see my piece on Wednesday, May 12 from 11-12 only! Then it will never be shown in public, sold or reproduced again.

One Hour Photo in the Washington Post

Here’s my contract:

Unmonumental

[darn! the Flickr embed isn’t working so… here: https://flic.kr/s/aHsjcAApTH]

I have been collecting images of found sculpture for a few years now. Judging from the inaugural exhibition at the New Museum in NYC is seems that this genre of sculpture is called Unmonumental. There are others that collect found sculpture under the rubric Unmonumental as well, like Joy Garnett at her blog Newsgrist.