Ballad of the Lost Photographer
I 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.
=
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 NYOPENING 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.
TECCS Gala and Silent Auction
Richard J. McCormack/For The Jersey Journal
This week I was very pleased to participate in a silent art auction organized by art critic Carly Berwick for the TECCS (The Ethical Community Charter School) Gala honoring Jersey City mayor Steven Fulop. The piece sold, a good time was had by all, and apparently the Mayor checked out all the art!
Carly wrote this nice blurb about the piece. I should work this William Eggleston connection.
Stevens’ photographs are found landscapes, reminiscent of William Eggleston’s color-saturated photographs of American vernacular scenes. Drive-in was taken in upstate New York, near the town Massena, on the border with Canada. Its seeming casualness belies the deep formalism of the image, with its repeating rectangles in the marquee, screen, and numbered posts. The sun-streaked outdoor cinema references vacation postcards yet replaces crowds and vibrancy with a sense of absence and decay. The leftover landscape becomes an accidental collage.
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.
The Family Analog
Here is proof, from the V18 blog, that I presented my orphan photo archive project The Family Analog with a talk called Borrowing and Ordering the Many at the excellent Visible Evidence 18 conference.
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.