Mark Tansey may at first glance appear smugly ironic, but has a fascinatingly subtle subversiveness to his thinking. He is nothing if not an extremely thoughtful painter, as well as a technically superior one. He understands that representation and narrative are very complex things. His paintings are also as much about post modern criticism as they are about art and painting. Here is an illuminating text on his work by a professor of the arts and philosophy, Mark Taylor.
Tom Bennett
I am having a few communications issues, my laptop is in the shop, my phone is buggy, blah blah blah, it’s not all that exciting or important but I am glad I uploaded this last week and didn’t use it. It’s my first abstract for awhile.
Back in the 90′s when I was living my dirty New York City life I would occasionally pick up some modeling work here and there, and due to the social circles I was moving around in it was more or less inevitable the I would end up working with Terry Richardson eventually. Before anyone gets distracted by the almost fancy sounding phrase “social circles” let me clarify that it means I was living in a hotel with a bunch of cracked out club kids, working in nightclubs, and subsisting on a diet of opiates and sugar. The term “heroin chic” was on the verge of being coined for a very good reason, an attempt to justify our habits in a more acceptable context and keep working. It still amazes me that people got that to fly for as long as they did, but anyway, back to Terry.
When I met him Terry looked like he stepped straight out of a 70′s porn film, complete with pedobar mustache and cut off denim shorts. Actually he still looks like that, which I think may not be helping him out here because he has recently been accused of exploiting under age, or nearly underage models. He was well established when I worked with him, but certainly not the mega star he is now with a series of books released by Taschen, a host of campaigns for Gucci, Miu Miu, Pirelli, Tom Ford, and a million magazines added to his resume. I can say that when I worked with him he was always respectful and professional, but that was also on the cusp of everything turning really ugly in the scene and I know first hand how a combination of drugs, a position of power, and unlimited indulgence from those in authority can become a recipe for really bad things happening. I stumbled across his book Terryworld a few years later in some shop in London and remember flipping through it and not being able to really think past “um…wow”. I’ll just leave it at that.
For another take on it, one from an actual teenage girl (no direct contact with Mr. Richardson) I’ll refer you over to the very well produced fashion blog Style Rookie. She gets into the nuanced dynamics of power, in the fashion industry, the media, and between older men of influence and young women of little experience. Tavi’s pretty bad ass.
I had a hard time finding some of the images that represent the issue most pointedly because apparently he’s been doing his damndedst to remove them from the internest, though there are few explicit ones in the article I linked up at the top over there (I’m not sure I’ll look at a carnation the same way again), but here are a few that might give you an idea of where we are going with this.
I was a little busy, but not quite as busy as Lauren. You may remember her from these three posts and as you can imagine she couldn’t stay that way forever. Last Tuesday was the big day and I had the honor of being invited to assist and document the arrival of their first child.
I am glad I took photographs because even though it all took a very long time, it passed quickly in a sort of semi-hallucinatory way. The walking, breathing, and focusing created a strange sort of group hypnosis with Lauren at the center as we moved around quietly tending to the needs of the moment, fresh air, hot water, back rubs, juice, fruit, cheese, and little jokes to keep her mood light. I’m not generally a person deeply attached to tradition for the sake of it, but I was moved by the sense of continuity and the history of women serving each other as hand maidens to the birthing process. I felt connected to something old and profound.
We welcomed Kalman George Pare Wallace into the world just as the light changed for the day.
So I’m still out in the desert and there isn’t a whole lot of time for making art. Grandma’s face healed up and besides we shot that last week anyway, so instead we looked at some old things and I found two little drawings my Grandfather made for my Grandmother back when he was in the service. My family tends towards the craftier side of art, building, sewing, quilling, and my Grandfather in particular was a person interested in solid tangible things (he built our house) so it was fun for me to find these more whimsical items.
I also decided to take part in one of our readers weekly photo challenges. Shutterboo has a fun thing going and a Flickr Pool if you want to have a look at other submissions, or better yet join in. This week’s theme was “Suitcase” so I made use of the old one my Mom had stuffed in her closet and the unparalleled background I had at my disposal. This is also the first thing I have done that is close to a self portrait in almost a year. Maybe one day I’ll get the guts back up to put in more than just my calves.
My Grandma is a very cool lady, she’s pragmatic, has a wonderfully dry sense of humor, and an appreciation for the absurd. She can spend more time gossiping on the phone than a 14 year old girl and people love to tell her all their secrets, a gift I was lucky to inherit from her. She took a little tumble at the library the other day so I came out to New Mexico to lend a hand, which is really just a convenient excuse to come hang out with her for 2 weeks. I told her that her bruises looked like she’s wearing KISS make up and just to show you how cool she is she both knew who KISS was and asked me to take this photo.
The Newark Museum has an exhibition tracing abstract art in North and South America.
Joaquin Torres-Garcia’s “Locomotive With Constructive House” (1934)
It’s up unti May 23. Looks good, let’s go!
I have a large family made up of incredibly complicated connections, biological, extended, adopted, etc. This is Siri, he fits into one of those categories. He recently made a big change to his appearance and we thought we would commemorate it with a photo, and the still falling fresh snow seemed like a suitable background.
Everything here is photographed as it was found.
Arndale, originally uploaded by Peter Rea 13.
Pete’s a friend of ours from across the pond. I’ve always liked his approach to photographing urban environments, always aware of balance, light, and pattern in the things that so often go unnoticed everyday. Check out his work at peterrea.blogspot.com.
I don’t really work in an office anymore, a situation to which there are pros and cons. Pro – I get to wear my pajamas to work and play with my cats while watching true crime shows and getting things done, cons – company Christmas parties are kind of small and not very exciting. Luckily this year I had the good fortune to be invited to another person’s party – at a prosthetic limb studio. What a fantastic experience, the walls and tables are all lined with custom made silicon molds and limbs and they even have their own full time tattoo artist to add personal touches at the patients request. I was permitted to photograph as I pleased while enjoying the catered nibbles and open bar.
I’ve always liked dollhouses, things in miniature, and the weird little worlds you can create with them. This artist, Heather Benning, took the idea and flipped it, taking an old abandoned farmhouse in Canada and turning it into a dollhouse.
I went a slightly more traditional route after viewing an evenings worth of wonderful creepy drunken cell phone shots of this same house by Ryan Soper, I thought I’d take a stab at it myself. Now I’m hooked.
More after the jump.
Sometimes I go back through old files of unused pictures and see something new, and that’s pretty much what happened here. I was working on something else entirely and this one just happened to be mixed in, this little landscape was just a small section of a much larger all and it almost slipped past my eye. I’m glad it didn’t because I kind of like this one.
I spent this whole holiday weekend alone, don’t feel bad, it was heaven as far as I was concerned. Nothing to do but fuss around the house, play with the cats, and watch a really fantastic marathon called The Genius Of Photography from the BBC. At one point they were talking about the working relationship between Edward Weston and Charis Wilson, with one commenter saying something to the effect of, “the camera becomes an equal sign, the person on one side of the camera equals the person on the other side of the camera.”
If you are in the area, come on out to the opening and see me!!
This week during my fall cleanup I found these two unfortunate little guys, the first was a victim of my cat, and the second I fear I may have had a hand in by leaving a bucket full of rain water out when I usually try to remember to turn them over. The cause of death provided for two very different results both in body and image.
I finally developed the five rolls of film that I’ve had sitting around since the end of summer, and here are some of the highlights. They were all shot in the St. Louis environs with the obvious Chicago exception. Viva la 35mm!
All Nikon N65, N80, or N8008s with either the Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.3-5.6G, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D, or Nikkor 35-135mm f/3.5-4.5 AF Lens attached and Fuji Superia ISO400 Film.
I don’t have a very good grasp of technical things. I have a camera, and even though the whole aperture/f stop/shutter speed thing has been explained to me about 4000 times and it all makes perfect sense while it’s being explained it goes clear out of my head as soon as 3 minutes passes. It could appear to be willful, but I am also the same person who took algebra 3 years in a row and failed every year and then spent my senior year in remedial math learning how to move a decimal point. I got a C and I was thrilled. I’m not sure why but certain types of information just won’t stick, while other seemingly useless information rattles around in there forever.
I’m not much better with Photoshop (layer? what’s a layer?) but I am hoping that it has less to do with a techno block and more to do with lack of repetition in applying what I have learned. Today I took an image and split it in two to make a diptych. Granted, I had to refer to the notes Mr. Hastings thoughtfully wrote down for me (last March), but I still did it and I am pretty excited. I don’t know if I am finished working on this, but it’s finished enough for now. Maybe next I will re-learn the coloring lesson I got the other day, expect finished results sometime in 2011.
Acid Reign
I’m sorry everyone, I feel like I have been kind of phoning it in the last month, and I wish I could say I have some super awesome art to share today but I am not sure that I do. What I do have is a couple of photos from spending the last month up in northern California, a place I took to right away, so these might just be glorified vacation photos, except I wasn’t on vacation so…ah jeeze, I’ve confused myself. Nevermind, I think I am still a little jet lagged.
Agora Gallery - the proud sponsor of the Chelsea International Fine Art Competition, which offers contemporary artists the opportunity to show their original art at one the most acclaimed juried art shows in Chelsea, New York’s art galleries district.
darteboard
jdhastings
ssstephg
Tom Bennett
Toni Tiller
Jason Gray
probrucer
laelia e. mitchell
galinatodorova
