Helmick and Stuart Schechter

"Fata Morgana: an optical phenomenon that creates the illusion of water, often with inverted reflections of distant objects, and results from distortion of light by alternate layers of hot and cool air. Also called mirage."

Pae White

Pae White's suspended sculptures are simple and hold a humble elegance which I'm drawn to in terms of presentation and concept. A white space seems to be typical of most suspended installations - though I was pleased with my work last year in a dark studio, photographing minimally lit objects so they popped out from a blackness and created an more ominous and stylized mood to White's sculptures. I think it's important to consider this idea from the point of view of a photomedia artist - there will be different things to consider if my final artworks are to be photos of the sculpture, rather than the installation itself. Also to note - the strings in these installations are visible, though not obvious, and still they do not detract from the magic of seemingly floating objects.

Gerda Steiner & Jorg Lenzlinger

Brainforest - a booklet documentation of Steiner and Lenzlinger's sculptural installations including The Falling Garden (below), installed at the 50th Venice Bienalle (2003).

 

I'd kill to see this installation in the flesh, the scale is breathtaking and I imagine walking through the 'Falling Garden' would be magical. I'm ambitiously considering creating a similar suspended sculpture made of everyday, mundane objects or perhaps eggshells and other fragile materials, hoping to create a sentimental, nostalgic mood while also commenting on the inadequacy of keepsakes as a gateway to memory and experience: what we own does not necessarily compare to who we are and I believe objects and heirlooms should play a less important role in our idea of self than they do in today's age. Also a self-reflective observation on the ability of a photograph to capture truth - a photographic print is, after all, only a record of the exterior surface of someone or something. It gives limited insight into anything below the surface, just as memorabilia can only bring back so much of a person who has died, or a memory which has faded.

Thomas Demand

Makes all these photographed installations out of coloured card and paper. Most are life sized and exact replicas of photographed spaces which actually existed at some point in time. Almost like sets to an audience, these paper sculptures appear to be real to the camera. This draws attention to photography's inadequacies in dealing with texture, space and reality. It also reveals the assumptions we make about the authority of the photograph, or in fact any for of representation.

I love the theatricality of these artworks, but also their simplicity - which is often lost in such detailed and intricate installations. Demand saves his extravagence for behind-the-scenes, and the final photograph is actually quite humble and believable.

Georges Rousse

Wrapping up Kate

In the filming studio for my first ever short film - which involved way more mess than had been anticipated but which was also a lot of fun! Pictured is Kate Haysom, my lovely, mess-friendly performer, who's tolerance was outstanding as we wrapped her up in layer upon layer of glue, glitter, paint, paper, fluorescent netting, gutter guard, cellophane and the like.

Chunky Move 'Connected'

 

Another video documentation of a performance/installation, but with stand-alone artistic power. Would have loved to have seen Chunky Move's latest show 'Connected' but missed it - luckily I think this video and many others do the brilliant performance justice! I'm interested in working with film, the body and sculpture in a multi-media/video piece for DIS2601. Perhaps using elastic and extreme close ups on skin.

Miranda July

Me and You and Everyone We Know

I still haven't managed to get my hands on the entire film but the clips available on youtube are wonderful, this intro sequence especially sets a great mood and I love the way Miranda July tells a simple story of ordinary people with such basic film techniques, and manages to make it seem so special.

Kathy Temin

I saw this exhibition at Heidi Gallery in Melbourne a few years ago, and will never forget it! temin's wonderful installations and sculptures are quite Seussical in their cute idiosyncracies - the white Felt Habitat (above) was absolutely magical to walk through. Her 'Problems' had so much character I wanted to take them home as pets!

Black Problem

 

The Duck-Rabbit Problem

Pipilotti Rist

Interior Space at MoMA designed by the wonderful Miss Rist: Architectural space turned organic animal body. I'm sure photos do it no justice but the idea is beautiful.

"The deliciously named Swiss miss Pipilotti Rist, who for two decades has been ravishing viewers with her fiesta-colored video visions, has risen to new heights of trippy bliss. Her opulently beautiful 25-by-200-foot wraparound video at MoMA—complete with two round breast-shaped projector pods protruding from the walls and close-ups of pink tulips, a black pig, and a fleshy nude—is catnip for the eye and a hormonal rush for an institution badly in need of one. It is one of the most seductively rebellious artistic gestures since Lynda Benglis’s notorious Artforum ad in 1974, for which she posed naked wielding a dildo. Benglis’s action slapped a biased art world awake; Rist’s Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) suspends us in a primordial sea of liquids, and performs a metaphysical sex change on the Museum of Modern Art. The atrium of this bastion of masculinism becomes a womb, and the museum itself a woman. In an abstract way, Rist makes the institution ovulate."

 

Another installation by Rist - similar relationship between building and body. I love this!

Tim MacPherson

So clever and simple, and beautifully sculpted as well. 

Takashi Murakami

Murakami's Jellyfish Eyes:
An installation about the concept of a hallway

Pop Art which critiques contemporary Japan, childish and empty, uses mass production to criticize it! Merchandising? Father of an Art movement: dark vision of Japan's obsession with Manga and Anime. Very Warhol! except he creates from scratch and therefore gets away with his cynicism.
Very commercial but that's the point, a critique of capitalism from the inside.

Greed: panoramic projection

Had the idea of using a comic book style for the highly graphic shots of chicken being eaten, and to really exaggerate the shapes/themes etc. SO I've used a pretty basic polarization effect on photoshop and played around with text - inspired by the BAM POW KABLAM etc exclamations of a comic, but with a more social message of GREED.

The result:

I'm pretty happy :)

Sandy Skoglund

Patricia Piccinini

 

Patricia Piccinini, Still Life with Stem Cells

Piccinini's irksome sculptures are subtly confronting/disgusting, but also endearing. They are very textural, and make the viewer want to reach out an touch them. This makes it easier for the viewer to connect with the artwork, but a division is maintained between object and subject thanks to the creepy feeling the bodily forms evoke. While they are human, and pathetic, they are also unknown entities and retain potential to disgust.

It is this disgust that I am aiming to achieve in my panorama project. An everyday activity like eating, which should evoke empathy and understanding from a human audience, suddenly becomes disgusting on a large, close-up  scale and difficult to connect with. It is this dilemma which intrigues me and which I wish to create.

The Body

In theory we've been discussing 'The Body' in relation to Eva Hesse's modernist sculptures, and how images which directly or indirectly reference skin, muscle, organs etc often make a very direct emotional connection with the viewer. While critics such as Michael Fried criticize Hesse's work because the impact of such purely physical, gory images makes them feel uncomfortable, it is obvious that references to the human body are powerful and perhaps even more so on a massive photographic scale.

James Turell