Elements

Medium: shaved ice
Artists: Zaha Hadid & Cai Guo-Qiang
Project: The Snow Show Project
About their process, Guo-Qiang writes "I poured vodka over Zaha Hadid's fluid ice and snow structure and set alight the liquid to produce a cool, blue flame that wrapped the installation in warmth." Hadid shares, "Ice was treated as a medium to be sculpted and carved. Vaulting, floating spaces and canyons formed an area that enveloped visitors in a glowing ever-changing glacier."

Elaine showed us The Snow Show project earlier this term. I revisited the site today; it catalogues work through March 2006, whereas the hard copy book focuses on the massive exhibit held in Finnish Lapland in early 2004 edited by Lance Fung.

The book in my opinion offers better documentation than the website. The site is great because it is free and is available everywhere, but the book has extraordinary photos and documents results of collaborations between architects and visual artists. I should note that I personally feel architects are artists. Architects, in the course of their study, learn engineering and structure more often than "artists" but in the end, it's all part of a continuum of experiences and learning. Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. He trained in stage design in Shanghai. Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1950. She studied mathematics in Beirut and architecture in London.


In the Fung book, I was struck by a collaboration between two artists I admire, both of whom have been discussed in prior sessions in Elaine's class. One collaborator is the pyrotechnically imaginative Cai Guo-Qiang and the other is the architecturally spellbinding creative force behind structures which seem to defy gravity, Zaha Hadid

The play of luminosity and shadow with fire and ice is an amazing shaping of the elements that is simultaneously loose and controlled. It was at once fixed and in a state of constant change.

I love this work because it is about great collaboration, about playfulness, about setting up a controlled environment and then relinquishing control, and ultimately, about wonderful light.

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy's works in nature are often about the play of light. He is one of my heroes.

Sunrise Time Lapse

I shot this sunrise video in HD format Monday, Nov 3 between 6-7:30 AM. The 27 second clip is a distillation of 45 minutes of real time.

James Nachtwey

Czechoslovakia, 1990--Heavy metals contaminated the air of an aluminum factory. (from the "Industrial Pollution" gallery on his website)

James Nachtwey chooses to use his camera to bear witness and provide testimony to human rights abuses, environmental disasters, and the tragedies of war. In 2007, he received a TED prize in which he shared his wish: to share a vital story with the world.

All his images show great care for the subject depicted; one key element in many of his images is his choice to sculpt with light. Some detractors claim he aestheticizes atrocity. I feel he uses his craft to be a storyteller of a very layered and complex problem. The great care with which he composes his images only draws me in further, creating space to contemplate the issue.

Boubacar Toure Mandemory

This photo, Couleurs de Peche, is from the series Capitales Africaines, 2000-2005. The intersection of color and light is energizing for me. I love how this image celebrates life. Mandemory is a self-taught photographer who is part of a contemporary movement in Africa to reject ethnographic representations of the continent.

Moshekwa Langa

Untitled XXI, 2005
For me, this photo is about a peace that is just out of reach. I somehow don't want to sit in the chair. It feels like an invitation to stand back, looking for a place of quiet. It is not a warm room, yet it is not cold either. I love how there is nuance in what seems to be a simple scene. I really appreciate how the light bathes the right of the frame while gently tapering off to the left.

The artist was born in 1975 in South Africa and now lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He creates works that are poetic and personal while also engaging in the worlds of art, politics, and popular culture. He often explores themes of exile. Perhaps that is what I see in this photo: a place that once was home but is no longer available for sitting.

Samantha Appleton

Samantha Appleton is a photojournalist. Her current work has been in the US covering the presidential race. She plunged into photojournalism in the aftermath of 9/11, rushing to NY from Maine to document the recovery efforts at the World Trade Center site. She has developed photo essays on Malaria in Africa; fishing communities in Maine; the war in Iraq.

In this image from Iraq, she creates depth with light and shadow and speaks volumes in one frame.

Art Practice

I've been trying to incorporate Elaine's philosophy shared last week regarding practicing art, making time to think and do a little each day. It really struck me and I like the idea of creating space for it, to allow the routine to prompt something unexpected. With music and athletics, it's a given that practitioners have to practice. So too with drawing and photography and filmmaking, etc. I'm enjoying the idea of making time each day for art practice.

Today, I was up at 5:00 AM to do timelapse filming of darkness into sunrise into morning. It was great. The exercise was one of patience and planning. It was also practice. I wanted to experiment because I have never done timelapse filming before. I decided to film a three-hour interval in real time in order to turn it into three minutes of screen time. Will post the results when I cut the movie. I chose the sunrise moment because I want to see the rapidly changing light distilled even further in a time lapse.

Alexis Bittar

Jewelry designer Alexis Bittar has a "Lucite" series created by hand painting and hand sculpting each piece. I love the luminosity.

Gabriel Orozco

This work is a photo by artist Gabriel Orozco.

The piece is called Pelota in Agua (Ball in Water), 1994.

I love the light patterns he creates in this piece. I especially appreciate his process: that he takes a ball floating in a puddle to suggest a celestial object in a cloud-streaked sky. I enjoy his work, and I'm inspired that he creates in many mediums: sculpture, drawing, photography, installation, and video. Orozco's pieces are playful and lyrical. He often draws on found objects for his inspiration.

A few years ago the Guggenheim in NY had an exhibit entitled "Moving Pictures" with Orozco, and artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Ann Hamilton, Kara Walker, Shirin Neshat. Notes from the Guggenheim's exhibit are a good description of Orozco's process: Sometimes, he transforms the ordinary just by the act of naming, as he does with titles such as Pulpo (Octopus, 1991) which bestows a symbolic, associative meaning onto a tangle of pipes, and Dos parejas (Two Couples, 1990) which anthropomorphizes pairs of clay vases.

theanyspacewhatever

Light is everywhere, but requires us only to stop and look for it. So too is life under our nose, but we sometimes can't see it because we're not looking. It seems that's a departure point for an exhibit I'd love to check out at NY's Guggenheim. From the NY Times: The exhibition “theanyspacewhatever” takes its title from a cinematic term coined by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to describe anonymous shots of things you look at every day but don’t see, used as transitions in movies.

Great slide show from the NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/31/arts/design/31gugg.html?hp

Collaboration

I really enjoy working in creative collaborations. This is not always easy. Personality clashes and ego are usually the culprits, and the victim is the artistic process itself. In Elaine's class, it's great that we all respond to each other's works. In particular, I'm delighted Stefan Vraspir and I are working together. He has a great way of thinking about process. We both enjoy experimentation and are more interested in the process than in a perfectionist pre-determined ideal. For the first documentary film I created, I worked with a NY colleague, Richard Adams, and it was the best process ever for the same reason: an ability to respond and create within parameters. Both Stefan and Richard have an ability to leave ego behind and focus on the project itself. Thank you, great collaborators!

Blogging

I'm learning to blog. Thanks for your patience while I figure out how to add more hyperlinks and create meaningful labels. Thanks for reading!

Art as process. Process is art.

An exhibit running until Jan 4, 2009, at The Whitney Museum of American Art in NY features Corin Hewitt. The exhibit is entitled Corin Hewitt: Seed Stage.

I love this exhibit. It demystifies art because the artist and the process are literally at the center of the gallery. In the physical gallery space, Hewitt can be seen creating the pieces which hang on the gallery walls. It is a great meaning for Artist-In-Residence. Here is the information from the Whitney: Artist Corin Hewitt takes up occupancy in the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Lobby Gallery in this ongoing installation that is part performance art, part live theater, and part meditation on ideas about still life. Redefining the notion of the artist-in-residence, on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays Hewitt physically moves about the space and engages in the manipulation of materials, both homegrown and store-bought, questioning the autonomy of the art object through a process of its constant transmutation. His methods include cooking, sculpting, heating and cooling, casting, canning, eating, and photographing both organic and inorganic materials. The result is an intimate examination of the cycles of transformation and transience.

Looking at Music

Through Jan 5, 2009, New York's MoMA has a small exhibit called Looking at Music.

While in NY to research a documentary subject, I took time to see Looking at Music, and I particularly enjoyed a piece by Laurie Anderson. It was a violin that played continuously through use of a pre-recorded track of an actual violin and the track was housed inside the violin object on display. For me, it was an artist's attempt to create a present continuous tense of something ephemeral (sound) and also at the same time, an object of sound embodied. Anderson is a visual artist and a musician, and in the violin piece, I enjoyed how one art form influenced another. For me, the violin piece is playful, meditative, and a great representation of interdisciplinary experimentation in media art. The exhibit as a whole reminded me of the outcomes artists find through collaboration and experimentation.

Here is detailed exhibit information from the museum's website: This exhibition looks at the dynamic connections that occurred from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s with a display of early media works by Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Steve Reich, Joan Jonas, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, and David Bowie presented alongside related drawings, prints, and photographs by John Cage, Jack Smith, Ray Johnson, and others.

California

California

Colorado

Colorado

Sharing Light

The photos I'm uploading in these initial posts are images I've taken in the past 2 years. I love observing light. I tend to have my camera with me when I travel; consequently, many posted images come from travels and a few come from iPhone camera function. In this blog, I will share the fun learning with Elaine Buckholtz and some wonderful classmates at Stanford in our class "Light as a Sculptural Object."

To give a sense of where light took me before Fall 2008, I chose to share some of the moments where I tried to catch light. Enjoy...

NY - Barcelona

Light Observed