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!