development of space || fall 2014 - artists | inspirations

angie reisch

"Rain Room"

12/8/2014

Rain Room, An Interactive Indoor Downpour That Keeps People Dry

In the interactive art installation “Rain Room,” visitors can walk through a thousand square foot space that is being soaked by falling water—without getting wet themselves (video). To achieve the effect, cameras track the locations of people within the installation, shutting off nearby water valves to stop the downpour over the visitors. The installation is on display at the Barbican Centre in London through March 3, 2013. “Rain Room” was created by London art studio rAndom International.

website: http://laughingsquid.com/rain-room-an-interactive-indoor-downpour-that-keeps-people-dry/

Francesca Woodman

12/2/2014

Francesca Woodman (April 3, 1958 – January 19, 1981) was an American photographer best known for her black and whitepictures featuring herself and female models. Many of her photographs show young women who are nude, blurred (due to movement and long exposure times), merging with their surroundings, or whose faces are obscured. Her work continues to be the subject of much critical acclaim and attention, years after she killed herself at the age of 22

Thoughts:
Incredibly beautiful and haunting images. Simplicity of the human body as well as simplicity of the still life style frame has a sad beauty to it. It's almost as if you should look away but you can't. She speaks through the body.

Isa Genzken

12/2/2014

Although Isa Genzken's primary focus is sculpture, she uses various media including photography, film, video, works on paper and canvas, collages, and books. Her diverse practice draws on the legacies of Constructivism and Minimalism and often involves a critical, open dialogue with Modernist architecture and contemporary visual and material culture. Using plaster, cement, building samples, photographs, and bric-a-brac, Genzken creates architectonic structures that have been described as contemporary ruins. She further incorporates mirrors and other reflective surfaces to literally draw the viewer into her work. The column is a recurring motif for Genzken, a “pure” architectural trope on which to explore relationships between “high art” and the mass-produced products of popular culture.

website reference: http://www.museion.it/?p=2789&lang=en

Thoughts:

Uses found objects and materials in ways I had never seen before in a transformative way
At the DMA exhibit, I realized how much the space a show or installation is put in impacts the overall feel. I felt that the space her Retrospective exhibit was held in was too small for the amount of work shown and felt cramped and overwhelming.
I really enjoy her sculptural works - especially her "bonnet" pieces in the way that they use movement through texture but also physically move.

Iiu Susiraja

12/1/2014

Thoughts:
Susiraja's series of self-portraits are confusing and almost amusing at first glance but upon further inspection are filled with a dark sadness that I can't really explain. It's something about her expression. Or maybe the subtle dullness of the colors in each curated image. Possibly the way she holds her body. It's not something that can be labeled or put a finger on. The way she uses her body as a tool for commodities is odd - almost disturbing - yet gets my attention.

Marie Lorenz

12/1/2014

Marie Lorenz was born in Twentynine Palms, Calif., and grew up traveling with her military family. She received a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. from Yale, where she now teaches in the Painting Department. Lorenz has received the Alice Kimball English Travel Fellowship and grants from Artists Space and the Harpo Foundation. In 2008 she was awarded the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, from High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, Calif., to MoMA PS1 in New York City. She has completed solo projects at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, and Jack Hanley Gallery in New York. Her ongoing project Tide and Current Taxi, featured in the Frieze 2014 in New York, is an exploration of the coastline in New York City.

Tide and Current Taxi: http://www.tideandcurrenttaxi.org/

Thoughts and Notes:

Tim Noble | Sue Webster

12/1/2014

Tim Noble and Sue Webster take ordinary things including rubbish, to make assemblages and then point light to create projected shadows which show a great likeness to something identifiable including self-portraits. The art of projection is emblematic of transformative art. The process of transformation, from discarded waste, scrap metal or even taxidermy creatures to a recognizable image, echoes the idea of 'perceptual psychology' a form of evaluation used for psychological patients. Noble and Webster are familiar with this process and how people evaluate abstract forms. Throughout their careers they have played with the idea of how humans perceive abstract images and define them with meaning. The result is surprising and powerful as it redefines how abstract forms can transform into figurative ones.

Parallel to their shadow investigations, Noble and Webster have created a series of light sculptures that reference iconic pop culture symbols represented in the form of shop-front-type signage and carnival shows inherent of British seaside towns, Las Vegas and Times Square. With the aid of complex light sequencing these signs perpetually flash and spiral out messages of everlasting love, and hate.

Noble & Webster have created a remarkable group of anti-monuments in their eighteen-year career, mixing the strategies of modern sculpture and the attitude of punk to make art from anti-art. Their work derives much of its power from its fusion of opposites, form and anti-form, high culture and anti-culture, male and female, craft and rubbish, sex and violence.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster's work can be divided into the 'Light Works' and the 'Shadow Works', though Webster does not see them as completely separate. She says:

"We kept them both going side by side. There are two sides to the work; the shiny side and the dark side. That kind of reflects the two personalities within us."

The influence of music on their art, particularly punk rock has been of great importance to them since they began their earliest collaborations: Says Noble:

"I think anything that's a bit of a rocket up the arse, anything that kicks against the routine, against the mundane things that close down your mind, is a refreshing and good thing. Punk did that very successfully . . . it offered a direct and instant means of producing products or things."

Adds Webster:

"When we make a piece of work we're constantly looking for something that will take our breath away because if it does that to us we've pushed it as far as it will go. We like to look at every different way of making it, it can be very simple or very complicated, but we don't feel satisfied until we've both given it a good going over

Thoughts:

Inspiration for "dots" transformations
Creating something out of nothing, deceiving the eye
We as humans look for recognition in objects and environments around us

Toba Khedoori

11/30/2014

Khedoori's works often fill the spectator's entire field of vision; a 'typical' Khedoori painting combines elements of drawing, painting, and art installation. Some of Khedoori's best-known paintings feature architectural renderings surrounded by a vast expanse of white or blank space. In recent years, Khedoori has incorporated natural imagery and landscape into her work. Additionally, her most recent output has moved from wax-on-paper into oil and canvas, with subject matter drawing influence from geometric sequences

Thoughts:
I often struggle with feeling the need to fill the entirety of a canvas, page, or any space. Khedoori's work shows the possibilities that arise when blank space is left alone. Sometimes the emptiness can be as powerful and purposeful or even more so than filling it up with colors/textures/images. There is a beautiful simplicity to her work. An objective yet memorable and personal look into objects we encounter on a daily basis. With space comes power.

Inspiration in My Own Work:

Klaus Kemp

11/6/2014

Diatoms are tiny single-cell algae encased in jewel-like shells that are among the smallest organisms on Earth of which there are an estimated 100,000 extant species.

The first diatom arrangements date back to the early 1800s, but the art form reached its peak in the latter part of the century. It was a period of intense interest in the natural world and also a time when the arts and sciences were more closely aligned. Diatom arrangements are a stunning example of that particularly Victorian desire to bring order to the world, to display nature in a rational way.

Diatoms range in size from 5 microns to 200 microns. A micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter. A diatom arrangement of 100 forms would fit inside a punctuation mark of average-size text.

"I love seeing the hand of man display the work of nature so beautifully,"

"Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

The diatomist video

James Casebere

10/21/2014

For the last thirty years, Casebere has devised increasingly complex models that are subsequently photographed in his studio. Based on architectural, art historical and cinematic sources, his table-sized constructions are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms. Casebere's abandoned spaces are hauntingly evocative and oftentimes suggestive of prior events, encouraging the viewer to reconstitute a narrative or symbolic reading of his work.

In more recent years, his subject matter focused on various institutional spaces and the relationship between social control, social structure and the mythologies that surround particular institutions, as well as the broader implications of dominant systems such as commerce, labor, religion and law.

Website: http://www.jamescasebere.com/group6.html

Commentary:
Casebere's recreation of space is so intensely realistic that we lose the sense that what we're looking at is a fabricated scenario. The emptiness is eerie, almost like we're the only ones who have ever been in this space or ever seen it. The spaces he chooses to represent seem to have a religious quality to them - as if we're in a church or a chapel - we have to keep quiet or pretend like we're not even there. His use of light and flooding of the space adds to the eeriness and gives the sense that we're supposed to stay back. It isn't a space we can easily navigate or be a part of.

Anna Zemánková

10/21/2014

Working in the pre-dawn hours between four and seven o’clock, Anna Zemánková found solace in art, creating floral and botanical drawings that served as a brief respite from the duties of her regular life. It was during these hours of solitude that she created, as she said, “I am growing flowers that are not grown anywhere else.”

Website: http://www.petulloartcollection.org/the_collection/about_the_artists/artist.cfm?a_id=65

Commentary
Zemánková's work at first seems strictly representational of different botanical objects and materials, i.e., plants, flowers, natural elements. However, looking into it more, it becomes more and more abstract and transports me into a spiritual or intangible place. The more look at it, the more I lose focus and grip on reality. It becomes hazy and my eyes blur.