MUSÉE 29 – EVOLUTION
Evolution explores the concepts of progress, transformation, growth, and advancement in an age when images are taking a dramatic shift in the role they play in our lives.
My imagery is concurrently precious/impaired, plausible/ridiculous and intermittently political. I like to manage or miss-manage what is absurd, humorous, and irresolvable and revitalize events from the past. Formalism and pictorial space are the structure for narratives to unfold.
A rectangular box fitted with red framing and a rotatable wheel sits holding an array of note cards in Chelsea’s Cristin Tierney Gallery. The note cards started out as a way for Neil Goldberg to keep track of his thoughts and plans, some twenty years ago, before they turned into an immersive exhibit. In the artist’s self-described “suicide-note” style font, he has turned his handwritten note cards into a political statement under the title VOTE IN THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS.
A dark room with ambient sounds and stunning visuals was packed with an overflowing audience (including two dogs) for the final day of Jeff Whetstone’s Batture Ritual at the Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea. Consisting of six photographs and a 24-minute film, the exhibit focuses on the banks of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, Louisiana. Whetstone spoke on the exhibit’s closing day about his inspiration and the work’s larger significance given the pivotal role the river plays in the global economy.
The stench of cheap brandished Trump steaks can be likened to the new Republican party and the men hiding behind red — not for country, but for power.
Georgia’s race for governor is drawing national attention and for good reason. The voter suppression tactics are an act of cowardice by Secretary of State Jeff Kemp who is desperate to win the election.
Discourse surrounding spirit photography has long been concerned with the veracity of the genre. The ability to capture human spirits on film seems like a stretch for the reaches of both art and science, but this practice has persisted for nearly two centuries, speaking to the age-old desire of humans to figure out what comes after death.
Released in 2009, Coraline isn’t often considered a horror movie because of its PG rating and because horror movies aren’t usually made for children. It’s a shame that there aren’t many horror movies made for kids when one considers how easy it is to terrify them; at least half of the original Brothers’ Grimm fairy tales read more like nightmares than whimsical bedtime stories.
If all Shivers amounted to was a savaging of the bourgeoisie it would hardly qualify as a horror movie, at least not in the tradition sense. Where the movie unsettles and disturbs is in its - and by extension, Cronenberg’s - capacity to tap into our deep-seated fear of our own vile bodies and their capacity to betray us.
Halloween and Friday the 13th ignited the slasher flame across the box office in the early 80s. Dozens of imitators were manufactured to cash in.
By 1982, the genre peaked and cliches piled up. Then came The Slumber Party Massacre’s witty approach to parodying the recycled scares and commentary on gender roles.
Over the past few days several articles started with, “October 27th, 2018, we saw the largest ever attack on a Jewish community on U.S. soil.” These articles usually go on to accuse Donald Trump of being an anti-semite and or of allowing this attack to have occurred in the first place.
For the second time, Magnum and Aperture are joining together to present Crossings, a Magnum Square Print Sale exploring perspectives on transition and transformation in photography. Crossings encapsulates physical crossings from one side to another, and the personal crossings that manifest in growth, revolt, mutation, self-realization, and voyages of the mind.
When we think of motion and motion photography, we think of dancers gliding across a stage or perhaps people made still, captured between moments of intensity. Either way, we think of the subject in motion while the camera remains steady, nearly predatory in the way it remains calm until the time to pounce. But what does it mean to flip this concept? The subjects still, the camera in motion. With this particular type of photography, movement is so apparent in the way that the photographs show a blend of blur and focus while also leaving the movement out of frame.
Swarms of New Yorkers commute between Brooklyn and Manhattan on the L Train every day. Packed tight with passengers, the train serves both boroughs through its tunnel under the East River. The underwater tunnel was severely damaged during Hurricane Sandy and is in need of repairs. Already closed on weeknights and weekends, the L Train is fully shutting down in April for a 15-month maintenance period.
Most American political ads are terrible. Regardless of whether or not the information in the ad is even true or has context, most campaign materials are incredibly lacking in any cinematic imagination or technique. It’s all too easy to visualize the black-and-white footage of a candidate that a SuperPAC opposes, storm clouds over a government building, and shots of “sketchy,” non-white individuals stalking the night. Even gentler campaign ads can be just as eye-rollingly predictable, as if stock footage of a diverse crowd of blue-collar workers in hard hats, soldiers saluting the flag, and children studying happily implies the candidate has plans to address racial injustice, military spending, labor unions, or education funding. Political advertisements rarely delve into visual styles that are more complicated than an Instagram filter. If campaign media receives widespread attention, it does so through production disasters, rather than through its effectiveness.
Feminists gathered at the Atlantic City boardwalk outside the 1968 Miss America Pageant to protest in a rally that would become iconic for decades to come. Including a Freedom Trash Can, a sheep wearing a Miss America sash, and stink bombs, these activists fought the unattainable beauty standards and oppression they experienced as women.
Back in the dog days of mid-August, 36-year-old Vanessa Campos was murdered in Paris’ Bois de Boulogne park. Her death came a year-and-a-half after the French parliament government passed a law designed to both stem prostitution and protect its practitioners - among whose ranks Campos counted herself. A transgender woman from Peru, she was shot by thieves taking advantage of her and her john’s vulnerability in an isolated corner of the park, widely known as one of Paris’ major bazaars of prostitution.
The phrase “Digital anthropology” could best describe the new Whitney Exhibit Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018. As we get a glimpse of our history and how the advances in technology, systematic thinking and computing code have transformed the way we perceive the world, what will the digital remains of our civilization look like? Will we be remembered for our Twitter feed discourse on reality shows, the way we programmed ourselves into the computer or our voyeuristic tendencies to huddle around the television set like a fire-place?
