lonely blog :(

This blog is lonely, and I like blogs so I'd like to make it not lonely by posting.



Nicole had made a post about Tierney Gearon here, and I thought I'd pass along what I read at a blog called Conscientious about her latest show in London during January. She's moved from photos about her kids and mother to in camera colleges.

Check out more here and here. And let me know your opinion on her new stuff. :)

Enjoy!

-Melissa

Yo Imae (Marissa's Pick)

I recently came across this young photographer from Japan that is now living in Brooklyn. I am really hoping to go visit and talk with him, as he seems to be dealing with many of the same issues I’ve been thinking about throughout this project. Unfortunately, there is little information about him or his process except for one interview. His photographs are simple yet powerful portraits of people he asks to photograph on the street. He is exploring perception as well as the process of interacting with his subjects.

“I hope to use my basic tools as a human, everything I have inside and out, and my camera as a tool to mediate this exchange of perception, and serve as another tool for clarity. Through my camera I hope to take what I perceive as clearly as possible, and feel the value of interaction. I simply want to react to the world as far as possible, and photograph subtle perception which I think leads me to some degree of clarity.

By being on one street and taking pictures of people also on the street, I am interested in what we perceive, and the connection we make. More than individuality, or different looking people, I am interested in displaying unity. Through a simple interaction, I hope that my pictures display some commonalities that can be perceived by everyone." - Yo Imae

I am really excited to have found this photographer. I really appreciate how he addresses his interaction with the people he is photographing. Many photographers feel it is important to portray their subjects as an entity and not influenced by the camera or the photographer, but this ideal of subject objectivity just seems to a more deceitful. The relationship between the subject and photographer is not always something to be avoided. In this case the relationship is a huge part of the image and the acknowledgement of it makes it closer to reality.

I think this relates to many photographers such as David Hilliard. He is exploring the world through his camera and chooses to accentuate this with multiple cohesive images. He is exploring spacial relations in reality, but undeniably through his camera.

William Eggleston (Cory's Pick)

My last artist pick is William Eggleston. While he is only tangentially related to what I'm doing right now, I really like his style. He takes pictures of ordinary moments, much like David Hilliard, and makes them significant. He doesn't transform the ordinary to make it interesting, he captures the interesting moments in the ordinary. I really enjoy his portrayal of the world, and think his style aesthetically captures my vision of the "past". There's a good video of his images with some audio from an interview with Eggleston's son at http://whitney.org/www/eggleston/images.jsp . There are more images too if you're interested. (I can't get the images to display right, so they're coming out pretty cropped.)

Kurt Wenner (Chris's Pick)

For this week I choose another artist who does sidewalk art. But it is not his sidewalk art that interested me. He also does paintings, architecture, and design; all of which are influenced by the Renaissance period. His ornamentation deals a great deal with perspective and illusion. He takes the sidewalk perspective art to another level by using numerous panels. He uses illusion and original designs to create everything from advertisements to murals.

He had one work in particular that caught my eye and that work alone made me choose him as my artist pick for this section. These two images show the ideal piece that I am trying to create. His ability to line up the perspectival lines fascinates me. The first image shows each panel of his box when laid out flat and the second image shows them when assembled together.

The next piece by him that interested me was his painting of St. George's Church. He painted an arched ceiling on a flat ceiling; another illusion that I am trying to create.


This website has some absolutely ridiculously amazing pieces.
Definitely worth checking out.
http://kurtwenner.com/artist.htm

Bobby Chiu (Casey's Pick)

Bobby Chiu is a great artist that I found on the Imaginism Studios website. He is an artist and teacher, primarily working with digital painting techniques. He does most of his work making creatures, which I thought related to Emily's pick, though most of them seem far friendlier. Chiu invents creatures, which seem to be a lot of mashing up of already existing creatures, a well as describing how they function in their environment. His digital paintings are a ton of fun and on his blog you can even watch him create them. I think most of his stuff is pretty self explanatory, so here it is!
Blog: http://imaginismstudios.blogspot.com/
Portfolio: http://www.imaginismstudios.com/port-artist-bob-01.html.

Shogo Endo and Shoji Otomo (Emily's Pick)

With the semester wrapping up, I've got a little something kitschy and nostalgic for you all.

Per usual, I can find very little information about the artists I've chosen. Most of the articles I've been able to find have been translated crudely with Google before I was able to glean any information at all, so you'll have to excuse the roughness of this post.


However, Shogo Endo and Shoji Otomo's joint efforts do speak a lot for themselves. These images come from the book, An Anatomical Guide to Monsters, 1967, 1997. The book's text and original concepts are attributed to Shoji Otomo, the man who pioneered the whole "kaiju biology" penomenon (more easily understandable for English speakers: "strange beast biology" or "monster biology" relating to those monsters from the old Godzilla, Gamera, Rodan, Mothra days... if you are a geek like I am). The illustrations to Shogo Endo, an accomplished animator and illustrator.


Shogo Endo has been a major animator on many more movies and animated television shows than I could count or name (or find English information about for that matter). Shoji Otomo had a stunningly full career for his years, a magazine editor and tireless proponent of Japanese science fiction during his 36 years.

These images appeal to me for obvious reasons, but kaiju eiga (怪獣映画 or simply: "monster movies") have always appealed to me for others. Godzilla (or Gojira, if we're getting technical) in particular is excellent if only for the sympathetic nature of Godzilla (and we're talking original 1954 Godzilla, you dig? Not the 1998 waste-of-money, Hollywood film). Yeah, he's pretty upset with Tokyo, but wouldn't you be upset if you were awoken by Hydrogen bomb tests in your own home waters which also mutate you to the point of gigantism and other strange bodily side effects? These monsters are imagined outsiders: stuck outside of humanity, outside of the animal kingdom, and outside of nature. But there is something real inside of them nonetheless, whether that reality is emotion or organs.


Shogo Endo and Shoji Otomo's collaborative efforts remind me most of Alice Newstead (Jenny's Pick). These pictures humanize creatures in a way most viewers would probably not think of without them. While Newstead uses her body to portray the pain and mistreatment of sharks, the images in An Anatomical Guide to Monsters remind us that even imaginary monsters have glands, brains, and marrow, and probably feelings too.

The book has just been re-released in Japan and one can buy it for only about $12.50 in US Dollars. (Check it outttt!)

Souun Takeda (Akio's Pick)

While I'm creating the sumi-e pieces this semester, my last post is on a calligrapher, Souun Takeda. The calligrapher was taught by his mother Soyo Takeda, who is also a calligrapher. He began his career as a calligrapher by creating his artwork on streets, in a manner similar to some musicians performing on the streets and in the subway stations. Up to this point, Takeda has collaborated with the professionals of different genres like the Noh actors and musicians, and was featured in various events such as the Fuji Rock Festival and the IAAF World Championship in Athletics. 

Like myself, Takeda's form of art is based on something that originated in the Eastern Asia and is aimed to be viewed and understood by people of the world, no matter what language they speak. The Chinese characters, the origin of all Japanese characters, have been around for over 3,000 years and were written and understood only by those who speak that particular language. The calligrapher is known as one of the forerunners who began the calligraphic style of deforming those characters in a way so they are more pictographic and emotional, and therefore could be understood by more people.