“Sierpinski Triangle”, Morphogenesis, Archival Inkjet Print, 2011, 30″x40″

Come by this Thursday and check out my thesis show at the Visual Arts Gallery!

Visual Arts Gallery
601 West 26th Street
New York, NY

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 16 6-8pm.

Show runs June 10 – 25, 2011.
Gallery Hours: Monday-Thursday 10am-6pm,
Friday 10am-5pm, Saturday 10am-6pm.

http://mfaphoto.schoolofvisualarts.edu/exhibition/2011/

http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6221&Itemid=174

An Excerpt:

“Spencer Finch: There’s a line from Freud where he talks about Kant, who said that there were two things—a moral thing and a natural thing—that continued to amaze him: the night sky and the goodness in the hearts of men. Freud was very dismissive, and said, “Oh yes, the night sky is quite beautiful.” I think it’s those two things, the idea of images that can straddle the space between abstraction and representation, and then also subject matter, that produces a sense of wonder and approaches this idea of the sublime. “

So, essentially, photography’s unique ability to represent the “real” was overtaken as soon as images could be worked out mathematically and reproduced digitally. Photography was put on the digital bandwagon but lost it’s technological uniqueness after Mandelbrot’s mathematics was realized. And while photography is still the most accessible way to create an image of something out in the world, it’s not unique in this pursuit.

“Dr. Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: how long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline.

“Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” Dr. Mandelbrot told The New York Times earlier this year in an interview. “The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.” ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html

To me, Mandelbrot was a mathematical poet and came closer than anyone to blurring the hard drawn line between nature and technology.

“Art by means of computer technologies is more comparable with other technologically mediated art forms such as film, video and photography, where the individuality and voice of an artist does not manifest itself in a direct physical intervention.”

My program emphasizes that it is focused on “lens based arts”. Maybe technological arts will suit it better?

“If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of the map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though the shreds are still discernible in the deserts–the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging)–as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that proceeds the territory–precession of simulacra– that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.” – Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Many similes and metaphors have been used in the attempt to understand mental abilities or functions. Here, in the as yet imperfect state of science, metaphors are absolutely necessary: before we know we have to start by imagining something……….

There is nothing finished in the brain, no real images; instead, we see only virtual, potential images waiting for a sign to be transformed into actuality. How this transformation into reality is really achieved is a matter of speculation. The greatest mystery of brain mechanics has to do with dynamics, not statics. We are in need of a comparative term that will allow us to see not only how an object receives and stores an imprint, but also how this imprint at any given time is reactivated and produces new vibrations within the object.” – Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

See more of her work here: http://www.ursulavonrydingsvard.net/

“Here’s a guide to the galleries-the art world in a nutshell-a tree of contemporary art from pure (abstract) “paintings” (on your left) to pure (illustrative) “pictures” (down on your right). If you know what you like but don’t know anything about art, you’ll find the artists on the left hardest to understand, and the names on the right easiest and most familiar (famous). You can start in the cornfields, where no demand is made on you and work your way up and around. Be especially careful of those curious schools situated on that overloaded section of the tree, which somehow think of themselves as being both abstract and pictorial (as if there could be both today). The best way to escape from all of this is to paint yourself. If you have any friends that we overlooked, here are some extra leaves. Fill in and paste up……”

I remember the first time I saw Gerhard Richter’s book, Atlas, as clearly as if it were yesterday. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, it was 2006 and I had temporarily moved to New York for my job. I decided that during that time I would not make work. This decision was mainly due to the fact that I did not have all my art supplies with me. I was, at the time, working in a mix of landscape photography and alternative photographic methods. I also hadn’t started taking digital photography seriously in my practice, so, all the photos I took with my company’s dslr I regarded as experiments.

I was at a friend’s apartment and it was one of those sticky summer nights. He had no air conditioning, so I was trying not to sweat through all of my clothing. We started going through his vast collection of philosophy and art books when he approached me with this extremely thick book. He asked me, “Have you ever seen Gerhard Richter’s work?” and I said, “The abstract painter?” Until that moment, I had never seen any of his photographic work only his abstract paintings, none of which I was all that impressed with having seen lots and lots of abstract painters during my art studies.

He said, “No, his photographs.” and he handed me the book.

I was sitting on his couch with the book in my lap. I opened it and that was it. That was the first time I had seen so clearly a practice of making images that inspired me to pursue something similar. The multiplicity of shots, the categorization of images, the beauty of the landscapes. To me, the images were one very long and soothing song. It was a very powerful book for me to look through at the time. It inspired me to go down a path of documentation with photography that I had not yet previously considered.

If you have not seen this book, and you are pursuing a practice that involves photography, I highly suggest that you take a look.

Photo taken by iPhone camera resting on an elliptical work-out machine.

Why is this an important step in deconstructing digital images?

Hexadecimals are a code that computers use to break down information into a binary language, which is how computers store information. The thing you are seeing on your screen that represents the photograph is the interpretation of such data into objects, color, composition, etc. Showing the hexadecimal make-up of a photograph is one way to show the procedural break-down of any digital image into a computer-native format. Unless you are working in pure analog, this is the “material” make-up of any photo you are looking at. It’s no longer text, image, object. It’s something like; text/image, object.

“…but in the end it’s always the subject that vanishes behind the lens. But this can be transposed elsewhere. Perhaps the species, by inventing a multiplicity of virtual connections, is finding a way of losing itself in the immensity of the networks. In the technical universe, the real actor is not the one you think he is. The rules of the game are doubtless not what you think they are either.”

-Paroxysm, Interviews with Phillippe Petit

In this passage, Baudrillard speaks of the sign being returned to object-hood. So, as an example, technologically speaking, things that are referenced as objects in hyperspace are not just signs of objects, but objects themselves. I take this way of thinking to heart, because my interest in photography and art in general lies in process and materiality. For 10 years I have played with the idea of using process in an object-oriented way to manipulate what is represented in the photograph. Sure, I have had an interest in documenting actual events or specific things that are conventionally perceived as not being obscured through process, but that is not what drives my motivation to make art. I do not particularly enjoy taking a straight photo of a thing and sitting in a group of people while we throw around ideas about the meaning derived by the objects in that image that have already been discussed dozens of times in similar ways. I am interested in taking an abstract idea and applying it directly to the visual piece in question, with or without the representation. Sometimes this leads to a visually confusing outcome because the piece is so specific, trying to derive vague meaning from it is difficult if you have never seen it before. So, in a sense, I am literally using language in attempt to create my own visual language through the interplay of object/idea. Every creative idea I have ever had has based itself upon some language in a text I have read because I use learning as a key strategy to making art. My ideas do not come to me because I have thought to myself, “I wonder what will happen if I do this”. While that is always an intriguing way to think of work I am making, the core idea is not so simple.

This mode of production seems to be very selfish in the sense that it does not allow anyone viewing easy access to the heart of what I “must” have been thinking when I made the images, they are there to beg the question about what I was thinking in a way that is, hopefully, meditative. Purely visually speaking, I want my work to have a meditative quality to it that allows for anyone viewing it to visually see it as making sense in a very personal way….the work is about me, but is also about you. This is, perhaps, my most difficult task. To come out of specificity to something so vaguely appealing that it will reach out to others in a way that transcends language.