Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Hin Chua "After the Fall" (review)

Hin Chua's photographic project “After the Fall” successfully navigates the often complex conversation surrounding the spaces where human made and the natural intersect. In most cases contemporary landscape photography has an axe to grind, playing heavily to one political side or the other reducing the complexity of environmental issues into a dialectic between utopia/dystopia. Granted Chua's photographs rely on certain visual tropes normally associated within the visual rhetoric of utopic/dystopic, but it is his perfect balancing of the two, manufactured being dystopic, and nature being utopic, that provides for an engagement with the subject matter rather than a statement or matter of fact lecture.
Chua's compositions create a visual rhetoric and sophistication presenting a standard of viewing similar to the early works of dadaist photographers and the new phenomenology whom worked to push for a unique photographic language to encompass the dynamic and oft complex relationships in their time period. Chua deftly finds spaces where nature and the manufactured meet not in contrast but in perverse blends of the utopic/dystopic. In the images below a band of brown and dried weeds resemble/mimic the structure of high gain power lines set against a clear blue sky.

In another photograph power lines cut across and grid the sky into square sections above nature and organic shapes and colours.

In other photographs Chua folds his trope and sticks it on its head. An other wise barren landscape of grassy hills and plains are transformed into the surreal nightmare of multi colour plastic bags presenting a hellish uncanny version of flowers in a meadow.


Chua ask his viewers to contemplate the idea and definition of nature and human made. For one side of the environmental political equation this people are boating in a toxic mess masked by the oft invisible poison of toxic waste. The other side, the PR blitz of clean green industry existing side by side with green spaces across the globe.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Photographer photographs

Fellow colleague and friend Alyssa Marzolf just posted some new work on her website. Check it out.


Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Things that don't belong - Patrick Bernatchez

The odd juxtaposition where nature reasserts itself in post-apocalyptic fashion resulting in chaos and destruction. The mundane safe unsuspecting ubiquitous places such as the office, or the interior of a car (chrysler) is turned upon its head. This technique is similar and in line with the reemergence of surrealist techniques such as depaysement or making strange through the juxtaposition of unlikely objects and events. Where the surrealist often failed to move beyond the ostranenie Patrick Bernatchez pushes forward, utilizing the surrealist technique as both a device for an uncanny investigation into site specific spaces, as well as the oft complicated relationship between nature and man.


In the video stills from the short film “I feel cold today” a metaphoric richness comes through in the multi layered concept Bernatchez has put forth for the viewer in the staged set. We are presented with both the psychological affect of the ubiquitous layout of the office space, and its affect on the psychology of the worker. The office as the site of continual fluctuation between the tedium of work and the grand myth of the capitalistic system. The pale colors, cheap office furniture, the visual white screech of fluorescent lights. Buried beneath the snow one can see Bernatchez second punch, his environmental angle. How readily to we forget the destructive and power of mother nature to reassert itself into the man made world. Here, lest we forget, is the uncanny future and reality of our daily world. We hold mother nature off with cheap walls and pumped in heat and artificial light, but when given the chance she will take it all back. Are we witnessing a cubical workers fantasy, or a eco-political gesture lest we forget the awesome power just outside the walls of our cubicles and cars.


Unlike “I feel cold today” the process and production of Chrysalide is made more apparent. Through the obvious placement of the lights, and the semi commercial quality of the lighting Bernatchez ramps up the fetishistic quality that the car has become in society. The performative act of the two hoses pushing gallons upon gallons of water into the car only to sit back and watch is a kind of sacrilege that breaks down the relationship and aura we have to the automobile. This breaking down and then revealing recontexualizes the car as a claustrophobic and isolating structure. As we speed by the world outside the windows of the car, tuned into radio stations, texting, cell phone calls, all the while speeding past everything in a disconnected manner. Car as insulated fishbowl, so why not treat the inside of the car as such. And what better car model to use than a Chrysler.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

"we may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoycing."

Was just reading over fellow artist, collegue, and friend Kim Neudorf's blog and discovered this serious yet humorous image by Sonja Vordmaier.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Debord's "Derive" and "Pyschogeography"

Guy Debord and Situationist the Theory of the Derive, and Pyschogeography. I recently came across the essay "The Poetics of the Derive" written by Vincent Kaufmann. Not being that familiar with Debord's Derive, and only slightly informed of its predecessor from the Surrealist Andre Breton and his walks through Paris, it quickly raised many questions to tackle. Most specifically the idea of looking at the early photographic works of Eugene Atget, and his systematic walks through Paris cataloging the ephemeral Paris of his time. One which was being demolished to make way for the Modern streets and boulevards that Debord and the Situationist would later lament in the same manner Atget did before. Yet, how might this theoretical construct of the Derive apply to the large amount of contemporary urbanscape photography found in the United States. And even more interesting the actual activity the photographer performs in order to find these locations.

Debord's Derive is not simple a walk through the streets of the city, of chance encounters. Instead one must move rapidly and decisively through the urban space, with intention. When possible the practice should not be done alone, but in groups of two or three. They should be aware of their surroundings, of the "...ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction..." (link to essay) Thus the most talented photographers who's oeuvre includes the investigation of the urbanscape. The walk itself, the interaction of operator, camera, and site breaks down the normal relationship we have with public urban spaces. Their activity alone is the Derive.

Breaking the rules of theory to return to Eugen Atget melancholic catalog of a ghostly Paris that is no longer. His photographs present to us the sites slated to be demolished, of the concrete reality of the demolition not just of squares and houses, but of the intricate means and subtle variations of the daily social realities created and maintained through public works and layout.

The pyschogeography. Atget's photographs of a forgotten urbanscapes now stand like so many rectangular ghost, an archive of ephemera, of power structures that have morphed, shifted, become temporal and translucent. They function as nostalgic tombstones, racked nicely in a file, viewed sequentially, ordered and precise. Are Atget's photographs any less powerful than they were in his time period? Or does the contemporary viewer see them only as quaint post cards, a romantic bygone era of a dirtier, grimmer, Paris leaving out the pychogeography of that site and the site that will replace it?

If Atget's photographs have lost their power to be anything more than romantic nostalgic post cards and coffee table books, then what of the contemporary photographers working within the urbanscape. Their photographs present tangible realities, visual stand ins of the power structures, specifically in the United States. Yet is the mere representation of these sites enough, does it go far enough to instigate more than just chance encounters for the viewer looking at the photographs. And what of the Modernist aesthetic formal qualities laid over these sites. Atget's Paris is grimy, dark, moody. Contemporary urbanscape photographs are made to be as beautiful as they are not in reality. The photographers activity of finding these sites is the derive, the photograph itself is the pyschogeography, the questioning. But unlike the gritty ghost of Atget's Paris, their contemporary formal presentation, high gloss, bright colours, fends off the questions raised by their derive. Instead the viewer is left with one word, nostalgia. The photograph becomes a representation of the United States political landscape and the power structures in play as it slowly turns and morphs. Instead of critical action and engagement, we mourn. The United States is changing and morphing its political and social power structures while its identity as super power declines. Its intial status symbols and sturctures that came to represent power have shifted, take on new meaning. Like so many tombstones the contemporary photographic formal aesthetic and their beautiful rendering of the dynamic and shifting urbanscape moots any possible critical interaction. Instead we are presented with lovely nostalgia, and pretty memento mori.