Friday, February 27, 2009




SO GO SHOOT SOME HORSE SHIT
AND MAKE IT LOOK BEAUTIFUL...
Lester Hayes, a pioneer of abstract photography who took photographs of ordinary things, using a sheet of mylar plastic shimmering in the breeze, to produce stunning images, and he did it all with the Kodak Instamatic. Kodak awarded his ingenuity with a major one man exhibition in New York City, but became disinchanted when Hayes discovered a tiny flaw in the camera that ultimately contributed to its demise. It was good for 1000 shots and then it self distructed!
Here's a recent shot off my phone:



Tuesday, February 17, 2009

David M. Mitchell: Friday

David M. Mitchell: Thursday

David M. Mitchell: Wednesday
A photograph captures a memory or documents a moment in time. When we look at photo albums of our past we can begin to wonder if we really remember the moment or is it just the snap shot we now remember from having viewed it repeatedly? We are all memory collectors with our cameras and are not inhibited by the medium. It doesn’t come with the same daunting strings attached as a paint brush and paint for the non artist. But behind the lens there are photographers with cameras and there are artists with cameras. Undeniably when David M. Mitchell is behind the lens, he is an artist. His emotive work doesn’t merely document a moment in time. It captures the essence of time passing and sometimes a complete disconnect or suspension in time beguiling the viewer with a gift of serenity. Through his metaphoric alluring imagery he engages the senses beyond sight. The work could even be described as sonic – if audible the sound would be ambient.

It is not the literal world we envision through the artist’s eyes or lens, but what we experience through his introspective mind. He transports us to a realm of contrasts which lie between definition and uncertainty; past and present; reality and the imaginary; even life and death. In his work these opposites coexist in a paranormal state as we are transported to a limbo where the unreal becomes real, the subliminal becomes obvious and audio disturbance becomes ambient sound. In this semi-conscious disconnect he imposes; the amorphous becomes a crystal clear tranquil reality.

Monday, February 16, 2009

I was in Philadelphia this weekend and
discovered one of the city’s Fine Art treasures:


GALLERY 339
339 South 21st Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
215.731.1530

Martin McNamara is director and part owner of Gallery 339,
Philadelphia's only art gallery dedicated to photography.
Mr. McNamara began developing the business five years ago,
and the gallery opened with its first exhibition in April 2005. The focus of the gallery is
contemporary photography, exhibiting a mix of local work as well as photography from around the world. McNamara's interest in photography developed as a collector and he is not partial to one specific area of photography.

Now exhibiting “Extended Views”
An exhibit of recent panoramic landscape photography by
Tetsugo Hyakutake and Daniel Lobdell.
Both artists, although working in a panoramic format,
embody a unique language of their own while examining
our historical and cultural relationship to the urban landscape.

Sunday, February 15, 2009



Brian Eno Interview Part I - 77 Million Paintings

Brian Eno Interview Part 2 - 77 Million Paintings

This may be old news but still worth a look. Read this article about the artist's relationship with the MAC. And more articles here.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Have your images printed on the
Epson Stylus Pro 9800 by a professional:

Artist Jane Martin offers archival inks and papers (a range of Epson and Hahnemuhle papers - and other papers and canvas for significant orders). Print size: up to 44 inches wide by length of your choice. Bring your file (300 dpi suggested) on a CD and leave with a perfect print. Same day printing available. Color-correcting and Photoshop.

email: janewmartin@mac.com or call 324-7179.
Reasonable rates
Springs location.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Melancholia: James Elaine and William Basinski

William Basinski is a classically trained musician and composer who has been working in experimental media for over 25 years in NYC. His haunting and melancholy soundscapes explore the temporal nature of liferesounding with the reverberations of memory and the mystery of time. His epic 4-disc masterwork, TheDisintegration Loops received international critical acclaim and was chosen as one of the top 50 albums of2004 by Pitchfork Media. Art Forum selected The River, his transcendental 2-disc shortwave music experimenton Raster-Noton, Germany as one of the top ten albumsof 2003. Installations and films made in collaboration with artist-filmmaker, James Elaine have been presented internationally, most recently at Cite de la Musique, Paris, and REDCAT at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles for The Museum of Contemporary Art’s VISUAL MUSIC Exhibition. Basinski’s new album,the Garden of Brokenness, was released in January 2006 on 2062/USA and is distributed internationally. Listen to William Basinski and similar artists here.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Kindred Spirits with Shared Aesthetic
Related to the intriguingly ambiguous
narratives of Jane Martin,
is the work of Fine art photographer,
David M. Mitchell of the UK,
living in Bangkok and Painter, James Kennedy of the UK,
living in Springs, NY.
Currently James is visiting Thailand.
Jane Martin: Depth Sound

David M. Mitchell: Amorphia

David M. Mitchell: Archaeopteryx

David M. Mitchell: Fate

Jane Martin: Shelter-Sky

Jane Martin: Sudden Dance
David M. Mitchell: Numinous C print available in limited edition of varied sizes.

James Kennedy: Burning the Chafe, 48 x 52 inches, Oil on birch

PRESS FOR JANE MARTIN

By Eric Ernst
Publication: The East Hampton Press & The Southampton Press
Dec 15, 08 3:11 PM

In her current exhibition (it is now closed) at Guild Hall in East Hampton, “Reckoning and Rapture,” Jane Martin is showing works conjuring intriguingly ambiguous narratives brimming with sensuality and an understated yet powerfully emotional psychological tension.
The exhibition is particularly interesting in its demonstration that these effects are perceived less by the viewer’s eyes and more through the emotions, reflecting, as the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once wrote, that one should never “pretend to understand the world only by the intellect, we apprehend it just as much by feeling.”


This has been an ongoing theme in Ms. Martin’s work over the last few years, most powerfully in the images from her series of video stills in the “Closer Far Away” series, featuring swaying nude female forms dancing to unheard yet delicately insistent rhythms. Allowing the figuration to take on mysterious qualities of apparitional wood nymphs furtively darting in and out of mystifying banks of fog in a primeval forest, the works juxtapose a certain surreal and dreamlike ambiance with the implied rationale and immediate impact of photographic reality.


Creating an environment in which madness and sanity are interchangeable emotional components, these works construct an intriguingly vague story line that is a product of the cadences and melodies elicited more by what was partially hidden than what was immediately visible. These words could apply directly to the work of David Mitchell.


In “Shelter-Sky” (video still, archival pigment print, resin, mixed media on wood, 2005), for example, the figure is frozen in motion, the strange intensity of the forest scene accentuated by the thick banks of fog from which the figure materializes. This effect is also heightened by the layers of resin that are poured over the photographic image, the elegant sheen invoking a great sense of depth while further underscoring a sensation of ambiguity and emotional distance that is powerfully arresting.


This construct is also prevalent in some of Ms. Martin’s more recent works, such as “On Wings, Lifted II” (video still, archival pigment print, resin, mixed media on wood, 2008) and “Reckoning” (digital C-print mounted on Dibond, 2008), each of which immediately establishes ineffable psychological overtones with the figuration of dancers frozen in motion, moving to what seems to be a cacophonous harmony that is silently dissonant and expressively jarring. Embodying a profound combination of mystery and sensuality, they illustrate the essayist Havelock Ellis’s observation that dance “is no mere translation or abstraction from life, it is life itself.” Interestingly, this existential narrative, which initially seemed a product of the ambiguity of the figures themselves as unrecognizably hazy seraphs, gains even more impact in the recent works in which Ms. Martin focuses on fragments of images that she then configures and constructs into a kind of psychological portraiture.


In works such as the two triptychs, “Immersion #1” and “Immersion #2” (both Digital C-Print, gallery mount on Sintra, 2008), for example, while posture and pose are still important elements in the compositions, the action derived from motion becomes more reminiscent of a stop-action sequence than of a single cell from which one discerns the artist’s thematic concept. In addition, and perhaps most important, while the figures are partially obscured by steam and condensation, Ms. Martin makes the personas of the models a more immediate element. This is accomplished through a narrative derived from stringing together shards of a given instant, thereby creating a disjointed portrait of a moment in time, a stream of consciousness that is somehow simultaneously openly revealing and opaquely vague.
This dichotomy reaches an apogee of sorts in the nine-panel “Inward Appearances” (video stills, archival pigment prints, resin, mixed media on wood panels, 2008) in which the grid of abstracted photographs offers a psychological narrative that is contemplatively disrupted, like fragments of memories that may pertain to a specific moment, even though their meaning changes depending on the order in which one confronts them.

This same effect is also a factor in Ms. Martin’s series in which the human form is replaced by images of waves, the differences in configuration of each swell managing to tie them together as pieces of an ever changing plot that one understands as much through their relationship to abstract imagery as to representational reality.
________________

Detail (section) from my latest Topographic Tiling Series of 12x12 inch pieces are intended to wall mount intuitively in accordance with the particular environment.


Lynn Dunham: Topographic Tiling Segment 2008, 12 x 12 inches poly-eurathane foam, latex, acrylic and ink

Monday, February 2, 2009


Calvin Klein's house on the beach in Southampton may get the wrecking ball. This former Dupont estate, once a stately summer retreat of classic Georgian architecture akin to Winterthur became this monster of a house which should house a bat cave but instead an aquarium large enough for a whale is on the lower level. Read more about this in the current news here and a 1984 NY Times related article.

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