Edith Newhall Reviews Photography Exhibition at PPAC

Edith Newhall, Art Critic fro The Philadelphia Inquirer reviews Contemporary Photography exhibition at PPAC and features AB 053 by David M. Mitchell in her review making note that his work was one of a few abstract works in the show. CLICK ON IMAGE TO READ FULL ARTICLE.

Mitchell - Installation view at the RMA Institute, Bangkok thru June 12

The full portfolio of Mitchell's Abstracts - 2011 collection is at Jim Kempner Fine Art, NY

MITCHELL: Abstracts, 2011, Archival Pigment prints - 36 x 36 (44 x 44 inch paper size) - A Solo Exhibition at the RMA Institute, Bangkok, Thailand opens May 21 at 4:30 pm. Concurrently, works from this collection will be available from Lynn Dunham Fine Art in the United States.

ABOUT THE WORK: Mitchell’s Abstracts 2011 collection is comprised of 39 images which follow the rudiments of Concretism, a non-objective art form of the 1940’s that defied all the norms of the Contemporary Art of its time. The central characteristic of this art movement produced works without the influence of any external factors, such as nature, people, or things. By definition, Concrete Art does not require the artist to have a definitive concept or subject. It is about the inventive play of lines, planes, and color, forming unspecific patterns and true expression of an artist's spirit. It is this movement which gave birth to Constructivism, Suprematism and Neo-Concretism, Minimalism and Op Art, all periods in art history which are embodied in Mitchell’s work since his departure from the commercial arena. He has recently employed the process of creating assemblages which he chronicles through the lens putting a contemporary spin on the principles art movements of the past century.

Mitchell’s prominent and innate sensibility is clearly related and is presented particularly in the culmination of two years’ work with the Abstracts 2011 collection, a portion of which has been selected to be exhibited in this solo at the RMA Institute. With his fresh perspective, he employs a 21st century point of view and establishes a new personal archetype. Mitchell states, “The conventional notion that photography is about representation is/has been rejected in favor of pure abstraction. The images themselves along with the process of image making are the subject rather than the depiction of something identifiable.”

DIVERGENCE

at

the Sande Webster Gallery

Five Views On Photography In the main gallery July 2 - August 28, 2010

RECEPTION: Friday, July 9, 2010, 6-8pm

LOCATION: 2006 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 - (215) 636-9003

http://www.sandewebstergallery.com/

This summer the Sande Webster Gallery presents Divergence: Five Views on Photography. This exhibitionexplores diverse approches to the photographic medium. As the field continually evolves to incorporate digital technologies, artists are finding freedom from traditional processes and new creative opportunities for personaland aesthetic expression. This contemporary photography exhibition begins a dialog about the current and future state of the printed photographic image. Divergence showcases the work of Krantz, Love, Mitchell, Stein and Tarver.Gregg Krantz is a Philadelphia artist with a graphic sensibility expressed through a love of printmaking,photography and design.

Krantz’s recent photographic works are abstract narratives that document surfaces and patterns indicative of particular places. His close-up, detailed photographs capture the texture, color and quality of light in his West Philadelphia neighborhood as well as his travels abroad. Through subject matter and rhythmic phrasing in each series, Krantz heightens one’s perception of the invisible dimension of time. His photographs ofurban facades, geometric forms and painted surfaces are transformed into a personal vocabulary that are arrangedin series, like musical compositions, in varying qualities of tone and harmony.

Arlene Love is an accomplished figurative sculptor turned street photographer. She has been working on anongoing photographic project called Walking Distance over the past few years. She doesn’t search for exotic newplaces and people to photograph. Her camera goes with her as she goes about her life within walking distanceof her home. The people on the streets of Philadelphia are as interesting to her now as were those in Mexicowhere she lived for many years. Nothing is more interesting to Arlene Love than simply watching people – exceptphotographing them when they are blissfully unaware of her presence. Love has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, and is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.

Mitchell rejects the assumption that photography is about representation. Pure abstraction and the process ofimage making are the subject of his work. His photographs have more in common with the sensory experiencesassociated with color field paintings and ambient sound than they do with the tradition of photography. Images areshot with the purest of intuition and from a perspective largely influenced by aura occurrences associated withTemporal Lobe Epilepsy. Auras can produce heightened abstract emotions, affecting the visual field. Concepts and meanings in words that might invigorate the imagination, or perhaps for the intellect alone are explored in his titles, which enhance the imagery. While the experience with auras, is not always evident in the result, it is irrefutably connected in the process of creation.

Phil Stein creates dimensional photographic collages of the urban landscape. He finds inspiration in the random visual fragmentation that occasionally occurs in live streams and video downloads. The Streets series explores various themes of image reconstruction based on these common algorithmic accidents. Digital processes are used with a variety of fine papers to create this body of photo-based work. The resulting artwork is a combination of photograph, collage and sculpture. The world through Stein’s digital lens is made up of bits of visual information. He creates a new way of seeing the world around us, defining what it means to be an artist in the digital age.

Ron Tarver began his recent series of ethereal black and white flower portraits as a journey through his ownbackyard. Beginning the first day of the season, Tarver set out to document the spring flowers of the Northeast,beginning with crocuses then on to the next blooms, such as magnolia and tulips. Tarver captures the beauty ofnature in such intimate detail. There is a sensuality to these images that is revealed in the graceful curves of eachpetal. Tarver is a master at his craft and presents sumptuous images that remind us how incredible our naturalworld truly is. Tarver, a 2001 Pew Fellow, is included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Oklahoma Museum of History and the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

Sara Vanderbeek: Four Photographers, 2008 (detail 1 of 2)

I just received the latest issue of Blind Spot (BS) - stunning as usual! This is a tri-annual art journal that publishes unseen work by living photographers. Remarkably it is free of commercial and editorial content. Images are selected and published collaboratively rather than curatorially. While today, the de rigueur artists’ statements and essays to support work seem to have become as important as the work itself, BS presents artists and their works without any introductory, biographical or explanatory text. This is enlightening in the art world where over intellectualizing has sometimes spoiled the pure experience of viewing and appreciating art. As its creators have stated, BS is not about photography - it is photography.

BS juxtaposes emerging artists with those who are established creating a significant milieu where each can benefit from the other. By publishing accomplished artists on an intimate scale, BS enriches its readers viewers. Since its launch in 1993, BS has featured over 300 living photographers including Uta Barth, Gregory Crewdson, Tim Davis, Rineke Dijkstra, Adam Fuss, and Vik Muniz, many of whom have gained critical and audience acclaim through their exposure in the magazine.

Blind Spot is a photography publication of exemplary design: This tri-annual journal is a "must have" for fine art collectors and artists. To view the BS archive of the past fifteen years click here. It is distributed internationally and is found in some of the best independent bookstores, museums, and larger booksellers around the world. For information on where to find BS click here.

For the link for BS artist submissions click here.

Neuroscience and Art

"The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science and art, so that each completes the other. From: To answer our most fundamental questions, science needs to find a place for the arts." By Jonas Leher

In working with Mitchell, (Mitchell's BIO) whose abstract photography is directly related to Neroscience, I have been seeking like minded artists. Here are some links on the topic of neuroscience and art: The work of Steve Miller, intergrating science and art. I like this quote on his website: "It seems to me that the most important gifts the sciences and arts have to offer eachother is a recognition and a synthesis of their different approaches to thinking, their different ways of being in the world. When these differences come together, often uneasily, we witness the full complexity and the mystery, and ultimately the grandeur of being human. Alan Lightman "Nature" vol 434, March 17, 2005. - -- A photographer who has had a history of experiencing/enduring repeated strokes Christian Erroi BIO Images --- Laurie Frick, mixed media artist states on the topic of neuroscience and art: I use pattern, words and color to replicate the feel of neurons firing in the brain. IQ points, bits of memory and accumulated media are all chopped up into a brain memory salad. Neuroscientists think memory is closer to bits flying out a blender than the often cited file-drawer analogy. I imagine the brain breaks down visual time into bits where the novel and odd are as important to recollection as the intensely emotional.

I use vaguely familiar cut-up materials as a stand-in for all the stuff you encounter in a day, where 24 hours are broken into corresponding mathematical equivalents and reorganized into a whole. Science is just moments away from explaining how our minds take in rhythm and how visual recollection and memory affect how each of us respond to art. Many neuroscientists are trying to assess from brain scans what is visually pleasing or beautiful. I think attraction is built on early experience, brain fluency and the desire to recover something recognizable. Not at the conscious or narrative level, but where pattern operates like music, and provides a rhythm that feels like a familiar recollection.
Mapping the brain is possibly the last big frontier, and it seems within reach. I compulsively study neuroscience – maybe deep down I worry about the slow deterioration of my mind and memory….does a fixation ever resolve anything? --- Susan Rankaitis, photographer in collaboration with neuroscientist David Somers. Her Limbick works at Robert Mann Gallery. Intersections of Art and Science at Scripps College - --"I Remember Better When I Paint", narrated by Olivia de Havilland, is the first international documentary about the positive impact of art and other creative therapies on people with Alzheimer's and how these approaches can change the way we look at the disease. A film by Eric Ellena and Berna Huebner, presented by French Connection Films and the Hilgos Foundation.. Among those who are featured are noted doctors and Yasmin Aga Khan, president of Alzheimer's Disease International and daughter of Rita Hayworth, who had Alzheimer's.

The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography

APERTURE
Text by Lyle Rexer

From the beginning, abstraction has been intrinsic to photography, and its persistent popularity reveals much about the medium. The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography is the first book in English to document this phenomenon and to put it into historical context, while also examining the diverse approaches thriving within contemporary photography. Author Lyle Rexer examines abstraction at pivotal moments, starting with the inception of photography, when many of the pioneers believed the camera might reveal other aspects of reality. The Edge of Vision traces subsequent explorations--from the Photo Secessionists, who emphasized process and emotional expression over observed reality, to Modernist and Surrealist experiments. In the decades to follow, in particular from the 1940s through the 1980s, a multitude of photographers--Edward Weston, Aaron Siskind and Barbara Kasten among them--took up abstraction from a variety of positions. Finally, Rexer explores the influence the history of abstraction exerts on contemporary thinking about the medium. Many contemporary artists--most prominently Ilan Wolff, Marco Breuer and Ellen Carey--reject photography's documentary dimension in favor of other possibilities, somewhere between painting and sculpture, that include the manipulation of process and printing. In addition to Rexer's engagingly written and richly illustrated history, this volume includes a selection of primary texts from and interviews with key practitioners and critics such as Edward Steichen, László Moholy-Nagy and James Welling.

ABOUT THE BOOK COVER: Bill Armstrong's work featured on the cover of Rexer's latest book

The Mandala photographs are loosely based on Buddhist paintings known as mandalas. Mandalas are concentric circles of images that depict central themes in Buddhism, such as the Wheel of Life or the Map of the Cosmos. Through abstraction, simplification and blur, I hope to create a context for the exploration of these broad spiritual themes that, rather than relying on a codified system, remains open and invites the viewer's personal interpretation.
Like the other portfolios in the Infinity series, the Mandalas are made from collages that have been photographed with the camera's focusing ring set on infinity. Extreme defocusing allows me to create rhapsodies of color that change as one gazes into them: they pulsate as if alive. This sense of "being" within the inanimate invites an inquiry into the idea of the interconnectedness of all things.

Whether seen as celestial spheres, imaginary objects, or microscopic details, the Mandalas are meant to be meditative pieces--glimpses into a space of pure color, beyond our focus, beyond our ken. Their essential purpose is to create a sense of transcendence, of radiance, of pure joy!

I am at NeoCon Chicago representing works by Robert Brasher, R.R. Lyon, Vince Romaniello and David M. Mitchell. Mitchell's work is particularly apropos to the commercial interior design as his large scale c-prints are a available in multiple sizes. Although the work has commercial appeal, he maintains the status of fine artist in that editions are very limited.

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.

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.

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.

Follow Surface-Library Gallery Thai Travel Blog

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.

Click here for more information

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

Click here for more information

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.

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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