"Exhibition" Pictures for Discussion and Questions NSFW - Photographic Art Sampling from the coming Photo LA 2014 Exhibition

It's daunting to represent anyone else's art in words and certainly impossible to bring you to the hundreds of photographers showing at the Photo LA 2014 Exhibition next week. So I'll continue to pick individual works to build up some feeling of where curator's choices 2014 are attempting to take us.

For understanding chemistry, it's great to have a reference and Dalton the chemist, discovered the element, hydrogen. It's mass is the standard by which all other elements are judged and measured. It's structure is basic, unarguably and simple. There's just one electron and one proton. Just the right Ying and Yang, masculine and feminine, right and wrong. Everything else can reference that one unique atom to explore the chemistry of all other matter we come across in our journeys. For this review of participants in Photo LA 2014, I have placed Jim Collum in the position of our photographer to be referenced. (I could have chosen any one of a number of other photographers here, but Jim happens to be having his work shown at Photo LA this year as last year, so folk who visit can examine what I'm proposing and make direct judgements on my assessments in this thread!) We know his work is unquestionably well imagined discovered and executed. now we can explore others who have achieved recognition, fame and some at least, fortune too!

As we move away from that classic style in photography, I'll being you examples to consider, where photographers work at the membrane separating real from imagined or bizarre. But always in the b.g. I ask you to keep in mind the beautifully rendered platinum-palladium photographs imagined, discovered and printed by the hands of the photographer, James, "Jim", Collum. That's to me, just for now, the reference by which I'd look at other imaginative work where the subject has been perturbed seriously even before the shutter is released!

Here I'll introduce a silver gelatin originating picture by the Phoenix Arizona artist, Christopher Colville(represented by the Duncan Miller Gallery in LA).

Christopher Colville is well respected, paints as well as photographs. He was commissioned by the City of Phoenix to create a series of works relating to Arizona's effect on their threatened desert ecology.






Some of these pictures are found here. He tried to bring to us some of the struggles we impact and threaten the desert's natural but fragile ecology. He has an extensive portfolio of photographs and paintings. However, this one series qualifies him best to merit your attention compared to looking at other choices. The series frames him as as a serious observer of our footprint on nature.

Having said that, we now venture forth into a zone of adventurism with serious photography. Since photography, as Maris Rusis, the Australian technically adept Photographer argues, is writing with light, I'd imagine we can place this unusual artwork by Colville, as representative of real photography, where mere digital pictures would not be admitted.


The photographer uses burning gunpowder on genuine silver gelatin film to expose and impact the silver nitrate to allow processing to yield images "written by light". Of course, the result as hardly predictable even by the pattern of the burn. However, it does represent a transient confluence of creativity and destruction. One could draw parallels between the creative growth of society in his city of Phoenix Arizona impacting and burning up nature's balance in the fragile desert ecosystems.

So here again, I draw comparisons which may be just rooted in my viewing experience, or as the British Photographer Mark Hampton would say, "reading the Reading". Or, could it be that the dichotomy of progress wrestling with destruction in city growth is really the kind of dual played out when gunpowder burns. That's for you, the reader to judge, as you "read the writing on my reading", LOL!

Asher

So, now I move to my next celebrated and talented photographer, based in Brooklyn N.Y.. Alsion Brady, while creative has little in socially redeeming qualities were I tasked with selecting folk for some sanctuary and guaranteed survival, before some doomsday event. Even if resources were few, I'd not allow her in!

OTOH, we have a glut of exposure opportunities for artists who annoy, irritate and insult us. Alison Brady is one example. She's a success and talented enough! Here esthetic judgment seems to have absorbed the oddities of image metaphors as exemplified in the works of the great Belgian artist, Magritte but the obsessions of Diane Arbus for the celebrating defectiveness in human make up. Since I am writing this in advance of the exhibit, I do not know all the pieces that will be exhibited. I do know however, which of her work is most recently exhibited and so I've chosen some examples to illustrate what one might see at the Photo LA 14 next week!




The two photographs above, can be recognized as reasonably original in concept and well executed. Are they it a jab against the veiled life of religious women in Muslim societies or does it refer to the woman of African origin or is it about all women. Does it actually refer to the masks we all wear, male and female as we navigate the social gauntlets society puts everyone through as we check out, inspect, rate, judge, dismiss or elevate each other.

I don't know the answers, but I find the art challenging but not in poor taste. Magritte messed around with inanimate objects and apart from distributing a lot of British looking Bowler hats, was pretty respectful to the human form.


This artist, however, sees nothing wrong in giving a woman a face of potato chips or roses, or implanting disfiguring tumorous masses in a lady's panties or on her back. Imagine that there's a dearth of malformed humans and Arbus would have gone home and overdosed. well Alison Brady has a fresh approach to photographing disfigurement and the imbecile: she simple creates them and she's good at it!

I'm grossed out by some of the work, while I appreciate her remarkable talent. Here's one of the least disturbing of her works:

House Projects: Alison Brady: Untitled Ab 1007

C Print 30x40"​

This work could very well grace a wall in one's house, as long as it had very large walls so that it would not dominate the mood of the place. However, it's more likely to be at home in an Art Museum in the context of a well-curated exhibition. There, the artist's universe of ideas will set a proper preparation of the mind for this work. Then we'll get the most out of Alison Brady's work.

This following picture will be exhibited next week! Many of her works are untitled. (As I find any names, I'll update the thread!)

Likely as not, some pictures will be already known to you or else you might better explain the meanings the works carry. Be encouraged to comment!

Asher