Evie Cahir – Untitled (2013)

I’ve been following Cahir for around two years now. She’s extremely talented; her doodles and cast offs are at times nearly photo-realistic.

Recently she’s been working on a comic called A Single Tear. The overall aesthetic seems like harsh pencil drawings from snapshot reference material with a certain Munch-esque whimsy for visual abstraction/oddity.

What’s noteworthy beyond the excellent craft, is her drawings work so damn well in part because of her frames. Her compositions are legible, dynamic and cinematic in the extreme.

I’m particularly taken with her depictions of the Berlin neighborhood of Neukölln–because she nails the interplay between the ethereal late day light and the electric feeling of this city’s (I’m writing this in an bar several blocks from Hermannplatz) chaotic fuss and bustle.

Momo Okabe – Untitled from the series Dildo (2008)

I was so high the last time I passed through Amsterdam. (How high were you?)

So high I completely missed the renowned photography museum foam.

I was still stoned this time but for the sake of proving there’s a difference between drug use and drug abuse, I managed to stop in this time.

For all the shiny things I’d heard about foam, yeah, uh, color me exceedingly unimpressed. Granted, a good part of the museum was shut down so that they could install a new exhibit on Magnum contact sheets. But Anne di Vries can eat my asshole–he’s clearly one of these Kurzweil kool-aid guzzling bastards who think that we need to shake off our limited perceptions and embrace the coming neo-human singularity. (I’m totally not shitting you. Did anyone else see this feature in Time about the future of photography? Especially disturbing given Apple’s Live Photos BS?)

The best part of the show was Momo Okabe’s Bible and Dildo, two bodies of work–ostensibly documenting the fringe existence of transgender folks in Japanese culture and the physical process of surgical transition.

I was warned before I purchased a ticket and subsequently via signs and blackout curtains blocking the portals to the exhibition that what I was about to see was explicit/shocking.

In the end, I do not understand all the strum und drang. Some of the pictures are intimate, perhaps even a little awkward given the viewer is treated to access no one other than a lover would ever be granted.

Okabe cites Araki as a formative influence–but it feels a bit like leading with the patently obvious (a well known subterfuge tact). Perhaps better corollaries might be Nan Goldin, Wong Kar-Wai and Tsai Ming-Liang.

As a photographer, Okabe tends to produce images that always have about a 8 degree from level cant to them–nearly always left leaning. She favors medium close ups unless pragmatic concerns–nurses tending to a patient before and after surgery, distance from the subject. These disjunctions from the rest of the work as a whole are actually what results in the most compelling imagery. (In fact, I would got so far as to say that all her loosely landscape–in terms of scale and content–is actually excellent and vital in a way most landscape photography these days isn’t.

The above image was in my opinion the best in the exhibition and therefore in the museum. There’s something straight forward and unguarded in it. The light and the confrontation short-circuit the insistence upon gender labels.

In essence, although I think the act of documenting the experience of transgender folks is of crucial importance–I think the fact that it is clearly presented as documentary, let’s the viewer off the hook as to why the documentary is so desperately needed. As documents, the images feel sparse and incomplete. However, the part of the work that is preoccupied with say portraiture or the moment of being alive and present in the world (which is how most of the more landscape stuff feels–as if the photographer nixed her own aesthetic preference in favor of the truth of the moment).

Agnieszka Sosnowska – Nowell, Massachusetts (1991)

If you follow this blog for the artier stuff, then you are probably already familiar with Lens Culture.

They do some rad stuff: serving as the impetus for posts featuring the work of Anna Grzelewska and Kumi Oguro.

Honestly, I was thoroughly underwhelmed by their presentation of Sosnowska. By focusing solely on her work’s ‘coming to terms’ with her families immigration to Iceland, there’s this sort of O Pioneers! vibe to it that registers as coy, sentimental and over-precious.

While I was in Iceland, the boastfully named Ljósmyndasafn Reykjavíkur, or Reykjavík Museum of Photography, had a show up called Traces of Life featuring a smattering of Sosnowska’s work.

I can’t speak to the quality of curation of the show–it seemed to lack an overarching cohesion and although explicitly preoccupied with self-portraiture, a great deal of the work was abstract in a way that beggars the question: how is this self-portraiture? (Not that most of the work on display offered much guidance on how to address such questions.)

Still, I have to qualify it as a success because I walked away with a respect for Sosnowska, I would have otherwise missed. Part of it was realizing that her work is fundamentally rooted in self-portraiture. Second, nothing available online does her images justice. She makes rich, contrasty, 3D baryta prints that are small, make stubborn demands for intimate observation and seethe with the ambiguous intention of a stumbled upon coiled serpent.

Source: sosphotographs.com

Akif Hakan Celebi – Raven (2015)

Although I’m not head-over-heals for Celebi’s work as a whole, I am in love with his rigorously consistent use of scale.

Yes. He uses different focal length lenses but across them the relationship between the amount of space occupied by the subject vs. their environment remains virtually identical.

I recognize that as an insanely subjective claim–any scale that compliments what the photographer is trying to achieve is acceptable in the end. However, I think Celebi present an ideal balance between the subject as focal point of the composition while presenting a contextually comprehensive cross-section of their environment.

My feeling this way likely stems from my background in cinematography. Given that in almost every image, if the character we’re not posed towards the camera and maintaining eye contact this could be a still from a narrative film. (Although I’ll grant that not many films these days would utilize a shot this wide for anything more than an establishing shot.)

Michael Culhane (aka Solus Photography) – Into the Light (2012)

Culhane’s body of work is never (as in not ever) going to be something I’ll celebrate. He does manage some crazy great skin tone on occasion, I will give him that.

The skin tone here isn’t anything to write home about but the picture is damn exquisite–her pose, his pose, the use of space, the way the light falls off all ‘round them.

Plus, I love photos where hetero couples are presented in flagrant delicto and it’s the dude who is fully open laid out for all to see and the woman is strategically positioned so that she remains obscured.

Source: polki1

quatre48:

[19.07.14] Bedroom #05/ quatre48.com

Plume Heters-Tannenbaum – Bedroom #05 (2014)

Normally, I try to space out posts from a single artist instead of packing them into a thick clot. I am making an exception for Quatre48 because I’ve been returning to this series with unusual frequency in the last three weeks.

I still maintain there’s a desperate need for more strenuous editing. Yet, these images trade in a palpable immediacy; and while you certainly can’t argue any sort of inconsistency in that theme across the entire series, what gets muddled in the presentation is their unusual perspective and carefully cultivated artfulness.

What I mean by the former is that the perspective of the images is definitively female. We have what I can only presume are self-portraits–so there’s the explicit photographer documenting her sexuality but even without knowing that there’s an implicit non-normative (w/r/t to stereotypical presentations in porn) gaze.

I can’t help but comparing the aesthetic to Aeric Meredith-Goujon, only these manage to intrigue and fascinate while Goujon–honestly–creeps me the fuck out.

Anyway, the point I’m getting at is that I can’t decide if this is an exception that proves a rule or if perhaps it is possible to produce something intended to be porn that is also simultaneously art–because this accomplishes exactly that.

Source: quatre48

Women can only stay marginal in an object-centered art history. Producing a few more names and flirting with the possibility of a ‘feminine’ input into existing categories of genre and style embellish the margins while leaving them … marginal. On the other hand, feminism finds natural allies among those poststructuralist and psychoanalytic approaches whose object of study is the field of signification and that offer accounts of the individual subject along linguistic lines as both subject of meaning (an active ‘I’) and subject to meaning (an object of reference).

Lisa Tickner, “Modernist Art History: The Challenge of Feminism” (1988), from “Feminism, Art History and Sexual Difference,” Genders 3 (1988): 92-128. (via lesbianartandartists)

Teknari – Untitled (2015)

I think most ‘curated’ Tumblrs are like gifs? Pshaw!

I mean there is something undeniably obnoxious about a grid layout on a infinite scrolling blogs filled with gifs.

However, I think there’s an insane amount of potential for creativity within the format–like Vine’s that don’t suck or something.

I’m super not enamored with all Teknari’s work–too much of it is Jenny-Holzer-joins-a-Burzum-cover-band–but as far as someone who is actively exploring the outer boundaries of what gifs can accomplish, he is pretty much the bleeding edge.

I love the minimalism of this–it’s not one of those where there’s only a factional movement that makes you question whether it’s a still image or not. But scrolling through my dash, the movement is timed in such a way that I scroll back because I wonder if you saw it right.

Source: blog.teknari.com

Travel notice

I’m on my way to the airport in a little bit, headed on a batshit crazy 3.5 week trip overseas that I can’t really afford and which could very well collapse on top of me at any moment.

I really want to keep up with pushing posts out on the semi-reg-like but–fair warning–things are likely to be rather erratic for the next nine days or so.

(In theory), I appreciate all of y’all. =)

And hey, if you’re a mutual follow or we know each other outside the Tumblr multiverse, I’ve vowed to blog about my adventures on about a 48 hour delay–hit me up if that sort of thing appeals to you and I’ll pass along the URL.

Also, if you, you know, have money burning a hole in your pocket and want to donate to your favorite transgressive art bloggers sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll travel fund, I’d be much obliged.

Take care,

-a

John John Jesse – The Allnighter (2003)

I’m reasonably open to drug use. I mean I’d be a right hypocrite any other way–given as I’ve probably done more than my far share.

Also, there’s a difference between drug use and drug abuse–thus the linguistic differentiation with you know two different terms.

But, I have zero tolerance for cocaine; also: zero tolerance for imagery that can even vague suggests sexual coercion.

This… this… OMFG it turns me on so much it hurts. This absolutely embodies everything I mean with the ‘transgressive’ in this blog’s description.

Source: punkpigpen