Category Archives: Exhibition

FORMAT17 | HABITAT

March 4, 2017 Cary Benbow Leave a comment

AHEAD STILL LIES OUR FUTURE

QUAD Gallery, Derby, UK
24 March – 11 June 2017

The 2017 edition of FORMAT, the UK’s largest photography festival will explore the theme of HABITAT. The biennial festival, now in its 8th edition, is a showcase for emerging talent alongside established artists. FORMAT17 will display work by over 200 international artists and photographers across 30 exhibitions, alongside a photobook market, portfolio reviews and a series of innovative events and performances.

Rapid changes in the environment caused by human impact on the Earth has pushed us into a new cultural geographical epoch known as the ‘Anthoropocene’. Ahead Still Lies Our Future brings together 10 international artists whose diverse work encourages speculation on global imagined futures. This is the focal exhibition of FORMAT17, curated by Hester Keijser and Louise Clements, in response to the festival’s theme of HABITAT.

The artworks range from Ester Vonplon’s requiem for the melting glaciers in her native Switzerland, to Lida Adbul’s video installation in which she returns to her homeland of Afghanistan to ask how the individual can deal with memories of a country so marked by war and tragedy. Especially for FORMAT, the Japanese transmedia artist Kenta Cobayashi will recreate his immersive and VR installation Island is Islands and Lisa Barnard’s exploration of gold, its mythology, influence and impact will be shown for the first time.

Ursula Biemann documents a series of landmark legal cases that brought the Amazonian forest to court to plead for the rights of nature in her video Forest Law, while Sohrab Hura captures life in the twilight moments of the extreme summer heat in a small village of Central India, and Zhang Jungang tirelessly photographs the ever-changing view from his tiny balcony of the bridge over the Song Hua River in Northern China. Hannah Darabi compiles photographs of a ‘new town’ under construction near Tehran with excerpts from J.G. Ballard’s short story Waiting Grounds in a series of the same title. Other artists create alternative worlds – Wanuri Kahiu explores a dystopian future in her film Pumzi, and Sadie Wechsler’s images show constructed fantastical landscapes.

Collectively, these 10 artists explore the interconnected nature of the human spirit and the habitat that it encounters or creates.

WORKS ON DISPLAY

What we have overlooked is Lida Adbul’s monumental video installation in which she returned to her homeland of Afghanistan to explore how the individual can deal with the memories of a country so marked by war and tragedy. Filmed by a lake near Kabul, the video shows a man, voiced by subtitles, in the lake holding flag, progressively slipping underwater. The project examines the relationship between the individual and the nation, represented respectively by the man and the flag. Man, voice and flag finally vanish under the surface of the lake, suggesting the high price paid by nationalist feeling – the annulment of the individual.

The Canary and the Hammer, new work by Lisa Barnard, considers the omnipresent nature of gold – concealed in our technology, a barometer for the economy, a global potent symbol of ultimate value, beauty, purity, greed and political power. In response to the financial crisis of 2008, Barnard’s photographs strive to make connections between very different stories focusing on the United Kingdom, and both North and South America. Exploring mythologies of the discovery of gold and the mania of the gold-rush, the brutal world of mining and sexual politics of the industry,. Barnard investigates how gold has become an indispensable component in engineering and electronic industries and offers solutions to a range of global health and environmental challenges.

Forest Law by Ursula Biemann is a synchronized video shot in the Amazonian rain forest in 2013. The oil-and-mining frontier in the Ecuadorian Amazon— one of the most biodiverse and mineral-rich regions on Earth – is currently under pressure from the dramatic expansion of large-scale extraction activities. At the heart of Forest Law is a series of landmark legal cases that bring the forest to court and plead for the Rights of Nature. One particularly complex trial has recently been won by the Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayuku based on their cosmology of the Living Forest.

Japanese artist Kenta Cobayashi will recreate his immersive and VR installation Island is Islands. In 2011, Cobayashi started to post photographs on his blog which were then duplicated, converted, and referred to across the internet. His photographs are the product of the process of transitioning, bred through a repetitive cycle of interaction and transformation. By altering the size or zooming in on the images on the Internet, the image infinitely breeds by a simple finger movement. Each new iteration of Islands is Islands experiments with visual live performance alongside new prints and visual images.

Waiting Grounds by Iranian artist Hannah Darabi is a photographic series about an under construction ‘new town’ near Tehran. Inspired by a J.G. Ballard short story of the same title, the work combines photographs and the cut-ups of text from Waiting Grounds. The main character in Ballard’s story lives on another planet and learns that life on Earth is terminated. All that remains is history written and engraved on gold columns in a code language. The protagonist decides to wait for the future – a future that “whatever it is, it must be worth waiting for”. Darabi’s work aims to represent the state of waiting in a country where history has been rewritten over and over again and where each version of the history has its glorious past which become an example for a possible future.

The Song of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer by Sohrab Hura is a series of photographs taken in Barwani, the central state of Madhya Pradesh, one of the hottest regions in India. Since 2013, Hura has been photographing the summer in Savariyapani, a small village secluded amongst the barren landscape of this region. With little rainfall and extreme temperatures, life in Savariyapani can take on an unexpected reality in the twilight moments of the heat.

Bridge and Nearby Scenery is a series of photographs taken between 2013 and 2016 from artist Zhang Jungang’s tiny balcony in the Northern Chinese city of Harbin. The balcony has a view of the bridge over the Song Hua River, and the vista changes almost every day, with variations in light and air from moment to moment. With long winters and short summers, there is always a new view for Zhang to capture and the resulting series of photographs is his reaction to the infinite richness of the world.

In Pumzi, a film by Wanuri Kahiu, nature is extinct, the outside is dead and the protagonist, Asha, lives and works as a museum curator in one of the indoor communities set up by the Maitu Council. When she receives a box in the mail containing soil, she plants in it an old seed which starts to germinate instantly. Asha appeals to the Council to grant her permission to investigate the possibility of life on the outside but the Council denies her exit visa. Asha breaks out of the inside community to go into the dead and derelict outside to plant the growing seedling and possibly find life on the outside.

Sadie Wechsler’s constructed images re-imagine landscapes, blurring historical and rational states to create alternative worlds. Some of the fantastical images depict landscapes where something is a bit off-kilter, in another a girl obscured in a shaft of light looks at the camera in an artificially perfect forest, and in another, a group of tourists stands and watches a dramatic forest fire. The images suggest photographic tropes such as stock imagery, sunsets, and holiday landscapes with unsettling, ambiguous undertones.

Ester Vonplon’s large-scale photographs are a requiem for the melting glaciers in her native Switzerland. To protect the glaciers from shrinking further they have been wrapped in giant, white reflective sheets. The photographs, however, do not depict unspoilt natural beauty, but instead the snow is filled with sediment, grit and ash, smoke-stained and grubby. The cloth started as pristine but has ripped and decayed into the melting ice of the glacier. These natural, pure monument, diseased and decaying, are mortal.

FORMAT was established in 2004 and organises a year-round programme of international commissions, open calls, residencies, conferences and collaborations in the UK and Internationally. The 2015 festival welcomed over 100,000 visitors from all over the world. The biennale edition incorporates over 30 of Derby’s most beautiful buildings and key landmarks including: QUAD, University of Derby, Derby Museum & Art Gallery, Derwent Valley World Heritage Sites, Market Place and satellite venues in nearby cities.

Further information and full programme on www.formatfestival.com from early 2017.

FORMAT is directed by Louise Clements, organized by QUAD and the University of Derby Supported by Arts Council England, Derby City Council and multiple partners from the UK and international origins.

Exhibition

127 Film Day Exhibition

January 21, 2017 Cary Benbow Leave a comment

An upcoming exhibition featuring images made with 127 format film or cameras is being hosted by J.M. Golding – please see the post at the website: http://127film.blogspot.com/

The deadline is coming up quick (February 27, 2017) – All types of 127 film format are welcome, whether the film began its life as 127, or you used 35 mm film in a 127 camera, or you cut down 120 film to 127 size, or photos made on 127 film in a different size camera are welcome too.

For entry details, please see guidelines here

Exhibition, Submission

Photographer Blake Andrews – Because The Past is Just a Goodbye

November 25, 2016 Cary Benbow Leave a comment

1-e1466539056864 — Emmett (2013) © Blake Andrews

Exhibit review by contributor Patrick Collier – Blake Andrews at Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR – June 2016

I’ve known about Blake Andrews for many years. He is a force to be reckoned with in the world of photography, particularly because of his minimally titled blog, B. Steeped in the history of and a dialog about photography, the blog is informative, but its real bite comes when Andrews applies his creative, incisive wit—sometimes so dry that how one interprets him says more about the person reading than what he writes—that makes it a must-read. Those who make the mistake of taking him at face value are said to start bleeding a good 24 hours later from the place his scalpel almost imperceptibly pierced their skin.

But I’m here to talk about his exhibit of photographs, specifically his exhibit this past June, Pictures of a gone world at Blue Sky Gallery. All framed by sprocket holes (not visible in the reproductions here), the 28, black and white, analog photographs carefully attend to a specific aesthetic and technical history of his craft. The subject matter is mostly his wife and kids, which some might consider a bit of a throwback. But the images illustrate the title for the exhibit, “Pictures of a gone world,” which, the exhibit’s press release informs us, is also the title of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s first book of poems.

“Gone?” If I were of a literal bent, I’d see no pending doom in these photographs. (Well, maybe in one photo, but we’ll get to that in a bit.) Quite the contrary: I see joy, even in the most chaotic of moments portrayed in these images, and a lot of fun being had.

Leo, Geoff, Dylan, Emmet, Tab (2005) © Blake Andrews

Oh! “Gone!” Like in “Gone, Daddy, gone,” as in “far out,” taking things to a new level, or being unconstrained. It is a vernacular older than Andrews; another time lost; still, albeit anachronistic, applicable for this exhibit.

The press release goes on to explain that this exhibit is inspired by a specific Ferlinghetti poem, “The World is a Beautiful Place,” which starts out: “The world is a beautiful place/to be born into/if you don’t mind happiness/not always being/so very much fun.” Continuing the theme, the poem finishes: “Yes the world is the best place of all/for a lot of such things as/making the fun scene/and making the love scene/and making the sad scene/and singing low songs and having inspirations/and walking around/looking at everything/and smelling flowers/and goosing statues/and even thinking/and kissing people and/making babies and wearing pants/and waving hats and/dancing/and going swimming in rivers/on picnics/in the middle of the summer/and just generally/’living it up’/Yes/but then right in the middle of it/comes the smiling/mortician”

I have gone to the bother of transcribing most of this poem for a reason, and it is not because these photographs are not capable of standing on their own. The majority were taken between 2006 and 2010, yet span a slightly longer period of time. As such, they function as a chronicle of his family as they age, and as one might suspect, there is a broad range of emotions portrayed.

Andrews is known as a street photographer, a practice that is said to depend heavily on the “decisive moment,” that critical and optimal split second in which the photo comes together in both form and content within the frame. These street skills become paramount when capturing the half-feral, gleeful chaos that can be found in a child’s exuberance. Even so, to be both parent and photographer must pose some interesting problems: To be both in the moment and outside of it; enjoying/enduring the time in a dual capacity; and then capturing it as best he can. Stopping to appreciate that which has just passed is an indulgence he may not be able to afford, that is if he is to follow the photographer’s dictate: Take it all in, watch, watch, watch to see and be ready before the moment becomes a missed opportunity. (And, I would add, capturing the decisive moment is only an attempt, the actual accomplishment something else, closer, perhaps, to the happy accident in one of ~36 frames.) Only at a later time might he make something of the experience.

Taken as such, the option of staging a photo doesn’t seem like a bad decision. And there is one photo in this group that does have that flavor, a photo that, somewhat understandably, was not available for reproduction here. It shows one of Andrew’s sons at a fairly young age, naked and holding a large pair of garden shears—the limb-lopper variety—in front of himself.

Despite this psychoanalytic show-stopper, I can hear someone ask incredulously, “Pictures of his children are worthy of an exhibition?” and perhaps continue with a litany of photo history references that amount to an argument of “been done a thousand times.” Sure, if the work simulated the times I’ve been trapped on someone’s couch with their photo album in front of me. Instead, Andrew’s combination of the candid moment and his composition skills set a stage from which to dismantle the contempt of even the most hardened, wow-me-now gallery-goers—and perhaps not just the ones who have watched their own children grow.

Emmett, Ella, Chris (2008) © Blake Andrews

Still, is the temptation to ask such a question telling of another gone world? There is a certain cynicism as well as disregard that lurks in the contemporary art arena; both attend to our need to expect the unusual. In the face of such a reaction, Andrews might smirk. The yearning for the quirky or unique creates a disconnect, both passive and active (seen that, done that), and manifests as a loss. In spite of all of the obvious fun his kids are having, these images could very well flip around and act as a stand-in for anyone’s loss of innocence or sense of wonder.

On the surface, cynicism is antithetical to sentimentality. A closer look finds something not always easy to perceive, let alone embrace and utilize: cynicism and sentimentality are two sides of the same coin. What if, then, we were to accept this kinship? What if cynicism was just as hackneyed as sentimentality, and just as much from the heart? After all, in the quest for artistic contemporaneity, should we distance ourselves from a substantial part of what has nurtured us?

We learn to anticipate loss. The loss all parents experience as their children’s autonomy burgeons is just one aspect of this life-long lesson. Blake Andrews’ images celebrate playfulness—including his own with a camera—all the while making us look more closely at what we have lost in our sophistication as adults. After all, it is the adult, not the child, who worries about that garden tool.

Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, Oregon, who has been “shooting photos since 1993, with occasional one hour breaks.” His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Artget Gallery in Belgrade, Photofusion Gallery in London, Drkrm Gallery in Los Angeles, Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco, Lightbox Photographic Gallery in Astoria, and Newspace Center for Photography and the Art Gym in Portland.

Patrick Collier is an artist and writer in rural Oregon. He most often writes art criticism for Oregon ArtsWatch in Portland. A daily updated sampling of his photographic work can be found at http://twentymileperimeter.tumblr.com

This is an edited version of an article originally published in Oregon ArtsWatch

Exhibition, Submission

Paris Photo 2016

November 21, 2016 Cary Benbow 1 Comment

Photographer and writer Mandy Williams attended this year’s Paris Photo exposition, and had a special interest in viewing works from galleries that were owned by, or whose directors are women. As a special contribution to Wobneb Magazine this month, Williams presents her experience and particular works of note. She found the artists’ desire to expand the definitions of photography was the highlight of the show.

Mandy Williams, PARIS – Visiting Paris Photo for a day when there are 153 galleries, 29 publishers and 1255 artists exhibiting means having a clear idea of what you want to see. I decided to focus on galleries with women directors, but specifically those showing distinctive contemporary work from emerging and mid-career artists. All of them had female directors, and all were showing artists who are either working beyond the flat surface of traditional photography, or exploring ideas of ‘real fictions’.

One of these was Binôme, a gallery founded by Valérie Cazin. At Paris Photo they showed two artists, Mustapha Azeroual, who applies old processes to contemporary photography, and Thibault Brunet whose camera-less photographs are created from digital sources.

I was immediately drawn to Brunet’s Typologie du Virtuel series, 2014-16 where he takes images of suburban buildings that have been modeled in 3D by Google Earth users. He personalises these images by adding a drop shadow according to the date and time of its creation and chooses a dominant colour for each building ‘defined by the objective modeling file data’. Visually, the work is stunning. The buildings seem to float halfway between reality and artifice in a world of muted colour. Brunet pursues his interests with intelligence, adding his voice to debates about authorship and our relationship to the virtual world.

At Melanie Rio gallery I was interested in the work of Edgar Martins, a Portugese photographer living in the UK. His 2010 series, ‘A Metaphysical Survey of British Dwellings’ shows the mock-up of a town created in 2003 for the purposes of police and firearm training. Pizzaland was on display at Paris Photo and like others from his series it appears both hyper-real and fictional. The blank facades, black skies and unpopulated streets create a sense of anxiety. This displacement, this absence of community is according to Martins ‘not just a simulacrum of contemporary British towns’ but ‘also a metaphor for the modern asocial city’.

leyla_cardenas_unschrouded3_vignette — Courtesy Galerie Dix9 Hélène Lacharmoise

Leyla Cardenas, showing at Galerie Dix9 Hélène Lacharmoise, explores urban ruins and city landscapes as indications of social transformation, loss and historical memory. In “Contained Entropy”, her image of the building is mounted on demolition debris, through an extension of the image. “Unshrouded #3” is a photo showing the facade of an old building in Bogotá, and is printed on fabric she uncovers at one end. She has used fabric and thread in her work for a long time and felt it was logical to start working with veils, ‘that are like phantoms, the last fragile image of places that are about to disappear and dissolve’.

Another artist using thread is Iris Hutegger at Esther Woerdehoff gallery, who applies drawing and stitching to her landscape photographs. The stitching is integrated smoothly into the surface using a machine she helped develop and the textural interventions are only visible up-close. From a distance ,the work appears as a fluid photograph. Her locations are deliberately unpopulated and place-specific references are limited. By choosing titles with numeric codes she keeps these places private and mysterious.

At Les Filles du Calvaire, run by Stéphane Magnan and Christine Ollier, I was drawn to the work of Katrien De Blauwer. I was drawn in part to the intimate scale of her work, but you can also see her skillful eye and artistic sensibility in her images made by cutting and layering found images. Her source material is mainly magazines from the 1930s-60s. Most images feature women suggesting an element of autobiography. She has said, ‘My work contains hidden layers, parts of me (or my past) in the work’. These small images possess a vivid cinematic quality, a mysterious voyeurism, but also a genuine emotional impact through her skillful cutting and layering.

Creating innovative new work from old material is an element of Thomas Mailaender’s work at Roman Road, a gallery opened by Marisa Bellani. Mailaender showed work from Illustrated People (2013) where he used a powerful UV light to temporarily imprint negatives – freely accessed from The Archive of Modern Conflicts collection of 19th and 20th century photographic documents – onto the skin of his models. His Cyanotypes (2013- present), are impressive large-scale images of often mundane or unexpected subject matter found on the internet. In both series old processes are reinvigorated and brought into the 21st century through performative elements, humour and visual puns.

Dinh Q Lê’s installation, TWC in Four Moments, at Shoshana Wayne Gallery is another work where reality and fiction merge. Each moment is represented by a 50 metre long digitally stretched and manipulated photograph of the World Trade Centre taken during the 9/11 attack from different perspectives in New York. Seeing the long colour strips spilling down to settle gently on raised plinths was surprisingly emotional in spite of their abstraction. Inevitably, memories of that event are revisited, adding layers and complexity to the abstracted images. Lê abstracts the scenes and creates a scroll-like landscape that is experienced one section at a time, much like traditional landscape paintings. The artist asks us to think about the images in relation to time; to travel through a landscape. The fact that the viewer only sees a limited part of an image that has been abstracted is exactly the point—the story behind each image is far more complex, layered, and interwoven than the eye can see.

More info and highlights from the 2016 Paris Photo expo can be found at: http://www.parisphoto.com/paris

Mandy Williams is a London based artist working with photography and video. http://www.mandywilliams.com/

Exhibition, Photographer

Niall McDiarmid – British Portraits Exhibition – Oriel Colwyn, North Wales

September 4, 2016 Cary Benbow Leave a comment

A big congratulations to British photographer Niall McDiarmid on his gallery exhibition from now through Oct. 14th. The show contains images from his long-term and ongoing project of making portraits of people throughout the UK.

For more info, or if you are in Wales in the coming month: http://orielcolwyn.org/british-portraits/

To read the in-depth interview Niall had with Wobneb Magazine in January 2016, click here: Faces of Our Times

Book Review, Exhibition, Photographer

Photographer Malcolm Lightner

April 12, 2016 Cary Benbow Leave a comment

Malcolm Lightner’s work, as seen here from his new book, Mile O’Mud, will be shown at the New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery through the end of May.

Watch for my upcoming review of Mile O’ Mud – as I slog through his images of Florida mud racing culture and portraits of the people connected to it.

Malcolm Lightner: Mile O’ Mud Through May 29, 2016 Churning the buttery muddy water at the Florida Sports Park, swamp buggy races keep Florida’s frontier heritage alive. With Mile O’ Mud, 4th generation native Floridian Lightner shows us his home’s beauty; scarred and raw, surrounded by lush blue sky and restorative greens and we witness…

via Malcolm Lightner @ New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery — F-Stop Magazine

Exhibition

KENTUCKY CAPTURED: PHOTOGRAPHS INSPIRED BY THE BLUEGRASS STATE

March 31, 2016 Cary Benbow Leave a comment

Screen shot 2016-03-30 at 7.43.49 PM

Ralph Eugene Meatyard American, 1925 – 1972
Untitled, 1970
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 × 11 1/2 in. (24.1 × 29.1 cm.)
Lent by University of Louisville
Photographic Archives

Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

Dates: March 12 – July 17, 2016
Location: Temporary Exhibitions Gallery, South Building
South gallery

Curated by: Elizabeth Reilly and Marcy Werner

Kentucky Captured surveys the many ways in which the Bluegrass State has inspired photographers in the twentieth century. This exhibition, selected exclusively from the University of Louisville Photographic Archives, is a travelogue stretching from urban to rural landscapes, backyards to graveyards, and from portraits to street photography. Bringing together Kentucky photographers and those from outside the state, the exhibition illustrates how the essence of Kentucky has influenced the photographer’s eye.

Screen shot 2016-03-30 at 7.43.25 PM

David Graham American, born 1952
Graveyard, Clermont, KY, 1983
Chromogenic print
8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm.)
Lent by University of Louisville
Photographic Archives

See more online information from the Speed Museum. The museum collection is a notable catalog of artwork from pre-history artifacts to contemporary artwork – including a number of contemporary photos in their collection in their third floor North gallery.

All images shown are copyright of the respective artist or estates.

AHEAD STILL LIES OUR FUTURE

Exhibit review by contributor Patrick Collier – Blake Andrews at Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR – June 2016

Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

An online magazine featuring contemporary photography