Rollin Leonard

Few days ago has taken place the closing of Trunks, Stems, & Heads a solo show by Rollin Leonard at Transfer Gallery where he presented some new great pieces. The photographic work of Rollin is highly focused on human bodies which frequently is his own body and portraits the source to be manipulated and distorted. This time Rollin has also used several models to continue the mesmerising animated and static work in which for some pieces he has translated pixels into cells of plexiglas by installing and distorting the bodies cell by cell, this also reflects how manual is his  experimental work process, it doesn't matter if it's physical or digital Rollin animates and works everything manually creating somehow conscious glitches. See more;

"Trunks, Stems, & Heads is a new body of work from Rollin Leonard. The focus of his first solo exhibition is the human form – organs, limbs and torsos are strewn about, arranged into impossible creatures, disfigured through collision and installed as highly aestheticized, meticulously polished piles of digitally mutilated forms. The work is shiny and fleshy, and offers a new take on portraiture that captures the shifting perception of the physical self in our contemporary digital moment.

Human faces, bodies, and familiar objects are frequent subjects for the artist – he is interested in our innate ability to recognize the objects despite scrambling or distorting the image. A face, a subject with high visual elasticity, is especially resistant to being obscured or lost in pattern. Just as you see faces in wood grain, clouds, and shadows, your mind easily knits human form together even when fragmented.

The artist’s photographic practice serves as the basis for the work. After capturing his subjects at precise angles, Leonard manipulates their bodies into highly composed and calculated compositions of looped moving image, digital collage and plexiglass installation pieces." - Transfer Gallery

Yes / No, 2013

animated loop, photographic video application

360° / 18 Lilia, 2013

36 second Yes / No, 2013, animated loop, photographic video

Cell Body (Panty), (Stocking) and (Joe) 2013 

730 1 by 1, 702 1 by 1 and 838 1 by 1 inch pieces respectively 

c-print face-mounted to 1/2 inch cell-cast Plexiglas

 

Installation view at Transfer Gallery_

Crash Kiss (Guthrie & Ellis), 2013

Crash Kiss (Jorge & Giselle), 2013

Arm Ball (Rollin), 2013

Arm Ball (Lilia), 2013

Cell Face (Rollin), 2013

41 2 by 2 inch pieces, c-print face-mounted to 1/2 inch cell-cast Plexiglas

Belly Chain on a Donut- Shaped Universe, 2013

tile texture for the Donuts_

Gamut Warning by Jordan Tate

Denny Gallery presented few weeks ago the first solo gallery exhibition in New York City of Jordan Tate, titled Gamut Warning and running till next October 20, 2013.

"Jordan Tate’s work represents a shift away from the understanding of photography as mechanical reproduction and an acknowledgement of the image-maker as the mediator of sight. Tate explores process and practice in contemporary visual culture. His work is based in ongoing research/meta-photographic critique concerning the visual and conceptual processes of image comprehension." - Denny Gallery. See more;

"The exhibition will include a selection of recent work by Jordan Tate, notably featuring New Work #150 (Gamut Warning), 2012. Gamut Warning consists of three distinct iterations: 24 color photographs, a large-run newsprint artist’s book, and a PDF e-book. He uses the different forms of image delivery to examine how images are created, produced and viewed. His work often focuses on the technologies and physical practice of making photographs. In Gamut Warning, for example, we see lights, color reference cards, human hands setting things up and arranging subjects, color gradients, slide holders and a machine vision camera. The works in the exhibition question the institutional authority behind our understanding of images and suggest that authorship, medium and context, rather than the reality of an image’s referent, have the greatest influence on what we understand from an image." - Denny Gallery

Akihiko Miyoshi

Interesting works and studies by Akihiko Miyoshi_

“Throughout my career I have been exploring the intersection between art and technology most frequently dealing with issues surrounding photographic representation. My works often reveal the conventions of perception and representation through tensions created by the use of computers and traditional photographic techniques.The photographs included in Abstract Photographs series are of mirrors, paper and tape often adhered to the surface of the mirror taken with a large format camera as they attempt to unpack the structural mechanics of photographic representation." - Akihiko Miyoshi. See more;

Abstract Photographs

[+] http://people.reed.edu/~miyos/Art/12/Abstract_Photographs/

"While the images allude to formal abstraction with various shapes and colors, the photographic nature of the images are emphasized as the image plane is selectively focused and blurred through the use of depth of field. The usually referencelessness nature of abstraction is contradicted by the presence of minute details captured by the use of a large format camera such as dust and scratch marks found on the surface of the mirror or the texture of the tapes used which makes the images photographically real and almost sculptural. These images have a duality (and tension) of being simultaneously abstract and photographically real. 

Further, as with many of my other works the photographs expresses my interest in the effect of digital technology in photography and its aesthetic. For example the choice of red, green, and blue tape is based on the three primary colors that constitute a pixel. From a far the tapes can be seen as the pixels glowing on the computer screen. While the images are made using primarily traditional photographic methods, they reference the new aesthetic that seems to be emerging as a result of the use of digital tools and technologies. Seen in this context, by always including only the silhouette of the photographer with his camera, the images remind the viewers of the presence/absence of the producer/author and the method."

18% Gray, 2010

"A "gray card" which has 18% reflectance is commonly used in photography as a reference to produce consistent exposure. We tend to think of gray, white, or black as neutral colorless color but in fact they are usually created using a combination of three primary colors. The piece "18% Gray" deconstructs this by effectively using depth of field, another photographic trope."

A Situation to be Viewed Through a Video Camera, 2010

"An installation consisting of a physical object (cardboard), a projected image (of a grid), and a video camera. The viewer is asked to view the installation through the video camera. The piece explicitly acknowledges and makes it an issue for itself how the viewer's perception is constructed by asking the viewer to see and acknowledge the effects every element has on the final view/image. At first, the viewer only sees a cardboard with light being projected on and a video camera pointed towards the cardboard. The "aha moment" occurs when the viewer looks through the video camera which turns a mundane scene into an aesthetic experience. One sees the cardboard, the projected image of the grid, and the rolling rainbow banding effect moving horizontally or vertically introduced by the video camera (created when the frame rate and the refresh rate of the projector are out of synch) combined to create an abstract picture. Upon seeing the abstract picture through the video camera, the viewer at last recognizes it as an aesthetic experience. It was made by a desire to create a piece that one had to see in person. Today most images produced are completely immaterial, captured on cell-phones and shared on social networking sites very rarely existing as an object. Photography has dislodged itself from its material substance and is about information and the transmission of information than anything else. If one can instantaneously download and view images that are art or of art, shouldn't we be asking ourselves "Why do we go see art, especially the photographic kind, anyway?"

RoRsesResoR, 2010

"A color video image of roses is projected onto faux roses that are spray painted white. The projected image creates the impression that the roses are colored. Upon close inspection the viewer sees that the image is slightly misaligned with the object and recognizes the separation of image from form. Further, the projected image very slowly separates itself, just as it has from form, into three primary colors that constitute the image."

via | i like this art

Matthew Brandt

Next April 4 Highlight Gallery will present Water & Polaroid, a solo exhibition by Matthew Brandt until next May 18, 2013. Into the post you can also find Lakes and Reservoirs, a previous series from 2011 which follows the same experimental process in connection with water from lakes.

"For Water & Polaroid, Matthew Brandt presents three bodies of work based on the manipulation of photographic emulsion. To create the works in the exhibition that involve Water, inspired by early landscape photography of the American West, Brandt incorporates the subject of the image into its manipulation. At its most elaborate, Brandt’s process involves using water from an actual waterfall he has photographed to rig an artificial waterfall that pours over the printed image, creating streaks of color that drip from the emulsion. At its most direct, he soaks prints in water drawn from their subject lakes.

Nymph Lake, one piece from Brandt’s Lakes and Reservoirs series, demonstrates this process. Out in the field, Brandt takes with him two key tools: a camera and a five-gallon plastic jug. “The camera is to take an image of the lake or reservoir, while the jugs are to take some of the actual lake,” he explains. Upon return to his studio, Brandt prints selected images, then empties the collected water into a large tray and submerges the C-print of the lake directly into itself. Finally, he waits, as the water in the image slowly breaks down the image itself over the course days, weeks, or even months." - Highlight Gallery. See more;

"In contrast to the external manipulations in his Water series, Brandt’s Polaroids explore the material of the photograph’s own substrate. By distressing the chemical emulsion of the Polaroid and manipulating the development process by hand, Brandt creates vertical color reliefs that mimic the structure of a waterfall in their flowing movement.

To complete the exhibition, Brandt will present for the first time a new body of work titled Water Falls, a series of light boxes that emphasize the extensive range of properties attainable through manipulated emulsion. For Mystic Falls, Brandt prints four separate color duraclear transparencies in cyan, magenta, yellow and black (cmyk), then subjects them to degradation in their own water for up to four weeks at a time. Using his artificial waterfall mechanism to interject the traditional cmyk colored layering process, Brandt creates a range of tonalities across multiple impressions of a single image of Mystic Falls, and then illuminates their every detail." - Highlight Gallery.

Water & Polaroid 

Lakes and Reservoirs, 2011

Interior Landscape by Carol Inez Charney

Interior Landscape, photograph series by Carol Inez Charney_

"My current photographic series, Interior Landscape, uses natural distortions present in our everyday world—namely, moisture on windows—to evoke a painterly image that recontextualizes our everyday architectural landscape. While focusing on the minute details of these natural distortions, we enter a space of quiet contemplation, which simultaneously inspires a new kind of internal and external vision." - Carol Inez Charney. See more;

"I'm interested in how different materials such as water and more recently ice—create their own types of abstractions. In addition, in my process I'm systematically exploring shifting points of view within the architectural grid to create compositional studies that are more commonly found in painting rather than in photography." - Carol Inez Charney.