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Monthly Archives: August 2011
MATTER: Interview with Matthew Gamber
August 29, 2011 – 8:34 am
Shana Beth Mason: How did the central idea for MATTER come about?
Matthew Gamber: Bill Sullivan had a concept for a possible collaboration, and he is the one who deserves credit for initiating contact between Jessica and myself, along with Mary Voorhees Meehan, a graphic designer, and Peter Hall, a design writer. For the past couple of years, Bill, Jessica, and I have been working independently on similar ideas about color: how we see it and how the camera apparatus creates it.
In our eyesight, color is a unified property. However, through photography, color is fractured and layered. Paradoxically, photographs have an illusion of full color because of our own vision failures (optical illusions, eye fatigue, and color blindness). Using these ideas as a template, we wanted to integrate Mary’s design with Peter’s interviews to create a conversation larger than the sum of our individual photographs.
SBM: Was the book created in a calculated process, or was the collaboration a series of organic responses to the initial concept?
MG: Our collaboration was [a] mixture of both methods. Since all the participants were geographically separated, most of the initial collaboration was centralized though a Facebook group. This format allowed us to quickly share links where we built a conversation through comments and immediate responses. We were able to establish familiarity with each other before we began to initiate content for the book.
By the time we met in person to discuss the final format, we were already comfortable with the concept. We were able to quickly plan a working draft. There were many lively discussions throughout the process. Mary’s strength was her ability to successfully incorporate such varied images into a final design that has a strong sequence.
SBM: The images in the book reflect an interest in the disappearance of meaning or context in images. Are the photographs about erasing meaning or are they simply an observation of image erosion?
MG: There is a complicated set of steps needed replicate color that we see in a photographic form. Most of these steps are rendered invisible by the very same technology that creates it. All of the images in the book have an element of erosion–capitalizing on mistakes that are not perfectly resolved in the technology. Photography creates flawed copies, just as we have flaws in our vision. The design of the book highlights this aspect of erosion as a property of photography.
Book Review: Eric Bessel’s Archives
August 26, 2011 – 8:18 am
Archive {2005–2010}, 2011
The first image of Eric Bessel’s Archive {2005-2010} – which includes 52 photographs, two essays, and an artist statement – pictures a strange work of taxidermy. The title, A taxidermied lemur, Cleveland, 2009, only seems to confuse rather than clarify. It is clear that this “arrangement of skin”* does not accurately represent a lemur. As the first essay explains, the skin of the lemur is in fact stretched and formed onto a model of a fox creating a hybrid creature: a lemur displaying white canines. The inaccurate representation of a lemur is not so different from the inconsistencies in Bessel’s publication. The title Archive does not accurately represent this body of work, the majority of the images are portraits but they are by no means objective, systematic, or encyclopedic the way an archive should be. Fifty-two edited images over a span of five years is not exhaustive, furthermore he often depicts his sitters in a theatrical manner evidencing their subjective nature. Neither Bessel’s statement nor the descriptive titles included with each image distinguish between those he knows intimately and average strangers. It is only through the second essay that we are privy to the nature of his relationship to the sitters, most are of his immediate family and some are of strangers. Bessel creates an opposing set of signifiers, the objective and subjective, simultaneously obscuring his relationship to the subjects (even naming a self-portrait Young man with cardigan, 2010) whilst including Lauren Applebaum’s** essay which makes light of his false distance. Archive {2005-2010} is a reiteration of the hybrid creature, the lemur-fox, as it attempts to stretch a diverse and subjective body of images onto the armature of the standardized and objective archive.
A taxidermied lemur, Cleveland, 2009
Man with breathing apparatus, 2009
Woman with silver hair in wind, 2010
Ad respondent with colorful blouse, 2009
Bessel’s approach dichotomizes the familiar with the unknown. The family member recurs and evolves while the stranger is cursory, awkward and unfamiliar. The interactions between photographer and subject emphasize this divide. Some of the sitters command their own representation while others are subjected to Bessel’s gaze. The level of intimacy Bessel shares with the sitter can be gauged by the amount of times a subject is included in the publication. For example, “Woman with silver hair,” (Bessel’s mother as Applebaum clarifies) is an artist who commands her space and seemingly orchestrates the many portraits she is portrayed in. The position of power by Bessel when photographing an unknown delivery boy or stiff ad respondent is not evident in the portraits of his family and friends. The photographs of his family are a mutual exchange as evinced by the way his mother’s outstretched hand in Woman with silver hair in wind, 2010 seems to be engaging with Bessel as if in mid-conversation. Whereas the blonde woman pictured as Ad respondent with colorful blouse, 2010, who only appears in Archive once, has her hands stiffly and self-consciously placed on the bench. This contrasting tension of the familiar and unknown is evidence of the impossibility of creating an objective collection of artefacts, an archive, when equipped with the all-too human realization that the social terrain in which one belongs is fraught with emotions, anxieties, comfort, and awkwardness. Archives {2005-2010} is a lemur-fox; it is the subjective masquerading as objective.
*Kenneth White, “Consider the Lemur: Eric Bessel’s Arrangement of Skin,” in Eric Bessel, Archive {2005-2010} (New York: Conveyor, 2011), 7-9.
**Lauren Applebaum, “Surrogates of the Self,” in Eric Bessel, Archive {2005-2010} (New York: Conveyor, 2011), 12- 5.
Faith Holland
August 25, 2011 – 12:01 pm
Raised by two computer consultants, it seems only natural that Faith Holland would go digital with her photographic practice. Profile Pictures, 2010 marks one of her first explorations into the expanding realm of video art. For this work, Holland takes still images of herself and friends from Facebook, and then using Photoshop, she transforms each image by smudging and altering the faces of the subjects. In an increasingly digital age, we often reconcile our “real” self with our online persona. Holland’s work makes us question how far removed our online character is from our true identity. She views the entire process as the most compelling part of the piece, rather than the end product of the edited photograph. This progression marks the point when Holland’s computer turned into her studio.
Just as Faith Holland’s desktop has become her virtual studio space, in an ever-present “online” world, some of us now experience and explore art via the home computer. Recently, we have seen the phenomenon of the revolutionary Google Art Project, a website that allows you to virtually explore famous museums all across the world. The program enables the user to zoom in on revered masterpieces to outrageous levels of detail. Holland’s piece, Another Way of Seeing (Starry Night), 2011 comments on this new and unnatural way of viewing art. She contends that this artificial method of art spectatorship reduces painting to a time-based medium, as the viewer now sees the work piece by piece through the technological lens of scrolling and page loading.
Faith Holland, originally from New York, graduated from Vassar College with honors in Media Studies. She is an M.F.A. candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York City where she studies photography, video, and related media. She lives and works in New York City.
