humble arts foundation

David Favrod

10.24.2011 | Gesche Wurfel

Sadako, 2009

Swiss-Japanese photographer David Favrod draws his inspiration from his bi-cultural upbringing as well as from his dreams and the stories he reads. In his work, he explores the notion of identity and belonging. In this interview, he talks more about his photographic approach and the series Gaijin for which he was awarded the Aperture Portfolio Prize 2010.

Gesche Würfel: The majority of your photographic series explore the notion of identity. How does photography help you explore and communicate identity issues?

David Favrod: I’m 29, but I still have many parts of myself to be illuminated. There is still misunderstanding. For this research (my photographic series), I am trying to reduce them. I’m making some efforts on my way. I try to understand my motivations, what bothers me or on the contrary makes me dream. So I ask you this question: What do we really know of ourselves? I usually find it hard to speak about myself. I always stumble upon the paradoxes of who am I. The notion of identity occurred to me when Japan refused to give me dual citizenship. It is from this feeling of rejection and also from a desire to prove that I am as Japanese as Swiss that this work Gaijin was created. I think that photography came to me naturally. It allows me to shape my own reality.

Untitled, 2011

GW: Where do you draw your inspiration for your work from? How does your bi-cultural upbringing influence the subject matter of your work?

DF: The majority of my inspiration comes from around and within me. My bi-cultural education is the essence of my inspiration.

Kobé, 2010

GW: Please tell us more about the series Gaijin. What is the project about? What made you create it? Please talk a bit more about the visual language that you have chosen.

DF: Gaijin is a project that I began in 2009. I started it as my bachelor degree’s project at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne and afterward extended the series. This first approach has brought together various topics that are important to me, for example the war stories of my grandparents, the correlation between Switzerland and Japan, the family archives, the stories that my mother told me when I was little, or the mountains. Gaijin is a fictional recital, a tool for my quest for identity, where auto-portraits imply an intimate and solitary relationship that I have with myself. The mirror image is frozen in a figurative alter ego that serves as an anchor point.

The image of the window with the paper birds is about the woman Sadako who at her home close to Ground Zero when the atom bomb was dropped in Hiroshima in 1945. Years later, she developed leukemia and was hospitalized in 1955 and given a year to live. She died in 1955 aged 12. During a hospital visit Sadako’s best friend folds an origami crane as an old Japanese story says that who folds 1,000 origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane. As Sadako didn’t manage to fold all 1,000 cranes, her friends folded the remaining ones and buried them with her. With this image I want to speak about the war and the atomic bomb but in a more lyrical way.

After Gaijin, in 2010, I produced the work Omoide Poroporo, which was published at Kodoji Press. It is a mix of my pictures and archives of and from my family, and now I am producing a series with Yokais as the main subject. Yokais are supernatural creatures that shift shapes and are very common in Japanese folklore. They can look almost like humans, often they have animal features, but they can also have no recognizable features at all.

Autoportrait en poulpe, 2009

GW: Where does your interest in constructing fictional stories derive? What are you trying to achieve? And what responses are you trying to evoke from the viewer?

DF: My interest in the construction of fictional stories comes from my dreams and my readings. A natural need. A need to escape. I do not think I can provide answers to the audience. My work is a proposal, an invitation.

Fuji, 2011

GW: What are your artistic concerns and how do they translate into your work? My artistic concerns?

DF: I do not think that there are artistic concerns, but rather a need. The Gaijin project came to me naturally.

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Emile Hyperion Dubuisson

10.17.2011 | Gesche Wurfel

portraits_001

Emile Hyperion Dubuisson worked as a cinematographer in Paris before turning to the field of photography. The revisiting of Far, a series the artist left untouched for ten years, has helped him become more “radical” in his creative process. He spoke with Humble Arts Foundation about his recent work, Lighted, which is on view in New York at the Dark Room Residency until October 29, 2011.

Gesche Würfel: I read that your series Far was your first experience with photography. Can you speak a bit more about that particular project?

Emile Hyperion Dubuisson: In Mac Cahill’s movie Another Earth, the magnificent Brit Marling tells the story of a Russian cosmonaut’s first trip into space. As he is looking down at the curve of the Earth, he starts hearing a repetitive and worrisome sound: “So the cosmonaut decides that the only way to save his sanity is to fall in love with the sound. So he closes his eyes, and he goes into his imagination, and then he opens them…he doesn’t hear ticking anymore. He hears music. And he spends the remainder of his time, sailing through space, in total bliss, in peace.”

With Far, I had to deal with the fact that the images I took were totally unprintable, almost in existent. That disappointment kept me away from photography for a decade. It’s only recently that I started to fall in love with those scratchy images. I suddenly got the feeling that the images had the potential to be beautiful.

portraits_003

GW: You’ve described Far as “magical, consistent, and surreal.” How has this series influenced subsequent projects you’ve done?

EHD: Far has a place in our collective imagination of the furthest reaches—the undiscovered. When you see the images, you don’t need to know where it takes place, you know it; it’s Siberia. You are directly transported to a mysterious land full of phantasms. The images make you travel in space, but also in time—because of the specific facture that they have. A catastrophic processing produced very damaged images. The scratches and dust are a synonym of time. Far gave the opportunity to take more radical directions in my creative processes.

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GW: Please tell us more about your most recent series, Lighted. What is the concept of the series? What reactions are you trying to evoke from the viewer? Do you have any ideas about where to exhibit this body of work?

EHD: Lighted sketches our silence and desires. It is a series of instants, a suspended time. The portraits highlight the moment between a question and a decision. The flash delicately coats the body with an intimate and unexpected fragility. The light envelops the face in a protective intention, favorable to a meditation. The light works like a filter, revealing a certain fragility of our humanity. I do care to find in each of us the angle that best describes our sensibility. I go around each person and highlight the detail that makes me want to photograph that person. I know that there is something that moves me in all of them and my goal is to find it.

portraits_006

GW: What drives your practice? Are there any particular questions or issues that your work addresses?

EHD: I do things fairly instinctively, even when they are intentional. For me, photography is a sequence of more or less conscious accidents and unforeseen incidents.

Emile Hyperion Dubuisson

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Tereza Zelenkova: Supreme Vice

10.14.2011 | Caleb Churchill

In Tereza Zelenkova’s artist statement accompanying the body of work Supreme Vice (2011), the Czech-born visual artist explains that this body of work evolved from ideas surrounding the occult revival in the 19th century. This renewed interest in the occult posits a counter-narrative to prominent Western ideologies regarding perception, reality, and the human experience. As many have noted, photography was born from a collective desire to accurately render the visual world. There is the simplified story of Louis Daguerre and Fox Talbot simultaneously arriving at the creation of commercially viable photographic technology, but the idea of photography was inherited. The increasing dependence of Western ideology and thought on vision, the preferred sense from which to perceive and understand the surrounding world, accounts for the photographic impulse that entertained the use of the camera obscura, diorama, physionotrace, and other interpretations of the photographic. The pervasiveness of positivism, rationality and the scientific method justified what could be seen and quantified as the only valid form of experience and truth. The photographic embodies this reliance on sight and reality. It is important to account for Zelenkova’s use of photographic technology to unravel the façade of rationality we attribute to our history and society. Her use of compositionally direct black and white photographs, a medium associated with truth, to give credence and visuality to “our susceptibility to irrational beliefs” emphasizes this duality as an integral part of human experience.*

The seeming opposition of the irrational and rational, of vision and blindness, is acutely illustrated in Supreme Vice. Zelenkova’s sophisticated rhythm and imagery implicates us into an uncomfortable state in which fear, superstition, and death are the norm. The last image in the booklet presents us with the culmination of esoteric symbolism, a robed and hooded figure placed in front of a stark white background. We are not afforded the resolution of identifying with the figure’s humanity as the face is completely hidden, leaving us involved. She continuously deprives our desire to define the subjects who are photographed. There are no faces, no geographical landmarks, no references for us to grasp to, and this ambiguity reinforces her stark postmodern vision. The second spread presents us with a disconcerting pair: the left image is of varying bones artfully and decisively placed in a triangular pattern, the right image is of a dressed skeleton in which only the skull is visible. Not only does the skeleton obviously remind us of the nature of our existence but also the bone symbol implies a talismanic quality invoking ever-present death. This preoccupation with irrationality, spiritualism, and death not only questions our seeming rationality; it also reminds us that photographs create mediated experiences and contingent truths. This tension is most wonderfully illustrated in what appears to be an otherworldly aerial landscape. It is at once an optical illusion and a fictitious truth; under scrutiny the landscape is inconsistent and impossible until the realization that it is water over sand. Although its illusion and untruth has been revealed, there is still the stubborn impulse to regard it as a landscape. It is symptomatic of the human experience to be able to fully invest in two contradictory truths, into rationality and irrationality, science and mysticism, blindness and vision. The occult revival was a backlash against overbearing concepts of reality, which threatened to reduce the multiplicity of experiences and perspectives enjoyed by humanity into one meta-narrative of truth.

24 Pages
19 X 27 cm
Edition 250
£12.00
ISBN 978-1-907071-24-9
Published in London by Mörel Books
morelbooks.com

Images: Supreme Vice, 2011 © Tereza Zelenkova & Mörel Books

*Quoted from Tereza Zelenkova’s statement, which can be accessed at terezazelenkova.com

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Daniel Newman

10.13.2011 | Wendy Given

C-TOWN

Daniel Newman’s ongoing twofold project—Cleavages—is a witty and decisive investigation of thoughtful oversized mash-up celebrity portraits paired with heavily layered collages. Intuitive and penetrating, Newman’s work keenly clefts a spattering of Western society’s fixation and neuroses with images and moments connected to personages of interest. Incisive visual splits and fused optical layers blur and mend his carefully curated narrative collections. The work seams emphatic junctures of pop culture past and hearsay, indicating clues and possibilities of deeper significance in the personal linkages of stardom and related stories—truth and dirt collide.

Visually scratching at the constantly fraying edges of stardom and icon, Newman demonstrates and montages the rampant rumors connected with elevated status of legend—the layering, splitting and shape-shifting of facts and individuals. The prestigious few and twisted narratives that he presents, melds into moments that seemingly talk over one-another, thus vibrating and humming like the low mumble of a dense, fanatical crowd. The photo montages and collages successfully maintain a consistent visual white noise, reminiscent of an inside dirty joke you’d love to know.

CLEAVAGE

Newman suggests the hidden back stories of each depiction through the titling of the portraits. For example, the work titled ROSEBUD pairs Marion Davies and Gandhi. The back story suggests that William Randolph Hearst’s pet name for Marion Davies’ clitoris was “rosebud,” or at least, that was a popular rumor in Hollywood at the time of Orson Welles making of Citizen Kane. This led to Hearst doing everything in his power to destroy Welles; it could be argued that he succeeded. Marion Davies also had a pet dog named “Gandhi” (a dachshund). As another example, the work aptly titled CLEAVAGES perceptibly fuses Jayne Mansfield and Sophia Loren. The two starlets are forever linked by the famous photo of Loren gazing Mansfield’s exposed cleavage at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills in 1957.

ORANGEPICKER

With smaller collages successfully operating similarly to his large-scale portraits—yet, more so as unique book-like objects almost topographic in form—Newman frames them in such a manner that the viewer is unable to do any flipping or exploring beyond what is readily seen. Dozens of papers are stapled together to create narratives of free association. The work is sandwiched inside nostalgic frames so the collaged stack is convex. One is forced to create meaning out of the tiny edges of papers under each frame’s glass, trusting Newman has, in fact, imbedded more to discover than what is given, comparable to a locked diary. Newman skillfully presents glimpses and interpretations of layered importance and depth, proposing strata of hidden meanings—double-take of saga, experience, fetish and intent.

The seductively overlaid portraits and densely collaged works corroborate with ideas of life as a tangled web or knot—especially of life and lore in the limelight. How do these trivial tales and images prolong and linger? Trails of vision, desire and idle talk become readily banded in the collective periphery. Celebrity worship ensues.

ROSEBUD

Newman’s work accomplishes great interest in the re-purposing of iconographic imagery alone. The back story, no matter how big or small, positive or negative, resonates within the work as hypnagogic, beckoning a disturbance and supporting its successes on levels closer to the narrative of the lies that are in fact photography and celebrity… and how they will always be and have always been lies we will continue to believe.

THE CLAIRVOYANT

Daniel Newman was born in 1978 in Jacksonville, Florida. He graduated from The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City in 2002. Recent solo exhibitions include PUENTE/TEXAS FLICKERS at Tomorrowland, Miami and CHA-CHA (HALLOWEEN) AND OTHER RECENT PHOTOGRAPHS for Light and Wire Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include WIT, curated by Glenn O’Brien, for Paddle8 and COMMERCIAL BREAK, curated by Neville Wakefield, at the 54th Venice Biennale.

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Barry Stone

10.12.2011 | Maury Gortemiller

Woman on the Cell, Austin, TX

Barry Stone’s various projects speak to the multiplicity of contemporary photography. Stone works in a variety of styles, from the ‘straight photography’ of his personal environment (Highway 71 Revisited), to drawing/sketching upon appropriated imagery (Hum), and manipulated reproductions of Ansel Adams photographs (My Musent Touch It.) This distinctive magpie aesthetic illuminates the decontextualized nature of the artist’s source material. ‘The found’ images, as well Stone’s seemingly-casual original photographs, traffic in the familiar language of the uprooted visual signifier. Personal photographs inform images of cultural icons in delightfully disjointed sequences. An image of Nikki Six from Hum, perhaps culled from a forgotten issue of Cream Magazine, details the minutiae of 1980s hair-metal fashion. Such machismo, infused with both the gender fluidity of early MTV and Reagan-era politics, rebounds throughout the series. An aging, forlorn Camaro, as well as a framed poster for Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, echo cultural notions and redressings of gender identity. Stone’s irreverent sampling from disparate sources both limns the differences and elicits comparisons of various media.

Targets, Texas Parks and Wildlife Expo, Austin, TX

Welcome, Highway 290, Austin, TX

Dickinson Falls, 2010

Stone’s rock-slinging at the conventions of photography is not confined to issues of subject matter. His images are often exhibited in various print sizes, and displayed upon the gallery wall at varying heights and in inconsistent spatial relationships to each other. The viewer is compelled to move back, to physically remove herself from the wall, so that the entirety of the work may be viewed at once. She must then move closer to more fully examine the larger prints, and closer still – right up to the wall – to view the details of the smallest prints. This forced perambulation suggests the singularity of each image (up close), the relationship between adjacent images (farther from the wall), the connection between images placed apart (farther yet), and finally, the images as one distinct patchwork, a mosaic of singularities to be consumed separately or together.

Barry Stone

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David Favrod

Emile Hyperion Dubuisson

Tereza Zelenkova: Supreme Vice

Daniel Newman

Barry Stone

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