Kirsten Kay Thoen's Sculptural Landscapes

Kirsten Kay Thoen challenges conventions of landscape photography by making dynamic three-dimensional photographic sculptures. These range from geometric lightboxes to magical, multi-paneled, trophy-like structures that give viewers a new and strangely elevated means of experiencing the natural world.  

Her overarching practice began in 2006 when she journeyed to the redwood forest to make large format landscape photographs of various awe-inspiring sites. At the time, Kirsten Kay Thoen felt that something was lacking in their one-dimensionality and craved an experience that expanded beyond simply viewing the final images digitally or on the wall.  With this new idea in mind, she entered graduate school in 2007 and began to evolve her methods. 

Her multidimensional process begins by photographing various landscapes around the world in sites including the California Redwood Forest, the volcanic terrain of Kauai, and geothermic Iceland. She selects these sites for their “profound energetic qualities.” In her own words:

“For me they are guttural-earth. I’m becoming consistently drawn to volcanic terrain for this reason. There is a metaphysical component to the work and what I am trying to convey within the process of transforming nature into image and back into form, like a talisman…I’m compelled by the idea of bringing these phenomenal sites to an audience that may not have the opportunity to experience them first hand, and I’m intrigued with the desire and questions of how to achieve that.” 

After photographing these sites extensively, she returns to her studio to transform her one-dimensional images into tactile 3D structures. This involves drawing, prototyping, and combining masks of her original source images with templates for the final geometrical forms. Her process continually evolves to push the boundaries of each new photo sculpture, and she often works with a variety of material fabricators to help actualize her designs. Most recently this has expanded to include the use of 3D printing technology as well as casting/molding custom hardware to assemble image panels. The final pieces, comprised of materials that include plexiglass, wood, and metal, are often internally lit giving them a life-like illusion. 

Two of her most recent pieces, currently on view in the exhibition Plasmatik, curated by Natalie Kates Projects, work together to create what Kirsten Kay Thoen describes as a “personal cosmology via objects that inhabit concepts of space, time and matter.” The first, Crystalline Pendulum & Pyramid, pictured below, is a two-part hourglass-shaped sculpture that depicts ice crystals from a receding glacier in Iceland which Kirsten captured in their final moments before being absorbed into the ocean. The second piece, Volcanic Nonagon transforms straightforward images of a volcanic boulder into multiple geometric planes that protrude from the surface of the wall as if floating in space. 

“The photographic images are no longer mere depictions of nature, but vital forms of their own, calling forth the sites they derived from.” – Kirsten Kay Thoen

Bio: Kirsten Kay Thoen was born in 1977 in Holladay, Utah, and is based in Brooklyn, NY.  She received a BA in Arts in Context from the New School’s Eugene Lang College, continued her studies internationally at The Royal Academy of Art in Den Hague, NL, and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Thoen’s artwork has exhibited in New York by Humble Arts Foundation at the Chelsea Art Museum and Affirmation Arts, by Capricious Presents at Smack Mellon Gallery, and at Field Projects Gallery.  Among art fairs, her work has been curated into NEXT Chicago’s Special Projects and presented at SCOPE Basel, NADA Miami, and SCOPE NY 2014 with Natalie Kates Projects.  Humble Arts Foundation awarded Thoen with the New Photography Grant, Spring 2010, and included her work in 31 Women in Art Photography 2010 and The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography, Vol. 2, published in 2011.  Thoen’s works are in private collections in New York and France. 

Posted
AuthorJon Feinstein
Tagssculpture, kirsten kay thoen, landscape, new topographics, conceptual, 3D printing

Matthew Swarts Transforms Intimate Portraits into Psychoactive Masterpieces

When photographer Matthew Swarts ended a long-term relationship, he faced a collection of photographs that felt mysteriously divorced from their original sense of intimacy. Images that once represented a deeply personal connection began to feel strangely removed, like discovering a shoebox of a stranger’s old snapshots. Instead of throwing them away, Swarts began to rework each image, in most cases covering or obscuring the original photographs with scanned information from the web. These initial images were part of a series called Beth, which evolved into Swarts' most recent body of work, The Alternatives.  In both series, Swarts process revolves around layering these personal images with graphs, mathematical patterns, and other abstractions that serve as visual representations of his growing uncertainty in an attempt to make sense of his developing sense of distance. 

The experience of looking at The Alternatives is not only distant, but also incredibly psychoactive. With no central focal point, the eye wanders in limitless directions and event through the image, much like staring through a 1990’s Magic Eye illustration. At first glace, many of Swarts’ images appear to be pure abstractions – patterns, or optical illusions not unlike those from childhood science textbooks. However, with a prolonged, steady gaze, a figure emerges – Swarts’ partner—almost as distorted as the initial surface patterns.  These are at times both enticing, and nauseating – they make your head hurt yet you somehow can’t avert your eyes. 

This aesthetic acid-trip comes from an elaborate technical process, compositing portraits of his partner with various digital tools, surfaces and forms. In many cases, Swarts repeats patterns, sharpens, bends, and virtually destroys the source images in order to create a exaggerated sense of visual cacophony. The patterns that overlay his personal photographs come from sources ranging from random web searches, to children’s books of optical illusions. 

“I’m more interested in what’s left over when I manipulate then subtract out the beginning,” says Swarts. “I’m fascinated by that optical shift and want most of all to make prints that actively operate this kind of perceptual confusion.” 

The utter randomness of Swarts’ source material reflects his distance from images that were once incredibly close and personal. The complex patterns, layers and zeros and ones become indistinguishable from images that were once close to his heart.

“I like the way they make my eyes feel, and they make my mind think of options. They present apparent topography and give opportunity for an altered perception of space. These are things that I also like about portraits and the people behind them.”

Bio: Matthew Swarts’ work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Doubletake Magazine, Contact Sheet, Afterimage, Fotophile, In the Loupe, and other publications. He attended Princeton University and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and has taught photography at Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Ramapo College, The University of Connecticut, The University of Massachusetts, Boston, Middlesex College, and The Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

He is the recipient of a J.William Fulbright Scholar Grant and the Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Award for the best new work nationally in photographic portraiture. 

His work is represented by Kopeikin Gallery  and will be shown with Paul Kopekin at MIAMI PROJECT December 2nd - December 7th 2014, and in a solo exhibition at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, from Feb 28th to April 4th, 2015. 

Posted
AuthorJon Feinstein
TagsMatthew Swarts, portraiture, abstraction, psychedelic, psychoactive, new photography

5 Questions With Haley Morris-Cafiero

Fat shaming unfortunately continues to be a socially acceptable form of bigotry around the world. For the past 4 years, photographer Haley Morris-Cafiero has responded to this photographically, turning the hateful comments, glances and gestures into impactful self-portraits. Morris works with an assistant in large crowds, capturing strangers as they mock her and uses her camera to reverse the power they may think they have.

Last year, Morris-Cafiero’s work went viral through dedicated articles on Salon, Huffington Post, Feature Shoot, Lens Scratch and other high traffic blogs. While much of the response was positive, she received numerous disparaging comments, in many cases verbalizing the hateful gestures captured in her initial photographs. Instead of letting this slow her down, Morris-Cafeiro used the comments to create new images in 2014, allowing her to have the last laugh. The Magenta Foundation will publish a monograph of the series this coming year.

Morris Cafiero is currently raising funds via Kickstarter, which we encourage our readers to support. 

In support of the project, we caught up with Morris-Cafiero to learn more.  

Humble Arts Foundation: You've received a great deal of positive response to your work, but there has also a swarm of hateful comments from online trolls. How did these comments influence the most recent work in the series? 

Haley Morris Cafiero: Before my photographs were written up last year, I had read the occasional comment section and got angry at the world.  But when the commenters started talking about how ugly my face, my body and my clothes are, it made me laugh hysterically.  I know that is a strange reaction, but to think that someone wastes their time to write something that has no influence on how I think about myself is hilarious.  So when so many of the commenters said that I needed to 'lose weight and get a make over,' that was the visual cue for what I needed to do next in my photos.  In the original photos I was the "everyday girl passively doing everyday things."  Now I will respond by happily engaging in what they want me to do to improve myself to see if I am surrounded by what could be called critical or questioning gazes.  They are more costumed (I don't wear spandex) and I take on a role of being happy while trying to make myself better. 

HAF: What was the most positive or moving response you have received so far? 

HMC: I have received quite a few really deep and almost private/confessional messages of support from people.  But probably the most recent impact was this one:

"I have been really depressed lately and I was crying about something completely unrelated as I read about your inspiring stop fat-shaming campaign. Your pictures highlight a huge societal issue of epic proportions but the fact that you have the courage to do what you do is amazing and it made me feel so much better. I can't say I relate as a 125 lb. 16 year old male high school junior, but I can have compassion for the cause. Also, despite what society may say, you are beautiful and I don't say that without meaning. Anyway, thanks for cheering me up! "

I don't know if its because of his age or his honesty, but it just made realize how what I do can impact someone.  That was never the goal when I started 4 yeas ago, but if my photographs can help someone miles away when they are feeling low, I am honored and fueled to do more.  His message made me see myself when I was a 16 year old and hating myself.   

HAF: That's amazing. You've made pictures in various locations in the United States, as well as abroad. Do you notice any differences in peoples reactions/ expressions in your photographs? 

HMC: Yes!  For at least 3 years when I was photographing, I would never catch the gaze of any young women age 15-25ish.  At least 5 times while shooting, I have heard young women make fun of me.  No question.  But when I look at the images, the young women look like they are talking to their friend.  So when I started traveling to countries where English is not the native language, I started capturing more of that age group. It may be coincidental, but it was definitely a trend that I noticed. 

HAF: How did the book project come about?

HMC: When I saw the impact that the images had on people, I knew that the project needed to be a book.  Most of the people who reacted so strongly to the images will not see them in a gallery or a museum and seeing them online doesn't give a personal experience.  If they are printed in a book, then people can hold the images and see them they way that I intend them to be seen. 

I am thrilled to be working with the Magenta Foundation on this book as they share the same vision that I have. When I first met Maryann Camilleri at FotoFest in 2012, she gave me excellent feedback that really pushed me and the work to a good direction. 

HAF: Are you continuing to make new images for this series? 

HMC: I am going to shooting new images until April of next year.  I am happy with what I have, but I always want to push the envelope to see what else is to be had.  My entire project hinges on timing and I need to give timing as many opportunities as possible to deliver.

Bio: Haley Morris-Cafiero holds a BA in Photography and a BFA in Ceramics from the University of North Florida and a MFA in Art from University of Arizona. She is an Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Memphis College of Art. Her series of photographs, Wait Watchers, has been featured in over 40 sites all over the world including CBS This Morning, Huffington Post and Salon.com. She has was a finalist for the Prix Virginia & Renaissance Prize the series was exhibited in the Chicago Photography Center and the Newspace Center of Photography in 2014. 

Posted
AuthorJon Feinstein
Tagsphotographer interviews, Haley Morris Cafiero, weight watchers, kickstarter photography projects, Magenta Foundation, fat shaming

Photographer Andrew Fladeboe Gives Dignity to Working Dogs

“Dogs are a universal part of human culture and have been by our side for 30,000 years evolving to help us in a number of working roles. However, dogs are distinctly non-human and evoke qualities of the savage beast. They straddle the line between man and nature, and are a perfect conduit to illustrate the greater power of nature in contrast to our usual human-centric point of view.” - Andrew Fladeboe

In May, 2013, as part of a Fullbright Fellowship, photographer Andrew Fladeboe began a seven month adventure traveling throughout Norway and New Zealand to photograph various breeds of working dogs in their natural environments. During this time, he fully immersed himself in the culture of working dogs, traveling and photographing extensively, and essentially living a shepherd’s life.

Fladeboe’s dog portraits, often shot before sweeping, monumental landscapes extend beyond straightforward documentary and reportage, with a range of influences drawing from Victorian painting to natural history dioramas. Fladeboe specifically cites nineteenth century painter Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, who pioneered the practice of elevating dogs in hunting scenes, positioning them as highly noble creatures. For Fladeboe, this is central to his love for animals and his quest to depict their uniquely bestial and regal qualities.     

While his pictures are in hardly typological, Fladeboe’s process for photographing the working dogs sticks to a formula that produces specific emotional responses and give insights into each dog's psychology. For each picture, he works closely with the dogs’ owners in order to get the right shot. This requires careful maneuvering, and anywhere from three to fifteen attempts before a dog looses focus. When editing, Fladeboe sets specific parameters for giving the dogs a certain aura of dignity.

“I have general rules I've set for myself when choosing the edit. Never have the dog lying down, always with its head up, finding the highest point in the area to shoot from. It was an interesting task getting some of the farmers to work with me, but ultimately they enjoyed the process and were much more interested in the project after they saw the way I approached my subjects” 

Fladeboe also credits the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History in New York City as the first and foremost influence to his photographic seeing and as a foundation for how he sets up and constructs his real world photographs.

“I'd wander around the ones at the Natural History Museum in New York and photograph them as many photographers do. I realized that I should try creating my own scenes with real animals, using the dioramas as compositional frameworks.”

The images shot over the past year are a continuation of Fladeboe’s ongoing multi-volume body of work The Shepherd’s Realm. The project began in 2011 during an artists’ residency in the Netherlands followed by three weeks in Scotland.  Many of the initial images were digitally manipulated composites of different species of animals, but evolved into the straight, dog specific photographs that Fladeboe made during his Fullbright. While these initial images might stand out from the group on technical grounds, they add a fundamental layer to Fladeboe’s unique relationship with animals. 

“ I see this project as a kind of box set of the wonderful animals I've met on my adventures. I will continue working on new volumes for many years (I have an evolving list of future locations), but I think my next project may be separate from the series with more deliberate, constructed, and larger scale works that still use animals as my narrative muse. Dogs may continue to be a focus but I'm open to branching out to different animals again. “

BIO: Born in California in 1984, Andrew Fladeboe grew up in Japan, Russia, and Austria before obtaining his BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. He has spent time photographing animals for The Shepherd's Realm series in the Netherlands, the Highlands of Scotland, Southern France, and Norway. In 2014, Andrew was awarded a Fulbright Grant to photograph and study working dogs in New Zealand. He is represented by Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art in New York City, where he'll have a solo exhibition in fall, 2015. Follow him on Instagram @Fladeboe

Posted
AuthorJon Feinstein
TagsAndrew Fladeboe, dog photography, documentary photography, working dogs

Faith Holland is Obsessed with the Internet

What do ejaculatory champagne bottles, feline emoticons, literal "birds and bees," and a shrine to an imaginary online "church of cat" have in common? They are all part of Faith Holland's wild obsession with the Internet in all of its virtual, continuously consumable glory. Over the past few years she's made a range of work that tackles the web with sharp, comical critique. While naysayers may feel that there is no new Internet Art to be made, and the same folks are likely skeptical of anything GIF (including its pronunciation), Holland adds new layers to the conversation in an attempt to surface the interconnectedness of it all. 

Holland uses images from various films and the Internet as her source material, mashing them up to draw larger inferences on how digital media represents, constructs and visualizes beauty, sexuality, and how we experience the world. She is particularly drawn to the relationship between visual spectacles in Hollywood and online. These include big budget special effects, low fi animated GIFs, and a focused attention on technological absurdities in online pornography. With many of her pieces, she pays particular attention to early, and now dated, Internet innovations such as self-published homepages in the mid 1990's, to the newfound appreciation for the GIF in art an pop cultural circles over the past five years. 

While these ideas are a common thread throughout all of her work, they are most obvious in Holland's series Visual Orgasms, which comments on what she sees as Hollywood's historical pressure on sex to be visually consumable. The series exaggerates this idea with various collages of sexual metaphors (waterfalls, trains leaving tunnels, fireworks, etc) that intentionally exclude actual sexual acts.

And somehow, cats seamlessly make their way into Holland's increasingly evolving fascination with online mania. For Holland, they are closely tied to her ideas of how the Internet is structured, and to other visual symbols and that appear throughout all of her work. She sees early Internet cat obsession as potentially being influential on the widespread development of memes and other forms of viral imagery. 

"Cats got on to the Internet on the ground level. When I look back at Geocities archives or my own personal collection of images downloaded from the Internet, they were always present—and they’ve been more enduring than other early Internet obsessions, like the Grateful Dead."

Bio: Faith Holland is an artist and curator whose practice focuses on gender and sexuality’s relationship to the Internet. She received her BA in Media Studies at Vassar College and her MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Xpo Gallery (Paris), Art in Odd Places festival (New York), Elga Wimmer (New York), Axiom Gallery (Boston), the Philips Collection (Washington, D.C.), and File Festival (São Paulo). Her work has been written about in The Sunday Times UK, Art F City, Hyperallergic, Animal New York, and Dazed Digital. 

Posted
AuthorJon Feinstein
Tagsinternet art, Faith Holland, animated gifs, conceptual art, cat photography