Found on Google image search.
June 2, 2009
Hannah Starkey
It’s amazing how difficult it is sometimes to find the exact image I’m looking for on the internet. Trust me, I’m not some search engine naif. Yet, when I look for certain photos or sculptures, I’m often left empty handed. I did manage to find some of my favorite Hannah Starkey photos online, but I’m a little disappointed in the information superhighway. Guess all of you will just have to get her book. The work is extremely film and theater oriented in feel. There are specific scenes set up, the characters are in the midst of action, and the light is gorgeous. A couple of details easily missed in these cheap 72dpis: the photo of the blinds has a human in it (all the way on left, there is some golden hair), and the one in the kitchen with the rabbit mom has a baby crawling up the legs.
More info/images/big word write-up: http://www.steidlville.com/books/502-Photographs-1997-2007.html
Book: http://www.amazon.com/Hannah-Starkey-Photographs-Iwona-Blazwick/dp/3865213731/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243954463&sr=8-1
Moray McLaren’s “We Got Time”
You must watch this in HD and full screen to get the experience. I’m being entirely serious, it looks amazing. It doesn’t hurt that the song is beautiful, or that video is chock full of things everyone loves: records, owls, deer, wolves… the list goes on. Watch it. Now. Video by David Wilson. Oh, and by the way, it’s not computer animated. At all. All video + rate of rotation. Whoa.
Moriceau and Mrzyk
I stumbled on these drawings by Petra Mrzyk and Jean-Francois Moriceau while looking for something else entirely. I wish my entire life was filled with surprises like this. “Oh, what a nice ripe avocado… wait a minute, is that a bag of money under it?” Or, “This is exactly the shampoo I was looking for… hold up, who is that? The Canadian rapper Snow? I’ve always wanted to ask you what those lyrics meant: a lickey boom-boom down?” The animations are also pretty awesome. Don’t watch them at work. I’m just warning you.
More work: http://www.everyoneforever.com/content/2008-01-21/moriceau__mrzyk/
Favorite Artists: Gillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing has done tons of photo and video work, and pwned the Turner Prize one year*. Her art plays with psychological tensions (I don’t know that that means either, but it always sounds so damn good- “psychological tensions!”). For example, she did a video called “Two into One” where she interviewed a mother and her two sons, then asked them to lip sync over each other’s interviews. In the end, the mother has the son’s voices, and the sons have hers, and the interviews are about each other. She did a confessions series, where she invited the public to come in a confess (anything, I guess), with the promise of later showing the video (they could be masked). I’m a huge fan of the family portrait series, where she literally had masks made of her family, including an entire body suit for her brother’s portrait. She wore the masks and body suit and posed as each member of her family, and I’m pretty sure the images were re-creations of old photos. She also did a couple where she made masks of herself at various ages and wore those to re-create early portraits. I love stuff like that! So strange and wonderful.
Write-up on the brother portrait: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/apr/09/artist-gillian-wearing-best-shot
Interview: http://www.jca-online.com/wearing.html
*Yes, pwned. One day, I will also use nOOb. Maybe.
