ai weiwei rocks out. give the man his passport back

er how did i miss these?!

research: James Benning

still from video Ten Skies 2004

James Benning now converted to digital until recently known for working in 16mm film
hailed as the cinema's voice of the midwest
raised and studied in Wisconsin US
Policitally awakened during 1960s and participated in civil rights movements, friends drafted and died in vietnam.
This American artists work was suggested to me when I was working on my first project using video.
The timeless, meandering quality appeals. There is no trickery, fancy editing. He is filming what is in real time.
I feel these sorts of video and arts that are more contemplative are reassuring to me. Most of the artists I have been researching based on what their visual imagery is about have ended up being interested in zen, meditation and more calm and tranquil results in their works. This may not be so coincidental after all but it's a stark finding after looking into a number of artists whose biographies and interests stated in interviews raise similar preocupations: Agnes Martin, Ian McKeever, Bill Viola, Tapies etc etc the list goes on.
Part of me wishes I could create more political, engaging, bold, humourous light hearted or innovative work. I appreciate these elements in other peoples but ultimately I seem to return to what I'm drawn to and it's light, calm, abstracted elements that are probably obsessions as a way of coping from the frenetically paced and emotionally draining work that I do when not at college.


Bio:

 His philosophy of “landscape as a function of time,” and “Looking and Listening” (which is also the name of a course taught by Benning) is particularly evident in his films since 1999 in the form of fixed, stable shots


Benning's use of duration reflects his accord with Henry David Thoreau's passage from Walden, “No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking at what is to be seen?”


Inspiration
artists:

 Bill Traylor, Henry Darger, and Mose Tolliver.

Gallery representation
neugerriemschneider gallery in Berlin


Sources:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/sight-sound-interview-james-benning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWuDiSd09S4

research:Idris Khan

Repetition and action have always been central to Kahn's practice

I came across Khan's work in a guardian article and was struck by how his images are similar to what's caught my eye during the drawing module.

Always a sucker for someone's background, his father was a doctor and Khan decided to tread his own path, remained fascinated with his cultural heritage but stopped his formal islamic beliefs as a teenager.

he does not describe himself as a photographer but uses photographs as an integral part of layering, blurring and abstracting images, whether of musical text, religious verses into intriguing pieces.

I'm intrigued by other artists working with blurring/overpainting at the moment and would be keen to see his work up close.

Again the still image reproduced can be fascinating enough for me. It will be interesting to see if his works changes much over time.

Bio from website
Drawing his inspiration from the history of art and music as well as key philosophical and theological texts, Idris Khan investigates memory, creativity and the layering of experience. 

Khan's works rely on a continuous process of creating and erasing, or adding new layers whilst retaining traces of what has gone before. He first gained attention for work in which he used digital technology to overlay and combine series of visual or textual work: every Bernd and Hilla Becher photograph of a gable-sided house, every page of the Quran, every late Constable painting, every stave of Chopin's Nocturnes.  

Repetition and action have always been central to Kahn's practice along with a restricted set of processes. However, if his earlier works drew on pre-existing cultural artefacts and were about creating a totality from discrete parts, his more recent series introduce another layer of mediation and are resolutely hand-made. Printed texts are stamped in densely overlaid geometric shapes on the surface of paintings, works on paper, sculptures and wall drawings. The texts are drawn from the artist's own writings in response to classic art historical, philosophical and religious tracts. 

Throughout his oeuvre, whether working with the still or moving photographic image, painting on canvas or directly onto the wall, Khan retains an aesthetic of elegant saturation. The density and precision of his images allude to the excess of information in the technical age, while encouraging a slower and more engaged way of looking and responding to our collective history and culture.

Born in Birmingham in 1978, Khan lives and works in London. Since completing his Master's Degree at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004 he has shown internationally, including recent solo shows at the Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester (2012); Sadler's Wells, London (2011); Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden (2011); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); Kunsthaus Murz, Murzzuschlag, Austria (2010) and K20, Düsseldorf (2008). His work has also been included in group shows at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (2015);  Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2014 - 2015); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2014); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida (2013); The British Museum, London (2012); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012); Fundament Foundation, Tilburg (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); and Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin (2009). In 2014 Khan collaborated with choreographer Wayne McGregor to produce stage design for STEPS, Switzerland's contemporary dance biennale. 

Gallery representation:
victoria Miro london

references

http://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/14-idris-khan/
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/mar/25/artist-idris-khan
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/04/idris-khan-artist-interview-blurred-lines-photographs-sculpture

research:Julie Mehretu

This artists work, often monochromal, gestural with intriguing marks was suggested to me when researching my drawing work.
I'm interested in the piece above particularly. I've been working on an A4 limited size, on ECG paper or MDF pieces in experimental work and do want to think about scaling up, using fragments that are completed pieces in their own right. Whether this feels less daunting than a huge empty board I don't know. I like the detailing of smaller work and find it alot more peaceful and absorbing and it would be interesting working on a larger scale to see if that feels the same.
 Do you have to go large or go home?!

"Typically, Mehretu begins these paintings by imposing a plan that will dictate the composition, then responds to these outlines with architectural drawings. Gestural marks inhabit those spaces: they act on and are acted upon by the built space of the painting."


I like the fact that there is some sparcity in her work, they're not completely covered, the marks are distinct whilst remaining coded, obscure and subtle.
She uses overhead projectors to lay the foundations of marks on a piece, draughtsmen colloborate to make marks, often architectural designs.
It was interesting to hear that she used to push the works too far and then realising she could erase back into it that the favourite repeated marks that were initially creating an obstacle could be pared back. She describes the work as 'moving back and forth'. That the 'resolution emerges' some pieces may take a couple of week others years.





b.1970 Addis Ababa Lives New York

Bio from website
Julie Mehretu makes large-scale, gestural paintings that are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making using pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint. Mehretu’s work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place and a collapse of art historical references, from the dynamism of the Italian Futurists and the geometric abstraction of Malevich to the enveloping scale of Abstract Expressionist colour field painting. In her highly worked canvases, Mehretu creates new narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies with a frenetic mark making that for the artist becomes a way of signifying social agency as well suggesting an unravelling of a personal biography.

Mehretu’s points of departure are architecture and the city, particularly the accelerated, compressed and densely populated urban environments of the 21st Century. Her canvases overlay different architectural features such as columns, façades and porticoes with geographical schema such as charts, building plans and city maps and architectural renderings, seen from multiple perspectives, at once aerial, cross-section and isometric. Her paintings present a tornado of visual incident where gridded cities become fluid and flattened, like many layers of urban graffiti. Mehretu has described her rich canvases as “story maps of no location”, seeing them as pictures into an imagined, rather than actual reality. Through its cacophony of marks, her work seems to represent the speed of the modern city depicted, conversely, with the time-aged materials of pencil and paint.

Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa in 1970 and lives and works in New York. She has exhibited in several important group exhibitions including ‘Poetic Justice’, 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003); Whitney Biennial; São Paolo Biennial and Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2004); the Biennale of Sydney and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Prospect 1, New Orleans (2008); ‘Automatic Cities’ MCA San Diego (2009); ‘From Picasso to Julie Mehretu’, British Museum, London (2010) and Document XIII, Kassel (2012). Solo exhibitions include Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; REDCAT, Los Angeles and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2003); St Louis Art Museum (2005) and MUSAC, Léon, Spain (2006); ‘City Sitings’, Detroit Institute of Art and ‘Black City’ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2007); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, (2008); ‘Grey Area’, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2009) and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010). In 2015 she was honoured with the US State Department's 'National Medal of Arts'.

Gallery representation:

White cube London

References

http://whitecube.com/artists/julie_mehretu/
http://bombmagazine.org/article/2714/julie-mehretu

Project 3: work in progress

stills from Project 3

i think i've always been interested in shadows and subtle change in lights but these photos may have been something I would have taken in the past but they now more obviously reference the work of Uta Barth. She says the camera helped her see, it draws her attention to the visible elements around her. The process of taking a photo makes them more visible to her. 

My work involves a sense of what I'm intrigued and drawn to and the spontaneous capturing of that, instantly deciding with digital if I've captured what I want. The possibilities of instand images enable me to take a photo again. I rarely want to edit the photos apart from basic exposures or contrast, the composition doesn't get messed with as that's what has drawn my eye to start with. My eyes frame the world and the camera captures it, making real the way that I see things. It exists outside my mind then and no-one can question my experience or tell me again that it didn't really happen like that...