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

ideas

http://www.studentartguide.com/articles/creative-photography-ideas

Chen Po-i

this taiwanese due follows me on flickr. get in.

research: Bill Armstrong

Aperture: Given your interest in spirituality and universality, do you have any religious beliefs or belief in God?

I had an interesting experience the other day. Bill Hunt and I were talking about the spiritual aspects of blue. He asked me if I believed in God and when I hesitated, he said, “You believe in the subconscious.” It occurred to me that belief in the subconscious might be another way of saying God is within you. I had never thought of that before. I guess I’m still learning.

I came across this photographer's work on a link (see research tab) when googling abstract photography.
The strong colours and blurred images are themes that are repeated in my work.
Obscuring, blurring and layering, these are aspects of mine and other peoples work that I'm intrigued by.
The figures in Bill Armstrongs work have a figurative element to them, they are recognisable as people. The blurred images set up a distance and barrier between the photographer/viewer and the subject. This is distance is a topic that I'm interested in, and engagement of the viewer is something I have been researching as part of my art theory essay on immersive installations and Olafur Eliassons' work.
The ambiguity and indistinct images add an abstract quality to the work. There is intrigue as to how these images are created, to me it adds a mystery to what could otherwise be a very technically executed sharp portrait image. I like reportage photography and portraiture, especially Sally Mann's work, but feel that Bill Armstrongs images have more of a fine art slant that I can relate to. See below for one of my photos that is a favourite image, It's a white van behind nasty 80s style PVC patterned window.

image by cloudstomper

the infinity series

The Infinity series is an extensive body of work that I have been photographing since 1997. It includes a wide range of portfolios, from figurative to abstract, that are made using my unique process of photographing found images extremely out of focus with the camera’s focusing ring set at infinity.

My unique process of appropriating images and subjecting them to a series of manipulations—photocopying, cutting, painting, re-photographing—transforms the originals and gives them a new meaning in a new context. Extreme blurring makes the edges within the collages disappear, so the photographs appear to be seamless, integrated images. This sleight of hand allows me to conjure a mysterious tromp l'oeil world that hovers between the real and the fantastic. It is a world just beyond our grasp, where place may be suggested, but is never defined, and where the identity of the amorphous figures remains in question. It is a world that might exist in memory, in dreams, or, perhaps, in a parallel universe yet unvisited.

The nature of visual perception intrigues me: how the eye continually tries to resolve these images, but is unable to do so, and how that is unsettling. And I am drawn to the idea that we can believe something is real, while at the same time knowing it is illusory; that the experience of visual confusion, when the psyche is momentarily derailed, is what frees us to respond emotionally.

At the same time, the subject of these collages is color. Extreme de-focusing enables me to blend and distill hues, creating rhapsodies of color that are meditative pieces—glimpses into a space of pure color, beyond our focus, beyond our ken.

Gallery representation:

Hackelbury (alongside photographer Gary Fabian Miller)

www.hackelbury.co.uk

http://billarmstrongphotography.com

http://www.aperture.org/blog/interview-with-bill-armstrong/

research: susan derges and co

Susan Derges

Gary Fabian Miller The Night Cell

During research, I was drawn to the photos of Susan Derges. Some of her photos of long overnight exposures use a classical curved frame. They are illusory, vividly coloured in a deep blue reminiscent of cyanotype work I did on foundation.
Reading about her work and methods lead me to another wonderful book called Shadow Catchers and the work below of other artist Adam Fuss and Gary Fabian Miller
I like Fuss's more surreal imagery. Fabian MIllers has a more scientific reference to it, the colours of monitors from labs and hospital or referencing petri dishes or lunar eclipses.
The symmetry, colours and abstract quality to these is something I enjoy and am drawn back to.

"There is something the air," writes Jeffrey Fraenkel in his introduction to  

Under The Sun: Photographs Paperback – Sep 2 1997

"Over the last decade a remarkable body of photographic work has emerged out of England, the look of which seems unaligned to most photography of the past 150 years what most distinguishes the work of this "Gang of Four"--Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Gary Fabian Miller and Adam Fuss--is their conscious and deliberate engagement with the metaphysical possibilities of the medium." "Gang of Four"--Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Gary Fabian Miller and Adam Fuss is their conscious and deliberate engagement with the metaphysical possibilities of the medium."



References:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/20/photograph-susan-derges-best-shot

murmur returns







can you see the drones in the last one?...

moon water reflection

back at shapwick heath

some stills this time

amazing reflections and hypnotic formations again

only 3 weeks left before the murmurs are over til next winter
love the delicacy of the way some of the murmurs photos have turned out. tweaked things a bit in iPhoto, the cooler tint is realistic and adds to the chill dreamy quality of the 'blue hour'.


There's a certain voyeuristic nature to watching these formations, it's an experience that my video work is trying to capture and that I'm having to distill down and analyse as the course progresses.

The noise, the goosebumps, the involuntary smile, the wonder.

It's all based on being there when something else is doing something, about being present and outside at the same time.