“Crude” Series

www.sonjathomsen.com

Obscure is my understanding of oil, its origins; its raw potential; its economic, social and political relationships. What does oil look like? Diverse circumstances came together that made me curious about oil’s invisibility and ubiquitous influence in daily life. These circumstances climaxed in November of 2006 when a loved one returned home after his tour of duty in Iraq. At this time I began collecting my used motor oil and photographing it. By examining oil most immediate in our daily lives, the photographs make visible the slippery substance that has become as needed as water to sustain our contemporary lives.

The photographs entitled Crude (2007-2008) are light jet prints. The dark creamy images abstract scale and are a visual metaphor of the incomprehensible. The title creates a paradox between the refined oil photographed, its origins, its captivating surface and its obscene usage.

Burning Water (2007) is a video completed in collaboration with a colleague and sound artist, Jason Nanna.  The four and a half minute video integrates my study of water, its elusive surface and potential, with my curiosity about oil–a complicated raw material that affects our economy and politics. -Sonja Thomsen

“GULP (Generative Urban Landscape Project)”

www.bigobjects.com

A gulp of water, a gulp of air, a gulp of reality…

In this photographic project, the ubiquitous Southern California pool becomes a medium through which the surrounding landscape is interpreted. The peculiar garden that is urban Southern California would not exist without water. Here it is viewed through that chlorinated lens. Descending into water, my movement, and the exhalation of my breath, causes distortion of the surface. Pictures are made looking upward. The water is clear, but distorts; the landscape can be intuited but the perspective is indeterminate. The resulting cognitive dissonance forces viewers to sense, rather than read, the images. Verisimilitude has never been my goal: instead it is to provide a sensual springboard for interpretation. My work has addressed issues of self, place, and memory through an appeal to the viewer’s body, using sculptural forms and architecture to do so. This new project takes me back to photography, which was my first love as an artist.

Using the sensual immediacy of large-scale photographic imagery I aim to cajole viewers out of their learned response to the environment into a more sensory experience of it, and back into their bodies, so to speak. The images are generated by an action, the descent under water. When viewers stand in front of the finished pictures, they find themselves inserted into the action and by extension into my presence there. The physical nature of the finished objects is therefore intimately connected to their effectiveness. The scale of the images the intensity of the color, the reflective surfaces play crucial roles in the work.

-Daniel Wheeler

“Kusho” Series

www.shinichimaruyama.com

As a young student, I often wrote Chinese characters in sumi ink. I loved the nervous, precarious feeling of sitting before an empty white page, the moment just before my brush touched the paper. I was always excited to see the unique result of each new brushing.

Once your brush touches paper, you must finish the character; you have one chance. It can never be repeated or duplicated. You must commit your full attention and being to each stroke. Liquids, like ink, are elusive by nature. As sumi ink finds its own path through the paper grain, liquid finds its unique path as it moves through air.

Remembering those childhood moments, of ink and empty page, I fashioned a large ‘brush’ and bucket of ink. I get the same feeling, a precarious nervous excitement, as I stand before the empty studio space. Each stroke is unique, ephemeral. I can never copy or recreate them. I know something fantastic is happening, “a decisive moment”, but I can’t fully understand the event until I look at these captured afterimages, these paintings in the sky. -Shinichi Maruyama

“alleverythingthatisyou”

www.starnstudio.com

For the Starns, the six-sided nature of snow crystals appears less important than the ways in which the flakes hover between one state and another. As the Starns photograph, the crystals are in a process of alteration from solid to liquid, from organized form in space to aqueous blob on a surface.  They suggest a transitiveness that photography, as a medium devoted to stilling the moment, would seem to contradict. Instead of appearing as specimens, in the manner of 19^th century scientific observation, the snowflakes are objects of transformation.

Few of the Starns’ snowflakes are models of perfection, and in this they remind one of finding starfish and seashells scoured by the tides and left to dry on sandy beaches. Many have parts missing, or they have all their detailed armatures on one side but not the other. Here again – and despite their appearance on gallery walls in grid-like arrangements – the Starns’ images exceed the aesthetic register of the catalog. Unlike industrial structures, or man-made devices, imperfection is an essential part of their beauty and poignancy.

Here, then, is material evidence of the Starns interest in the phenomenological character of the natural world, cast into being against the certitude of our own impermanence. The photographs speak of the fragile delicacy of our ever-warming world while being themselves a visual bulwark against despair, and they draw us, like moths to light, to the pleasures of sight that but for the camera would exceed the human eye.”

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Excerpt from Andy Grundberg’s introduction in alleverythingthatisyou (catalogue published by the Wetterling gallery, Stockholm—Sweden 2007)

“Water” Series

www.larrysilver.com

Larry Silver [b.1934] began photographing the streets and subways of New York City in 1949 at the age of 15, and studied photography at the High School of Industrial Art (1949-53). The School’s proximity to Peerless Camera Store enabled Silver to meet numerous members of the Photo League, including W. Eugene Smith, Weegee and Lou Bernstein. In Silver’s senior year, he won first prize in the Scholastic-Ansco Photography Awards, and was granted a full scholarship to the Art Center School in Los Angeles (1954-56). During visits to the Santa Monica Beach, Silver photographed the local weightlifters, body builders, and acrobats. This celebrated series, “Muscle Beach” (1954), was the subject of a solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography in 1985, and again in 1999 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In 2003, after more than 50 years, Larry Silver began to move away from documentary photography and began creating a series of water abstractions.  These photographs often bear little resemblance to water, incorporating natural and unnatural impurities such as pollution, bacteria, leaves, and brush.  For Silver, these works were the beginning of a conceptual leap – moving away from depicting people in their environment to the effects of people on their environment.

Larry Silver has work in over 20 museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Yale University Art Gallery.

“JUMP”

www.stephendirado.com

One of the rites to passage for vacationers on Martha’s Vineyard is jumping from the American Legion Memorial Bridge into the ocean 18 feet below. For many this symbolic ritual is tantamount to announcing: “my vacation has begun.” Stephen DiRado, a Worcester based photographer, has spent the past seven summers photographing the tourists and residents who take this leap of faith. Although DiRado has been visiting Martha’s Vineyard for nearly 20 years, he drove by the bridge for almost 15 years before he stopped to photograph. He was lured by the chanting which surged to a frenzy when a jumper hesitated: “JUMP! JUMP! JUMP!”

The pictures invite us to leap with the jumper, albeit vicariously. DiRado notes, “The first pictures were exploratory, an inventory of sorts about their process: limbering up, adjusting bathing suits, veins pumped with adrenalin, followed by the leap, contact with the water and look of pleasure when they turn upwards to witness the reactions from peers. I came back to do the same the next day, and then the day after, realizing that I was onto something. I was experiencing the thrill of jumping through my camera.” For DiRado, whose fear of heights and water keeps him from jumping himself, this experience is freeing. -Stephen DiRado

“Water Paintings”

www.peterwbrooke.com

I have based this group of paintings on a new collection of Poems by Charles Wright titled Sestets.  Each painting, however, is not directly about any given poem.  They are rather, evocations of elements and fragments of the work as a whole.  Water certainly plays an elemental role in Wright’s work, however it is not the poet’s exclusive theme.  So, like his poems, water is certainly a theme or vehicle in my paintings, but ultimately they are about mortality, nature, reflection, and illusion. -Peter Brooke