Australian artist Ian Strange‘s ambitious project two year in the making is difficult to pin down. SUBURBAN isn’t quite installation, photography, performance, or video art – its really more than all of these. The project is really Ian Strange’s investigation of and interaction with the idea of suburbia. The sidewalk, front yard, middle class, ubiquitous rows of homes have grown with a generation of young people, and now with a second and third. The neighborhoods and houses themselves have become symbols of something beyond their function that Strange’s work seems to seek and find. Check out the video to get a preview of the upcoming exhibit.
Emma Kisiel‘s series of photographs At Rest is as intriguing as it is simple. Kisiel happens upon animals that have died, typically roadkill, and sparsely decorates the site. Simply by placing stones and flowers around the carcass, Kisiel draws attention and returns a certain dignity to each animal. Typically these animals are only seen from inside a car as it momentarily passes. Kisiel says of her interaction with the animals in the series:
“They are happened upon, visited with, remembered, and left to return to nature.” [via]
There’s something at once lighthearted and sad about Benoit Paillé‘s photographs in the series Jour du Déménagement (translates from French as “Moving Day”). Discarded furniture, boxes, mattresses and other household items sit in piles waiting to be picked up by the garbage truck. The photographs are taken in the dark, seemingly in the middle of the night, and the trash lit by a single bulb. Little attention is paid to garbage on the curb; at night while everyone is sleeping it’s completely forgotten. Regardless, items we’ve lived with often for years quietly sit there all night. The scene is reminiscent of food in the refrigerator, and wondering what happens when the door closes and the light goes out.
London-based artist Julie Cockburn revises old throw-away photographs and paintings with embroidery thread, shears, and other sundry items to create new contemporary curiosities. Each delicately considered piece contemplates craft culture in relation to the industrial age or mass production, and the identities that roam invisibly from one transmission to the next.
Of her work, Flowers Gallery suggests, “Julie introduces ideas to found objects that generate dialogue about modernity and art history, gender and identity, nature and urbanity and the relationship between process and idea.”
Coke Wisdom O’Neil’s conceptually driven portrait series The Box feels theatrically avant-garde, akin to Sartre’s No Exit, with strong emphasis on “the look”– or, the dilemma of seeing ourselves as objects in other people’s consciousness.
Each photograph was originally shot in a twenty-two foot tall wooden box, constructed by the artist himself and set up in a variety of different public spaces from New York City to Texas. Such an unnaturally large empty platform allowed curious subjects the freedom to perform when shooting; however, ironically, it also has a tendency to trap when printed– evoking a doll-like sense of display, especially when collected back-to-back on a gallery wall, suggesting “the look” is relative to not only our minds, but also most apparent in photography or art itself.
Alicia Savage captures her life with a surreal twist that pushes beyond the static point and shoot. From absurd flights of fancy to soft reflective moments, each self-portrait conveys an independent sense of travel or transcendence: movement that emphasizes the importance of dreaming in relation to personal exploration and documentation. Conceptually, it’s that simple– but technically, it’s a little more challenging. Her exquisite use of color, light, setting, and digital manipulation curiously compels us to enter these departures with great anticipation.
Zander Olsen wraps white fabric around trees to “intervene” with the organic lines of a landscape, often blurring our sense of foreground and background to generate a jarring sense of flatness. Olsen suggests such compositions convey a new “visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.” As a result, the lush wonders of Wales, Surrey, and Hampshire are transformed into beautiful abstract images, with pops of white.
Project B unearths vintage photographs from the margins of society, presenting rare originals and printing large format limited editions to the public for sale. The artists are anonymous / unknown and this is exactly the curatorial allure. Whether you’re a collector, designer, or everyday art enthusiast, this project is not about capturing the honored. It’s about appreciating the medium’s forgotten past and exploring its throwaways. The personal and technical flaws are just as endearing as the mysterious people who elusively inhabit these cryptic realms.