Claire Elizabeth Barratt, director of Cilla Vee Life Arts, has produced a multiple-video experience that explores the creative elements of dance and movement. The exhibition can be seen and experienced at the Flood Gallery in Phil Mechanic Studios, 109 Roberts Street in the River Arts District, through the end of the month.
“Dance is the New Visual Art” is an installation of video pieces, each created specifically for the camera. The result is visual artistry, and not a documentation of a dance performance.
The videos are played simultaneously and continuously, some projected onto screens and others displayed on monitors.
The combination of screens and monitors takes on sculptural forms created by fabric and paper in white and black. These forms serve not only as screens on which to display the videos, but also design the shape of the space, creating a complete environment for the viewer. Visitors to the exhibit can use headphones to hear the sounds related to each piece.
Claire created all the videos in collaboration with numerous artists from a variety of disciplines. “Sallimone,” for example, is a short, abstract art video produced with two local Asheville artists (composer Kimathi Moore and videographer Charles Elmer). Another piece, “Silver,” is a movement meditation with bowed gong music by Japanese percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and shot by New York/Jamaican video artist Randy F Simon.
I’m trying to decide if the phrase “contemporary old school” is a clever oxymoron or not. It’s the phrase that struck me when I started interviewing Jenna Kraczek about her stunning and unique photography. Stylistically Kraczek has managed to veer away from the pack by putting a modern-day spin on classic glamour photography. Think George Hurrell from the forties combined with a little Herb Ritts and splash of Albert Watson. The blend is effective, compelling and shocking considering that Kraczek has only been shooting for a few years. When I sat down with her for this article, I discovered that her road to being a photographer was a more of a mythic journey than a walk in the garden. It all started with some paper and a charcoal.
Kraczek’s introduction to the visual arts started with her mother who was an artist. It was the exposure to her mother’s work at a young age that inspired her to pursue drawing and painting in college. Unknown to her at the time, Kraczek’s embrace of charcoal on paper as her favorite medium was heavily influenced by her love of black and white photography. Especially images with simple composition and pronounced light and shadow.
After Kraczek graduated from college with her art degree, she had to find a career path that would enable her to make a living quickly. Jenna’s attraction to glamour led her to beauty school which could get her working soon after she finished the program. Once again she didn’t realize that she was pursuing yet another path that was one of the parts of the whole of her photography calling.
Because of her very young exposure to painting, Kraczek excelled at color theory and trained to be a colorist. Her last year in beauty school she was part of hair competition in which she also did the makeup on the models. Out of nowhere she ended up winning an award for her makeup and not the hair. For Kraczek it was a wake up call. She loved doing makeup.
As she planned a course to makeup school, she also constantly practiced the craft. Weddings, editorial, short films, some-budget projects, no-budget projects, she didn’t care, she just wanted to practice her passion for painting faces.
Eventually her need to work as a makeup artist outweighed the frequency of opportunities that were available in which she could be highly creative. Kraczek was working with “Model Mayhem” photographers. Not surpassingly the work she was asked to do was pedestrian in concept, or the photography was so dreadful that it failed to showcase her work. So she opted to practice her concepts herself and shoot her own pictures to record the work. It was one of those epic moments like when you see a lighting strike, or the green flash right before the sun dips below the horizon.
Using herself as a model, a few spotlights from Office Depot, and a point-and-shoot camera, Kraczek had come to the end of a journey and found that photography was her true passion. Or as she describes it “her vice.” She began shooting friends, neighbors, and eventually models. Of course doing her own makeup and hair.
As her portfolio started bulking up she began getting noticed. First it was a few small projects, and then a few editorial spreads. Her arrival as a pro came recently when she started getting calls from Hollywood to bid on jobs that engaged her specific style. Yes, there is a reason I’m being vague. The projects are under the hush hush of NDAs at the moment.
Kraczek’s work is extraordinary to look at, not only for its aesthetic beauty, but also for inspiration. Her site is one that I have bookmarked, and check in with often just to see what she’s conjured up lately.
Jenna Kraczek’s career reads like an epic journey where the hero goes through life picking up the required skills that she’ll need to pursue her ultimate destiny. Ironically, in Kraczek’s case, it’s the destiny she would have never discovered had she not travelled the odyssey that she did.
“fbFaces“ is a project by Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay, who study New Media at the University of Visual Arts and Design Kassel, Germany. The project deals with the issue of data accessibility on the Internet; a topic that is gaining more and more attention – especially in our times of privacy protection and social networks. ”On the one hand “Internet giants” like Google are coming under criticism for collecting any unsolicited information accessible, on the other hand it’s surprising how many intimacies we reveal voluntarily, especially in social networks like Facebook.” Read on for more.
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““fbFaces” is a Facebook crawler, built using JavaScript & PHP, that starts at the public profile of any fb-user, saving profile image, Facebook-ID and name, and afterwards continuing its way to the public profiles of the user’s friends. And so on…” -Joern and Jonathan
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“An unimaginable flood of images with self-projection as its only purpose. 100,000 of these profile images were used (via Processing) to print a wallpaper for an entire room.” Joern and Jonathan
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“fbFaces is an attempt to visualize the incredible amount of data and images that we are daily overwhelmed by, so that we can neither realize our own selectivity nor consider the amount of data perceived.” -Joern and Jonathan
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“The wallpaper transforms the room itself into a flood of information. It surrounds us, cannot be estimated from distance; details can only be caught through determined selection. But then they vanish again – in a cloud of information.” -Joern and Jonathan
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SO Note: You can (kind of, but not really) find more on the artists by visiting Joern Roeder’s hidden card, and Jonathan Pirnay’s not at all hidden card. Thanks toTriangulation for the via.
What would you do to improve on the Mona Lisa? Our friends at Booooooom!, the Vancouver-based art blog, are asking photographers to flex their creative muscles by remaking classic works of art. A sampling of the amazing results from the Remake project—modernizing paintings by Rembrandt, Ingres, van Gogh, Lichtenstein, and others—follows.
Above: Grande Odalisque remake, by Craig White
Above: Grande Odalisque, by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Above: Ohhh…Alright… remake, by Emily Kiel
Above: Ohhh…Alright…, by Roy Lichtenstein
Above: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp remake, by Bruna Pelissari
Above: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, by Rembrandt
Above: Self Portrait 1889 remake, by Seth Johnson
Above: Self Portrait 1889, by Vincent van Gogh
Above: Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses soeurs remake, by Emile Barret
Above: Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses soeurs, by unkown artist
The harvesting machine whirs to life. Mechanical arms extend and retract, rusty cogs knuckle past each other and greasy chains creak on an endless loop. Despite a flurry of clockwork motion, the machinery is immobile. That’s because these spare combine parts have been repurposed as contemporary art, reassembled as interactive music makers, and relocated to the gallery floor. The “Combine Project” is the brainchild of Steven White, an Ontario-based visual artist profiled by Musicworks. White got the idea to convert an obsolete artifact of our agricultural past into a collection of fanciful kinetic sculptures when he and his wife moved to some property in rural Ontario. There they found the farm equipment—specifically a hulking, abandoned 1964 Allis-Chalmers All-Corp combine harvester. Sprockets, gears and valves on many of the pieces are interactive, and when you crank them, the sculptures produce an eerie, mechanical kind of music. Here are a few of White's creations and a clip featuring “Molecular Roulette,” a sculpture that looks and works like a bizarre, 6-foot-long music box. (Right-click the link and select "Save Link As" to download an MP3 of White’s machines in motion.)
"Happy Apple Tree" is a kinetic sculpture made from the odd parts of abandoned farm equipment by Canadian visual artist Steven White.
Made from a segmented drive-shaft cover, "Brian's Arc" is modeled after a human spine in a resting position.
A monstrous piece called "Spider Bark."
"Insect Variation," named for its structural likeness to a grasshopper, conveys the tension between technology and the natural world.
White wrote in Musicworks that "Tooth Organ," pictured above, "reuses a crank, two chains, several gears, and graduated metal tines from the combine to produce a sonic mashup that sounds like a blend of a home radiator pinging and a tin cup being rattled on metal jail-cell bars."
In the city, sometimes it's hard to remember what was there before what's there now existed. It may have been a building you used, enjoyed, admired as you walked past. It burned or was neglected to death or demolished for new development. How easily it is forgotten.
There are iconic buildings that are remembered even if never seen in actuality. For example, every time I walk by the "sinking ship" parking garage I see the old Hotel Seattle that it replaced. How could this tiny garage be more valuable than that building? Its loss was the impetus for historic preservation in Seattle. It may have eventually been lost anyway, to fire or earthquake, we'll never know, now.
We lose bits, or major portions, or even entire cities for reasons preventable or not (think climate change; earthquake). Many places are thoroughly documented in the digital record thanks to omnipresent cameras and cellphones. I'm not up to date on the tech but I believe there are apps that can show you the historic record of the place in the city you are currently looking at. You might see the city in composed layers of transparency and diffusion, like layers of history over time (see poem in previous post).
This reminds me of Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo is using objects from cities he has visited to explain them to Kublai Khan, who doesn't share a common language. Now (or soon) we can say "there's an app for that".
"Burst" by Jen Stark, demonstrating a powerful eruptive force with just stacks of cardboard! Photo by Harlan Erskine.
Look at these intriguing, repetitive shapes like eruptions by Miami-based Jen Stark: Her three-dimensional, kaleidoscopic paper art is simply hand-made with dozens of layers of thick coloured paper. With her abstract geometrical patterns just shown in the new Tactile book by DGV, PingMag feeds you an interview with the artist about the quality of cardboard.
Written by Verena
Two-dimensional circles jumping out of the frame: Detail of “Production Line: Triangle, Circle, Square.” Photo by Harlan Erskine.
When did you start with your… can I call it kaleidoscope paper art?
I began making paper sculptures when I went to study in France for a semester. Since I could only take two suitcases with me for five months, I decided to purchase art supplies when I got there. The Euro was high and everything was pretty expensive, so I decided to get the cheapest but coolest looking thing in the art store – a stack of construction paper! I started experimenting with what paper could turn into and it took off from there.
The tendency of any body on the Earth’s surface to drift to the side due to the planet’s rotation is called the “Coriolis Effect.” Here, we see paper drifting to many sides, by Jen Stark. Photo by Harlan Erskine.
What makes paper so fascinating to work with?
I like the fact that it is so common and usually used two-dimensionally… and I’m trying to show what it can do sculpturally and how much it can be transformed with such little changes. Also I love all the colours it comes in!
Awesome! “Piece of an infinite hole.” Photo by Harlan Erskine.
And the same hole - with a depth of 4 ft and a diameter of 2 ft. Photo by Harlan Erskine.
What exactly do you use?
Usually card stock, non-fade and acid free.
Does it have to have a certain quality to be rigid enough, such as for your marvellous “Primaries” series?
It is better for it to be pretty rigid for more sturdiness and this will also help it last longer.
Intricate paper works resembling three-dimensional objects: “Primaries: Red,” by Jen Stark.
Roughly how many layers goes into one piece?
It can range from about thirty to eighty, depending on the piece.
And how do you choose the order of the colours in the stack?
I usually buy a stack and then arrange it how I think the colours look good together. I try to spread them out a bit so they are mixed up and contrasting colours are next to each other.
“Peepholes” Photo by Harlan Erskine.
… and the awesome, illuminated “View Inside Peephole #1.” Photo by Harlan Erskine.
The Mandala-style “Untitled.” Photo by Harlan Erskine.
When you pick the colours, do you just grab everything in the store?
I get the “Assortment Pack” and use all these colours it comes with. I haven’t used black very much because the colourful packs I buy don’t usually have it. But I just got a bunch of black papers separately so I can use them now.
About the mysterious “Untitled:” Is it inspired by kind of aMandala? How do you develop it?
It is mainly inspired by geometric patterns. I just cut a shape and slowly change it as the layers progress. With these kind of sculptures I usually don’t know what the end design will look like.
Resembling geographic depictions of differences in altitude: “Microscopic Entry.” Trippy!
Do you have a certain method of cutting? For example, how did you achieve these multiple layers in “Anatomical Evolution”?
I cut each layer of paper one by one and then put them together. I always cut by hand using an X-Acto knife. It is a bit time-consuming, but I like it!
Detail of “Assorted Explosion:” imagine how long these most delicate cuts might have taken… Photo by Harlan Erskine.
About your lovely eruptive “Assorted Explosion:” Is it meant to depict an explosion in its early stage?
Exactly! Usually, stacks of construction paper are sold in “assortments” of colour. So, I wanted to play with that word as well as what it looks like it’s doing: exploding. A very colourful kind of explosion and there may be many paper cuts.
A metaphor for people’s multiple inside layers… “Cylinder: Paper Cut.” Photo by Harlan Erskine.
A beautiful “Mold Study.” Photo by Harlan Erskine.
The “Cylinder: Paper Cut” with a solid surface that’s cut open caught my eye: Could we see the paper layers as a symbolic representation of the inner layers of people, or objects…?
Definitely. You are one of the first people to mention this. I like to make the insides very colourfully confusing. You can relate it to people or things being so complicated and elaborate on the inside. Yet the outside layer is usually white to show that something may look simple and ordinary on the outside – but the inside is beaming with colour!
An inside showing a colourful spectrum indeed…
Yes, and it can also be a metaphor on how intricate and colourful people are, both physically and emotionally. There is a lot more to what is inside than what you see. And the paper sculptures give a little window to look into…
See it move! Stop-motion animation “Papermation” from 2007.
Multiple layers as metaphor for the many layers a personality may have… How poetic cardboard can be! So, apart from your paper explosions, what inspired your beautiful, fragile paper leaves as silhouettes?
I live in Miami, Florida, and these leaves came off of trees from my parent’s backyard. They are called sea-grape trees because the trees produce grape-looking berries. I was searching for something to cut into and I decided to try a leaf because it is pretty thick and strong. I was inspired by how leaves can naturally turn into skeletons over time– losing the green part and keeping only the veins. I wanted to simulate this with my X-Acto.
