“Some where someone or everyone discovered everything and learned everything except one thing and they named it God. God could think and that led to the following tale.”
Tom Repasky, 2008
http://eloquentinsanity.com/writings3/howtopissoffgod.html
Definition:
sur·re·al Listen to the pronunciation of surreal
Pronunciation: \sə-ˈrē(-ə)l also -ˈrā-əl\
Function: adjective
Etymology: back-formation from surrealism
Date: 1937
1: marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream ; also : unbelievable , fantastic
2: surrealistic
— sur·re·al·i·ty Listen to the pronunciation of surreality \(ˌ)sə-rē-ˈa-lə-tē\ noun
— sur·re·al·ly adverb
Artist 1:
Artist Name: Scarlett Hooft Graafland
http://www.scarletthooft.com/
Reason for Choosing:
I ran across an image of Graafland’s entitled “Salt- Bolivia (2004)” Which reminded me of a painting of Odd Nerdrum. The photograph is such a divergence from reality, an image of Hopi sitting on white salt hills with umbrellas. I like the idea that she is a performance artist and produces such engaging photographic stills. They are filled with the weird juxtaposition of geography, societies and objects.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Potosi
c-print mounted on dibond, behind plexiglass
100 x 125 cm
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Harvest Time
c-print mounted on dibond, behind plexiglass
100 x 125 cm
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
“… the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table (can provoke) the most powerful poetic detonations”
Le Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, 1868.
We are delighted to announce the first UK solo exhibition of work by Dutch artist Scarlett Hooft Graafland. Inhabiting the border between straight photography, performance and sculpture, Hooft Graafland’s photographs are records of her highly choreographed live performances in the salt deserts of Bolivia. Fascinated by the surreal beauty of the harsh natural landscape she utilizes this as her canvas. Anthropologically curious, her ideas emerge directly from the local mythology that originates in this otherworldly environment.
Using naïve and childlike colour palettes her photographs draw on the language of the surreal showing familiar objects out of context (a llama wearing balloons, top hats flying through the desert and a pair of naked legs entwined around a cactus). Her humorous and unsettling juxtaposition of these everyday objects with the sparse, unforgiving landscape echoes the aesthetic of surrealists such as René Magritte. Hooft Graafland utilizes the medium of photography, associated with the representation of truth, to represent the fantastic and the irrational.
‘Vanishing Traces’, a homage to land artist, Robert Smithson, is made out of floating balloons at Laguna Colorada in southern Bolivia. Smithson was inspired to make his original piece after reading about this particular red salt lake (Laguna Colorada) in the book Vanishing Traces of Atacama’ by William Rudolph. Due to the remoteness of the location however, Smithson installed his work in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Hooft Graafland has returned to the place of his inspiration, with her team, to build her own transient spiral balloon jetty. The clean simplicity of her finished works offer no indication of the difficulties in accessing and working in such inhospitable terrains. Highly dependant on the collaboration of the local people, her journeys are indebted to the assistance of the local people and artists with which she works.
Born in the Netherlands in 1973, Hooft Graafland is based in both Amsterdam and New York. She has studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, The Hague, Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem and Parsons School of Design, New York and has traveled to Iceland, Israel, Canada and the United States for her work. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions all over Europe and as part of group shows at the Metropolitan Museum. New York, and the Musée D’Orsay, Paris amongst others.
Bibliography of Review
http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/exhibition,past,3,0,0,96,6,0,0,0,_potosi.html
Artist 2:
Artist Name: Roger Ballen
Reason for Choosing:
I enjoy the weird context in which Ballen’s photographs exist. They seem at first like documentary photos of the lower tiers of societies, the poor, the wretched, the deformed and the strange. But as I browse though his photographs I begin to see these images not just as typographies or purely unmanipulated images. They become directorial of the bizarre. I find it odd to see such an easy slippage- not an outright declaration but one of subtlety and patience.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Two Figures, 2000
Silver Gelatin Print
39 x 39 cm
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Cat Catcher, Gauteng, 1998
Silver Gelatin Print
39 x 39 cm
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
“Roger Ballen was born in New York City in 1950. His interest in photography began at the age of thirteen when his mother, Adrienne Ballen, started working for Magnum in 1962 as a picture researcher. She was later to open the first photographic gallery in New York City. After receiving a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972 and suffering the death of his mother, Ballen began a five-year journey hitchhiking around the world. Along the way, Ballen photographed what would become his first book, Boyhood. He arrived in South Africa in 1974 where he met his future companion and wife and has lived ever since. Since 1974, Roger has spent most of his time in South Africa photographing the countryside and its inhabitants, searching for aesthetic symbols to convey the sense of the place and people that have inspired him.
Ballen’s South African experience was soon to produce a second book, Dorps, in 1986, a Walker Evans-style photographic essay on the Platteland (‘flatland’) towns. He writes, “My purpose in traveling among the dorps had been primarily to document that society, to record a phenomenon vanishing from the South African scene. But of course I was also orienting myself to this country, making links and finding aspects of myself in these small towns. The trend in my work since then has been away from the documentary, increasingly towards an exploration of my own interiority.”
As Ballen continued his immersion in the visual mythology of the Platteland region in South Africa, he moved from an obsession with form to an obsession with psychological issues. This became the subject of his third book, Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa, published in 1995. The subjects are photographed mostly in their dwellings: mixed-race couples, forgotten civil servants made redundant by affirmative action and political change, independent small-town diamond miners ever hopeful of striking it big, subtle and not-so-subtle statements of inbreeding and loneliness. The subjects are all linked by their poverty and by the time warp they occupy in South African history. In 1997, Photo Poche published a fourth book of Ballen’s images from the Platteland period and this spring (March 2001), Phaidon Press is publishing a volume of Ballen’s collected work from 1981 onwards entitled Outland.
Two of Ballen’s photographs hang in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They also feature in the permanent collection of the Maison Europeene de la Photographie, Europe’s most prestigious photographic center, as well as in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum.”
Bibliography of Review
http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artist,show,3,2,25,460,0,0,0,0,roger_ballen_cat_catcher,_gauteng,_.html
Artist 3:
Artist Name: Jeff Bark
Reason for Choosing:
Bark’s photography speak if an otherworldly gothic romance that seems to be deeply rooted in painting. His images are very rich and sharp yet oddly removed from those images usually wrangled for commercial consumption. They evoke another world that is easily ripe for cliché.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Untitled
2007
C-Type Print
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Untitled
2007
C-Type Print
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
“The much-anticipated new series of work by Jeff Bark, Woodpecker, is full of dark romanticism. Under the cover of a manufactured night, his young subjects indulge in skinny-dipping, huffing, smoking pot, and moments of introspection echoing Bark’s own memories of his near adulthood.
The subjects of Bark’s previous series, exhibited at Michael Hoppen Contemporary in 2006, were captured in moments of self-contained abandon in formally constructed urban interiors. In Woodpecker, his subjects are pictured in naturalistic outdoor tableaux, sometimes interacting in couples or groups but always with the suggestion an internal isolation. The rich detail, vivid self-contained illumination and the complexity of the constructed surroundings in these photographs draw the viewer into the dense pictorial allegory.
Occupying a space between the classical artistic categories of photography, painting and film – Bark moves against the lure of instantaneous photography. The collaborations, castings, set construction (the swamp took one month to sculpt in a Brooklyn studio) and illusionary narrative in the series bring the act of photo taking closer towards the highly considered processes of both the Old Master tableau and the younger art of cinema. Nothing is built by Bark beyond the edge of the frame and his subjects are snatched out of real time, so the audience is viewing an enactment, a constructed diorama rather than reality. Held together in a film, cinematically constructed, dissected and reassembled - the works can be looked at as individually structurally significant, and also as part of a larger extended narrative.
In these photographs, scenes of dream-like concoctions coexist with unembellished realism. The muted moonlit tones soften the human forms and the watery illumination lends them the appearance of otherworldly creatures indulging in their private fictions, desires and escape. The images are heavy with symbolism: the swamp, at the fringe of urban sprawl is a no mans land between civilization and the wilderness: the swan, recalling the erotic motif of Leda and the swan but also signifying, light, self-transformation and the higher self. On first glance, the location is a rural idyll but on closer inspection urban debris is revealed - a pram, crates, tyres, mattresses, telephone wires, bed frames and a car are strewn amongst the rotting landscape. The corruption of the scenery is mirrored by the corruption of the youth - drugs, disillusionment, violence and sexual behavior, referencing Eric Fischl and his depictions of psychosexual malaise of American prosperity.
Jeff Bark (born 1963) lives and works in New York. Woodpecker is his second exhibition at Michael Hoppen Contemporary.”
Bibliography of Review
Artist 4:
Artist Name: Polly Borland
Reason for Choosing:
Borland’s world intertwines humor and repulsion to create an odd vignettes or snippets to view. When I look at her images I am at once enticed into the strange and funny non real human forms while at the same time experiencing the “eww” factor. These are not the skeleton chic Hollywood starlets we all love to point out. These are figments of another world that exist not because of our societal quirks, but hers.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Untitled V
2004-2005
Fujicolor crystal archive print
92 x 67 cm
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Untitled, (2004-2005)
Fujicolor crystal archive print
27 x 35 cm
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
A leading portrait photographer before moving to the UK from her native Australia in 1989, Polly has earned her reputation for specializing in stylized portraiture and off-beat reportage. She shoots regularly for numerous UK and US publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Independent and Dazed and Confused.
In 1994 she won the prestigious John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, and a selection of photographs from The Babies was exhibited at the South Bank’s Meltdown Festival in 1999, curated that year by Nick Cave.
The National Portrait Gallery in London and Australia have acquired a number of Polly’s photographs for it’s collection, and in 2000 both exhibited a solo show of her work. Powerhouse published her first book The Babies in 2001 with an essay by Susan Sontag. In that same year she was one of eight chosen photographers to photograph the Queen for her Golden Jubilee.
Polly has recently collaborated with Lauren Child on two children’s books for Puffin, reworking the fairytales The Princess and the Pea, and Goldilocks and The Three Bears. Michael Hoppen Contemporary will exhibit her Bunny project in 2008 – a series of portraits of a giant girl called Gwen.
Bibliography of Review
http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artist,show,3,6,18,795,0,0,0,0,polly_borland_untitled,_.html
Artist 5:
Artist Name: Desiree Dolron
Reason for Choosing:
Dolron’s images evoke notions of fantasy/horror and such painterly traditions as portraiture . She takes what we expect from more established mediums and genres and after combining them presents them again as profoundly complex and compelling images. It is definitely intimidating to look at a portrait of a woman that should look demure or passive at the least, only to see pathos and psychological archetypal visions of death, terror and fetish.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Gaze, study number 16
Cibachrome Print
16x20"
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Xteriors VIII
Colour Coupler Print on Endura Paper
174.5 x 115 cm
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
For years now Desiree Dolron (Netherlands, b. 1963) has traveled around the world. Whatever corner of the world she finds herself in, she has invariably returned with uniquely personal records of her journeys.
Dolron’s acute vision meshes traditional reportage photography and computer enhancement to create a richer version of a genre that many believe to be tired and overused. The stillness and subtlety that is evoked by her seamless work has created a 21st century vision at odds with traditional photographic practice. Her references are obvious, but the results are a revelation. Perfection, often disappointing in practice, is in Dolron’s work, a newer vision.
Michael Hoppen Gallery has previously exhibited Dolron's Te dí todos mis sueños (Cuba) series of work in 2003 which followed by the much talked about Xteriors in 2004 on the contemporary floor.
Since then Dolron's reputation and recognition as one of the leading contemporary artist has excided our own expectations - supported by her first retrospective show of work from 1990-2005 presented by the Fotomuseum den Haag (The Hague Museum of Photography).
The associated book, Desiree Dolron, contains her four most important series: Gaze, Exaltation, Xteriors and Te dí todos mis sueños, and a limited number of copies are available at gallery. Please visit the Publications section for more information
Bibliography of Review
http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artist,show,3,4,94,380,0,0,0,0,desiree_dolron_gaze,_study_number_.html
Artist 6:
Artist Name: Alex Prager
Reason for Choosing:
Alex Prager’s photography evokes references to other photographers, film and filmmakers. His images rely on a certain acceptance of an artifical world- a directorial world. In each image we are asked to relinquish what we might consider to be true or real for the sake of the building of another narrative. This narrative is full of implications as we step into the middle and are forced to figure out what’s going on…all based upon an artifical staging of people, props and angles. I definitely see Cindy Sherman in Prager’s work.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Annie, 2008
C-Type Print
36 x 48"
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Susie and Friends, 2008
C-Type Print
36 x 58"
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
Alex Prager was born in Los Angeles in 1979. She was raised by her grandmother in a small apartment in the suburb of Los Feliz and her curious and restless nature was evident early on. Her nomadic upbringing saw her splitting her time between Florida, California, and Switzerland without truly settling down long enough for a formal education. Prager's interest in art began in her adolescence, but it was in her early twenties that she began to focus on photography after being inspired by the work of William Eggleston.
In keeping with her independent spirit, she eschewed art school and began taking photographs on her own, teaching herself equipment and lighting through trial and error. Prager has since contributed to a number of publications including ID, Elle Japan, MOJO, and Complex. All the while, she continued to exhibit her work in various group shows throughout Los Angeles. After the release of her first book The Book Of Disquiet (2006) Prager was given her first solo show at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, CA entitled "Polyester", which was covered by the Los Angeles Times. Along with her 2007 exhibition at Sara Tecchia Roma New York, Prager is slated to exhibit in both London and Miami Photo.
Bibliography of Review
http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artist,show,3,120,147,742,0,0,0,0,alex_prager_annie,_.html
Artist 7:
Artist Name: Toshio Shibata
Reason for Choosing:
Shibata’s work is pretty easy to discern yet the firm basis of a simple dam shot becomes the departure point for these transformative surreal landscapes. Through the use of black and white photography and control over printing techniques the image becomes a thing, which is not the original subject. Through camera techniques and manipulation alien landscapes emerge where a pedestrian one falls to the wayside.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Grand Coulee Dam (p.15), Douglas Co., WA, 1996
Gelatin Silver Print
20x24"
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Minakami Town, Gumna Prefecture, 2005
Silver Gelatin Print
32x40"
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
Toshio Shibata explores the delicate balance and powerful juxtapositions between the landscape and the infinite ability of man to impose structure on that landscape. Seen through Shibata’s large-format camera and wide-angle lenses, colossal industrial structures confuse our sense of mass and volume, and our ability to orient the subject in relation to human scale; the pure beauty of the photographs places man in awe of the structures Shibata has received international acclaim, most notably with a recent one-person exhibition at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, preceded by a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago to photograph in the United States.
Bibliography of Review
http://www.michaelhoppengallery.com/artist,show,3,104,152,654,0,0,0,0,toshio_shibata_minakami_town,_gumna_prefecture,_.html
Artist 8:
Artist Name: Bianca Brunner
Brunner uses light, color, tension and lack of context to conduct these oddly normal/ not normal personal explorations and seems to play with the idea of mystery and possibly notions of identity or knowledge. It’s not that I feel this work examines the artist reflexively but rather examines personal space of the subject depicted. It invokes a sort of mythological sense of idea of quest and self.
Reason for Choosing:
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Limbo 5, 2004
C-print,
Image: 18" X 22"
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Limbo 3, 2004
C-print,
Image: 18" X 22"
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
As noted in reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow (Aperture, 2006), Bianca Brunner's photographs are based on memory. Limbo 5, included in reGeneration, is from Brunner's five-image Limbo series exploring the concept of somatic memory, the body's own memory. The series shows people fixed in motion, in a moment of stillness. Nothing in the images is moving; everything is held in a prolonged state of waiting. Brunner wants us to remember that human beings do not only remember things with their minds, but that many memories may be held inside the body.
"When we touch things, or move in certain ways, the thoughts attached to these bodily functions can pop up," Brunner says. "Or it can be the other way around; remembering something can unleash certain physical feelings or even movements. This phenomenon . . . the displacement in time that takes place when a latent image suddenly emerges and disrupts the scene of the present . . . is what this work is all about."
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
Bibliography of Review
http://www.aperture.org/store/prints-detail-w.aspx?ID=533
Artist 9:
Artist Name: Atta Kim
Reason for Choosing:
Atta kim’s work works to segue way to visual forms into one consciousness, namely the formal qualities of time and geometry with ideas of environment and “human” spaces. The two do not ever coexist in a comfortable space of rationality and therefore can not be understood on the fundamentals of recognizable imagery and narrative.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Museum Project #001, from the Field series
C-Print
1995
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
On-Air Project #110-2, from the New York series
C-Print
2005
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
Every day, hundreds of tourists snap photographs of a crowd- and car-jammed Times Square. The average picture takes — what? — 15 seconds to shoot? The same picture of the same place takes the Korean photographer Atta Kim eight hours. And his Times Square ends up with only an eerie trace of a human presence, like a deserted movie set.
Other pictures by Mr. Kim, who is making an outstanding New York solo debut in a show titled “Atta Kim: On-Air” at the International Center of Photography, have required less time. A photograph of a soccer game: two hours. Of a couple having sex: one hour. Still others go way beyond the eight-hour mark. “Monologue of Ice,” with its mysterious lozenge of pollen-yellow light hovering in the dark, is the product of a marathon 25-hour shoot.
Bibliography of Review
By Holland Cotter
Pub July 12, 2006 New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/arts/design/12atta.html
Artist 10:
Artist Name: Simen Johan
Reason for Choosing:
Well Paul you’ve got this guy coming in so it was kind of a no brainier as far as “surreal.” He is coming here so I need to look at his work and learn a little more about him anyway. He seems to be very interested in the ideas of history as a phenomenon(read here history museum) and also shared concepts of human history. Using this as the basis of the work I see him taking the idea of going into a museum for example and creating the perspective and imagination of children and the ideas and notions that would germinate from such experiences or encounters we might have had as youngsters.
Image 1 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Untitled #111, from the series Breeding Ground
C-Print
2003
Image 2 of Artwork- Include Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions
Untitled #118, from the series Breeding Ground
C-Print
2003
Outside Review of Artwork: A 2-3 paragraph quote
In Until the Kingdom Comes, Johan presents animals using escapism and fantasy to construct identity and purpose. Similar to his earlier work of children, this series explores our predilection towards imagination and emotion, rather than reason. Using digitally manipulated photography and sculpturally enhanced taxidermy, the artist presents scenarios that address ways in which we contend with inherent fears and desires.
A sculpture of an arctic wolf posed atop a circus pedestal/beauty display, its hair extensions threaded with crystalline jewels, transforms a childhood horror into absurd beauty (or serves as a symbol perhaps for all those things we deny, cover up, or manipulate in order to make our reality desirable). A large mammoth made of cement, standing in a natural landscape, creates an uncanny relationship between the organic and the artificial (or testifies to our ways of preserving history and honoring the dead in order to conquer our own fears of mortality and being forgotten).
Bibliography of Review
http://www.yossimilo.com/exhibitions/2006_03-sime
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