Amelia and Laurie Conquer Erwin Wurm's "Euclidean Exercises" at the IMA

... while Jacinda relished in the excuse that she is recovering from surgery and could not participate.

The museum guard convinced us that lying sideways on the plank was best. Amelia held on for nearly a minute in that position and aced the foot balancing exercise.

Laurie, on the other hand could have taken a nap in this position. She held on for well over a minute with such ease, it hardly looked like a challenge.

None of us wanted to turn into Wurm's One Minute Sculpture Forever. Euclidean Exercises is still on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art until the 21st June.

 
P.S. This may be the ugliest/least inviting art museum bench I have ever seen.
Signed,
The Hater of All Things Beige

Boise State - Visiting Artist Gig with Alexis Pike

The posters and the contracts.

Alexis discussing we sagebrush folks in Jonathan's class (photo by Laurie Blakeslee).

Where I fell in love with photography and changed my major from English to Art. It hasn't changed too much since 1995.

The only Jobo left in the old color lab.

The first time I exhibited the cakes with an "archive" in a vitrine. More exhibition documentation coming soon.

Boise in September

Fire Alarm Dispatch cards at the Sesqui Shop. They are hand drawn maps showing the location of the box alarms in Boise.

Best paint by number artwork in Laurie and Stephanie's guest room.

Spotone on the bookshelf.

Laurie in the garden she has photographed for a couple years.

White cats left in a cul-de-sac.

View from the Boise Airport that I will never forget since I first saw it as a child.

Society for Photographic Education National Conference: Chicago

 Valuable information learned at this year's conference:

1) The Photobook: A History Volume 3 will be published next year! I am a big fan of volumes 1-2 as envious as they make me of Martin Parr's book collection. Who wouldn't love a publication that prints photographs of opened books like this:

Daido Moriyama, Bye Bye Photography, 1972

2) Speaking of Mr. Parr, he is an endearing lecturer (by far my favorite talk of the conference). He showed his undergraduate school installation of photographs displayed in a living room, discussed Bad Weather at length, and his infatuation with collecting political ephemera, Saddam Hussein watches (he owns 85) and Osama bin Laden paraphernalia. So Long Osama Blood Orange Soda was the biggest oddity. Throughout most of the lecture, I dreamed of where Martin Parr stores all his objects (what does his house look like? how does he organize them? does he have room for more?).

 Martin Parr from Parrworld: Objects and Postcards

He also stressed that he is photographing fictions not realities as he intentionally captured litter at its worst in the image below.

Martin Parr from The Last Resort, 1983-85

I immediately placed Autoportrait on my interlibrary loan list when returning. Ending his lecture standing under a photograph of his head superimposed on a muscle man's body was the perfect conclusion coming from a soft spoken Englishman who excused himself for "having a frog" in the middle of his lecture.

 

Martin Parr from Autoportrait

3) Garry Winogrand is on everyone's mind since his first retrospective in 25 years opened at SFMOMA. I tend to love the photographers who make/made work vastly different from mine and he is no exception. Cass Fey and Leslie Calmes delivered an informative lecture on his archive at the Center for Creative Photography. His contact sheets are labeled PD if they are posthumously developed. If a print is made from one of those thousands of undeveloped rolls of film he left after he died, it can never be sold or de-accessioned. It exists only in the CCP archives. Small facts about printing work posthumously that I had always wondered about.

Garry Winogrand's Women are Beautiful on view at the Art Institute

4) Why or why wasn't Kate Palmer Albers teaching the history of photography at University of Arizona when I was in graduate school? Her lecture Abundant Images and the Collective Sublime resonated with me on so many levels. She discussed one of my favorite contemporary photography installations:

Erik Kessels, printing every photograph uploaded onto Flickr in a 24 hour period (image via)

Kessels piece, Penelope Umbrico's millions of sunsets, Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe's 100 Setting Suns at the Grand Canyon, and Gerhard Richter's Atlas were her primary examples of artists establishing mass.

Penelope Umbrico, Suns from Sunsets from Flickr, 2006-ongoing

These artists obsessively mark time with photography. She also stressed that the "self-archive is rapidly gaining headway" as a viable form of art. Albers' talk validated my current interests in masses of objects and introduced me to new artists like Hasan Elahi who explore surveillance and tracking in a contemporary way.

5) Richard Misrach's keynote lecture reminded me that I have to watch Spike Lee's follow-up to When the Levees Broke - If God is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise. I've refrained for a few years but after hearing Misrach discuss his latest photographic series, Petrochemical America, the time has come.

Richard Misrach, Untitled, February 14, 2012, 6:19 PM

Misrach is getting closer to making portraits of people as he zooms in on the faces of swimmers. He returned to the same hotel room where he photographed On the Beach (above) with a digital camera and telephoto lens. I don't know how I feel about those and am looking forward to seeing how they are received when he publishes them soon. I am so enamored with the vulnerable human surrounded by the sea (substitute me), I am not sure I want to know their identity.

6) SPE brought so many of my wonderful photo friends to Chicago some of which are pictured below.

 James Luckett, Laurie Blakeslee, and Amelia Morris

Adam Neese in the Empire Room

Mark A. Lee after winning the Richard Misrach raffle photograph

Sneaking an image of a famous photographer...

the back of Jerry Uelsmann's head.

Wishing I had a photograph of...

me talking to Richard Misrach about our meeting in 1996.

7) The biggest surprise I received will be featured in a post next week. I am not opposed to a sneak peek however:

Chris Toalson's A Long Overdue Artist's Book, 2011-2013

Society for Photographic Education National Conference

This is the first time Amelia and I stayed at the conference hotel since Denver in 2008. This is our view from the fifth floor (we didn't have the spectacular balcony that all of our friends and Sally Mann had for their viewing pleasure).


Hyatt Regency reading material as displayed by Amelia Morris.



Staying near the Ferry Building on Embarcadero was very convenient as there was good food to be had relatively cheaply for a downtown SF location (hello Cowgirl Creamery). Here is the Vaillancourt Fountain view from the Hyatt.


I would imagine that this was the most photographed lobby at any SPE conference in recent memory. Amelia and I stood here for 20 minutes staring at the light show our first night (we learned that it changed colors and shapes every few days). Amelia and I didn't spot one burned out bulb either!


The Hyatt Regency light show as Las Vegas also from the 5th floor.


My portfolio box with Amelia's business card, Amelia's Photoshop extravaganza printed on Photo Tex adhesive paper (my first attempt at this material in preparation for cat wall paper) and my Ed Ruscha postcard from SFMOMA.

Overall, this year's lectures were hit and miss. Many of the ones I wanted to see took place in the middle of reviewing student portfolios or having my work reviewed for the first time in ten years. The dominant theme (much to our annoyance) was photographers not showing any images choosing instead to talk about their work with the lights off (= instant snooze fest).

Amelia, Alexis, Laurie and I (along with two of my students and one of Alexis's) crammed our work into one large table at the entry way of the open portfolio walk-through Friday night.


I spent a lot of time looking at Laurie Blakeslee's new work (I love this print - the image is from an old Montgomery Ward catalog).


Amelia getting ready to show her portfolio. The big disadvantage of the Hyatt lobby was very poor lighting!


Cass Fey listening to Matt Compton talk about his BFA thesis work Average American.


Kellie Kuratko and her thesis work Memory Distortion.


The next day I showed my work to Chuck from SF Camerawork. He was relatively speechless with the David C. Nolan / Marilyn Monroe photographs and kept referring to them as "strange." The highlight of his conversation was mentioning the "physicality and materiality" of photographs as something he is seeing a lot of now. Because photography is immaterial (primarily seen virtually), more and more photographers are gravitating to making photographs about photographs and that is where this work fits in.


I had a great review with Chris from the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. He continually referred to the series as "strange." He had a number of ideas for presentation which I am seriously considering: it should exist as a book first and secondly in display case vitrines as an archive. He thought they were incredible from a design sense and liked cropping portions of the text. We ended our conversation with him telling me that the "photo's final resting place is as important as the photo itself" which I continue to think about regarding this work.

In any case, I promised both Chuck and Chris images of Aline's cat collection by the end of May. Self-imposed deadlines! No traveling in sight! Here's to getting some work DONE on this series!

Another one of my favorite memories of this conference was meeting fellow Postcard Collective participant Sheila Newbery who spent a very long time looking at my portfolio. She emphasized the need for the Marilyn photos to be seen in a book and presented the idea of it being poster size. That plan may be implemented soon!

Amelia and I also decided that Photo Lucida is in our future.

SFMOMA

My second visit to SFMOMA in 2006 featured seeing Matthew Barney at a press review prior to the opening reception. He came down the main staircase into the foyer with a crowd of reporters, answering questions about his Drawing Restraint exhibition. I could not help but search the crowd for Bjork (who was not present). I always remember the remnants of this piece below that he created for that show and this time sought out the exhibition placard to read the details.


Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 14, 2006

From the wall card: "The remnants from Barney's performance inside the museum's turret. He scaled the wall and navigated a system of carabiners under the bridge until he reached the opposing wall and commenced drawing. He was dressed as General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw the American Occupation of Japan after WWII... A plastic cast of the general's corncob pipe rests at the foot of the climbing wall; the pipe also figures in the drawing."

The 2012 visit to SFMOMA resulted in meeting Alexis Pike and some of her 27 students that she brought from Montana State - many of whom I had met during my visiting artist gig last November. Another surprise visitor was Laurie Blakeslee who I hadn't seen since 2008. Here's a BSU (as in Boise State University) portrait of the three of us in front of the Dijkstra exhibit by Amelia Morris.



One of my favorite works of video art ever: Rineke Dijkstra's Buzz Club. It is a two channel video installation depicting teenagers dancing in a make-shift studio at the back of the Buzz Club in Liverpool. It was utterly mesmerizing. Alexis, Amelia and I learned some new dance moves from this participant at the beginning of the video clip which were featured prominently during the last evening of the SPE conference.



Jim Campbell's Exploded Views in the foyer was an equally fascinating installation reflecting the traffic and pedestrians outside the museum onto a light show that resembled the decoration in the conference hotel (coming soon).





Yet another instance of old technology elevated to a higher status as previously seen in Luther Price's slide carousel installation at the Whitney Biennial. Needless to say, Alexis and I both wanted this device from Tris Vonna-Michell's GTO: hahn / huhn, variation 1.



I also fell in love with Colter Jacobsen's watercolors in the 2010 SECA Art Award Exhibition. Check out more of his work here (particularly the photo influenced drawings on book covers).



Colter Jacobsen, Bridal Veil Falls, 2007 [Image via.]

Upon returning to Indiana, I immediately purchased the Rineke Dijkstra catalog and The Elements of Style Illustrated so I will never forget when to use "whom" vs. "who" (and so on). Plus who could resist a book cover that looks like this?