Saturday, March 10, 2012

►Misha Gordin - An image that talk

Misha Gordin was born in 1946, the first year after World War II ended. Having survived the hardships of evacuation, Gordin's parents returned back home to Riga, Latvia, after the war which was then under Soviet occupation. Growing up among the Russian speaking population of Latvia, Russian became Gordin’s root culture. He graduated from the technical college as an aviation engineer but never worked as such. Instead he joined Riga Motion Studios as a designer of equipment for special effects. At this time social realism was an official culture of the country and having little formal knowledge about art, Gordin did not care about it too much. Information about modern western art was scarcely available.


Gordin started to photograph when he was nineteen, driven by his desire to create a personal style and vision. He was involved in portraiture and did some documentary shots, but soon realized the results were unsatisfactory. Putting his camera aside, Gordin concentrated on reading (Dostoevsky, Bulgakov) and cinematography (Tarkovsky, Parajanov). He was constantly looking for the right way to express personal feelings and thoughts using photography.
One year later it came to him clearly and simply. Gordin decided to photograph "concepts" rather than the literal capturing of a moment on film. In 1972, Gordin created his first, and most important image, Confession. Instantly recognizing the potential possibilities of his conceptual approach and the knowledge acquired from creating this image, Confession become the backbone for the work he has since produced.
In 1974, after years of disgust with communist authorities, Gordin left Latvia and immigrated to America.










Artist's Statement…
"My technique, though polished and improved throughout my career, cannot compete with the ease of digital manipulations. My first introduction to digital photography demonstrated how similar it is to analog techniques and I believe that a soul of a photograph, its magnetic language of feeling, can be achieved both ways. At this moment, however, I do not see any reason to switch to digital manipulation. My technique is unforgiving and laborious. Mistakes can be made, but not corrected. A trace of fear of making a mistake is present in every image I make, as is the precision of every move and the complete concentration necessary for my repetitive steps. These limitations and imperfections add to the power of my images with blade-line simplicity. While digital approaches may be instrumental in bringing conceptual photography from the periphery to a well-deserved place in Art Photography, I prefer the glowing material qualities of original gelatin-silver prints. Despite its similarities to other means of manipulating images, I think some element of "truthfulness" is lost in digital photography. It is, after all, truthfulness, and our trust in it, that made me choose photography as my tool.






The greatest power of the photograph – our belief in its straight-forward truthfulness – has been lost forever. We place our confidence in what accurately represents reality, and photography, with its realistic accuracy, has long been aligned with "truth" and its etymological relative, "trust". Its undeniable advantage to painting and other mediums is that we subconsciously believe that what is photographed has to exist. In the digital era, however, truth can be conjured and changes made quickly, with no chemicals, no darkness and no mistakes. An obviously manipulated image tries to "trick" its viewers with its version of the truth, thereby diminishing our trust in its image. The question arises: do my photographs represent external reality, or do they point inwards towards my soul? Am I documenting the existing world, or creating my own world, so real but nonexistent?





What truth can you find in the manipulated image, what is trustworthy about visions of a world that does not externally exist? And does it matter? To me it matters. The translation of personal concepts into the language of photography reflects possible answers to the major questions of being: birth, death, and life. The transformation of a concept into reality is an essential part of conceptual photography, and imbues it with the reality that resonates with one’s inner sphere of experience, as in painting, poetry, music, and sculpture. Conceptual photography employs the special talent of intuitive vision. The poor concept, perfectly executed and realistically portrayed, still makes a poor photograph.





In all my years of creating conceptual images, I have tried to make them as realistic as possible. The plausibility of my scenes is not the most important part; they function in such a way that the question "Is it real?" does not arise. The authenticity that I present is that of an interior moment, so that my viewers may trust and react to the conceptual truths that they may know to be external fictions. I don’t interpret my images. I feel them. Nevertheless I always encourage my viewers to interpret my work as they see or feel it. My goal is to create an image that talk."











Monday, February 13, 2012

►Opulence, I has it - Direct TV commercial

►Get a glimpse into the Opulent life. He loves his riches - gold remotes, Van Gogh paintings and of course the Swedish models. And don't forget his pygmy giraffe ;)


Sunday, February 12, 2012

►Robert Harvery Oshatz – The Wilkinson residence

►Evoking the feeling of being in a tree house is exactly what the beautiful Wilkinson residence in Portland does. Located on a flag lot, the extraordinary house is brilliantly designed to perfectly blend with the natural landscape. A steep sloping grade provided the opportunity to bring the main level of the house into the tree canopy.


Catering to the desire of the client, Wilkinson Residence designed a dwelling that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music. It has a natural wood ceiling that wonderfully floats on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall, which wraps around the main living room. The interior space of this amazing house flows seamlessly through to the exterior. Taking a walk through the house will help you see its complexities and its connection to the exterior.











http://www.oshatz.com/

►Ron Muech – Hyper realistic sculptor

►Ronald "Ron" Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in the United Kingdom.There is a point, when sculpturing, at witch taking great care of details leads to creating hyper realistic artwork that cannot be set apart from the real world objects it is supposed to represent. Ron Muech sculptures are just that, extraordinary realistic art that seems real even after looking at it for the tenth time. The design of his creative sculptures can be explained just using this word: superb!


Mueck's early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children’s television and films, notably the film Labyrinth for which he also contributed the voice of Ludo.
Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side. Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles.



In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art, collaborating with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, to produce small figures as part of a tableau she was showing at the Hayward Gallery. Rego introduced him to Charles Saatchi who was immediately impressed and started to collect and commission work.
This led to the piece which made Mueck’s name, being included in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy the following year. Dead Dad is a rather haunting silicone and mixed media sculpture of the corpse of Mueck’s father reduced to about two thirds of its natural scale. It is the only work of Mueck’s that uses his own hair for the finished product.


Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five meter high sculpture Boy 1999 was a feature in the Millennium Dome and later exhibited in the Venice Biennale.
In 2002 his sculpture Pregnant Woman was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for $800,000.
Check out the photographs that speak louder than words about the detail levels and the creativeness of his artsy sculptures.






Mueck first gained international attention with Dead Man, a naked, half-scale impression of his father shown in “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” (1997) at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. With no formal art training, he perfected his skills in the commercial world of special effects, model-making, and animatronics. In 1996, he presciently created for his mother-in-law, well-known British painter Paula Rego, a figure of Pinocchio, the quintessential embodiment of truth and lies. Saatchi saw this sculpture, and smitten, began acquiring Mueck’s work.











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