Faculty News

BFA Photo Faculty Kate Wolkoff Featured in Seeing Science Project

Current BFA Photo Faculty Kate Wolkoff ‘s bird silhouette series “Found” has been included as a mini exhibition in curator Marvin Heiferman’s Seeing Science Project at the University of Maryland.

You can view the mini series here.

Thomas Werner (BFA Photo Faculty) Named Editor at Large for IRK Magazine

“IRK Magazine Is an Independent Paris Based Art, Photography and Fashion Printed Magazine and Digital Platform. ”

IRK Magazine

BFA Photo Faculty and Program Director Colin Stearns’ Book “Meridian” Reviewed in Photo Eye

“If all photographs are afterimages — traces and disclosures of an ever-changing world — what is gained by foregrounding this fact? Always previous and elsewhere, images reveal people we’ve known, know or may never meet, as well as places we’ve been or may never visit. They linger, reinforce or displace memories, and come back in unexpected ways. A personal reflection on the vagaries of photographic vision, Colin Stearns’ self-described photo-novel Meridian gathers three years of peripatetic images taken in France and New York City. Modest and unassuming, the images follow the life of a young man on the move with a camera. Alone and restless, he gazes at the world from a distance and moves through a landscape of foreign cities, parks and wilderness, and the confines of anonymous hotel rooms and flats. Less romantic autobiography and more philosophical missive, Meridian points to a past that is slipping away and yet held still in mute images. ” – Adam Bell

Visit Photo Eye to read the full review

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY EXHIBITING MATTHEW JENSEN

INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES HARBUTT | BFA PHOTO FACULTY

WHAT PROJECTS ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON?

I stopped working on “projects” years ago. I was always protective of my freedom to make any picture I wanted, any way I wanted, any time I wanted. Projects took away that freedom and were a distraction.

As our brains evolved, we started to think we needed laws, rules: “Cross at the green, not in between.” In New York, where jaywalking reigns? I think the result is we’ve lost our trust in instincts; we’re trained not to trust them but control them – to reduce life to a set of rules, concepts. But in art, in making things, there are no rules. If you think you know a rule, try breaking it. You might take a great or at least an original photograph.

In a way, my teaching is about freedom. I think that’s the great seductive metaphor of all art – dance, music, poetry, painting, photography – it’s about freedom both for maker and viewer.

WHO OR WHAT INSPIRES YOU IN YOUR WORK?

The life around me.

WHAT LED YOU TO CHOOSE PHOTOGRAPHY AS A CAREER?

It was the only medium that could even pretend to be in touch with reality.

The content of a photograph as opposed to its subject interests me, both in my own work and in teaching. It takes students a while to see this, that photographic qualities such as tonality, distance from subject, shapes, framing, all these things, inform the meaning of a photograph more than the subject matter and making a student aware of this may reveal to them what – to give one example – their real emotions about their family are from what they believe is nothing more than a family snapshot.

I love photography because you can’t define it. It’s true that photography is a medium where a thing itself makes its own picture, but what that thing is, is very slippery. I like pictures that boggle the mind, when they expand the notion of what is real. You can’t do that in another medium because you don’t start with anything real. As long as you’re faithful to the notion that whatever you’re looking at was actually in front of the camera one time or another, and hasn’t been fiddled with, you’ve got a very interesting medium because you’re not talking about artist’s conception, you’re talking about life.

WHAT ACTIVITIES DO YOU ENJOY OUTSIDE OF WORK?

Reading, music, films, food…

WHAT DO YOU ENJOY MOST ABOUT TEACHING?

I encourage students to work instinctively, rather than to illustrate concepts. All over the world cameras are basically the same. What’s going to be the difference between your work and everybody else’s? It’s not going to be technique. It’s what you feel. Shoot what you feel something strongly about. Look, you like ice-cream. Take a picture that shows how that sundae looks to someone who loves ice-cream.

WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR OUR STUDENTS ON FOLLOWING THEIR PASSIONS AND PURSUING A CAREER IN PHOTOGRAPHY?

Keep your photo career your own.

PHOTO FACULTY GEORGE PITTS CONTRIBUTES TO HELMUT NEWTON’S DOCUMENTARY FILM “PROVOCATEUR”

PHOTO FACULTY CARLOS MOTTA SOLO EXHIBITION | 2015.01.24 – 2015.03.22

Röda Sten Konsthall is proud to present Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, the first survey exhibition of Colombian artist Carlos Motta.

Presenting a selection of installations, videos, sculptures, and documentary-based works from 2005 to 2014, the exhibition highlights Carlos Motta’s ongoing preoccupation with democratic representation and the repression of individual and collective civil liberties. Promoting the act of self-representation, Motta creates works that question the writing of history, the construction of political memory, and the normative discourses of sexuality and gender, arguing that the state of democracy cannot exist merely by means of tolerance and inclusion. True equality and freedom demands systemic transformations that allow ways of self-government: Being human is being beyond parameters – without sex, gender, ethnic, racial or social constraints. But, how can this ideal be attained?

Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love focuses on Motta’s investigation of the history of the subordinate sexual body by drawing parallels between pre-Hispanic and colonial cultures in Latin America and contemporary queer politics. Creating discursive platforms to enable conversations around matters of sex and gender as issues of social justice, Motta’s work challenges the traditional grounds of society—from the violent imposition of sex as a legal and a moral category, to the hegemonic authority of the Church, to the State’s regulation of bodies and identities.

The exhibition features the installation Nefandus (2013-2014), which includes Nefandus Trilogy,three beautiful and haunting films that study pre-Hispanic homoeroticism and the brutal stigmatization of sexuality during the European colonization of the Americas; and We Who Feel Differently (2012), a video installation that addresses critical issues of international contemporary queer culture in the light of forty years of LGBTI politics.

The survey also includes documentation from three pieces of Carlos Motta’s Democracy Cycle(2005-2014): Deus Pobre: Modern Sermons of Communal Lament (2011), Six Acts: An Experiment in Narrative Justice (2010) and The Good Life (2005-2008) – all works that investigate the construction of political memory in Latin America by using performative interventions in the public sphere. READ MORE

Curated by Aukje Lepoutre Ravn.

PHOTO FACULTY JEANINE OLESON CREATIVE CAPITAL GRANT RECIPIENT

A human(e) orchestra is an umbrella over a series of performances, workshops and a film with an ensemble brought together to enact various compositions that range from conventional music to physical labor to speech acts. The first of the series, Hear, Here, was performed in June 2014 and will develop into a film. Subsequent projects are working from the collectivity of people to produce noise around a series of agreed upon issues and audiences in need of music or temporal arrangement approaching unity. This “music” will occur through the commissioning of appropriate scores, instruments, workshops and then the presentation of discrete works in varied spaces ranging from traditional exhibitions and theaters to web and film. READ MORE

Jeanine Oleson is an artist whose practice incorporates interdisciplinary uses of performance, photography, film/video and installation work. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Rutgers University. Oleson has exhibited at venues including The New Museum, MOMA/PS1, White Columns, Art In General, Socrates Sculpture Park and Exit Art in NY; Commonwealth & Council and L.A.C.E. in Los Angeles; Beta-Local, San Juan, PR; and Grand Arts in Kansas City, MO. Oleson has received a Franklin Furnace Fellowship and a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant in 2009; Brooklyn Arts Council Community Arts Regrant, 2008 and 2009; and a Professional Development Fellowship, College Art Association, 1999-2000. She has been an artist in residence at The New Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Smack Mellon Studio Program. Oleson is an Assistant Professor at Parsons the New School for Design.

www.jeanineoleson.com

Photo Faculty Sarah Palmer “No Whiteness Lost” Interview with Baxter St Camera Club of New York

www.baxterst.org

This week I had the pleasure of meeting with photo-based artist Sarah Palmer. Here in her studio at The Invisible Dog Art Center, Sarah arranges, photographs and re-photographs small assemblages to produce thoughtful, highly literary images. For me, Sarah’s insights into photography, literature and her current project, No Whiteness Lost underscore the importance of continually connecting with and learning from other artists.

Liz Sales: You have so many Polaroids here!

Sarah Palmer: I have hundreds more. I shoot 4×5 film with strobes, so Polaroids or, these days, Fuji Instant packs help me to pre-visualize my images. A photograph is such a different visual experience than real-life seeing.

Liz Sales: But these don’t always serve a solely utilitarian purpose, do they? You include Polaroids in your still-lifes —for lack of a better word.

SP: Yes,I like to include photographs as physical objects within my images. I think of them almost at mirrors that reflect inward, eliminating the elusive “viewer,” creating an almost disturbing psychological space.

Mirror Dance, 2014

LS: Is this something you’re exploring currently?

SP: Yes, in many different ways. I’ve been slicing up old prints and putting them back together. For example, this is an image of a balloon that I composited with a Hubble Space Telescope image of the birth of a star. I took the same image, inverted it and printed that, as well. I combined the images and re-photographed the collage. There is this hard shadow, cast onto the background, which a real balloon would never make. I think this non-indexical quality widens the gap between what an object is and what an image of an object is, which is an important idea in my work.

Nursery (Carina), 2014

Liz Sales: So, this is part of a larger body of work?

SP: Yes, this series is called No Whiteness Lost. I borrowed it from a line in The Descent, a poem by William Carlos Williams. He became one of my favorite poets, when I was studying literature in college.

LS: I’m not familiar with The Descent. Could you tell me about it?

SP: Williams wrote, “[N]o whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness.” He wrote this poem as an older man, and, to me, it really articulates the way memories transform as time passes. I don’t remember events as vividly as I remember feelings and emotions. If you asked me about a novel or a film, I would be more likely to recall how I felt when I read or watched it, the color or formal elements, the music and the tone, than the plot. That’s why I’ve appropriated No Whiteness Lost as the title for my series – I’m interested in making pictures that create color/form, “music,” and tone rather than narrative.

LS: That resonates in Object (Swann), which references Proust’s idea of the fallibility of memory. Are literature and poetry significant to your work in general?

Object (Swann), 2014

SP: Yes, text is always significant to my work. While making this work, I’ve also been thinking about the lead light and empty horizons – a sense of ecstatic futility – in Beckett’s Endgame, as well as the whiteness of Melville’s white whale, as a metaphor for horror.

LS: Whiteness as a metaphor for horror in literature often references Colonialism and racial dominance. Is that idea relevant to your work as well?

SP: That is quite a complicated question for me. I resist the didactic in my work. I am politically concerned but have a complex relationship to activism, and I struggle with how to engage these issues in my work. Perhaps this will change over time, as I mature as an artist. Photography is such an easily illustrative medium and I thwart clear narratives; rather the “whiteness” I reference here has the power to blind with glare, to obscure, to create blank space.

Hence, I tend more toward philosophy, looking at artists and poets who explore ambiguous spaces, including Williams and H.D. among Modern poets; Samuel Beckett; my father, the poet Michael Palmer; the poet Robert Duncan and his partner, the artist Jess, (both were close friends of my father’s); the poet and painter Norma Cole, (also a friend).

I’m also drawn to contemporary artists who engage with photography in fascinating ways, including my husband Dillon DeWaters, Sophie Ristelhueber, Viviane Sassen, Gabriel Orozco, Sigmar Polke, R.H. Quaytman (herself, the daughter of a poet, Susan Howe), Leslie Hewitt (whose work engages in a fascinating way with history), my friend Lucas Blalock, the brilliant Paul Chan, Lorenzo Vitturi, whose work I just discovered, and I could go on for pages and pages. It is really important for me to be part of a community, even if is a community of influence, artists I don’t know. The smallness, the inter-connectedness, of the world makes it more engaging to me.

A Shadow is a Shadow, 2015

LS: That reminds me of a conversation I had with Dillon.  He also stressed the significance of being part of a community of influence and the importance of artists, filmmakers and writers being in conversation with one another through their work. How does being married to and sharing a studio with another artist influence your practice?

SP: Dillon’s and my work are hugely influential on one another. When we met ten years ago, we were in love with photography, with the history of photography. For both of us, that relationship to photography has evolved and developed, has transformed, really, into a more complex and interesting one, into an art practice. Both of us have moved away from more traditional forms of photography, into ourselves and our psyches, finding sources in other artworks rather than just in the field. We also have a son now, which makes an art practice both far more difficult and incredibly, more necessary. We have had to make peace with our pasts, so to speak, and in my case, that involves embracing my love for words and the way words make my heart race, create electricity in my head. That’s what I desire from my work.

Polke 1969 (Perfume Picture), 2015 

We also end up photographing the same subjects, from time to time, on our own. We are actually on the cusp of releasing an ongoing series of limited edition diptychs, Pyramid Editions, one a month in 2015.

LS: Congratulations! It’s also note-worthy to me that you mentioned empty horizons in literature earlier. I’ve noticed that your images tend to obfuscate the horizon line. For example, in A Spiritual Urgency, an empty stepladder seems to exist midway between Earth and the stars, with no distinct horizon line separating the two.

SP: The ladder is actually surrounded by fake “snow” which I created by blurring stars photographed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. I have a memory of being backstage at the ballet while they were testing the fake snow for The Nutcracker—snow falling on an empty stage. It was thrilling, and it stayed with me.

A Spiritual Urgency, 2013

LS: That sounds like a wonderful memory, and hearing about it adds a tenderness to the work. Are you a romantic?

SP: I’m a bit of romantic, but not (I hope) a blind romantic. I’ve thought a lot about the Sublime, ever since reading Edmund Burke as an undergraduate, and have been searching for that heart-stopping and wonderful-terrifying moment, looking over the edge of the cliff (hence, Endgame, Moby Dick, The Descent – apocalypse, horror, facing inevitable death). As a result, my scale has gotten relatively small; I used to make landscape photographs.

LS: I don’t understand.

SP: In my graduate thesis, I was searching for the sublime in America to see if it still existed, post-railroad era—

LS: Oh! Does it still exist?

SP:  Nope, not in the German Romantic sense. So, I started to explore the sublime inside my studio, and my scale necessarily condensed.

Control, 2013

LS: It’s definitely worked out. In contrast to the small scale you’ve adopted primarily, you also appropriate astronomical images. Could you talk about your interest in space?

SP: What could be more terrifying than the vastness and unknowability of the universe and time, and our relative infinitesimal tininess? The terror I first felt at the idea of non-existence was not dissimilar from the terror of space and infinity, both around age 9. And yet, the Hubble has made these incredibly beautiful, knowable, picturesque images available to us. Even if they are romanticized data approximations, they are so late-80s and fantastic. Black light posters and smoke machines and raves. All-night dance parties.

LS: You’ve found a tension between fear and pleasure, which I associate with the sublime, especially in your depictions of people. Could you talk a bit about your decision to seat your subjects facing away from your camera?

SP: That’s a very good question. I rarely photograph people and I’m not interested (in this work, at least) in making portraits, but people have this inescapable quality, a particular-ness, in photographs. And, therefore, there is something horrifying about removing their faces, which I do with hair or masks or simply by turning them away from the camera. I like to treat people no differently than I would treat any other object in my studio.

Wove out of the dark, 2012

LS: I’ve noticed that you often use studio supplies, like ladders and buckets, in your work as well. Is that in reference to the artist’s process?

SP: I work intuitively and don’t have preconceived notions going into the studio, so I tend to use what is available. Also, I love the idea of turning something mundane into something uncanny or unrecognizable through context, use against purpose; re-examining ordinary objects, and somehow through that examination transforming them into something radiant. For example, people tell me this image, No Horizon, looks like a scribble, but it’s actually a photograph of gathered tulle.

No Horizon, 2014

LS: Oh, I did think that might be a photograph of a drawing!

SP: That’s what I love about tulle! It responds to light in a way that causes it to appear blurry or unfocused on camera. I’m always fighting against the inherent representationality of photography. It’s an absurd and impossible struggle; photography literally re-presents reality. I’m using a medium that is intrinsically representational, and I’m trying to move away from representation.

LS: That’s interesting, because even though you are pushing against the medium in many ways, I find your work to be inherently photographic, or at least self-reflective.

Red Burn, 2014

SP: Oh absolutely, this summer I started a project, making contact prints on construction paper, by leaving 8” x 10” negatives on the paper out in the sun. So, even when I am not using traditionally light-sensitive photographic material, I am still referencing photography. Literature and philosophy are important to my work, but it is always still rooted in the medium of photography.

Photo Faculty Vincent Cianni Exhibition at exhibit in the May Gallery, Webster University, St. Louis, MO

Photo Faculty Vincent Cianni Gives TEDx Talk at University of Navada

On January 23rd, using images and narrative, Vincent Cianni described how his work documenting gays in the military broadened his own perspective of understanding and accepting the differences of others. Listen to the edited version here.

Photo Faculty Michelle Bogre to Curate in China

Other books by Michelle Bogre:
Photography 4.0: A Teaching Guide for the 21st Century

Photo Faculty Katherine Hubbard Exhibition and Lecture-Performance at CAPRICIOUS 88

Katherine Hubbard
Four shoulders and thirty five percent everything else
Nov 9 – Dec 28, 2014

CAPRICIOUS 88
88 Eldridge Street, 5th FL
New York, NY 10002

Capricious 88 is proud to present Katherine Hubbard’s most recent work of black-and-white silver gelatin prints shot in southern Utah, entitled Four shoulders and thirty five percent everything else. A site she has explored for the past three years, the works set the stage for play between performance and image — placed within a desert landscape marked by sight lines that delineate the field of vision between two facing cameras. Hubbard uses her body to mark the space and depth of the landscape-stage while simultaneously marking the film plane.

A series of black-and-white landscape photographs made with multiple exposures and the compression of numerous points of view into a single frame will be shown in conjunction. Each image becomes a point of consideration in asking how we may look at land now. Four shoulders and thirty five percent everything else is of the belief that all looking is political, as each person does not see the same thing.

On Sunday, December 14th , Katherine Hubbard will present her lecture-performance, “Notes from Utah, Notes on Grey”, inside the gallery.

Katherine Hubbard is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a photographer whose practice incorporates performance, sculpture, clothing, text and video. Her performance, A thing and its thing-ness. It’s all just nouns and adjectives baby, 2013, a deconstructed opera in response to historical invisibility was presented at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. Additionally, Hubbard’s work has been exhibited internationally at Renseriet, Stockholm, Sweden; University of Maryland Stamp Gallery, Maryland; Higher Pictures, NY and Murray Guy, NY. Hubbard maintains an ongoing collaboration with A.K. Burns exploring the history of queer esthetics, iterations of which have been exhibited at Recess, The Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, all in New York. Recently, Hubbard and Burns have exhibited their collaborative works in NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial at The Museum of Art and Design, Walk-ins Welcome at Marlborough Gallery and As We Were Saying at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York. Forthcoming in 2015 she will present Small Town Sex Shop, a conceptual clothing project in collaboration with Savannah Knoop at Recess, NY. Hubbard has an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is currently part-time faculty at Parsons The New School for Design.

Capricious 88, as an extension of Capricious Magazine, initiates experimentation while working with a variety of artists from emergent to established who use photography as their point of departure to seek out new vehicles of expression in sculpture, video, performance, or publications. The gallery is located on 88 Eldridge Street in Manhattan. For further information please contact Sophie Morner at info@Capricious88.com or visit our website at becapricious.com.

Capricious 88 Gallery Featuring Photography Faculty Member Katherine Hubbard

Photography faculty member Katherine Hubbard will be featuring her latest work Four shoulders and thirty five percent everything else, at the Capricious Gallery in New York. Learn more about her upcoming exhibition below.

Opening November 9, from 6 – 8pm

Exhibition runs from November 9 – December 28, 2014

CAPRICIOUS 88
88 Eldridge Street, 5th FL
New York, NY 10002

Katherine Hubbard’s most recent work of black-and-white silver gelatin prints shot in southern Utah, is entitled Four shoulders and thirty five percent everything else. A site she has explored for the past three years, the works set the stage for play between performance and image — placed within a desert landscape marked by sight lines that delineate the field of vision between two facing cameras. Hubbard uses her body to mark the space and depth of the landscape-stage while simultaneously marking the film plane.

A series of black-and-white landscape photographs made with multiple exposures and the compression of numerous points of view into a single frame will be shown in conjunction. Each image becomes a point of consideration in asking how we may look at land now. Four shoulders and thirty five percent everything else is of the belief that all looking is political, as each person does not see the same thing.

BIO: Katherine Hubbard is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a photographer whose practice incorporates performance, sculpture, clothing, text and video. Her performance, A thing and its thing-ness. It’s all just nouns and adjectives baby, 2013, a deconstructed opera in response to historical invisibility was presented at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. Additionally, Hubbard’s work has been exhibited internationally at Renseriet, Stockholm, Sweden; University of Maryland Stamp Gallery, Maryland; Higher Pictures, NY and Murray Guy, NY. Hubbard maintains an ongoing collaboration with A.K. Burns exploring the history of queer esthetics, iterations of which have been exhibited at Recess, The Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, all in New York. Recently, Hubbard and Burns have exhibited their collaborative works in NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial at The Museum of Art and Design, Walk-ins Welcome at Marlborough Gallery and As We Were Saying at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York. Forthcoming in 2015 she will present Small Town Sex Shop, a conceptual clothing project in collaboration with Savannah Knoop at Recess, NY. Hubbard has an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is currently part-time faculty at Parsons The New School for Design.

Interview with Charlotte Cotton

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