Almost Fall
“Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things and small people talk about wine.” - Fran Lebowitz
Carol Eisenberg
Carol Eisenberg, #8, From the Underwater Reverie portfolio, 2021, Digitally constructed photograph, 45 x 60 inches
I create constructed digital images that blur the line between painting and photography. This duality of aesthetics is an essential component of my approach to art and life. I am drawn to the polarities of beauty and decay, the contrived and the natural, the excessive and the elegant. - Carol Eisenberg
Carol Eisenberg, #12, From the Underwater Reverie portfolio, 2021, Digitally constructed photograph, 45 x 60 inches
Carol Eisenberg’s genre-bending photography blurs the boundary between floral still-life, historically coded as feminine (and therefore lesser), and landscape (traditionally coded masculine). Commanding the terrain of landscape photography, she subversively deploys vivid color, blossoms, texture, tactility, and the equally—though we are less apt to admit it—historically feminine mark of trash. The femininity of trash is the unspoken discourse of the feminine as the abject, the cast-out, the worthless. Women are “discarded” more readily than men (think of the phrase, discarded mistress). Women are cast as the always-already at the verge of discard. - Claire Raymond
Carol Eisenberg, #4, From the Underwater Reverie portfolio, 2021, Digitally constructed photograph, 45 x60 inches
August
by Dorothy Parker
(1893- 1967)
When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;
Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces' pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.
North by Nuuk; Greenland after Rockwell Kent by Denis Defibaugh
Denis Defibaugh, Uummannaq Island, 2017, From the book; North by Nuuk, Greenland after Rockwell Kent
Denis Defibaugh, Pujunnguaq Hammond and David Nielsen dog sledging to their fishing holes. Temperature is about -10 degrees. Uummannaq Fjord 2017, From the book; North by Nuuk, Greenland after Rockwell Kent
Denis Defibaugh recently received a prestigious National Science Foundation award to research and produce A Comparative View of Environmental, Social and Cultural Change in Contemporary Greenland. Defibaugh’s Greenland exhibition and monograph, North by Nuuk, Greenland after Rockwell Kent will begin travelling in Winter of 2021. The vast sweeping landscape seems to overwhelm the human figure. It is the soul of the people, dangerous yet inviting at the same time. Greenland’s rugged beauty and sublime Inuit homeland inspired photographer Denis Defibaugh to immerse himself in the richness of the Greenlandic way of life much the way it moved Rockwell Kent 85 years earlier. Through an 18 months immersion into Inuit lives, culture, and environment; Defibaugh’s photographs evolved to express insight and understanding of the native traditions, along with the primal and social landscape of Greenland’s relatively untouched remote arctic.
To purchase this book, click here.
“North by Nuuk: Greenland After Rockwell Kent—a book of faultless production values and cross-cultural insights—is a landmark publishing event. By reproducing Kent’s historical photographs, many for the first time, together with Defibaugh’s absorbing photographs of contemporary Greenland, the book is a rare visual resource for historians of the Arctic as well as of modern American art.” - Jake Milgram Wien in ARCTIC
Tillman Crane’s new works from The Square Foot Studio
During the pandemic, our sunporch became my Square Foot Studio. Using a macro lens and attachments I photographed leaves and flowers that found their way into our home, I became lost in their changing structure as they withered and dried. As the shifting light recorded their decay, I imagined them as monumental, beautiful platinum prints. In a limited edition of 1/1, these 26×35 inch images call me in close and I find in their quiet beauty the stirrings of hope for what comes next. -Tillman Crane
These works are currently on display at the Stanhope and Spencer Gallery in Rockland, Maine
Alnis Stakle’s Mellow Apocalypse Series
Interested in the fate of the canonised artistic, scientific and journalistic images and their potential to embody contemporary meanings, for in in my new series of collages titled Mellow Apocalypse, I have used images from open source collections of art museums, scientific institutions and various image banks whose archives may be considered iconic testimonies of the present and the past. The collages are grounded in my search for syntactic visual language connections in the images pertaining to various periods, media and domains of the visual culture. The collages make use of the ideas and technical codes established in the visual communication that transcend the borderlines of ages, media and cultures. The codes that are so deeply engrained in culture that they are used without thinking and are understood through pre-existing schemas in the recipients’ minds. Although the decoding of images depends on the recipients’ interests, values, convictions and wishes, yet the globalised world of the visual culture is oversaturated with simulacra where the feminine and the masculine, the other, the desirable, the repulsive and the beautiful is depicted through the use of similar ideas and technical codes in different epochs and various media. These syntactic connections across various periods of visual culture and different media are traceable in persons’ postures and gestures, in colour stage designs and similar outlines of objects and architecture. The technical execution of the collages is based in the image post-processing software algorithms, letting them overtake the accuracy and precision of image depiction. Thus, the digital post-processing technological features become a part of the collages’ notional and technical code. -Alnis Stakle
John Woodruff
John Woodruff, Shared, 2020, Photograph, 40 x 30 inches
My newest work shares the same themes I have explored and/or worked with for years - patterns which occur at every level of life, and the beauty of amorphous cellular shapes. Drawing on cues from nature, I create lush, patterned, fictional landscapes that often mimic aerial views. Colorful, immersive and visually charged, the photographs tend to linger at the intersection of painting and photography, imagery and abstraction. My images are created in the studio by hand. Xeroxes of source images (the sun and moon) are cut into organic shapes, composed on layers of glass and re-photographed using spotlights to enhance color and create an illusion of depth. My educational background includes photography and biology. As a consequence, my work almost always combines science and art. I am influenced by the natural world, background music in movies like the Jefferson Airplane light show in the seventies, Gary Stephan, David Reed, Ross Bleckner, Jack Goldstein, and the work of Adam Fuss. -John Woodruff
Summer Job
by Richard Hoffman ( 1949- )
“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss,
once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,”
he said, “he gets to middle age—and by the way,
he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until
he’s forty, forty-five, and then you give him five
more years until that craziness peters out, and now
he’s almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains
to himself that life is made of time, that time
is what it’s all about. Aha! he says. And then
he either blows his brains out, gets religion,
or settles down to some major-league depression.
Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights
torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one.”