Laura Stevens is a photographer whose work blends the elegance of the cinematic with the erudition of the documentary. She shoots her subjects—most often a number of single female figures—in series that detail an engaging range of emotional and psychological states. The action in these images takes place in similarly evocative and highly staged domestic settings: an antique and ornately wallpapered hotel room, a subject’s[…..]
At the heart of Lisa Wicka’s artwork is a set of keenly nuanced spatial and visual adaptations. Her work transforms motifs, compositions, and ideas—human figures, abstract shapes, and reinterpretations of physical and perceived spaces—into unified bodies. Her small canvases, combine-like sculptures, and large-scale installations all mark their spaces of display with striking gravity. Most arresting is Wicka’s ability to create compositions that profoundly alter visual[…..]
Typically, the studio is where artists make their work, but Joe Penrod’s space for creative development exists anywhere a shadow falls. Armed with only a roll of cerulean painter’s tape, Penrod transforms once-mundane shadows (and the objects that cast them) into fecund sculptural compositions. There are a few stages in Penrod’s process. First he finds an object that casts a particularly beautiful or striking shadow.[…..]
Matt Shallenberger approaches his photographic subjects—most often landscapes—as a cartographer approaches a new territory. As he discovers information by following the sight lines of mountains, rivers, boundaries, horizons, and the ever-changing position of the sun or the moon, he always takes into account the history and prior records of his subjects. While he works consistently with darkened, blissfully moody vistas, Shallenberger’s research into his subjects[…..]
Digital and analog technologies are seemingly at odds, with the digital on the verge of subsuming and overtaking the analog. The work of artist Kristine Schomaker, however, attempts in strikingly direct fashion to bridge the increasingly complex space between these two poles while acknowledging a deep-seated fascination with both. Schomaker uses digital graphics and animations to make objects, images, and avatars. These works stand as[…..]
Holger Kilumets is keenly aware of—and keen to explore—the conceptual and physical mechanisms of photographic representation. In a new body of work, Maps & Territories (2014), Kilumets uses visually witty vagaries to link a series of seventeen photographs that borrow tropes across subjects and structures—including art history, advertising, still life, television, theater, and film staging. Trichromatic Vision Model (2014), the second image in the series[…..]
Geoffry Smalley’s work is rooted in early-19th-century American painting, deriving specific scenes and techniques from historical canvases and the Hudson River School. In 1836, painter Thomas Cole completed his five-part series The Course of Empire. The series documents Cole’s vision for the birth, life, and death of western civilization, from the pastoral to the desolate. Cole had a calculated optimism for life and renewal, but[…..]
