This past Sunday, December 13th, distinguished California based photographer Larry Sultan died of cancer.  He was born in New York in 1946, but moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1949. He received a BA from University of California Santa Barbara in 1968 and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1973.

It was at SFAI that he met the artist Mike Mandel, with whom he produced his first major body of work, “Evidence.”  This book of appropriated photographs and catalogued images collected from a large body of government agency archives, corporations, and research institutions looks at the then contemporary American life. The body of work evolved into an exhibit hosted by SFMOMA in 1977.

In 1988, Larry Sultan began working as a professor of photography at California College of the Arts, where he grew to be an integral part of both the Graduate Fine Arts, and Undergraduate Photography programs.  He was an influential mentor, teacher and colleague and received a great amount of joy from sharing his experience with his students.

Sultan produced what grew to be arguably his most recognized body of work entitled “Pictures from Home” in 1992.  The project began when his father was forced into early retirement, and became the culmination of a decade of photographs of his parents and their lives, as well as an inclusion of source text, home movie stills, and family artifacts.  This project ultimately led to his next body of work, “The Valley,” a look at the use of suburban houses for pornographic film sets.

Sultan has been internationally recognized and exhibited throughout his career.  His work has been collected by numerous established organizations including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The New York Times obituary for Larry Sultan recounts some of his greatest achievements.

Andy DuCett is a Minneapolis- based artist working with a multitude of media, utilizing sculpture, collage, drawing and installation.  His installations predominantly feature site-specific pilings of mostly found objects.  The sculptures are temporary, and are most typically indicative of the cultural location in which they are built. His first solo show, entitled AOT Has Been Here Forever, Except When It Wasn’t,  recently on view at Art of This gallery in Minneapolis chronicles the history of the buildings, residents and streets around the gallery. The installation uses items from thrift stores and cast objects in order to draw attention to our interactions with the world. This assemblage of objects typical in his sculptural work is mimicked in his drawings, which pull together various occurrences and locations, illustrating for instance, events taking place over the course of a month.  His interest in found objects is apparent in his collage work, as well.  Using only found photographs and illustrations, DuCett constructs impossible scenes that subvert comfort, utilizing imagery of youthfulness to depict hazards and barriers.

DuCett received his Masters in Fine Arts from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006.  He is also currently presenting work in a group exhibition of artists using collage entitled CUTTERS: An Exhibition of International Collage at Cinder’s Gallery in New York.

]]> https://www.dailyserving.com/2009/11/andy-ducett/feed/ 0 https://www.dailyserving.com/2009/10/kathy-aoki/ https://www.dailyserving.com/2009/10/kathy-aoki/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:27:35 +0000 http://dailyserving.com/?p=1144

Kathy Aoki is currently presenting a solo show at Oakland’s Swarm Gallery entitled The Museum of Historical Makeovers. In her faux-museum exhibition, Aoki takes on the role of a curator from the year 3011 at a cultural history museum. The exhibition specifically follows Gwen Stefani as if humanity has uncovered artifacts from her clothing lines and accepted them as culturally significant. The museum consists of several sculptural works in the vein of egyptian artifacts, (canopic jars, maps of burial sites), as well as etchings and illustrations detailing modern makeover processes including Brazilian waxings and anal bleaching. Finally, the museum hosts a tomb room of Stefani burial artifacts that is “temporarily closed” due to vandalism, allowing only a small peep-hole-style viewer for museum patrons. As is evident with this exhibit’s tongue-in-cheek portrayal of feminine social standings, Aoki considers herself a “sneaky feminist,” inserting subtle statements of accepted female beauty “norms” into her work concerning feminine gender roles.

Kathy Aoki received her MFA in printmaking from Washington University in 1994 and currently lives and works in Santa Clara, California where she is an assistant professor at Santa Clara University. She has shown at a large variety of galleries, including San Jose Museum of Art, Smith Anderson Editions, as well as participating in San Fransisco Arts Commission‘s Market St. Kiosks in 2004. The Museum of Historical Makeovers runs until October 25th, and is accompanied by an artist talk on October 14th with Aoki playing the role of the Museum curator.