One offshoot of photography is the debate over the authority we give it, a fact that San Francisco artist Sean McFarland plays with in Viewshed, a solo show up this month at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions. Viewshed contains two separate but related bodies of work: Dark Pictures, a series of large, extremely dark but detailed photographs taken of what look like wild and wooded landscapes; and[…..]
One might be tempted to call Lisa Tan’s exhibition at Arthouse in Austin poetic. But what would this mean? It is spare, filled with layered and complex allusions, much like a poem. The imagistic lyricism of two finches in a cage; a lone man smoking as he stares out a window; flashes of barren mountain peaks; and a doctor’s stark appraisal of an aging body[…..]
With a broad mix of photographs from both unknown shutterbugs and internationally recognized artists, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 at SFMOMA examines the images of a culture existing in an uneasy relationship to the camera. The exhibition probes our social connection to surveillance, pornography, and physical and emotional violence. Last week, Daily Serving’s Bean Gilsdorf sat down with Senior Curator of Photography[…..]
A solo exhibition of Victor Albrow’s photography is currently on view at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow. On entering the exhibition space, one is immediately drawn to the almost life-size portraits through the odd contrast of figures in a contemporary setting staged so to be reminiscent of Renaissance portrait paintings. While Albrow did not intentionally create parallels with Renaissance portraiture, the similarities and contexts are[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Irving Penn’s Still Life with Triangle and Red Eraser (1985) currently hangs in a small maroon room in the basement of the Getty Museum’s West Pavilion. It’s part of the In Focus: Still Life exhibition, a charming but uneventful “best of” survey of the Getty’s images of objects. The print is a[…..]
I love how far the term “curate” has fallen. Once particular to egg-headed museum types who cared for collections of rarities, now curating, at least in marketing terms, means nothing more than making a kind of fancy or personalized choice. Instead of plain old dinner and a movie, you can now curate the best locavorian burger and artisanal fries while selecting a companion film from[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley In the spot filmmaker M. Blash created for Levi’s Jeans in 2009, Walt Whitman’s voice is like the Pied Piper’s pipe. “Come my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,” recites Whitman, played by an actor (an earlier Levi’s spot purportedly featured an actual recording of the poet). As[…..]
