Gail Wight: Windswept

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2015 07:12:57 +0000

From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Gail Wight’s meditation on wind. Wight writes: “I began to understand that the color and texture, the hue and saturation of the sky—or of the ocean swell, the arching trees, the rippling seaweed—are constructed largely by the presence, or absence, of the otherwise invisible wind.” This article was originally published in Issue 7.2, Art, Science, and Wonder, on October 29, 2015.

Gail Wight. Homage to the Wind (video still), 2012; HD video; 16:09. Courtesy of Gail Wight.

On my bookshelf is a dog-eared and ragged copy of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, the “revised pocket edition” from Yale University Press. I picked up this small paperback at a second-hand store in Boston in 1986. It came with a tiny packet of colored paper chips and a few loose leaves for comparing colors. I’ve always loved this little treasure.

The original version was published in 1963 as a glorious set of one hundred fifty silk-screens, with die-cut overlaid pages and accompanying text, all within a slipcase. Yale describes it as “a masterwork in art education.” It’s been in print ever since, and celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2013 with a beautiful, clothbound, two-volume edition.

Read the full article here.

She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World at Cantor Arts Center

admin — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 07:00:19 +0000

Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you a review of She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World. On view though May 4 at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the exhibition showcases the work of twelve photographers from Iran and neighboring nations. Author John Zarobell notes that the works are “immensely poetic expressions of building a life in a world so full of destructive potential it has become inured to personal tragedies.” This article was originally published on February 17, 2015.

Gohar Dashti. Untitled #5 from the series Today’s Life and War, 2008; pigment print. Courtesy of Cantor Arts Center, Palo Alto.

Countless narrative threads run through this unprecedented exhibition. Most of the women photographers who are featured hail from the Middle East, and all engage with dynamics of contemporary Muslim culture, violence, and the region’s complicated relationship with Western ways of seeing (and thinking). The curators who assembled the exhibition clearly meant to highlight photography as a storytelling device; almost all of the works in the show are drawn from series.

The decision to focus on women photographers exposes a [Western] political subtext of presenting the world from a female perspective. The politics involve the reversal of the gaze, the refutation of stereotypes, and the repudiation of Orientalism, that long-standing tradition of representation emerging from Europe that so often placed “exotic” women from “the East” in the position of objects to be consumed. This subtext introduces a curious paradox to the exhibition: These artists are not usually interested in telling stories that return the gaze of “the West” or correct false stereotypes. Certainly there are exceptions—Boushra Almutawakel offers correctives to the incursion of more restrictive veiling, while Shadi Ghadirian delivers send-ups of nineteenth-century Orientalist images of Middle Eastern women—but the overall message that emerges from this exhibition is not concerned with the perception of Middle Eastern women by Westerners or conservatives in their own countries. Instead, the viewer encounters moments of experience and glimpses of protest in images that are sometimes staged and sometimes straight but always full of personal meaning.

Read the full article here.

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Gail Wight: Windswept

She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World at Cantor Arts Center