Art and Photography Blog

Particles, Particles Exhibit at Surface Gallery, Nottingham, UK

As stated in Facebook, as part of the new exhibition programme for 2009, Surface Gallery sees the first curated exhibition; ‘Particles, Particles’ within its new venue. The show consists of a diverse range of media; from painting and sculpture to performance and installation, featuring an array of international artists, brought together from Italy, Norway, Japan and the UK. The gallery is located at 16 Southwell Road, Nottingham, UK. Wish I could be there.

The exhibition projects an ambitious light on the range of skills and values present in an artist’s capabilities today, and the intensity of one’s own intellect. A nostalgic, almost surreal presence floats over the “particles” foundations, with something we can all relate to - yet at times it is unclear just where we felt those sensations at a previous moment, or how close to us those moments are.

Christina Bryant will be performing exclusively at the Surface Gallery for the private view. She will be responding spontaneously to the audience in her role as ‘the drawer’ (in which she will be situated within a white cube), inviting, through the action of a live drawing, the audience to literally be drawn into the piece. The Norwegian artist Tone Holmen considers the impact of consumption in relation to climate change. Through transforming non-degradable materials into sculptures of poignant meaning, she addresses key issues that are relevant to us all. Sam Clift explores the visual perception and connotations of materials once they are taken out of their original context; transforming them into an altered state quite different from the source. Japanese artist Yuko Takemura’s interactive installation explores the inner mind of one’s self, through interacting with the viewer’s senses; it evokes recollections of thoughts, daydreams and past times.

Featured artists include: Chris Loukes, Caroline Elliott, Robert Lang, Sam Clift, Christina Bryant, Kate Walters, Joanne Wilton, Helen Dryden, Yuko Takemura, Tone Holmen, Lorena Carbonara Kaoru Shimadam and my friend Karen D’Amico.

To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, Surface Gallery are collaborating with Brass Monkey cocktail bar to host the after party at their venue in the Lace Market, from 9pm onwards. They will also kindly be providing drinks at the opening of ‘Particles, Particles’, whilst Edin's Deli Café have generously contributed to publicity costs.

The Private View will be held on the 6th February 6-9pm, where you will be able to come along to view the work and meet participating artists whilst also having the opportunity to partake in a live performance!

How to Briefly Describe the Difference Between YouTube and Online Video Sites Like Hulu?

While I understand that technically speaking YouTube shows mostly short-form amateur videos and Hulu and other similar sites show long-form professional videos – mostly TV shows and movies, I am trying to determine how to briefly convey this distinction.

At TVissimo, the television and online video search engine I am involved with, we are not only indexing TV broadcast schedules but also online video sites such as TidalTV (Completed), Hulu (coming shortly) and others. When we say that we are offering a unified search capability for online videos and scheduled TV, people say – oh, you going to also show content from YouTube. Well, actually we are not planning to index YouTube, as it already has a good search function and content that is indexed differently from the videos we focus on.

We enable finding “topical” videos (TV shows and movies generally described in a “topical fashion”, namely a Seinfeld episode, a movie with Dustin Hoffman or a segment from the Olympics. We will offer access to similar content from other sites, namely movies and TV shows.

These videos are different from “scene” oriented videos of YouTube, where, among many other things, you can search for and find a video with scenes such as a “cat chasing a mechanical mouse”. These scenes may actually be segments of TV shows or movies, but the focus is on the individual scene, as opposed to the entire episode or program. Of course, YouTube has many other functions but showing whole segments of TV programs is not one.

So what do you think? I would greatly appreciate suggestions. YouTube is a social medium and TV and Hulu are not social media. This is certainly one difference. Now I also asked this question on my Twitter feed so I will be interested to see which media, blogs (my Portals and KM blog and the TVissimo blog) or Twitter (my Twitter feed and the Tvissimo one) gets the most, if any, response

Karen D'Amico - London Artist and Designer

I have written about my friend’s blog before – see Fluid Thinking – Karen D’Amico’s Artist Blog – but I have not covered her graphic design and art so here are some thoughts. She has a new site for her graphic design work, D’Amico Design. I think the entry page is a great example of focus as there is an interesting image that takes a minute to figure out and then a simple objective statement below that draws your eye after seeing the banner.

The “about section” covers her 18 years in the design and print industry including Karen’s technical and design capabilities, as well as her services. She also mentions that she is a practicing artist, and maintains a studio in Hackney. I certainly agree with Karen’s statement, “I like the fact that the boundaries between fine art and design are often blurred. I consider both professions to be innately creative, requiring lateral thinking and the ability to find unique solutions.” Too often fine art looks down on design work. I see them as peers and the ability to create just the right simplicity required to convey a message through good design is something I have great respect for.

In Karen’s portfolio I especially like the Glitter and Grime series in Portfolio One. It is design for an artist’s book with many street scenes. Karen said she had complete autonomy on the design effort. I think the text and the illustrations work as equals with neither fighting the other. I also like the design work in her own ezine, Tangent Projects, seen in Portfolio Three. Here you also see a balanced relationship between text and images. The art of occupation invitation makes a strong conceptual statement and then you notice the balanced design that drew your attention to the conceptual centerpiece.

Karen’s art site contains the statement that her “art practice focuses on the devising of various groupings and systems as agencies of connecting and interpreting notions surrounding identity/legacy, accumulated histories, and sense of place. By incorporating maps, text, assemblage and the photographic image in her work, she juxtaposes and manipulates objects and images in an attempt to order, contain and re-present them in various contexts.”

One project that conveys this message is the collaborative Travellers Secret Box 2005- 2007. It “sought to explore, locate, identify and perhaps dissolve some of the seemingly undetectable territories existent in terms of art and culture, social inclusion and the ever-shifting locality of identity as well as notions of home.” In 2008 this concept was extended to the Sandwich Box, another group effort that Karen is the co-curator. Karen often works at boundaries and her champagne army is another wonderful example I wrote about before. I find her work a nice balance of accessibility and complexity.

The images section presents a wide variety of work. I was struck by “Outpouring,” a mixed media work; “burnt offerings,” an assemblage; “time trap,” another assemblage; “no such place,” a digitally manipulated photograph that looks like an aerial image but is really a micro-world. There are many others but I will stop here and recommend that you take a look.

New Art Web Site and Blog by Liz Sweibel

I wrote about my friend Liz Sweibel’s work and recent exhibit on this blog, see - Many Kinds of Nothing Creates an Inviting Art Space. The site organizes her work into three galleries that show pieces that work together. I especially liked the interiors series in gallery two. They are collages of interiors with ink drawing added. I liked the simplicity and stark presentation. These interiors reminded me of some of the interior images of the contemporary Spanish painter, Antonio López García, who I greatly admire.

Liz also provides a play section that offers her more experimental work, as well as a statement and more background. The statement concludes, “My work uses modest materials, simple gestures, and its slight presence to cultivate space and slow time. I hope for it to be a quiet yet persistent call for attention, an invitation to stop and experience the nuances of the moment, and to realize that there is much to cherish and much we can do better.” I think she achieves this goal with her work.

On the site you can click on an image to get a bigger view and then click again to get an even bigger view. She also links to her Flickr photo stream for some nice images. You can also join her email list.

Liz has also started a blog that seems mostly devoted to her art. I especially liked the post, "But the Visual Is Not Reducible to the Verbal." This is an issue I have been had a life long interest in as both an artist and a cognitive psychologist. Liz starts with her efforts to categorize her work, a task that requires using words to describe the visual, a cross-media task. She concludes the post, “As someone who's made a living from words for 30 years, this dilemma is actually exhilarating. It's always been my need to make work that exceeds (if not precedes) words, to get at something beyond (if not before) our brains' capacity to reduce it to the verbal.”

Two Different Views of Abandoned Stuff

My friend Karen D’Amico, a London artist, sent me the link to Photology. It has wonderful photos of old cars, trucks, boats, other vintage stuff, along with flowers. The photos of vintage stuff remind me a bit of Walker Evans. The flowers seem like Man Ray doing a better job on Georgia O’Keefe images. Anyway they are enjoyable in their own right.

Karen also sent me a link to Abandoned Places by Henk van Rensbergen. It takes theme of abandoned images found in Photology and goes a lot further. The site says, “Old buildings, abandoned hospitals, industrial palaces overgrown with plants and trees, 
the remaining walls decorated with graffiti, smashed windows, rain dripping through the roof... These places have become hard to find, difficult (or illegal) to access, dangerous to explore ... great to spend the day !” He updates the site with new images. The most recent was of Château de Noisy, “a sort of Disneyland castle after 30 years of abandonment.”

Enjoy. You should also check out Karen's web site for her latest projects. I will be writing about them soon.