MELANIE PULLEN: Ace Gallery

Pullens, Headlights Flare. Plexi Face Mount 2004.

Pullen, Red Stockings. C-Print, Plexi Face Mount 2005.
Pullen, Phones. C-Print, Plexi Face Mount 2005.

Melanie Pullen's collection of more than one hundred photographs that comprise High Fashion Crime Scenes is based on vintage crime-scene images she mined from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, the County Coroner's Office, and other primary sources. Drawn to the rich details and compelling stories preserved in the criminal records, she began re-enacting the crime-scenes, outfitting the "victims" (her selected models) in current haute couture, and photographing them in staged settings.

Pullen's images are repulsive and lovely all at once. Each scenario seems real as though one has seen it before whether they have or not. That they are in color heightens this sense of them being real. Yet, many have a staged quality that renders them false. Either way, they suggest strong narratives that are uncomfortable, eerie, and mysterious. As a viewer I want to know what happened to each of these women, I want to know the story, the history.

3 of my images: week 8

These photographs are about textures and marks that have been left behind either naturally (rust) or man made (graffiti). They mimic the human condition which is flawed and transient.

ANNETTE MESSAGER: The Hayward Gallery; Southbank Centre

Annette Messager: The Messengers at The Hayward marks the first major UK retrospective of this celebrated French artist.

I really enjoy Annette Messager's artwork, particularly her photography. The way she fragments things and puts them back together again to create larger wholes is really interesting. As a viewer I feel like I am never seeing the whole piece, and this is desirable sometimes as it leaves the mind open to fill in the blanks with their own narrative.

BEATE GEISSLER + OLIVER SANN: Several Silences; The Renaissance Soceity (Univeristy of Chicago)

Geissler and Sann, Personal Kill #13, 2007 C-print 41"x 53"

Titled after an essay by the late philosopher and literary theoretician Jean-Francois Lyotard, Several Silences is a group exhibition exploring various kinds of silence. As a discourse, the aesthetic of silence has been thoroughly domesticated within the visual arts. Although silence as a discourse in art arose out of conditions calling for the negation of art, it has subsequently become familiar subject matter no longer operating as the avant-garde ideal it once was. This is not to say silence has lost significance. If anything, it has become a more potent antidote to a culture of distraction. Silence, however, is not the absence of communication. It is dialectically opposed to communication, so that one sustains and supports the other. Inextricably bound to communication, which it tacitly evokes, silence itself is a form of communication with many meanings. There are voluntary and involuntary silences--some comfortable, others not. There is Cage's silence, which calls for the distinction between clinical and ambient silences. There is silence as conscious omission or redaction. And then there is memorial silence.

I think this exhibition is great conceptually. Its ideas relate directly to a culture that is overstimulated, bombarded, and busy. The idea of "silence as a form of communication with many meanings" opens up infinite ideas to be expressed and exlpored. Geissler and Sann's image Personal Kill #13 is very 'silent' in that it is an isolated, empty space, void of human life, but its meaning is anything but silent. A lone wooden chair at the end of ta dirty, wet, confined corridor surrounded by heavy bare concrete walls with two small windows giving the smallest glimpse of life outside penetrates the viewer and a strong sense of death and abandonment are experienced.

ROBERT GOBER, MATTHEW BARNEY + OTHERS: Strange Bodies: Figurative Works from the Hirshhorn Collection

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1990, from the Hirshhorn's collection.

Robert Gober. Untitled. 1991. Wax, fabric, leather, human hair, and wood, 13 1/4 x 16 ½ x 46 1/8".

An important strength of the Hirshhorn Museum is its holdings in figurative art. Strange Bodies brings together some of the most praised and popular examples of figuration from the collection to show how expressionistic and surrealistic impulses toward human representation have evolved from the early and mid-twentieth century to recent decades. The tension between the enthusiastic response that figuration often receives from general audiences and the loaded, at times dark content it can carry is also explored. Moreover, the installation allows an assessment of past collection building.

I really like the idea of this exhibit more so than the actual art presented. That we have tendencies/desires to distort the human figure is an interesting subject in itself to ponder. It made me think about my own reasons for depicting and fragmenting the human body in my own photographs. Likewise, the beauty/enticement/repulsion of the human figure is again looked at, this time in a more contemporary sense.

3 of my images: week 7

These photographs are about the passage of light and the illumination of objects. Aesthetically they are concerned with texture, color and rhythm. Each is shot with a macro lens which confines the object itself, or fragments it. At the same time the viewer is confined to the space with little depth of field. In this way the fragmented objects take precedence and allow the viewer to focus on their subtle details.

HAROLD EDGERTON: Walker Art Center; The Quick and the Dead

Edgerton, Bullet through Balloons 1959. Gelatin Silver Print 11 3/8" x 18 7/8"

Surveying art that tries to reach beyond itself and the limits of our knowledge and experience, The Quick and the Dead seeks, in part, to ask what is alive and dead within the legacy of conceptual art. Though the term “conceptual” has been applied to myriad kinds of art, it originally covered works and practices from the 1960s and ‘70s that emphasized the ideas behind or around a work of art, foregrounding language, action, and context rather than visual form. But this basic definition fails to convey the ambitions of many artists who have been variously described as conceptual: as Sol LeWitt asserted in 1969, conceptual artists are “mystics rather than rationalists.” Although some of their work involves unremarkable materials or even borders on the invisible, these artists explore new ways of thinking about time and space, often aspiring to realms and effects that fall far outside of our perceptual limitations.

Strangely enough, I am drawn to the image of the bullet shooting through balloons not because of any deep concept or theory that I see within the piece. Instead I am attracted to it by the way it makes me feel. There is a sense of strength, destruction, fragility and then in the end, peace.