Category Archives: Photography

Paige Tighe, Walk with ME Project (2012-14)

From Tieghe’s press release:

A Desire for Connection: “I began the project in LA out of a sense of frustration about the terms of everyday touch in America,” says Tighe. “I was having a massage, and as the massage therapist began working on my hand, all I wanted to do was hold her hand. Not out of a romantic impulse, but from a simple desire for connection.”

“What does it mean to live in a culture where people hug hello only rarely, almost never kiss each other on the cheek in greeting, and hardly ever take another’s hands unless they’re sleeping together? And what would it mean and feel like to hold hands in public with people who’ve volunteered to experience that connection? I decided I was going to hold hands and walk with as many people as I could.”

As they walked with Paige, her partners spoke of their dreams and aspirations, worries and plans while holding hands.

Tieghe also has an artist book documenting one iteration of the project.

Philippe Guillaume, Every Foot of The Sidewalk: boulevard Saint-Laurent (2010-2012)

Every Foot Of The Sidewalk: boulevard Saint-Laurent
Map (2010-2012)
original mixed media, google map, photos, pencil, tape
42” x 276”
FOFA Gallery exhibition, Montreal (2013)

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“Philippe Guillaume’s Every Foot of the Sidewalk: boulevard Saint-Laurent (2010-2012) currently exhibited at the FOFA Gallery is a compilation of photographic cityscapes of the desolate Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Upon entering the FOFA’s main gallery, the viewer is immediately immersed in the eerie void created by these rarely captured moments of what is commonly the busy and populated Boulevard Saint-Laurent. One of the works, Working map of Every Foot of the Sidewalk: boulevard Saint-Laurent (2010-2012) displays a linear arrangement of photographs in parallel with a Google map image of the boulevard. The map is numbered, indicating the specific locations in which the photographs were taken. This work invites the viewer to participate by locating him/herself along this frequently visited and familiar street. In depicting this Montreal landmark, the artist is attempting to offer a new or perhaps different perspective of the space and street by removing its principal component of people. Guillaume’s work encompasses the act, art and history of walking and photography in order to explore concepts of space, community and a lack there of.

Among the books and articles left for consultation in the center of the main gallery lies Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Solnit seems to have played an influential role in the artist’s process and discussion of this work. The void captured in the photographs brings attention to a conversation common in Solnit’s work, regarding streets, people and shared spaces. Streets, such as boulevard Saint-Laurent, act as a space of congregation, a space for festivals, parades, revolutions and protests. They act as a place for voicing and displaying one’s citizenship, a shared and “unsegregated zone.”[1]Particularly in light of the student protests last year in Montreal, Guillaume’s city of no citizens explores an interesting juxtaposition between the possible usages of space that touches on many social, political and spatial discussions relevant today. — Review written by Caro Loutfi.

[1] Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust : A History of Walking. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 2001.”

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Fran Crow, WALKING TO SAVE SOME SEA – MY 46000 CHALLENGE (2006-7)

“I have always loved walking by the sea and was increasingly disturbed by the amount of plastic I was finding washed up on the beach. But in 2006, the United Nations Environment Programme reported that humankind’s exploitation of the oceans was ‘rapidly passing the point of no return’ and I was really shocked to discover that they estimated that on average there were around 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating on every square mile of ocean, leading to the death of over one million seabirds and over 100,000 marine mammals every year due to entanglement with or swallowing of litter.

We now know that over 12 million tonnes of plastic end up in our oceans every year, travelling on ocean currents to every part of the globe. These plastics endure in the marine environment indefinitely: items from the birth of plastics are washing up on our shores, virtually unscathed. Scientists estimate that plastic can take 1000 years or more to degrade in seawater and even then will continue to pollute our environment with thousands of microscopic fibres: samples taken from a Northumbrian beach were found to have over 10,000 fibres in just one litre of sand… But disposal of plastics in our oceans isn’t just harming wildlife now. We are also providing a toxic legacy that may last an eternity. Moreover, plastics can be found throughout the food chain, even ending up in the food on our plates.

plastics, like diamonds, are forever…

The Challenge
I was so shocked by what I had learned, I felt I had to do something and resolved to ‘save’ one square mile of ocean by collecting 46000 pieces of litter whilst walking on the beaches near my home. Every time I visited the beach I picked up all the litter I could carry. My challenge took exactly a year to achieve (September 2006 – September 2007) and in total I walked over 200kms and carried away nearly a third of a tonne of rubbish.

But sadly my challenge will never really be complete. Scientists estimate that the amount of plastic in the sea is increasing at a rapid rate, doubling every 2 or 3 years. I’m still collecting (I can’t stop!). But this could be a lifetime’s work and I still might not save a single square mile of sea…
My efforts may only be a literal splash in the ocean compared to the immensity of the problems are seas are facing. But what if everyone tried to do something about it? Luckily there is a lot more we can do – have a look here at the things we can all do…

Whilst walking, I took photographs and created a book of what I saw, contrasting the seemingly unspoilt beauty of the landscape with the man-made debris which inhabits it.
See my photographs in sequence from the beginning of my challenge.
To see specific locations, click the following links:
Aldeburgh – Bawdsey – Covehythe – Dunwich – Felixstowe – Orford Ness – Shingle Street – Sizewell – Southwold – Thorpeness – Walberswick

Collecting
I have saved and photographed nearly everything from my walks.
See some of my collections.

Exhibitions
The plastics I have collected have become my materials: I create huge installations with what I have found, ‘recycling’ it as art with potent message, playful but deadly serious.
See photographs from some of my exhibitions.“

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David Taylor, Working the Line (2007)

“Beginning in 2007, started photographing along the U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso/Juarez and San Diego/Tijuana. My project is organized around an effort to document all of the monuments that mark the international boundary west of the Rio Grande. The rigorous undertaking to reach all of the 276 obelisks, most of which were installed between the years 1891 and 1895, has inevitably led to encounters with migrants, smugglers, the Border Patrol, minutemen and residents of the borderlands.

During the period of my work the United States Border Patrol has doubled in size and the federal government has constructed over 600 miles of pedestrian fencing and vehicle barrier. With apparatus that range from simple tire drags (that erase foot prints allowing fresh evidence of crossing to be more readily identified) to seismic sensors (that detect the passage of people on foot or in a vehicle) the border is under constant surveillance. To date the Border Patrol has attained “operational control” in many areas, however people and drugs continue to cross. Much of that traffic occurs in the most remote, rugged areas of the southwest deserts.

My travels along the border have been done both alone and in the company of agents. In total, the resulting pictures are intended to offer a view into locations and situations that we generally do not access and portray a highly complex physical, social and political topography during a period of dramatic change.” [credit]

Lawrence Weiner, OUT OF SIGHT (2016)

“Lawrence Weiner: OUT OF SIGHT is a participatory artwork and experience that blends hopscotch and word play for a joyful connection of mind and body that speaks to all ages and walks of life.

Known for text-based works that recall visual poetry, literary aphorisms, or Zen koans, American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner frequently transforms gallery walls into artistic messaging boards. In his ground-based mural OUT OF SIGHT, he creates a pathway to be viewed and navigated, both physically and intellectually. OUT OF SIGHT combines wit and whimsy in a game-like format, encouraging learning and self-actualization from the viewer through the use of graphical phrases embedded throughout the work. By being able to stand, walk, or jump from one position to the next, OUT OF SIGHT taps into the dynamic “gamification” of learning and self-discovery. The viewer navigates the creation as they see fit—interpreting the work while interacting with it.

“A person coming in with whatever situation they find it, young, old or indifferent, the minute they have any thoughts about themselves going FROM HERE TO THERE, will be able to stand still and realize they first have to imagine themselves doing it, that’s assuming a position.” – Lawrence Weiner

Like McEvoy Arts’ exhibition Next to You, OUT OF SIGHT reminds us of the connections we make within ourselves and with each other through the shared experience of performance and the arts.” [credit]

On Kawara, I Got Up / I Met / I Went, 1968-79

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On Kawara (Japanese, 1933–2014)

Photomechanical prints, 8.3 x 14.0 cm (3 1/4 x 5 1/2 in. ) each

Credit Line: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2001

“In the I Got Up series, Kawara sent two postcards every day to friends, family, collectors, colleagues. The postcards that Kawara chose were always horizontal in format, and always of the touristic variety. He played games with the cards, sometimes sending a single recipient multiple[s] of the same image, or taking recipients on tours around the cities.

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Transcript

Narrator: Here on Rotunda Level 3, you will see three bodies of work organized by On Kawara to be viewed as a single section of the exhibition that he titled Self-Observation. These works all represent a record of ordinary activities—the kinds of things we all do, each day. Every day for 12 years beginning in 1968, Kawara sent postcards for the series I Got Up, recorded lists of names for I Met, and traced his movements on maps in I Went.

Presented here are over 1,500 of the more than 8,000 postcards comprising I Got Up. Kawara used various kinds of stamping tools to date and address the cards, including a return address, which provides another way to plot his whereabouts. Along with this information he stamped the phrase I GOT UP AT followed by the precise time he arose from bed. Assistant curator Anne Wheeler:

Anne Wheeler: In the I Got Up series, Kawara sent two postcards every day to friends, family, collectors, colleagues. The postcards that Kawara chose were always horizontal in format, and always of the touristic variety. He played games with the cards, sometimes sending a single recipient multiple of the same image, or taking recipients on tours around the cities.

Narrator: Curator Jeffrey Weiss:

Jeffrey Weiss: He’s taking advantage of mediums that already exist in the world. What he’s doing is supposed to reflect the parameters of daily life that are decidedly nonaesthetic. Kawara’s work seems to be the residue, in a way, of a practice of these activities. It takes the form of the repetition of modular elements, or units, that are roughly but not quite the same from one to the next.” [credit]

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“Considered the most personal and intimate of his works, I GOT UP is part of a continuous piece produced by On Kawara between 1968 and 1979 in which each day the artist sent two different friends or colleagues a picture postcard, each stamped with the exact time he arose that day and the addresses of both sender and recipient. The length of each correspondence ranged from a single card to hundreds sent consecutively over a period of months; the gesture’s repetitive nature is counterbalanced by the artist’s peripatetic global wanderings and exceedingly irregular hours (in 1973 alone he sent postcards from twenty-eight cities). Moreover, Kawara’s postcards do not record his waking up but his “getting up,” with its ambiguous conflation of carnal and existential (as opposed to not getting up) implications.

Contrasted with the random temporal shifts conveyed in the text messages are the diverse images of Manhattan featured on the postcard fronts, which accumulate over the piece’s forty-seven day duration into an unexpectedly quasi-cinematic aerial tour of the city-circling around the United Nations (and inside the General Assembly), down the East River along the waterfront to New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, and finally roaming around Federal Plaza at street level before coming to rest at City Hall. Like the newspaper pages that line the special cases housing each date painting, these found images juxtapose the infinite variety and quotidian reality of the public world with the elliptical, self-reflexive messages on the back. The sequence also extracts a drifting urban poetry from the mass-produced and anonymous, layering it conceptually over the banal, functional postal route of the objects themselves, as well as reintroducing a formal design to a work that is at first glance anticompositional.

With tremendous economy of means and a surprising visual elegance, Kawara creates a complex meditation on time, existence, and the relationship between art and life.” [credit]

MJ Hunter Brueggemann, Vanessa Thomas, Ding Wang, Lickable Cities (2014-2017)

“Lickable Cities is a research project that responds to the recent and overwhelming abundance of non-calls for gustatory exploration of urban spaces. In this paper, we share experiences from nearly three years of nonrepresentational, absurdist, and impractical research. During that time, we licked hundreds of surfaces, infrastructures, and interfaces in cities around the world. We encountered many challenges from thinking with, designing for, and interfacing through taste, including: how can and should we grapple with contamination?, and how might lickable interfaces influence more-than-humans? We discuss these challenges to compassionately question the existing framework for designing with taste in [Human-Computer Interaction].” [credit]

Richard Fleischner, Chain Link Maze (1978-79)

Chain Link Maze, 1978-79 (destroyed), Galvanized chain link fencing, 8′ x 61′ x 61′, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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“Adjacent to the University of Massachusetts football stadium in Amherst stands an 8-foot-tall chain-link fence encompassing an area some 60 feet square [by Richard Fleischner (1944-)]. …

The work sits, as do most of Fleischner’s projects, delicately on its terrain—it does not so much structure the natural, open site as it asserts itself discreetly, sensitively on the slightly rolling topography as a neat, geometrically concise object. Once through the corner entryway, we are confronted with a long corridor, the beginning of a path that winds, multicursal, toward a central inner chamber. Decisions must be made, and confusion is possible as we look through the wire grid at spaces beyond our reach. Both entry and path are ample, affording no sense of claustrophobia. One is struck instead by the open, hospitable feeling of the first corridors as they trace the perimeter. Comfortable strides are possible within the labyrinth; one can even turn or stop easily. It is not long before one of several decision points is reached—several paths can be taken but no great mistake can be made. It is as if the artist wants to coax us gently through this experience. There is no threat here but instead a fuller, more rewarding task of finding one’s own way. We are separated spatially but never visually from the outdoor environment as we can almost always see shimmering details through the various layers of mesh.

As one traverses the walkway, patterns of light reflect off the metallic walls, sometimes creating moiré-like surfaces, at others seeming almost flat and mat-colored. Fleischner has given us a visual labyrinth as well as a participatory maze. In no other maze are almost all the parts visible even as we are confined to a specific track. Depending on how many layers of chain link we gaze through (and this can vary from one to almost a dozen), details of the environment and other figures in the maze fade in and out of our sight. This seems then the perfect visual accompaniment to the fugitive spatial experiences we all undergo within a labyrinth.

In Chain Link Maze, Fleischner uses intuition to achieve his means—physical, optical and psychological experiences that depend on carefully measured spaces. In a broader context, a work like this directly engages some of the notions, particularly American, of the unbounded, natural environment. Fleischner works directly in the landscape, sometimes using concepts from rarified historical traditions. He has reasserted his ability visually to grasp the given landscape in a particularly American fashion, while simultaneously structuring situations within that landscape derived from conventions of garden design, architectural history and spatial perception. —Ronald J. Onorato ” [credit]

Mindy Goose, Art, Access and Urban Walking (2017)

Mindy Goose, Art, Access and Urban Walking (2017)

“On Saturday 7th October, I led a walk as part of the Love Arts Festival 2017 programme.
The ‘Art, Access and Urban Walking’ grew out of the walk I led as part of Jane’s Walk Leeds in May. The idea was to create conversation around accessibility in urban and green spaces, and document it in a creative way through photography, writing, sketching, or spoken word. There were so many snippets of conversation I wish I had recorded, about the spaces we occupy, how we neglect visiting areas outside our neighbourhood; and once we hit the shopping park, conversation moved towards accessibility in public spaces.” [credit]

Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon, BorderXing (2002)

“BorderXing, a 2002 commission for the Tate Gallery in London, in which Mr. Bunting, 37, and Ms. Brandon, 28, documented illegal treks they made across European borders.

“I’ve always wanted to be nomadic — to beg, borrow, find things,” Mr. Bunting said. He travels light, often with no change of clothes and only a few basics: a penknife, a diary, a passport.

The BorderXing Web site, available for individual use by request (at irational.org/cgi-bin/border/clients/ deny.pl) offers pictures, suggested routes and tips for evading the authorities. A vacation slide show of the couple’s journey is on view at the New Museum, as well as online, without registration, at duo.irational.org/borderxing–slide–show.

Despite the political provocation involved, the project retains the aura of a pilgrimage — to be close to the land, to throw off the weight of nationality and statehood, simply to put one foot in front of the other and go.

… BorderXing is concerned with the physical, visceral aspects of travel…” [credit] [full article as PDF]