Sheila Burnett
William Sadowski
In February 2009 I spent some time interviewing people who had recently visited the Vietnam memorial in Constitutional Gardens, Washington DC. What developed was an intriguing insight as to the reasons they needed to relate to the experience of others. The formation of traumatic collective memory and its drawing out from those that visit memorials has been the driving force of this investigation. The work can also be seen alongside excepts of text from recorded interviews with the sitters. The work has so far been presented in book form with text annotation. Example: 'I wish I was in a war, My family were in Vietnam and the Korean. i was born in 61 so could have been in the Gulf War' and: 'I don't know what the rules are for putting names on the wall, I think its only combat deaths. But he deserves to be there in one way or another.' The investigation forms part of a wider body of work looking at trauma and modes of photographic representation of experience.
Alice Rodriguez
Alice Rodriguez American Home The real world has the power to fake reality. “American Home” was a project developed and concluded with a delicate white pallet as the background and the defined color on the print; this lets the objects live in the space with romanticism and precision. The emptiness in the frame is carefully balanced, allowing basic home scenes to happen. The photos are based on American suburban home-settings recreated inside a studio to analyze family environments that are stereotyped by society as being cozy and welcoming. Each photograph has the characteristics needed to embrace the observation of photography and the principle of minimalist abstraction. “American Home” explores photography in the way the medium is used to sell an idea but not necessary to tell the truth. All the photographs are playing with the viewers’ minds and also criticizing our everyday life and the way consumerism is part of reality and us. The settings recreated maintain only a few key objects from the space and remove any emotional or personal traces from the frame.
Konstantinos Markogiannis
The “Tramp” series by Konstantinos Markogiannis The “Tramp” series was created in London during a period of two years. The photographs balance between documentary photography, portraiture and fine art. The series was shot exclusively on black and white film and printed in the darkroom, as a tribute to“old school” photographers such as Bill Brandt, Andre Kertesz and Robert Frank. The “classic” look of the pictures evokes a sense of timelessness and reacts against postmodern/ digital age photography which often looks rather clinical, artificial and soulless.
Stevie Deas
Stevie Deas Artists Statement SANDBAGS These six images are an offshoot of a fine art project exploring the media’s responses to war and terrorism. Having used sandbags in previous installation work I began to notice them scattered around the city. Sometimes these sandbags were in use, sometimes seemingly abandoned, damaged and slumped about the city. The contrast between the use of hi and low tech equipment in recent conflicts has been marked and the sandbag, being such an ancient, deceptively primitive tool obviously has many potential everyday uses, ias well as military ones. The shapes these sandbags form reminds me of photojournalistic news images of those tortured at Abu Ghraib, the inmates of Guantanamo Bay and metaphorically the experiences described by soldiers on their return from the front line. I hope that viewers of the work will bring their individual associations and reference points to their experience of the work. June 2009
Emma Leech
These images were taken as a college project in 2006. The brief was about looking at everyday objects in another way (Bauhaus). I chose Dymchurch as my location, because when we are at the coast we take benches, steps and steel railings for granted. They are objects we see but hardly notice of their presence. It is rare for us to notice the patterns and textures that have formed on these objects by the weather and sea over time. By using film to take these exposures, it has helped to emphasize those textures.
Brijesh Patel
This series is part of a long term project about the impact of the 2012 Olympic games development in East London. These roomswere the student halls of residence for University of East London which were destroyed in 2008 to make space for the Olympic Village. Once the personal possessions were removed, the halls were demolished, furniture and all.
Lynne Collins
The Trespasser series created in 2009 Lynne Collins Borrowing from the aesthetic of Seventeenth Century Dutch masters, Lynne Collins reworks the symbolism of the still life to make a modern allegory of decadence. Lynne produces a narrative that questions society's casual acceptance of wealth and abundance and its propensity to throw away things and places it no longer has any use for. For this series "The Trespasser", Lynne visits abandoned old buildings before they are either redeveloped or knocked down. She roams the corridors and empty rooms captivated by the beauty she finds in the broken windows, peeling paint and rotten floorboards. For Lynne the abandonment of once elegant and proud structures has become a visual representation of the ease in which asociety can consume and discard. Written by Bridget Coaker
Zoe Plummer
A Perception of self aged 2. Documenting the mirror stage of a child’s development. Considering the sensory explorations of sight, touch and taste. The child investigates the journey of recognising oneself.
Darcy Brown
These pieces represent a harmonic collision of purpose and situation. In each a space, where a story unfolds before the viewer for their consideration, interpretation and ultimately delectation. All have their own sounds, unique descriptors of the reality of their moments, from the intense, dry crackling of the last standing tree counterbalanced by its bitter weeping bark to the proclaimed disgrace shouted by two lonely coins echoing around and around in a cup that overflows with despair. A woman's uneven heels clatter and slip across the wet pavement she traverses, as the whiny, flicker of sodium lamps dilute the night. The beauty lies in the freedom to listen, to hear the sounds of life created and lost, to release the reigns of your imagination and write your own story...
Monica Curtin
Eric was a poet.Well he considered himself a poet.He was very funny and spirited,but he didn't have the strength to resist the temptations of the world.
Jim Stephens
Bhutan is a country very much from a bygone era. I hope these images give a flavor of what it is to be a Buddhist monk in Bhutan.
Neil Duffen
A late summer in Paris, October 2008
Neil Duffen
A thick powdery blanket covers the capital in early 2009
Jan Fyfe
My work operates at the intersection between time, memory and photographic representation. Eschewing the use of photography as a memory trigger, I have employed layering strategies to suggest a conflation of emotional responses. While my images are not merely illustrations of remembered events, the choice of location is significant. Central to this investigation has been the notion of the palimpsest, which can be used to describe the way in which people experience time as a layering of present experiences over faded pasts. My intention has always been to lead the viewer back into their own memories using my images as the mechanism through which their past can be constructed and situated within the present.
Karen Knorr
Karen Knorr, an American was born in Frankfurt am Main , Germany and was raised in San Juan Puerto Rico in the 1960s. She finished her education in Paris , Switzerland and London . Karen has taught, and lectured internationally including The University of Westminster, Goldsmiths College, Harvard and The Art Institute of Chicago. Karen Knorr studied at the Umiversity of Westminster, a contemporary of Olivier Richon , Mitra Tabrizian, and Mark Lewis whose photography addressed the critical debates concerning the "politics of representation" practices which emerged during the late 1970's and early 1980's. Karen Knorr produced Belgravia (1979- 1981) ground breaking series of black and white photographs with ironic and humorous texts that highlighted aspirations, lifestyle and the British class system under the neo liberalist Thatcher era in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Her most well known work called Gentlemen (1981-1983) was photographed in Saint James’s clubs in London and investigated contemporary conservative values. In 1986 her work Connoisseurs used colour to explore connoisseurship regarding heritage and art in England in the 1980’s. Here she introduced elements and staged events in the architectural interiors of Chiswick House, Osterley Park House, the Dulwich Picture Gallery. This is a strategy that still appears in her photography today. The use of text and captioning appeared as device to slow down consumption of the image and to comment on the received ideas of fine art in museum culture. Karen Knorr’s work has developed a critical and playful dialogue with photography using different visual and textual strategies to explore her chosen subject matter that ranges from the family and lifestyle to the animal and its representation in the museum context. Karen Knorr uses photography to explore western cultural traditions from gentlemen’s clubs to elegant Palladian country houses; that present and comment on British society. Karen has been photographing fine art academies throughout Europe since 1994. Academies reflects on the relationship beween the production of art , its transmission and consumption. Her work continues a critical dialogue with conceptual art , visual culture , feminism and animal studies. In her recent series Fables (2004- 2008) photographs mix analogue and digital photography playfully reconfiguring tales (Ovid, Aesop La Fontaine) with popular culture (Disney and Attenborough) in museums and heritage sites which include Carnavalet Museum, the Museum of Hunt and Nature in Paris, Chambord Castle and the Conde Museum in Chantilly Castle. The visuality of these photographs is rich with reference to the baroque. More recently Knorr has been exploring modernism using Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in Poissy reintroducing life into the modernist aesthetic of a building which has become a shrine to high modernism.. Karen Knorr is currently developing a new project in India considering the cultural heritage and animal world focusing on Mughal architecture and women’s quarters : “zenanas”. Karen Knorrr exhibits her work internationally and her work is in many public and private collections worldwide. Her retrospective exhibition Fables was recently shown in Brussels is currently traveling across France. Karen Knorr will be showing Gentlemen in Elles @centrepompidou , George Pompidou Museum in May 2009..
Helen Sear
Rice is one of the oldest cultivated crops in the world and in some parts a failure of the crop is a matter of life and death. It also carries with it symbolic significance relating to fertility. The earth and the sky reflected in the flooded rice fields of southern Milan are conjoined by the tiny shoots of rice as they pierce the surface of the water.
Myka B.
The submitted images are part of the ‘lunar mare’ series, which underpins an ongoing exploration of the moon. I am interested in the longstanding impact the moon has had on daily human life whilst modern urban civilisation has become oblivious to it. The work aims to portray the mysterious and transient nature of the moon that often passes us by unnoticed. The capture of the familiar in an unfamiliar form intends to inspire the viewer to reconsider and respect the beauty and fragility of our universe.
Dave Farnham
Inevitably, my work emerges from the stand point of the Western male voyeur. A cultural by-product of the MTV generation, I am at once both the artist and the viewer - anesthetised by a barrage of sanitised war imagery, fed to me intravenously via 24hour news feeds and YouTube. I do not intend for my works to glorify war; instead I hope that they serve to highlight the fact that throughout time the Western subject has become saturated by first-hand images of conflict which have only served to distance the viewer from the reality of war even further.
Jacqueline Mccullough
So Much Past As the child of a foster parent, my life has been shaped and informed by an ever-changing family unit. This experience lies at the heart of my work. This series explores various viewpoints of the care system. I felt a desire to seek out those surrounded by, involved in or working in the system to ask questions that I myself have found difficult to answer. I invited carers, social workers and young people involved with foster care to respond to a series of questions. The resulting portraits stem from the dialogue between the subject and myself. The blackboard, layered with the remnants of others experiences, acts as a metaphor for the transient nature of the care system where a past can be wiped away, yet scratches and traces still remain. Sarah When she left there was just this space. An absence. An emptiness. The last photograph taken of her is absolutely heartbreaking to look at. Something about the look in her eyes makes you feel like she knew what was coming. We are all sat on the sofa in our school uniforms and she is looking at the camera, her eyes filled with tears. She arrived at eight days old and stayed until just after her 1st birthday. Eighteen years on I still have a box of her belongings, unable to leave her behind.