[A Thousand Shades Of Grey] – http://greenneonlight.tumblr.com

About

With photography being frequently used as a tool to capture a specific moment in time or something worth while, the objective of this project aims to use the medium of photography to capture those ‘mundane’ places which generally resist photographic documentation. Based on my proximity to the subject matter the photos I take have no site specificity or uniqueness, they have no personal or historic reference. They allow for this kind of second viewing to take place; the objects that we would normally pass by are re-emphasised establishing the idea of examining ones surroundings with a renewed interest. They do not lie in the realm of personal momento or art practice, they lay claim to the becoming of an activated participant amongst an everyday setting.

For now here are some photos I took one evening off the coast of Wicklow.

Thomas Demand, born in 1964, will present an extensive solo show at the Neue Nationalgalerie from September 2009. While he has had major exhibitions dedicated to his work in such cities as London, New York and Zurich, the show in Berlin will be his largest presentation in Germany to date. Entitled Nationalgalerie (National Gallery), the exhibition is not, however, a general retrospective of his work up to now, rather it is purposefully dedicated to one theme in particular – perhaps the most important in all of Demand’s richly diverse body of work: Germany. Correspondingly, the exhibition coincides with the anniversaries of two pivotal historical events in German history: the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany 60 years ago and the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

The approximately 35 works on display, which include new, previously unshown pieces, deal with social and historical events since 1945 and their immediate background. However, Demand’s pictures do not merely bear reference to exceptional moments in history. Alongside momentous political and societal events and instantly recognizable scenes, the exhibition includes works which depict the private and incidental, but which represent equally a kaleidoscopic part of a particular time and society.

Thomas Demand is not a photographer in the classical sense, but rather someone who documents our various media worlds and is both a reproducer and an illusionist. Photography is the medium in which his works are preserved and exhibited. The artist often finds his subjects in the mass media using them as the starting point to recreate a particular spatial situation as paper sculptures, which are then made into a two-dimensional image with the use of a large format camera and meticulous attention to detail. In a conceptual sense, Thomas Demand is a sculptor as much as he is a photographer. Specific traces of the reproduced incident are systematically erased from the three-dimensional, life-size reconstructions; and so too are the people present in the original photographs. What remains are phantom images of ‘crime scenes’ of missing events which often appear just as familiar to us as they are impalpable.

In this way, Thomas Demand’s works test our reception of visual media and explore their influence on the structures of our memory. In a truly empirical manner, Thomas Demand conducts experiments in visual culture which centre around the questions of whether and to what extent a society’s appearance is condensed and concentrated in individual key images as well as being retained in people’s minds and remembered through such key images. Demand’s reconstructive handling of images that carry significance or appear to carry significance, focuses on the conscious or unconscious self-portrayal of a society and its changes. There could hardly be a more fitting place for an exhibition which offers us a panorama of a nation’s history than the great glass hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie of Mies van der Rohe. The building is not only an incunabulum of post-war architecture, but also equally historically significant as a symbol of the way the Federal Republic of Germany viewed itself at the former inner-city border. The magnificent exhibition design by the London-based architects Caruso St John, forms an ideal connection between Demand’s works and the light hall of Mies van der Rohe.
Source

Each of Thomas Demand’s photographs is one or more steps removed from reality, creating tension between the fabricated and the real. He begins with a pre-existing photograph of an actual location culled from the mass media. While his large-scale photographs resemble these mass-media images, they actually show three-dimensional, life-sized models made from cardboard and paper that Demand builds in his studio solely for the purpose of being photographed. Demand knowingly uses the traditional role of photography as a faithful transcriber of the world to throw his subject’s artificiality into doubt. This confounding of references is such that the very idea of an original recedes completely.
Source

Thomas Demand began as a sculptor and took up photography to record his ephemeral paper constructions. In 1993 he began making constructions for the sole purpose of photographing them. Demand begins with a preexisting image culled from the media, usually of a political event, which he translates into a life-size model made of colored paper and cardboard.

His handcrafted facsimiles of architectural spaces and natural environments are built in the image of other images. Once they have been photographed, the models are destroyed.

At first sight, the subjects represented in Demand’s photographs seem commonplace and familiar, but often they relate to scenes of cultural or political relevance, which have come to our attention through the mass media. They range from the archives of German filmmaker and National Socialist propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, Saddam Hussein’s attempt to purchase a concentrated form of uranium called ‘yellowcake’ from Africa and the kitchen in Saddam Hussein’s hideaway in Tikrit, Iraq.

Art curators and critics interpret Demand’s work as reconsidering the traditional notion of photography as a faithful record of reality, highlighting the evasiveness of the medium in a world that is saturated with manipulated or mediated images.
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For German artist Thomas Demand, this manifold popular impression of a singularly famous site—grounded at times in fact, but also, increasingly, in fiction—epitomizes the paradox of mediated truth and constructed cultural memory. At least that’s the sense you get from a suite of five new large-scale photo works by Demand, currently on view at Sprüth Magers in London, depicting various views of the Oval Office. It’s familiar conceptual territory for Demand, whose critically acclaimed work has carefully focused on the arbitrary nature of mass media imagery and what he calls “the spectator’s perception of reality.”
Source

A short Bio taken from this website.

The work of Lawrence Malstaf can be situated on the borderline between the visual and the theatrical. After having studied industrial design, Lawrence Malstaf starts of in theatre. He designs scenographies for choreographers and directors as Benoît Lachambre, Meg Stuart and Kirsten Delholm. Soon he develops more into installation and performance-art with a strong focus on movement, coincidence, order and chaos. In 2000 he makes a series of sensorial rooms for individual visitors (Nemo Observatorium, Mirror, Pericope/Horizon Machine). Later he creates larger mobile environments dealing with space and orientation often using the visitor as a co-actor (Orbit, Nevel, Compass, Boreas, Transporter). His projects often involve advanced technology as a point of departure or inspiration but also to activate the installations. Lawrence Malstaf is exhibiting internationally and in 2008 he wins the Witteveen + Bos – prize for Art + Technology (NL), in 2009 he receives the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica (A) an in 2010 he is the winner of the Excellence Prize at The 13th Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo (JP).

Nemo Observatorium 2002

Styrofoam beads are blown around in a big transparent PVC cylinder by five strong fans. Visitors can take place on the armchair in the middle of the whirlpool or observe from the outside one at a time. On the chair, in the eye of the storm it is calm and safe. Spectacular at first sight, this installation turns out to mesmerise like a kind of meditation machine. One can follow the seemingly cyclic patterns, focus on the different layers of 3D pixels or listen to its waterfall sound. One could call it a training device, challenging the visitor to stay centred and find peace in a fast changing environment. After a while the space seems to expand and one’s sense of time deludes.

Nevel 2004

A matrix of nine pivoting walls forms a labyrinth whose architecture continuously changes. A sequence of different compositions creates choreography of spaces flowing into one another. It is an auto choreographic space to wander and get lost in, like in a mutating city, to linger and surrender to the disorientation. Occasionally a video artist, musician, or even a mathematician is invited for a live intervention (Christophe de Boeck, Luis Recoder, Yukiko Shinosaki, Isar Stubbe, Chris Kondek)

Boreas 2007

A matrix of sixty-four tubes is spread out equally over the room. These tubes bend over extremely slowly as if a slow motion wind were touching them. Leaning into one another they reach out to the visitors like the tentacles of a giant snail. The room continuously transforms from a geometric grid to an unpredictable organic structure and back. Order to chaos to order in a never-ending cycle. We are both welcome and dispensable in this alien forest. Nature accepts us but does not really need us, reorganising itself patiently.

Transporter 2008

2 conveyor belts of about 13m long are set up next to each other and running in opposite directions. People can lay down on them to be transported very slowly. Hidden under the surface an invisible mechanism produces a subtle yet intense tactile experience for the spine. Halfway the trajectory the visitors are confronted with 2 horizontal mirrors moving up and down above them.

A short bio taken from: source

John Gerrard’s (Irish, b. Dublin, 1973) works hover between fact and fiction. They present actual scenes from desolate corners of the American landscape and unfold in real time so that patient viewers can experience the progression of the day from morning to night in each setting; however, what looks like a live shot is, in fact, a manipulated, fabricated image. Gerrard photographed every site from 360 degrees and then animated the stills into seamless cinematic panning shots. Instead of the overt conflicts so prominent in video games that use this same technology, the artist relates realistic elements—a pumping oil derrick, a pig processing plant, and a vintage storm photo superimposed on a real farmscape—with elegant subtlety. Yet while these works recall the stark illumination and precision of twentieth-century realist paintings by Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, and Edward Hopper, their heightened effects also underscore the bleak ramifications of depleting natural resources. Gerrard’s mesmerizing replicas re-imagine landscape art and offer meditations on the impact of our habits of consumption.

Sentry (Kit Carson, Colorado), 2008

Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas) 2007

Sow Farm (near Libby, Oklahoma) 2009

Taken from: source

Sow Farm (near Libby, Oklahoma) depicts a particular instance of animal factory farming facilitated by a large computer-controlled complex devoid of human presence. Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado) presents an oil derrick in action.  Like related previous works such as Animated Scene, Sow Farm and Lufkin acknowledge the artificial and detrimental ways we manipulate the environment.  Effectively set in the visually bare plains of middle America, Gerrard underscores the alarming depletion of natural resources that supports our culture of consumption.

Gerrard’s technique is as compelling as his subject matter is relevant.  The artist builds upon traditions of painting, photography, cinema and sculpture while actually working with the video game technology Realtime 3D.  Like many contemporary artists working in complex new media, Gerrard develops the creative concept behind each work while relying upon specialists to help realize it.  The artist photographs each site from a complete 360 degree radius.  His production team in Vienna, led by long time collaborator and producer Werner Poetzelberger, then completes the work – turning the artist’s photographic stills into continuous, animated cinematic panning shots.  Complex details are accurately replicated at each site by 3D modeling, which is guided by topographical and satellite data.  It typically takes a few years to replicate each site over a particular period of actual time – showing changes in light, weather and season.

The end result – a subdued hyperrealism – hardly points to the immense efforts of its creation. Sow Farm (near Libby, Oklahoma) and Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado) are shown throughout an entire 365 day year.  The work’s projection on a large-scale screen engulfs the viewer in a calm and contemplative viewing experience well suited to serious subject matter.

For more information check out:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2009/11/john-gerrards-virtual-dust-bowl/

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2437

http://www.johngerrard.net/index.php?sub1=4&wTextId=1

About: (taken from-IMMA Website)

Between Metaphor and Object features a range of works from the IMMA Collection, primarily sculptures and installation works from the 1990s. It provides perspectives on the diversity of practice that is represented in the IMMA Collection from this period, explores its particularities, and considers them in the context of international trends of the decade. The title of the exhibition references perceived polarities in art since the 1960s and also proposes the idea of the continuous flux visited upon artworks in the mind of the viewer between symbolism and objecthood. Notably the exhibition incorporates a number of pieces from the Weltkunst Collection, which is on loan to IMMA since 1994.

Artist’s participating include: Barry Flanagan, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Alison Wilding, Avis Newman, Lucis Nogueira, Julian Opie, Jacqueline Poncelet, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Wentworth, Elis O’Connell, Siobhan Hapaska, Kiki Smith, Ann Hamilton, Maud Cotter, Illya and Emilia Kabakov and Micheal Warren.

There were two pieces which were my favourites, the first was Ann Hamilton’s Filament 11 (1996). This piece consisted of a high curtained  structure which circulated the material around in one space. It stopped every 15 seconds or so, enough time for one or two people to enter into the spinning vortex of linen material. Whilst standing inside the whirlwind of fabric I felt as though I myself were almost flying or being transported to another dimension or something (ok, this description might be slightly exaggerated, but I have quite an ambitious imagination!) Either way, I fully enjoyed the experience of the piece immensely.

The second piece I was fond of was the installation The Mysterious Exhibition (1998) by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Kabakov is known well for his writings ‘On the Total Installation’, which I am currently reading at the moment. He explores in detail what an installation is and all wide ranging aspects of it, from being in an exhibition space, to the symbolic gestures of the walls, the ceiling, the floors…. (I will hopefully be giving a more detailed account of this on the blog when I am done researching it myself). For this exhibition at IMMA, The Mysterious Exhibition consisted of a couple of rooms of a hospital ward, with a hospital bed, chairs, bedside locker and miniature theatre beside the bed. Kabakov is interested in this idea of story telling in his unique and provocative style. One does not simply look at a picture or listen to a story, the visitor is immersed in the atmosphere, in the place where the story is taking place itself. In this case one is in a children’s hospital, sitting at an empty bed, watching a small theatre show take place. The text outside this exhibition piece told the audience how this small, almost puppet-like theatre was used to help sick children get better through stimulation of the imaginative workings of the mind. To me, this was a very chilling, eerie experience, but also silent and subtle at the same time.