Graduate School Application Post 11.08.10

I am planning my trek Westward in May of 2011. I am packing my car with a few things and driving cross country to California. I've decided that California is where I want to be, therefore, I am looking at SFAI and CalArts.

SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE (SFAI)
Nestled within the streets of Russian Hill, SFAI's campus overlooks the Bay area and is really quite breathtaking. I visited San Francisco this past May and had the opportunity to meet with Admissions Counselor, Jana Rumberger. SFAI encourages its students, both undergraduate and graduate, to explore many different avenues and allows individual development within an interdisciplinary context. In addition to its lovely location, SFAI boasts working one-on-one with their accomplished professors, an impressive list of visiting artists lectures at their graduate lectures symposia, and allows direct exposure with professional artists.

*This Institute was also founded by Ansel Adams in 1945, the Photography Department was the first program of its kind dedicated to exploring photography as a fine art medium.

*Also SFAI is ranked 7th for Graduate Photography Programs as stated in US News & World Report.

*Annie Leibovitz earned her BFA at SFAI in 1971.

Photographs from my trip:

PROFESSOR HENRY WESSEL

BIOGRAPHY:

Henry Wessel was born in 1942 in Teaneck, New Jersey. He is an American photographer noted for his descriptive, yet poetic photographs of the human environment.

Wessel earned a B.A. degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1966 and an M.F.A. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972. Before graduating with his M.F.A., in 1971, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Wessel a fellowship and, one year later, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his photographs. In short order, Wessel's work was included in exhibits at the International Museum of Photography and collected by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Visiting California in 1970, Wessel was taken by the West Coast light and moved to San Francisco. Today, Wessel is on faculty in the photography department of San Francisco Art Institute. Much of Wessel's work is still produced in California. To date, Wessel has produced five books of photography. In 2007, Henry Wessel will be exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

QUOTES:

"Wessel's remarkable work, witty, evocative and inventive, is distinctive and at the same time a component part of the great development of photography which flourished in the 1970s. The pictures continue to grow and evolve and the work is now regarded as an individual and important contribution to twentieth-century American photography." - Sandra Phillips, Introduction at the SFMOMA, 2007

"Chances are, if you believe the light, you are going to believe that the things photographed physically existed in the world. It's this belief that gives the still photograph its power." ( from an Interview with Henry Wessel by Stephan Janáček published by Min Gallery, Tokyo, Japan 1986)

Wikipedia, Initials. (2010 , September 17). Henry wessel. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wessel,_Jr.

WORK:

Fascinated by his mother’s real-estate photos as a teenager in New Jersey, Wessel shot this series of bungalows in Southern California from the armrest of his truck more than thirty years later. Playfully candy-colored, these houses suggest a human presence only in details, such as a modest cooler left curbside or a garden hose coiled against the side of a house. Although different in color, the structural similarities of the bungalows, as well as the similar compositions of the photographs themselves, imply both the futility of originality and the manufactured quality of the American dream of home ownership.

Museum of Contemporary Photography, Initials. (Photographer). (2010). House pictures, 1990. [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/wessel_jr_henry.php

GRADUATE STUDENT CARLING MCMANUS

WORK:

When I visited in May I had the opportunity to visit the Diego Rivera Gallery with a collection of graduate student work. McManus constructed light boxes for each of her seven "One Minute Studies" of 8mm film cut and arranged onto plexiglass. Unfortunately, I cannot find any other information on her, but here are a few more close up images of that I took of her work as seen in the gallery:



http://www.carlingmcmanus.com/

California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
* CalArts is ranked 6th for Graduate Photography Programs as stated in US News & World Report.

I am interested in CalArts for a number of reasons. There students are called "Calartians!" How cool is that? It is located in Valencia, CA and also boasts one-on-one mentoring by its faculty and encourages interdisciplinary experimentation. As an MFA seeking student I will have my own SPACIOUS studio. CalArts has extensive Artmaking facilities for photography as well as a "Super Shop" that is used for processes such as woodworking, metalworking, machining, moldmaking, spraying and sandblasting. I also have a great interest in metals and jewelry. With their facilities and "Super Shop," it will allow me to experiment with both photography and metalworking. Oh, did I mention they have an outdoor pool??


PROFESSOR JO ANN CALLIS BIOGRAPHY:

Since she emerged in the late 1970s as one of the first important practitioners of the "fabricated photographs" movement, Jo Ann Callis (American, born 1940) has made adventurous contributions in the areas of color photography, sculpture, painting, and digital imagery. For her, photography is another studio tool to be used, along with the sets she creates and the models she directs, to render the sensual tones and textures of fabric and food, or to animate clay figures of her own making. The persistent inventiveness of Callis's work has made her a force in Southern California art and in recent photographic practice.

Callis began her art studies in Ohio in the 1950s. After marriage and child rearing, she returned to photography in the 1970s to finish her undergraduate degree, and continued on to a graduate degree in the arts at UCLA. Her avant-garde style of fabricating photographs was soon publicly recognized, and her work was exhibited and published internationally. At the same time, she developed her own role as teacher at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

Throughout her career, Callis has created complex sets for her photographs. She often makes her own props, hires and directs models, and designs the lighting.

"Jo Ann Callis: Woman Twirling at the Getty Center." Getty (2009): n. pag. Web. 5 Nov 2010. .

WORK:

From "Early Black and White"


From "Early Color"




http://joanncallis.com/index.php

ALUMNUS JAMES CASEBERE

BIOGRAPHY:

JAMES CASEBERE was born in 1953, in Lansing, Michigan. He grew up outside Detroit, attended Michigan State University, and graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with a BFA in 1976 where he studied with the sculptor Siah Armajani. In the fall of 1977, he attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, and then moved to Los Angeles where he studied with John Baldessari and Doug Huebler. He was John Baldessari’s teaching assistant. Classmates included Mike Kelly, and Tony Oursler. He received an M.F.A from Cal Arts in 1979.

Casebere's pioneering work has established him at the forefront of artists working with constructed photography. His first exhibitions in New York were at Artists Space, Franklin Furnace and then Sonnebend Gallery. His work was associated with the “Pictures Generation” of “post-modern” artists who emerged in the 1980’s, which included Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, Matt Mullican, James Welling, Barbara Kruger, and others. For the last thirty years Casebere has consistently devised increasingly complex models and photographed them in his studio. Based solidly on an understanding of architecture as well as art historical and cinematic sources, Casebere's abandoned spaces are hauntingly evocative. His table-sized constructions are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms. Starting with Sonsbeek ’86, in Arnhem, Holland and ending around 1991 Casebere also made large scale sculpture installations.

Early bodies of work focused on images of the suburban home. He followed this with both photographs and sculptural installations dealing with the myth of the American West. In the early 1990s, Casebere turned his attention to the development of different cultural institutions during the enlightenment, and their representation as architectural types. With his photographs of prisons in particular, he critically addressed contemporary attitudes and approaches to incarceration, as well as metaphorically pointing to relationships of social control, and social structure in the broader society.

Since the late 1990’s he has made images whose sources span the globe starting with the bunker under the Reichstag (Flooded Hallway), and the sewers in Berlin (Two Tunnels). He created an expansive and beautiful body of work referencing the Atlantic slave trade. This includes a slave factory in West Africa, (Four Flooded Arches), plantations in the West Indies (Nevision Underground), Thomas Jefferson’s plantation home in Virginia (Monticello), and other 18th Century American colonial architecture.

The modern architects Victor Horta (Spiral Staircase, and Turning Hallway) and Richard Neutra (Garage, and Dorm Room) inspired him to create another small, austere group of works that seem to cast a critical eye on the homogenizing effects of globalization.

After 9/11 Casebere turned his attention toward Spain and the Eastern Mediterranean. Several works examine 10th century Andalusia and the flowering of culture and co-operation between Islamic, Jewish and Christian cultures before the Inquisition. (La Alberca, Abadia, Spanish Bath, Mahgreb.) Other images depict Tripoli, Lebanon, Nineveh and Samara in Iraq, and Luxor, Egypt. Several photographs of elaborate soaring models of mosques were inspired by the 16th century Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan.

Casebere was included in the 1985 Whitney Bienniel. In 2002-3 Casebere had a solo exhibition at SECCA Gallery in Winston Salem, NC which traveled to the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, OH., the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, Quebec and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis. In 2000 –2001 he was in an exhibition called The Architectural Unconscious: James Casebere and Glen Seator, initiated by the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover Mass. which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in Philadelphia, PA. In 1999 Asylum, another solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, traveled to Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, in Norwich, England. In 1996 he was in Campo, at the Venice Bienale, Italy, curated by Francesco Bonami, which travelled to the Sangretto Foundation in Torino, Italy and the Konstmuseum, in Malmö, Sweden.

Casebere is the recipient of numerous fellowships including three from the National Endowment for the Arts, three from the New York Foundation for the Arts and one from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His work has been collected by museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among many others.

Since the late 1990’s Casebere has lived in Fort Greene Brooklyn, with his wife Lorna Simpson and their daughter Zora.

James casebere biography. (2009). Retrieved from http://jamescasebere.net/bio.html

WORK:

From Landscape with Houses, (Dutchess County, NY) #2, 2009, digital chromogenic print, size variable

From Landscape with Houses, (Dutchess County, NY) #1, 2009, digital chromogenic print, size variable

Zoe Beloff Questions Due 10.31.10

Questions for Zoe Beloff:

• Just curious about your fascination with mental illness (mythomania, hallucination, scientific case studies of psychoses, etc.) as seen in your work in The Somnambulists. What drew you to this subject matter?
  
• At first glance your subject matter seems silly as you see footage of case studies where people are seen in various stages of hysterics, then you come to realize that the subject matter is much darker. Do you feel your work is exploitative?
• What inspired your decision to create 3D wooden theaters? Do you think the use of miniatures makes the work seem more objective?
  

Idea Post: Loneliness 11.04.10

THE LONELY AMERICAN: CHOOSING TO RECONNECT IN THE 21st CENTURY

My new series is all about going back to sites that were once significant in my life. These sites are now new sites of loss, loneliness, and emptiness of what once was but will never be again.

Loneliness is a feeling in which people experience a strong sense of emptiness and solitude. Loneliness is often compared to feeling empty, unwanted, and unimportant. Someone who is lonely may find it hard to form strong interpersonal relationships.

Common symptoms

Loneliness can evoke feelings of social inadequacy. A lonely person may become convinced there is something wrong with him/herself, and that no one understands their situation. Such a person will lose confidence and will become reluctant to attempt to change or too scared to try new things for fear of further social rejection. In extreme cases, a person may feel a sense of emptiness, which may become a state of clinical depression.

In modern society

Loneliness frequently occurs in heavily populated cities; in these cities many people feel utterly alone and cut off, even when surrounded by millions of other people. They experience a loss of identifiable community in an anonymous crowd. It is unclear whether loneliness is a condition aggravated by high population density itself, or simply part of the human condition brought on by this social setting. Certainly, loneliness occurs even in societies with much smaller populations, but the sheer number of people that one comes into contact with daily in a city, even if only briefly, may raise barriers to actually interacting more deeply with them and increase the feeling of being cut off and alone. Quantity of contact does not translate into quality of contact.^[4]

Loneliness appears to have become particularly prevalent in modern times. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century families were typically larger and more stable, divorce was rarer, and relatively few people lived alone. In the United States, only 5% of households were single-person households in 1900; by 1995, 24 million Americans lived alone; and by 2010, it is estimated that number will have increased to around 31 million.^[5]

A 2006 study in the American Sociological Review found that Americans on average had only two close friends to confide in, down from an average of three in 1985. The percentage of people who noted having no such confidant rose from 10% to almost 25%; and an additional 19% said they had only a single confidant (often their spouse), raising the risk of serious loneliness if the relationship ended.^[6]

Loneliness has also shown a strong connection to internet usage,^[7] and many people suffering from loneliness tend to flock to internet sites in attempt to find help or mend their pain, as seen in phenomena such as the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread.

"Loneliness." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 14 October 2010. Web. 24 Oct 2010. .

QUOTES:

"Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, cars, sidewalks, stores. Everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man."
-Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver

"Life is very long when you're lonely."
-Morrissey, in "The Queen Is Dead", from the album of the same name by The Smiths (1986)

"We suffer a lot in our society from loneliness. So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: 'Let's talk to each other; let's do things together so we won't be lonely.' And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that's about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we're very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much."
-American Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho: The Way it is

"Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty."
-Mother Teresa

Epistemic loneliness is the fundamental and unsolvable paradox between the desire of mans consciousness to have meaning met with the universe seen as existing without God Mans consciousness can be thought of as a hole in Being, or nothingness. Just as nature abhors a vacuum consciousness abhors its own vacuous vortex and is constrained to seek in futility the plenitude of being in order to fill up the lack, or non-being, that it is. One attempts to unite the emptiness and nothing that comprise his consciousness (Being-for-itself) with the fullness of Being, as objectively instantiated by the non-conscious Being-in-itself. However, according to some philosophers, this unity is impossible, and thus humans are nothing but a futile frustration to be something they cannot.lt;/ref>

Loneliness as a universal principle

Epistemic loneliness is seen as innate. In the view of Ben Mijuskovic all acts of consciousness and conduct are inevitably motivated by the wish to escape or evade loneliness.lt;/ref> However, to do so is impossible because consciousness is so constituted that loneliness serves as its sovereign a priori In other words, loneliness is an absolutely universal and necessary principle. Because of this, loneliness is the prism through which man views reality, without being aware that it is a prism. Mijuskovic believes that there can exist no theory through which one can rescue himself or others from this loneliness, as any action he takes is simply a result of the "master motivator;" loneliness itself.

Sartre's view: man as an isolated entity

Jean-Paul Sartre saw the essential struggle of epistemic loneliness - to unite the emptiness of nothingness with the fullness of Being - as only unifiable in the concept of God Indeed, mankinds frustrated attempt to create this harmony within itself is yearning for divine-like repletion. Thus, Sartre viewed God as the projection of human epistemic loneliness, while man himself is nothing else but loneliness forever frustrated by its fruitless endeavors at self-completion.lt;/ref> Sartre believed that love is mankinds most radical attempt of consciousness to transcend its own loneliness. Through love, he argued, man endeavors to annihilate its contingency and satisfy its esurience for the abundance of being. Sartre believes that lovers are attempting to preserve their "internal negation" (freedom) while eliminating their "external negation" (epistemic loneliness). However, since these two freedoms cannot be reconciled into perpetual unity, love is doomed. Any apparent unity between the two is self-deception; an "illusion of fusion" which will serve to propel the lovers into more devastating epistemic loneliness than had they not tried to escape it.

"Epistemic Loneliness." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 14 October 2010. Web. 24 Oct 2010. .

Photograph
Martin Usborne
MUTE: The Silence of Dogs in Cars
2010

Artist Entry: Martin Usborn 11.01.10

MARTIN USBORNE

Martin Usborne's newest series "MUTE: The Silence of Dogs in Cars" explores themes of loneliness, sadness, isolation, and the fear of being left alone.

Martin Usborne is a London-based photographer who specialises in portrait photography. He does work for private commissions, magazines, events and fashion, including children’s fashion. Martin’s work has also been exhibited and sold in a number of photography exhibitions.

Martin Usborne @ VideoJug

MARTIN lives in central London where he has his photographic studio.

He started his photographic career after a number of years working as a creative director in children's TV (which included dressing up as a furry white alien). Before that he studied psychology at Edinburgh University and then animation at Glasgow School of Art.

Martin thinks there is something magical about looking through the lens and capturing a bit of the world. 'You see an interesting array of shapes - people passing in front of a strangely coloured wall and -click- its yours forever. Its so easy it shouldn't be allowed'.

When Martin isn't photographing he is either rockclimbing (he is too heavy to pull himself up), meditating (he can't do the full lotus because he has bad knees) or he is writing his novel (he is stuck on chapter 3 - not having finished Ch.s 1 or 2).

"ABOUT Martin Usborne." Martin Usborne. Martin Usborne Photography, n.d. Web. 24 Oct 2010. .

QUOTES:

"I was once left in a car at a young age.

I don't know when or where or for how long, possibly at the age of four, perhaps outside Tesco's, probably for fifteen minutes only. The details don't matter. The point is that I wondered if anyone would come back. It seems trivial now but in a child's mind it is possible to be alone forever." ABOUT THESE IMAGES (MUTE: The Silence of Dogs in Cars)

Around the same age I began to feel a deep affinity with animals – in particular their plight at the hands of humans. I remember watching TV and seeing footage of a dog being put in a plastic bag and being kicked. What appalled me most was that the dog could not speak back. Its muteness terrified me.

"The images in this series explore this fear of being alone and unheard, both in relation to myself and to animals in general.

When I started this project I knew the photos would be dark. What I didn't expect was to see so many subtle reactions by the dogs: some sad, some expectant, some angry, some dejected. It was as if upon opening up a box of coloured pencils I was surprised to see so many shades of grey inside." - Martin Usborne

"Mute Faces: Photo Stories." Foto8. Foto8, 221 October 2010. Web. 24 Oct 2010. .

Award-winning photographer Martin Usborne will present a new solo exhibition, MUTE, at East London gallery theprintspace on Thursday October 21, 2010. The exhibition consists of photographic prints of dogs looking silently out of car windows in the dead of night. While you might think that this is a statement on leaving dogs in hot cars — it’s not. Rather, Martin is exploring the sense of loneliness and isolation that many humans (and animals) experience in modern times. These images are poignant and haunting.

The prints are for sale and 10% of proceeds are donated to the Dogs Trust to help its work rescuing and re-homing stray and abandoned dogs. Martin also has a book on dog photography that will be published next year. He is the owner of Moose, a Miniature Schnauzer.

"MUTE Exhibition by Martin Usborne." Dog Milk. Dog Milk, 09 September 2010. Web. 24 Oct 2010. .

The following are images from MUTE: The Silence of Dogs in Cars














'MUTE' An exhibition of unusual dog portraits by Martin Usborne

Martin Usborne

Martin Usborne @ Conscientious

Artist Entry: Lydia Anne McCarthy 10.25.10

Lydia Anna McCarthy is one of this year's Conscientious Blog Portfolio Competition Winners. Two of her three bodies of work really inspire my current work. Like myself, she has chosen to focus on using imagery from the neighborhood she grew up in to create a visual separation and barrier by layering photographs of screen. In "Merged: Experiments in Space-Time," McCarthy photographs her middle-class suburban neighborhood and combined it with overlays of images she has shot of screens:


QUOTES:

"My work is concerned with the concept of multiple dimensions in space and alternate realities that exist simultaneously in our everyday lives. I am interested in the potential for these realities to be glimpsed through our interactions with and experiences within our environment."

"I am always struck by the imposing, almost suffocating presence of Southern magnolias. The one you see here had its branches hung perfectly in a “v” form, creating two openings into a sunlit grassy field. With this photograph, the screen image fit well into the composition of the landscape and allowed me to fracture the space even more."

"Lydia Anne McCarthy." Eye Buy Art. Eye Buy Art, n.d. Web. 23 Oct 2010. .








In her other series "The Light" her use of light, color and subject matter of light filtering in through leaves and branches has a similar aesthetic to my own.






My Work:


Lydia Anne McCarthy

CPC 2010 Winner Lydia Anne McCarthy

The 50 States Project

Conscientious Conversation with Lydia Anne McCarthy