ARC Magazine

ARC Magazine has just published its 5th issue. ARC is a non-profit, independent bi-annual periodical launched in January of 201 by wunderkind Holly Bynoe to offer a platform for photographers and other visual artists and writers engaged in contemporary practices occurring in the Caribbean and throughout its diaspora.

Rob Perrée’s interview with Charl Landvreugd, “Don’t Talk Black, Do Black”,  is particularly interesting look at an artist embracing a compound identity.  By combining aspects of European and Creole aesthetics, Landvreugd creates a personal style truer to his lived experience.  Landvreugd was born in Paramaribo, Suriname and moved to the Netherlands at the age of four then grew up in Rotterdam until moving to Paris at seventeen.  He has since lived in Amsterdam, Milan, Istanbul,  Cologne and Brussels.  His conversation with Perrée centers around the intricacies, multiplicities and ramifications of the Black European aesthetic.  

Issue 5 addresses also includes the work of Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, Melissa A Calderon, Lawrence Graham-Brown, Vladimir Lucien, Frank Bowling O.B.E, Kervin W. Brisseaux, Nicholaas Porter, Simone Padmore, Robert Charlotte, Malick Sibide, Charlie Phillips and Viviane Sassen under Kenneth Montague and the Wedge Curatorial Projects, Gerardo Chijona, Hew Locke, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Sandra Stephens, Oneika Russell, Deighton Abbott, Jehan Jackson, Nicholas Martin, Shediene Fletcher, Taj Francis, Toorel Asher, Marie Helene Cauvin and Maro M Morisson, who together paint a complex picture of the Caribbean and its diaspora and the evolving identities of artists working at home and abroad.

For more information visit: http://arcthemagazine.com

For more information about Charl Landvreugd: http://www.charll.com/

For more information about Rob Perrée visit: http://robperree.com/

—Liz Sales

behold, this dreamer cometh.

the script was already written.

all the punctuation perfectly placed,
all the pauses held formally, stuck in the back of our throats like
an unknown hero, like a silent ‘e.’

we tore pages from the interludes of histories, arranged and rearranged them,
authored great revelations and messages from beyond the grave.  

the corners softened to curves.  the tape yellowed in tiny measures.  
the world waited to be lived in, cradled in the wings.

we were cast against type, “c’est un miracle!”  
but everything else perfectly placed, yes, lungs full of air for the dive.

that map folded in my pocket, yes.

yes; and amen.

_______________________________________________________

Jeremy Haik & Dominica Paige { Part 1 }

Jeremy Haik is an artist and film-maker living in Brooklyn. He holds an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts. His work looks at the slippages and inconsistencies of language and history through the combination of material and digital practices.  { www.haikstudio.com }

Dominica Paige writes under various pseudonyms and isn’t sure why she’s chosen to use her real name for this piece.   { www.dominicapaige.com }

______________________________________________________________

Words with Pictures is a weekly two-part post that pairs photographers and writers. The first week, a writer is given a photograph to inspire the creation of a new piece of writing. The following week the photographer is given a piece of writing and responds with a new photographic piece. This series is curated by Conveyor Magazine Editor Dominica Paige.

Pinky Promise

Pinky Promise is a visually and emotionally complex publication by South African photographer Pierre Crocquet that explores childhood sexual abuse. The work including the stories of five victims and three abusers told through Crocquets black-and-white portraits, text and reproductions of ephemera  including images from family albums, letters, drawings and legal documents that the subjects shared with the photographer. Crocquet also included elements from his own notes and journal entries made while working on the project over a three-year period. The result is a visually and textually layered documentation of a pervasive social problem.

For more information: www.fourthwallbooks.com 

-Liz Sales

Wanderlust Presents: Chris Engman

Hello Chris Engman,

We only ever get to experience one instant of time at a time. The future doesn’t exist yet, the past no longer exists, and the present is fleeting and intangible. For the past there is only memory, and photographs provide fixed images for memory.

The Meeting, 2004 archival inkjet print

Although recently featured by the wonderful Elizabeth Bick here on the Conveyor Blog, the poignant artistic process of image maker Chris Engman, seems all more deserving of a featured spot on Wanderlust…

Time, struggle, fabrication, possibility, and disillusionment, reach a point of poetic convergence in Chris Engman’s complex constructions of sculptural documentation. Through labor-intensive gestures, and man-made alterations into the landscape, the images beckon to the never-ending passage of time.

Three Moments, 2009 archival inkjet print

Chris’s labor focuses on the human condition, considering the most fundamental of issues: the bewildering actuality of our existence, the ephemeral experience of time, and phenomenon of our own reality. His work calls attention to our skewed perceptions—the divide between what think we see and think, verses what is actually before us.

The Library, 2005 archival inkjet print

Within the inconsistency and constructed nature of memory, Chris photographic process speaks to the passage of time, and how it is truly experienced outside of our own minds.

Equivalence, 2009 archival inkjet print

In his series Equivalence, which references Alfred Stieglitz’s first abstract photographs by the same name, Chris utilized the backdrop of rural Eastern Washington as a blank canvas for intervention.

Three Moments are documented, each a month apart, and then presented as a physically recorded memoir. The resulting image disorients fact with the constructed fiction. Appearing as a window to a fleeting moment, the constant shift in cloud pattern and light, elevate the singularity of time and place - irrevocably gone already.

Abandoned Crates, 2007 archival inkjet print

Time is an inherent tool in the manufacturing of Chris’s images. In Abandoned Crates, everything was constructed first in the studio, disassembled, and rebuilt on the water. The reproduction encompasses both a documentation of sculpture and installation, as well as record of vigorous architecture both actual and cognitive. Through rigorous structure and order, Chris seeks to find stability in constantly fluctuating environment.

 The Audience, 2004 archival inkjet print

A process in constant pursuit of new challenges, the series Variations, represents a formula for 120 possibilities in the organization of five barrels, while a sixth (the red) remains stationary.

Variations, 2010 archival inkjet print

With a picture recorded every ten minutes over the course of two consecutive days, Chris’s reconnaissance for a formulaic outcome pushed his own mental and physical boundaries to establish a tangible order.

Variations, (Detail) 2010 archival inkjet print

The photographs bear witness to a methodically composed act of appreciation  for uniformity and order, yet with the possibility for intervention and change.

The Inversion: Day One, 2009  archival inkjet print

In a similar fashion, The Inversion, was born out of sanctity of both order and chaos. Hindered by the reality of a broken down truck in the rural Nevada desert, and feeling, “like I was gonna die out there and be eaten by wolves”, Chris chose the serendipitous nature of his situation to combat the dire situation. Setting up at night, by way of moon and headlights, he proceeded to arranging the pile of cinder blocks.The Inversion: Day Two, 2009  archival inkjet print

The two photographs appear at first glance to be identical, but have the slightest variations. After the first shot, Chris spent hours reorganizing the cluster of cinder-blocks, flipping each block along its vertical axis. The second image, Day Two,  was then taken at the solar “twin point” of the first, so the shadows meet and line up. The effect, upon closer observation, resonates with the positioning of a sundial, acting as an homage to the impermanence of existence and passage.

Obscuring the intersection between our own truths and those inherently in place around us, Chris’s photographs portray the uncanny possibility of illusion as a reality.

The Empty House, 2006 archival inkjet print

Created in close collaboration with the suns rotation, the contours of land, and the impermanence human condition, Chris’s surrealist photographs become acts of reverence. They reassure us of the natural order always in existence outside ourselves.

The Disappearance, 2006  archival inkjet print

Someday you and I will no longer exist, all records of our work will be lost, and it will be as if we had never existed at all. In The Disappearance a free falling man is in limbo, coming from nowhere and about to disappear into nothing. He is here for an instant and this, for him, is all there is. And it is all there is for us.

Chris received a BFA in photography from the University of Washington in 2003, and is currently working towards his MFA at the University of Southern California.  He was awarded the Artist Trust Fellowship in 2004, and has also received the GAP Award (Grants for Artists) three times. He has exhibited at Claire Gallery, Munich; Project B, Milan; Seattle Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Greg Kucera Gallery, and SOIL, all in Seattle; Texas State University, San Marcos; and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

Landscape for Benjamin (Trees), 2005  archival inkjet print

To see more of Chris Engman go here: {www.chrisengman.com}

Sarah Simons. No One May Ever Have The Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory 1915-1935. CA: Museum of Jurassic Technology, 1994.

A Letter from Mrs. Alice Williams to the Mount Wilson Observatory

Auckland

Tuesday July 7th

Dr. Edison Petit Dr. Seth B. Nicholson

Dear Gentlemen,

Some weeks ago I wrote you a letter. Not yet having heard from you I was wondering if you received my letter I wrote you from Homai. Since, I have shifted from Homai, to Auckland. So I thought I would send you my new address. I want to tell you I am not after money & I am not a fraud. I believe I have some knowledge, which you gentlemen should have. If I die my knowledge may die with me, & no one may ever have the same knowledge again. Because if people hear talking they want stick, they go & do away with their selves. I have gone through frightful things still I go through it & I am beginning to get knowledge. I would write down & tell you what I no. But I would sooner wait till I hear from you. Because you are both strangers to me & my letter may go astray. When one writes one needs peace & quietness.

I have got half a house with another woman some years older. She will not let me sit quite a moment it is terrible she keeps wanting to no the ins & outs of everything. She keeps running up & down the stairs in & out of the doors slamming them about & keeps wanting to talk & keeps wanting me to get ready to go out. It is awful I don’t no whether I am standing on my head or feet & still I am going through that treatment I told you. At times something works my mouth to talk out loud & I have got to be careful of her hearing as she thinks I am mad, & makes all sorts of fun of me to people. So in a few weeks I may have a little house of my own, & in the meantime I may hear news of you people & then I will be able to sit down & write quietly without interference. You no yourself if people interfere with you can’t do your work properly. I do want to tell you something because the entrance into the other world is worked different to what you ever thought & you will get a shock. When I tell you I don’t want no money from you. It won’t do you no harm to have my knowledge. So I will now conclude hoping you gentlemen are living & in the very best of health as I hear that people are dying in America, with the very hot weather they are having.

I Remain Yours Sincerely

Alice Williams

Mrs. Alice May Williams

No. 18 Norman Street Rocky Nook off Dominion Rd

Auckland. NZ.

P.S. Please excuse writing & mistakes as this lady is worrying me to get ready to go out. Please keep my letters secret till I tell you what I no. Then you can do what you like. A.W.

In a closet size room called The Misch/Webster Gallery in a strange and wonderful place called The Museum of Jurassic Technology there are 33 letters presented as part of an exhibition entitled “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory”.  The entire collection of letters allegedly sent to the Observatory between 1915 and 1935 are available through the Museum, compiled into a book, also titled No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again. 

This publication was the first I purchased from the Museum after I became interested in it and its curator, David Wilson.  Even after having read everything published by and on the Museum of Jurassic Technology, I am still defiantly unsure what to believe and hopeful that turn of the century astronomy enthusiasts truly wrote these letters. I return to them again and again to reexperience that sense of wonder.  They exist outside the law of diminishing returns.

For more information visit: www.mjtgiftshop.org/collections/museum-publications

Wanderlust Presents: Akihiko Miyoshi

Hello Akihiko Miyoshi,

Exploring the intersection between art and technology, Akihiko’s images reveal the conventions of perception and representation through self constructed glitches in analog photography.

22211a 2012, from the series Abstract Photography

With a background in computer engineering, Akihiko approaches image making with a unique perspective, placing emphasis on the possibilities and failures afforded by digital technology.

093011c 2012, from the series Abstract Photography

While the images are constructed using traditional photographic methods, they gesture towards the aesthetic merge from film to digital. The silhouetted frame of Akihiko positioned with his camera, signifies the presence and absence of the creator, as well as the complex methodology of authorship in the digital world.

031212i 2012, from the series Abstract Photographs

Constructed of mirrors, paper, tape, and taken with a large format camera, Akihiko dissects the structural mechanics of photographic representation with the slightness of abstraction.

112711k 2012, from the series Abstract Photography

Utilizing depth of field to blur the plane of focus, the residue of dust, scratches, and fingerprints on the surface of each image allude to the significance of Akihiko’s presence as the author.

073011a 2012, from the series Abstract Photography

The choice of red, green, and blue tape symbolize the structure of a pixel, a dichotomy of digitization verses analog. Calling attention to the aestheticization of digital image making, Akihiko highlights the digital errors we sometimes overlook in a overly saturated world of manipulated images.

110111i 2012, from the series Abstract Photography

Emphasizing the pending anonymity and elusive nature of a photographer in a constant evolving state, Akihiko’s approach reaffirms the complex nature of authorship and representation in the digital world.

032112c 2012, from the series Abstract Photography

110111e 2012, from the series Abstract Photography

Born in Japan, Akihiko received his MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology after taking a leave of absence as a PhD student in computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He has exhibited widely, most recently at the 2012 Portland Oregon Biennial, where he currently lives and teaches.

How We See Things, Inkjet, 2003

To see more of Akihiko Miyoshi go here: { people.reed.edu/~miyos }

The Situationist Times

Boo-Hooray has produced a complete facsimile of The Situationist Times, Jacqueline De Jong’s self published periodical, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its inaugural issue. The six original issues are reprinted in an edition of 900, bound individually and enclosed in a silk-screened slipcase. And the set also includes the never before released seventh issue and ephemera and interviews. 

 The Six Published Issues of The Situ­ation­ist Times

The Situationist Times ran between May 1962 and December 1964 in Hengelo, Copenhagen and Paris, in editions of about 1,000. Contributors to the heavily graphics-oriented publication included Noel Arnaud, Théo Wolvecamp, and Max Bucaille. 

Jacqueline De Jong

Dutch artist, Jacqueline De Jong, joined the Situationist movement, rooted in Marxism and  artistic avant-gardism, in 1960.  She was interested in creating “a completely free magazine, based on the most creative of the Situationist ideas,” and in 1962 she began The Situationist Times. The highly stylized nature of the publication demonstrated the theoretical divide between the 2nd Situationist International of de Jong and the Situationist International of Guy Debord.

Spread From  Issue 6 of The Situ­ation­ist Times 

The Situationist Times was initially printed offset on thick colored paper, eventually shifting to full color lithography.  There were six issues printed before the student uprisings of May ‘68, leaving a 7th issue compiled but until now, un-published.  

For more information visit: boo-hooray.com

Original printings of The Situationist Times may be viewed at NYPL: catalog.nypl.org

busy about you

but i don’t have time to paint you with letters. i am busy about you.
frantic in bathrooms i am stopping the drip. sealing leaky faucets
with the monkey wrench that is my jaw. i am stopping the drip.
you are an observation. more than fortune you are a hologram of a
hologram of the edge of one drop of water. i am close to the inside
of you. i am stopping the drip. the water i am putting to rescue will
be stored in a reservoir called your name is my body. you are my
favorite human woman. you live on the nocturnal side of the water.
your fingers walk across a multi-colored globe & i am stopping the
drip.

_________________________________________________________

Stephanie Slate is a photographer living and working in Philadelphia PA. Her B.F.A in photography was received from Pratt Institute in 2008. Slate uses alternative processes such as Platinum/Palladium printing and also Wet Plate Collodion. Her work mainly consists of images that explore the delicate boundaries between the repulsive and beautiful, while her newer work focuses on the wonders of boredom.  {www.lynslatephotography.com}

M.G. Martin is the author of One For None (Ink) & the chapbook Fall Out Of Your Skin (Pangur Ban Party). His work has appeared in Word Riot, ZYZZYVA, Explosion Proof, PANK & >kill author, among others. A Pushcart Nominee, M.G. lives & writes in Brooklyn. Find him: here & here.

—-

Words with Pictures is a weekly two-part post that pairs photographers and writers. The first week, a writer is given a photograph to inspire the creation of a new piece of writing. The following week the photographer is given a piece of writing and responds with a new photographic piece. This series is curated by Conveyor Magazine Editor Dominica Paige.

Daido Moriyama’s COLOR

Last night the International Center of Photography Bookstore was packed with folks eager to meet Daidō Moriyama and have their special edition of COLOR signed. 

COLOR was published to commemorate Moriyama’s receipt of ICP’s 2012 Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement this week. It measuring 10 x 7”, has 312 pages filled with Moriyama’s recent color images (a departure from his high contrast, grainy, black and white photographs) and has no text whatsoever.

COLOR’s cover is metallic silver with die cuts for one of twenty small c-print. Last night, the purchaser’s got to pick their print and the book’s title, COLOR, was stamped by hand on each publication before being passed to Moriyama for his signature. 

Any unsold copies are available through the ICP store.  

For more information visit: www.icp.org/store

Images by David Bivins: www.davidbivins.com

Liz Sales

Wanderlust Presents: Heidi Norton

Hello Heidi Norton,

Blending the lines of photography, installation, and sculpture, Heidi Norton’s methodology for image making is in a constant state of organic flux. Integrating live plants, wax, wood, and other objects, her process is informed by the questions and conundrums of Modernism. In particular, is Heidi’s own visual investigation into notions of idyllic beauty and how to redefine it.

Channeling (Baby Spider Plants), 2010 archival pigment print, from the series Not to see the sun

Informed by an unconventional upbringing in rural West Virginia; Heidi and her sister were the children of avant garde, bee keeper parents, who embraced an alternative style of rural homesteading. They were living off the grid before it could be culturally defined as doing so.

In memoriam to such a dinifitive history, the series New Age Still Life (2009-present), is a selection of house plants, seashells, glass jars, books, and mirror shards photographed as still lifes, or constructed as so.

Moss Hole, 2011 wax and mixed media

Each and every object is selected for its formal, as well as personal qualities. Through the application of both preservation and deconstruction of these plants and organic objects, the images are created as both 2D and 3D life forms. Eventually the plants will complete their lifespan, growing, withering, and shedding the acrylic paint or wax, to deconstruct and be reborn again.

Deconstructed (Rebirth), 2009 archival pigment print

The paint encapsulates and preserves, but it also stifles the plants, thus the organic forms oscillate somewhere between life and death. Through the science and mechanics of photography, as well as the use of color, geometry, and art history, Heidi has redefined the definition of the still life.

My Dieffenbachia Plant with Tarp (Protection), 2011 archival pigment print

Installation shot, 2011 from the series Not to see the sun

There is an inherent tension in place with each of Heidi’s images and sculptures. Evoking the delicate relationship between humans and nature, like basic biology, we must destroy something in order to rediscover its potential.

“I’m trying to embrace that idea of flux and decay. I’m also interested in how the sculpture changes—like in color, the leaves turning from bright green to yellow or pink to brown” over time.

Wax Corner, 2011 archival pigment print

Circle Template for Glass Sculpture, 2011 archival pigment print

Fossilized in time, yet precariously non archival, each image is its own ecosphere of histories.  Heidi’s primitive, imaginative, and keen process to the reappropriation of photography and its dimensionality, is visually engrossing as a both a tactile image and  disintegrating life form.  She’s a visual Bee Charmer.

Elephant Ear Prize Orchid, 2011archival pigment print

Heidi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum in Baltimore,  Los Angeles, London, Spain, and the Knitting Factory in NYC. Her first solo show, Not To See The Sun, 2011 in Chicago was wildly praised.Untitled, 2010

To see more of Heidi Norton  go here: { www.heidi-norton.com }

Leif Huron’s The Valley at Tribeca Film Festival

Leif Huron, whose work has graced the pages and walls of several Conveyor Arts productions, is screening his short film The Valley in the Journeys Across Cultural Landscapes program of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Huron’s 10-minute gem examines an instability between wild and domestic space. It plays on the tension between search and enclosure, territory and flight, the desire to aspire, and a need to find home.

The Journeys Across Cultural Landscapes program will be shown on April 19 and 27 at 7pm (Clearview Cinemas Chelsea 5), April 28 at 11:30pm (Clearview Cinemas Chelsea 7), and April 29 (Tribeca Cinemas Theater 1). Q&A with Huron and the other filmmakers in the series will follow.

Clearview Cinemas Chelsea
260 West 23rd Street between 7th & 8th Avenues

Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick Street at Laight Street

California über Alles / October Surprise

The 80*81 Book Collection is an 11-volume guide to the period between 1980-1981 told through a barrage of interviews, documents and photos. The second volume, California über Alles / October Surprise, by Christopher Roth and Georg Diez, is made up of two companion books bound together, like John Gossage’s The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler / Map of Babylon, so that neither book clearly comes first and there is no hierarchy.

California über Alles, named for the Dead Kennedys’ single, surveys the power and influence of Hollywood through a mislay of ephemera, such as snippets of articles, interviews with Giorgio Moroder and Paul Schrader, film stills from movies such as American Gigolo, Little Darlings and The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man and images of a mismatch of icons including Farrah Fawcett, Tatum O’Neal, Blondie, Matt Dillion and of course, Ronald Reagan: the man that brings California über Alles / October Surprise together.

California über Alles becomes October Surprise, or vice versa, midway through book block, wherein the orientation of the publication reverses top to bottom.  October Surprise surveys the crisis surrounding American hostages in Iran and the election of Ronald Reagan through a disarrangement of clippings from Gary Sick’s October Surprise, interviews with Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr and images of Farah Diba and the Shah waterskiing, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad waving to supports, the 1980 Presidential Debates and Ronald Reagan riding a horse.

“If all the world follows Hollywood, Hollywood might as well rule the world.”

Diez, Georg, Christopher Roth, Sadr A. H. Bani, Paul Schrader, and Giorgio Moroder. The 80*81 Book Collection: Volume Two. Zurich: Ed. P. Frey

For more information visit: http://www.8081.biz

Liz Sales

Stephanie Slate & M.G. Martin { Part 1 }

double dip recession

there is a shortage of skin
& i have taken my nakedness
to the tattoo employment agency

it costs no money to take off the hair
of my pubis & provides more work
for the agency

the agency appreciates ingenuity
& awards me their highest honor
it is called: untitled improvisation

i think of the time before hair
when i took you to the tree the naked
elders called: what planet is this

where we practiced the ninety nine
disciplines of nakedness & drew
tattoos of tree sap with tree sap
onto our skins

i think of when you said:
we aren’t falsely oblique in a real sense
we are really oblique in a false sense

i am volunteering to bear your mistakes
on my body i would do it for free
but i am a patriot during this recession

i accept the worth of skin but am shamed
that i can’t facsimile mine & distribute
this flesh in these times of infirmity

upon leaving i note:
the agency is open monday through friday
during normal business hours

—-

Stephanie Slate is a photographer living and working in Philadelphia PA. Her B.F.A in photography was received from Pratt Institute in 2008. Slate uses alternative processes such as Platinum/Palladium printing and also Wet Plate Collodion. Her work mainly consists of images that explore the delicate boundaries between the repulsive and beautiful, while her newer work focuses on the wonders of boredom.  {www.lynslatephotography.com}

M.G. Martin is the author of One For None (Ink) & the chapbook Fall Out Of Your Skin (Pangur Ban Party). His work has appeared in Word Riot, ZYZZYVA, Explosion Proof, PANK & >kill author, among others. A Pushcart Nominee, M.G. lives & writes in Brooklyn. Find him: here & here.

—-

Words with Pictures is a weekly two-part post that pairs photographers and writers. The first week, a writer is given a photograph to inspire the creation of a new piece of writing. The following week the photographer is given a piece of writing and responds with a new photographic piece. This series is curated by Conveyor Magazine Editor Dominica Paige.

Wanderlust Presents: Thomas Jackson

Hello Thomas Jackson,

Each October we use to all gather for the migratory anomaly of the Chimney Swifts. Just before sunset, several thousand of swifts would suddenly flood the sky. Pulsing in waves of shifting patterns, the seemingly choreographed display would end with a spiral plunge down an old brick chimney to roost till dawn.

Thomas Jackson’s series Emergent Behavior illustrates, yet also challenges this self-organizing phenomena, known as “emergence.” It arises out of the natural patterns and multiplicity of our environment. The slightest gesture, such as the flocks of birds, inherently create a predisposed order. In duality with such order, is natures desire for chaos, to which Thomas invites.

Broken Pallet, 2011 from the series Emergent Behavior

With the use of unlikely materials behaving in seemingly natural ways, the barriers of fact and fiction, play off an allegorical interpretation of the truth.

Cups 2011 from the series Emergent Behavior

Precariously constructed by hand, Thomas uses wire, cups, sticks, and leaves, to suspend these sculptures throughout natural and man-made settings. Most fall away, or are destroyed soon after, which inherently feels like part of the performance and process.

Cheese Balls, 2012 from the series Emergent Behavior

The familiarity of some materials and ambiguity of other, creates an inquisitive tension. A tension of peculiarities, in an off kilter relationship between the natural and the artificial construction.Assorted foliage, 2012 from the series Emergent Behavior

Like kinetic ghosts, consequence seems evident after the pause of each captured moment. Apprehension also arises from the idea of the aftermath, the fall of a tree, or the dissipation of a million air born plastic cups, Emergent Behavior resonates on multiple levels, in its strangely curious dialogue of opposites.

Yarn #1, 2012 from the series Emergent Behavior

Thematically, Thomas seems inherently drawn to these contrasts in the world. In The Robot Series, elements of literature, science fiction, and motifs from mid evil tapestries, are used to create a narrative of a lone Robots plight to co-exist with the natural world.

Robot Coda series, 2011

From the series, Thomas constructed a book to house the story. Acting as an artifact to the world he’d made, the book is an organic collaboration of images, illustration, salvaged wood, and metal. It is an homage to “an inscrutable relic long lost in an apocryphal future.”

The Robot Book, 2011

Robot Coda series, 2011

Robot Coda series, 2011

In hesitation to define himself as an experimental visual artist, Thomas utilizes various formulas to manifest his ideas. With the construction of precarious materiel’s, prediction, or lack thereof, is part of the process. In dialogue with the natural world, Thomas builds from the willingness to let go of a self imposed structure. His visual vocabulary highlights the poetic order inherently in place around us.

Leaves #1, 2012 from the series Emergent Behavior

Like the flock of swifts, the behavior of over 5,000 birds to fly together as one emerges from the desire of the individual birds to avoid collisions while staying close to their neighbor. Nature will always find a way.

Thomas Jackson is a self-taught photographer, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, daughter and two goldfish, Marty and Marty. His work has been shown at Central Booking in DUMBO, Brooklyn, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Vamp and Tramp Booksellers, The Center for Books Arts and the Governors Island Art Fair.

Nebulae

To see more of Thomas Jackson go here: { www.thomasjacksonphotography.com }

Mark Your Calendars!

PPAC’s 3rd Annual Book Fair
Saturday, May 5th, 2012
From 12:00 -6:00pm

The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center will be hosting its third annual book fair on Saturday, May 5th from 12:00 - 6:00pm. There is already a great line up of local, national and international presses, publishers and artists who will be in attendance selling books, prints and other ephemera. 

Some of this year’s participants include… 

Gottlund Verlag
Sun System Press
A-Jump Books
Schematic Quarterly
Chad States
Debutante Hair
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
Vox Populi
Bodega Press
Visual Studies Workshop
Spaces Corners
MACK Books
Miniature Garden
NOWORK
Empty Stretch
Conveyor Arts
Indie Photobook Library
Lay Flat
Mossless
Swill Children
Chad Muthard
Christopher Gianunzio & Jenny Tondera
Light Work

The Curated Table will include publications by: 

Roma Publications
Little Brown Mushrooms
Paula McCartney
Loosestrife Editions
Hamburger Eyes
Megawords

And there will be Book Signings…

Ron Jude
Lick Creek Line (MACK)

Benjamin Lowy
Iraq | Perspectives (CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography)

Ed Panar  
Salad Days Volumes I &II (Gottlund Verlag)
Animals That Saw Me: Volume 1 (Ice Plant)

We highly recommend you rent a car, hop on a bus or opt for the train { most romantic mode of transport } and come to the PPAC Book Fair. It’s one of our favorites, mostly because it’s followed by a Philly Cheesesteak. And we get to hang out with all the other awesome participating artists and publishers. We hope to see you there!

For More Information, Visit: { www.philaphotoarts.org }