kayl parker

i am in love with ali bosworth’s body of work; the color palette, the content, the re-occurrences, the oddities.

everything about his work is mundane, all of it, which may be what makes these images so appealing. the color palette is cold as water but as warm as skin; the consistent tonal quality carried throughout his entire portfolio gives the viewer a sudden calm, as if they’ve stepped out of reality and in to this smooth pink world created for us by bosworth.

obviously, there are repeating subjects throughout his work, which sometimes overlap to create references and metaphysical nods towards images already viewed. the most apparent repeat is the young lady bosworth continuously photographs making us wonder who she is. what is their relationship? where is she going? is she real? perhaps not; perhaps she exists within the photograph for that singular moment captured. i like to go on believing this theory; the girl is too floored to exist outside the portraits. i feel the same way about some of his other imagery, that it shouldn’t exist in this world or reality, only in this body of work. the boarded up house, the painted cat, the exploding cave all seem too ephemeral to remain here for long. we would destroy these things as quickly as we could, but in bosworth’s photographs, they exist forever, in the surreal landscaped world he’s created for himself and his characters.

at the beginning of photography’s short history, we find an immense library of images involving the western world and its customs, cultures and inhabitants. but photography had the ability to transport someone hundreds of thousands of miles away in a single instant, therefore spurring a round of photographers to pursue the non-western world, the exotic, the orient.

above: samuel bourne, an english photographer who photographed in india for seven years.

above: francis frith, an english photographer traveling and shooting the middle east.

above: john thompson, a scottish photographer who photographed the far east.

blue quilt and cheerios and louisiana, or somewhere in between, lithograph and gouache, 5x7”, 2011

make fun of me all you want, but i’m retaking color photo next semester because jason lazarus is the professor. he’s famous. and sooooooooo good. (above: 10 matchbox cars, 7 packages of crayons, 10 shimmer pens, 24 band bracelets, 2 multi-colored big scratchpad notebooks, 24 oz tootsie roll, 1 lb. of pat’s beef jerky, 24x30”, archival inkjet print, 2010.)

above sigmund freud’s couch, 40x50”, archival inkjet print, 2008

blake frogging, 11x14”, archival inkjet print, 2006

untitled, 30x36”, archival inkjet print, 2006

kashmir and lindsey (easter), 11x14”, archival inkjet print, 2006

looking at the back of at ad reinhardt, 40x50”, archival pigment print, 2007

today, cody and i had the opportunity to sit through a presentation by local artist duo sonnenzimmer (nick and nadine). they are a local print team (who incidentally were included in the pulled book i just received from mike perry) who work with painting and other hand-made elements incorporated into the screenprinting process to create unique and highly artistic commissioned works for various venues. though the creations are ultimately posters, sonnenzimmer focuses on the art piece a commissioned poster can become, even with guidelines.

i just recently got mike perry’s new screenprint catalog in the mail. luckily, i was one of the first 200 to order, so the cover of my issue is hand screenprinted by mike perry himself (what it is supposed to look like is pictured below). i highly recommend you browse through it if you have the chance.

i like it when artist’s openly talk about their work; where they started, the inspiration, the process, and sergio vega has a lot to say about his projects. if you think i’m kidding, visit his website; there are pages and pages about the photographs he’s taken, beginning, ironically enough, with a book and a library. there are times, however, when work seems to speak for itself. this is one of those times. that will not, unfortunately, stop me from talking about the photographs.

vega utilizes some of my favorite elements in photography; installation, pictures within pictures, portals, windows, found sculpture and construction. he seems to bind these drastically different fields together in a singular body of work.

though i am attracted to much of vega’s work, i am also sufficiently confused by it, especially due to the set up of his website, which seems sporadic. there are exhausting references to eden and the elements involved in the story of the fall of man; speaking about the garden, the fruit, the serpent. although the fact that some of the work references these subjects that have already been excavated by the art world to such an extent that none of us want to see another reference about them again, i find it incredibly easy to block the artist’s intention regarding the work and focus purely on the composition and aesthetics. despite the infinite amount of information provided by the artist, i begin to feel lost among the array of material i am presented with. therefore, i begin to take the photographs at face value, gauging my likeness to them through colors and scenes and subjects, and becoming less and less interested in the concept behind it.

some images from david la spina. this week, i am the queen of not talking about what i post.

i coley brown may be the next ryan mcginley.

i am about to bombard you guys with images.

paul barkshire: working in london during the eighties, barkshire began making an archive of places that seemed to be slowly disappearing. he found the oddities that seemed out of place in the streets of modern london, oddities that he assumed would not last much longer. though i would hesitate to refer to these photographs as documentary, they have a sense of obsession and collection while showing a sort of archival longing. though aesthetically i prefer photographs without any sign of the negative or contact sheet, the writing within the borders adds to the archival quality and depiction of the past that still survives in the present.

going back to the body of work i attempted through black and white, in which i tried to find sculptural accidents within chicago, my professor brought to mine richard wentworth (whose work i posted months and months ago). he is a sculptor who works with things within the urban environment whose definition changes when it is being used for a different purpose than intended. a cup is no longer a cup, it is a prop for the window. it’s function and purpose accidentally changes; wentworth finds these instances and records them through his shutter.

examples of my secondhand sculptures mentioned above:

as i mentioned earlier, with an overview of some of letha wilson’s works, i have become consistently interested in the blurring of photography and sculpture. for my next project, i am going to try some constructions of my own, working with materials based off memory (more information to come later). meanwhile, here are some of the contemporary artists i am currently using for reference and inspiration.

travis kent

sterling allen

charlott markus

john houck