Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

A Boy And His Dog (1975)



Post-apocalyptic Don Johnson. Is there any other kind? The whole film is on Youtube. Here is the first 10 minutes.

 

John Timberlake

Timberlake's Another Country series (2000-2003) is a disturbing mix of photography, painting, and model figures. The landscapes are familiar English paintings by the likes of Turner, Cozens and Constable. The nuclear clouds are copied from archival images of British nuclear tests.



Mark Klett

Mark Klett studied geology before working as a photographer with the U.S. Geological Survey. In the late 1970s, along with Ellen Manchester, JoAnn Verburg, Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus, he undertook the re-documentation of many places in the Western United States that had been photographed in the 19th century by territorial survey photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan, William Henry Jackson and John Hillers. The Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP), as it was called, repeated over 120 19th century photographs between 1977 and 1979. In 1997 Klett and a new group undertook a new project, called Third View, which returned to many of the sites to make a set of third images. There is a great Third View website -- link is on the right.

I'm not sure of the provenance of the video below. This has only been up on Youtube since May 2010. The clips are accompanied by this text:

Mark Klett, a Regents Professor of Art at Arizona State University, and fellow photographer Byron Wolfe have spent three summers locating the sites of historic photographs and artworks of the Grand Canyon and making new photographs at the same locations.

These new photographs explore the relationship of the original images to the spaces they depict. The approach is intentionally experimental and playful, but the results are meant to explore the early art of the canyon and how the Grand Canyon landscape became one of American arts icons.





Monday, June 28, 2010

Bill Brown

Lakenheath and Mildenhall

United States Air Force information film prepared by Detachment 1, AETC Training Support Squadron, Lackland AFB, Texas, introducing the Lakenheath airbase and surrounding region.



Assignment Mildenhall, another information film for US air personnel.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Jane & Louise Wilson

Sealander, The New Art Gallery Walsall, 14 December 2007 - 27 January 2008.

I missed this one completely. Here's what the Walsall gallery website says:

This exhibition, originally shown at Haunch of Venison in Zurich, consists of eight large-scale photographs and a multi-screen installation.

Black and white photographs show decayed, abandoned coastal bunkers. Though monolithic and compelling, these now useless edifices have become merely repositories for graffiti and litter, perhaps a place for shelter for local tramps. They occupy a place between land and sea. Though they carry the scars of battle, they now seem to defy any sense of time and place.

In the multi-screen installation, an exploration of the bunkers is inter-cut with footage of a rare deep sea squid, the Vampire Squid, which possesses the largest eye proportional to its body of any known creature. The eye of the squid seems to embody both the eye of the spectator and also of the camera as it moves constantly and fluidly through the sea or over the surfaces of the bunkers.

More information on this show, including installation views, can be found at the Haunch of Venison site. See also J.G. Ballard, 'A Handful of Dust,' The Guardian, Monday 20 March 2006, which is included in the Haunch of Venison catalogue for the show.


The vampire squid, according to the Sea and Sky website, 'is covered with light-producing organs called photophores. This gives the squid the unique ability to "turn itself on or off" at will through a chemical process known as bioluminescence. When the photophores are off, the squid is completely invisible in the dark waters where it lives. The squid has incredible control over these light organs. It has the ability to modulate the size and intensity of the photophores to create complex patterns that can be used to disorient predators and attract prey. The photophores are larger and more complex at the tips of the arms and the base of its two fins. Unlike most other squid, it does not have the ability to change its color. This ability would be useless in the dark environments in which it lives. The squid's light show is probably its main form of defense, since it lacks the ink sack which is present in other squid species. It can, however, eject a thick cloud of glowing, bioluminescent mucus from the tips of its arms when threatened.'

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Saturday, June 05, 2010

Artavazd Pelechian



Plenty of other Pelechian films available at Ubuweb, including Our Century (1983).