Eliot's 125 word statement/manifesto

I create images with the notion of beauty in mind. I am a Romantic and because of this my images take on aspects of the romantic.

To be romantic is radical.

To be beautiful is radical.

Therefore I can only surmise that my work – my photographs – are trying to be radical.

My work takes itself very seriously.

I photograph sentimentality and other more complicated emotions and to me this is a radical action. However it should be noted that I don’t find myself to be a radical artist – just as artist who makes work that could be seen as radical.

My photographs are simple and executed to the highest degree of my ability.

I am a photographer of human moments.

I am content but my stomach still growls – this is why I continue to make work and why my work continues to define me. 

RMB Manifesta (250 words)

RMB Manifesta

In my work as a photographer, performer, and cultural theorist, I mash-up familiar icons and personae, disorienting myself from a conventional experience with them as a passive consumer.  Engaging the visual language of mass media, I create timeless, placeless stages, leaving only the represented body and the constructed image to reconfigure signifiers of authenticity.

Through still lifes of books, album covers, and other mass-produced objects, I excavate links to the narratives of those who attempted to subvert oppressive paradigms, only to be reabsorbed back into them. These narratives are vital to creating my own mythology, not suffering through trends of cultural consumption but fostering an oppositional gaze. With each meticulously displayed gesture, I ritualize my privilege to work this way.

Following this same focus in my performance and video work, I embody what I call a “contemporary freemason,” a culturally syncretic trickster who possesses skill in repurposing symbolic meaning.  Depicting multiple roles of jester, servant, master, and creator, the self-portraits and performances intentionally reassign modes of representation as sites of resistance and choice.

By exploring the overlap between the performed and the personal, I attempt to recover a sense of agency in my own representation. No longer the subaltern or the abject, the intact black female body dominates as the vehicle through which the possibilities of self-determination and multi-consciousness manifest. The dilemma of double-consciousness will be damned.

Soohyun Kim_Statement (250 words)

In my photographs, I am acutely aware of the tension between a clarity of the thing itself and a vagueness toward what it represents. The photos often have a literal or figurative translucence, adding to or diluting intrinsic meaning. Objects are redefined by each other, in the midst of an ongoing investigation of architectural space. Defined spaces or items — street paraphernalia, window displays — are turned into abstract portraits, but their true functional nature, and those of the places I capture — slums, housing projects, horse stables — remain like echoes. The real slips into the unreal, or surreal. At the same time, these depictions are also a conscious way of addressing poignant historical and cultural contexts and conflicts. 

The subjects of my photographs are drawn from concerns arising out of my immediate environment, first in South Korea and now here in Chicago. In South Korea I was particularly concerned with capturing the social and political complexities arising as consequences of the fast economic development and the controversial effects of the contemporary, capitalist paradigm. My recent photographs in Chicago continue these same concerns and explore spaces of political and social tension. I see traces of modernist, utopian experiments, for which Chicago was the testing ground, and I see the reminders of their failure thrown into contrast by a contemporary reality in which there is still so much injustice and inequality. 

Kevin Weil

I’m interested in slipping myself into the gestational period between the birth and death of an object or event’s ultimate trajectory. It is in this liminal highway of layered histories where I interact. I’m engaging with infrastructural elements of a commodified framework so as to locate myself within the much larger system that I’m interacting with. It is through documentation of these evidential relationships that the cause and effect nature of systemic interaction can be charted.

The arc of an event’s occurrence is relative to the individual’s point of entrance and exit in perceiving it. There is a slippery absoluteness that is often the result of individual experience. The entrance is not the only entrance. There is a back door perhaps, an open window, and these too function as an entrance. I believe that the process of locating our entrances and exits is vital to our understanding of where we are, of how we came to be there, of where we can go.

It is there deep in the web of interactivity, or maybe it is right on the surface, or maybe there is no difference, there is only that which is imposed by language and systems resultant. Because things are not so linear and upright and absolute there is infinite room for error. It is here where the wiggling can occur. Where things spill and other things absorb the spill and those things become another thing. This is the place where places claim to be.

Hayden's Shortened Statement

A disease is haunting the human condition - the disease of striving.

As relationships form, money is gained, and materials are accumulated, the disease feeds itself. It latches on, and attaches itself to the objects and entities it comes in contact with. On the surface, this continual push to strive may disguise itself with a droll cloak, but at its core, within its purest essence, it is desolation. It is a loneliness that goes undetected, yet embeds itself in public, as well as the most intimate spheres we come in contact with or reside in.

I am not immune to the disease.

My practice is somewhat ironic. Through exploring the "strive" objects that surround me, I myself am in a state of "strive". I am fueling the epidemic.

I dont know exactly why I am attracted to these objects. I think there is something I find (in between) the tragedy and the comedy, that is somewhat indescribable. An in between existence. Neither here, nor there. Neither home, nor away. In this in between state, I believe humanity is summed up.

Kayl//Brief Art Statement

I make still lifes.

I am an image maker, balancing depictions of the real with graphic counterparts.

I am interested in objects, their connection to the history of art, to contemporary connotations. I want to imbed myself in the ongoing history of the still life genre's traditions while questioning photography and the ways a photograph comes into being.

Through the studio, I can empty objects of potency through erasure of context.

I am, above all, a gatherer and interpreter of popular imagery, which I present in order for the viewer to reflect their full identity, consciously or subconciously interpreting the image and its content.

By photographing, I point a finger. By viewing, the audience names.

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            My current body of work investigates the relationship I have with my eccentric, estranged grandparents.   Through narrative portraits and still life images of their belongings and rooms of their house, I attempt to understand my place in their world.  As an adult the dynamics of our relationship have changed drastically as we have developed class, cultural, political, and other opinionated differences that drive a wedge between us.  These clashing ideas result in terse discussions and greater distance between our phone calls and visits.  This displeasing disposition we’ve developed is one that I challenge to break through, wanting our differences to no longer come between us. In these photographs I document my lonely visits to their house, using my camera to bond with their belongings and push for more portraiture in order to better assimilate this division.

Eliot 250word statement

I strive for honesty in my work, at any cost. I believe that in order to create a body of work worth remembering one must put in as much effort as they can in order to achieve the highest level of understanding from their viewers. That being said, my work is thought-out, planned, and executed with regard to the highest of standards - my own. Regardless of the project I undertake I always strive to produce the best image possible both conceptually and technically. This can only be achieved – I feel – if the work is honest and made with very specific intent.

My work has always been about sentimentality – whether it be my own sentiments or those of another. My portraits focus on the depth of human emotion and all that carries with it. My landscapes and still lives evoke a similar feeling of knowing – complete empathy between my subject, my audience, and myself. It is these aspects, I believe, that make my work romantic in every sense of the word. For what greater honor is there but to share an emotion with another human being.

Brian

When I was studying philosophy, one of the reoccurring questions was the essence of human nature: what distinguishes human from any other beings. The answer that appeals to me the most is our ability to imagine. I like to think that the most important trait that differentiates human from others is that we can imagine being something other than ourselves. We imagined flying like birds, and we invented airplanes, and no other being that I know of is capable of imagination to such extent. So then my question is, can humans actually become something else. Can we as a human race become something other than what we are? So far in history some may argue that it is not our nature, but our tools, that evolved. Can we change? Can we do to ourselves, what we did to wolves to create dogs?

While my curiosity seems like a philosophical question, I found the field of philosophy to be unfitting for my pursuit. Immanuel Kant argued that our ability to reason was the essence of human; therefore, lying could never be justified since it disables men’s ability to reason. J.S.S. Smart argued that a man was only responsible for the predictable result of his action. However, is it really possible to live without lying? In the age of internet and overflow of information, can “I didn’t know that would happen,” really be an excuse? There are theorists working in the field of philosophy who deals with these questions, but not in the manner that scratched my itch. On the other hand, I found a satisfying answer in Diane Arbus, who photographed people we normally don’t look straight at but through the edge of our eyes. She photographed her subjects at the center of a square frame with straight lighting. Thinking of photographic gaze as a gesture rich of ethical statement excited me. Also James Turrell, who made me question my bodily perception by creating gestural space with illusionary awe. Thus I turned to art making as my ideal quest.

My most recent project is a starting point of my inquiry and it consists of two elements. First part is a photographic documentation of my applying wet clay to my body, wearing it for the duration it takes to dry, and documenting the remains. My aim is to create an awkward and painful situation for myself to emphasize the diminishing meaning of bodily presence in contemporary society. We live in a world of virtual reality; our existences depend on facebooks and twitters. As long as I have access to an internet device, my not being able to move my elbow or knee is meaningless. My identity exists in hallow.

Second part is my psychological response to the first part. After photographing my body as a negative space, I felt an urge to create something that reinforced my bodily presence. Thus I made a human scale triangular pyramid out of clay. I wanted to make an object that contained the trace of my labor and it was only fitting that the process resembled a primitive method of object making. I wanted the pyramid to be a perfect tetrahedron, which I also knew was impossible via hand making. However, the sculpture exploded in the kiln, and when I was making another pyramid, I found that my idea of perfection became the nonexistent first sculpture. Therefore, not through labor and care but through destruction, the first model reached perfection.

Jackie's Statement

I draw on photography and video to frame allegorical narratives. Employing the use of ambiguous spaces, characters, and time, I focus on the intricacies of psychological trauma in social youth cliques and their establishment of communal hierarchies. In dialogue with idealized notions of adolescence, youth, and womanhood, I seek to explore how these constructions are made through social and cultural practice. I am interested in how societal expectations influence individual behavior.

            Through these visual fictions, I consider the themes of seduction, aggression, madness, envy, and fear as devices for manipulating power within shifting psychological systems in adolescent cliques. In my narratives, the camera manifests the imperceptible marks left behind from these psychological games. Additionally, I am interested in the power the camera holds over its subject. Through the eye of the lens I have the ability to frame the context and exact moment at which these actions are captured, endeavoring to frame them at their most menacing. In my photographic constructions the subjects must partake in the action to solidify a record. They are required to engage in the violent gestures of force to illustrate the hidden trauma. This process of capturing implements a system of dominance between photographer and subject. Much like the reality of these cliques, this power dynamic goes unchallenged.

           Through a deliberate use of aesthetics, I aim to engage the viewer in a game of seduction, just as a youth is seduced by the promise of acceptance. The brutal nature of these mental games is often overlooked due to the implied innocence of its players. My use of aesthetics endeavors to mirror this presumed innocence. 

Chris' Statement

            Support for the æther waned in the early 20^th century, as general relativity emptied it of physical value, leaving a brittle shell of what once was a dense and fundamental property of the universe. Simultaneously, in a booming era for photography, specifically the push to make photography a fine art, æther went through a spatial and dimensional transformation, ending up in the photographic plane. The space photography creates, as of its own accord, between a paper substrate and gelatin emulsion, exhibits properties which are foreign yet recognizable. There is a volume present that seems to have substance. The virtual space of a mirror mimics these properties, but cannot contain them; the mirror plane, being a virtual volume, is fundamentally empty, a reflected image of reality. Its boundaries, its edges, are not challenged, allowing substance to leak out through the transparent frame. A photograph, or certain photographs (a sub-class of the entire genre), occupy a volume that is, of course, an “image,” but an image with different and often substantial density; importantly, it is not a literal reflection. The space created acts differently than both the actual space or a reflected virtual space of what is being represented in the photograph.
            The æther is a unique state of matter, able to act as gas or viscous liquid, exhibiting an inherent dynamism that does not illustrate the origins of its effects. It resembles an ideal gelatin that never solidly or completely sets, moving in currents fast and slow, imbuing the photograph with undetectable movement noticeable only through periphery. Its density is a deceit, just as photography is, but that does not null the effect.
            Glimmers of the æther can be snared through structural phenomena of the image, under the right conditions. Photographic density and boundaries are coupled in a way that leads, ideally, to a destructive end. Peaks in an energy landscape defy the idea of a static system – a ball cannot stay put on a sharp peak. Instability gains momentum at greater heights. Inversely, a ball that rolls in to a steep energy pit will become trapped. The density of an image acts as a scaffold to keep the borders intact. If it is too thin, too light, the edges will crumble and collapse the image. Heaviness acts differently, supplying a strong base for the image to stand. But this, too, can lead to destruction: Stuff too much into a given volume and the boundary stretches. When cracks develop, they offer a path in to the photograph’s volume. There is a dynamism at play here – the ball cannot stay at the peak; fissures close and others open as the current changes. The drive is a search for cracks and fissures in the structure of an image, in the æther that defines the reality of photography.

ayesha saeed-2013

artist’s statement:

I see “possibilities” now in the photographs I take. The work is heavily invested in an epiphany I had at the Art Institute of Chicago with Dutch Modernist Theo Van Doesburg’s painting Counter Composition VIII. It is essentially a white and black painting in a white room; it has an odd tilted framed that seemed to cause me to suddenly see the painting as if it were popping out of the wall like a pixel. This totally flat plane suddenly was like a window into another space with multiple white planes; just like the one I was in. In a moment, I had the experience of being unable to any longer precisely define what was real and what wasn’t.

It was so quiet, and so satisfying. I can only describe it as if I was suddenly liberated from some vast decimal system; a sense was granted that there’s more to what we see around us. We really can move through space, and deconstruct our habitual vision.

Visually, I have tended to be more of a micro- than a macro- person. I often get so immersed in a subject and magnify it so much that it becomes hard for me to look at it from a distance. But after this event something happened; I started producing work from the painting, and as if falling down a rabbit hole, I didn’t know where I was going. Things began to gel when the process took me back to a photograph I had taken in Lahore, Pakistan over a year ago.

I began realizing this experience I’d had with the Van Doesberg was something that had been hinted at in other moments, and that I’d been skirting these same insights or experiences in the past, including in this photo from Lahore. I began using and manipulating this photo to produce most of the works you see in my portfolio, amplifying and exploring the possibilities of this pixelated, mind-body insight.

My work revolves around this word ““possibility”. The writings of Agnes Martin, introduced to me by a professor, really helped me to make sense of my process and what I was seeing; they gave me full permission to just trust these strange-seeming intuitions, and explore them.

I’ve come to understand my work as a process of actually refining my awareness, and my self. I’ve passed through that boundary where I seem to realize it’s not just job/ hobby/work anymore. I guess you could call this process “spiritual”, though that seems limiting. It gives an unknown joy. It makes me value the everyday details of life’s light, and its shadows. The work is about the quietness of the repetitive patterns of our daily lives. It has its unique rhythm which I hear everywhere around me. I see strange systems of chaos and order around me; the beauty of monotony, yet the complexity of it at the same time. The pieces seem to allow me to focus, but then again push me back again so I can see from a distance: the tension of micro and the macro.

The investigation of the image that I am working with lead me to an interesting track which deals with Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Mughal architecture, a French doctor and traveller François Bernier along with my own exploration of what square means to me. In nut shell, I Believe in Square and I am finding out my way through it.

David's Statement

Ok im gonna have two cause I'm David and i do what i want.

here is a shorter statement that i wrote 15min ago

statment of the artist. 

I won't pretend to know anything about what is in my images 

but i would really like to. 

In-fact it eats away at me 

because to continue as i have

might lean toward madness

but i won't pretend to know of madness either

I believe It is somewhere between faith and devotion that my actions find reason.

In what im not so sure i know

but i would really like too. 

I do know what it means to try. 

To continue to try. 

In a way ones manhood is falsely assumed by his accomplishments.

Not his efforts. 

I understand effort

Ive heard a man often does but a boy often tries.

Maybe i am disillusioned by the idea of my own success 

I fear its emptiness.

Its finitude 

I seem to prefer to walk away from things empty handed. 

But i have my picture. 

making gestures that allude to my efforts 

I try on many guises looking for the one that may make you smile

I oscilate between wanting you to love me and wanting the picture to love me. 

I’m not sure i know how to accomplish either 

but i would really like to

It is very much a belief in believing though. 

In The frame 

The light 

The camera

what is in front of it

and behind it

The object

the time 

the place

the event

I have my little picture now

this little pathetic record i have made

so trite

so terrible at what it wants to be. 

but boy does it try. In superb detail

Impotent but disarming. 

I flirt with the possiblity of utilizing this power 

because It makes me feel like i am in control of our intimacy.

Here is a draft of my jargony statement that i turn in when i want money from people. which is pretty sad cause its not that good either.

The Politics of Seeing: Artist Statement

I always start by photographing, specifically looking for moments where I can point to the spectacle of my everyday, using the apparatus of the camera to investigate the nature of seeing it. I then seek to politically problematize that way of seeing, through strategies influenced by the history of post-structuralist thought. I arrest that often exclusionary critical faculty to investigate my individual way of seeing as interdependent to a collective, depolarizing the roles of spectator and consumer within the construction of socio-cultural difference. The photographing then becomes a willing flirtation with the possibility of an alternative. It's a fitting allegory for my desire to transgress the burden of what W.E.B Dubois refers to as my 'double consciousness.' It is relief within an inherited repression. 'If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.' - Michel Foucault-. 

When I first took up photography it was the darkroom not the camera that seduced me. Now the distinctions and barriers between the two have collapsed, and I'm interested in the agency of the unique phenomenological space that is created between them. It is a gesture toward depolarizing the space between the question of truth and the subjectivity of desire. After the moment of capture, back In the studio, i start the practice of trying to respond to and complicate what I have done. This allows me to ontologically destabilize the works object-hood and assigned meaning, while taking responsibility for the instinctual elements that construct my narrative gaze. My desires, insecurities, inadequacies, and obsessions, they are all giving form to my pastiched visual language. Through simple shifts in installation, juxtaposition, and context, i provoke moments that point to the malleability of familiar signs and readymade structures, figuring them open and unstable. 

My way of seeing is nestled within the desperation to find my own specificity within a clear cut archetype; Wholly middle class, 2nd generation college educated, raised in predominately white suburban neighborhoods, and most importantly disillusioned with trying to figure out what those things mean to a black body twice removed from the civil rights movement. There is a dissociative blankness there. It feeds a kind of psychological fugue state where the relationship to ones own cultural memory feels familial but foreign, warranted but perverse. My linguistic instinct then slips into an omnidirectional palimpsest, utilizing various forms of intentional and situational code switching. Linguistic systems and their assigned narratives, academic, personal, and pop culture, are deconstructed and re-constructed creating new abstract mythologies from their residue. 

So there exists this ebb and flow; construction and deconstruction, naïveté and criticality, kitsch and camp, the world at large and the studio. I am at war with the irony of my inherited difference, evasively perpetuating and deconstructing its existence. It's a kind of comedy too trite and awkward to be tragic but playing along feeds a seedy kind of omnipresent self-reflection. My work lives in the pleasure of this kind of perpetual abstraction.

Artist Statement (500) Su

Ideally my work will manifest itself only onto a flat rectangle or square, that is, either a painting or a photograph. This constrained form gained its utmost importance from my teenage years, when I was relearning how to see the world through a scientific, mathematical eye. Horizontal and vertical, the ideal two axes x and y meeting at perfect right angle, represents the rational way of looking and thinking. The rectangular or square two-dimensional surface abstracts and compresses the actual, living world, the four-dimensional space-time continuum to its ideological limits, the most rational form.

I see this as an analogy of how we gain knowledge, the world existing as a virtual, digitalized matrix in human mind. But I also remember another kind of knowledge from a time before I must assign cold numbers onto every single thing in my life. I remember one time I was woken up by my grandma at night, got onto a shuttle bus, not knowing where we were going. The darkness outside, the starless sky and scattered window lights from houses on the horizon burnt into my memory, my earliest memory. This other kind of knowledge, the empirical one, reminds me what life really is. I am most human when I experience confrontation between these two kinds of knowledge.

And this confrontation is what I hope to bring into my work. I work with various subject matters, from personal, everyday experience or from scientific discoveries or theories, transforming both into an in-between form of representation. But no matter the source, I want to maintain a kind of opacity in the meaning of the finished picture. This is a two-folded intention. On one hand, I want the picture plane to remain a neutral ground for the viewer to meditate on. On the other hand, I’m attracted to the inherent irony in the attempt to fully communicate knowledge, either scientific or empiric. If the viewer gets from my work something valuable, yet different from what I put into, my task is accomplished.

I’m currently working on two separate bodies of work. The first one is a series of panel paintings. I'm incorporating photo transfer into the painting process, collapsing personal images onto patterns of color theory. This meeting of two different, yet equally important imageries is one example of the absurd confrontation between the two kinds of knowledge. The second body consists a series of photographs. I’m using a photogram of a 3D model of tesseract (a four-dimensional hypercube) as an index to contextualize all the other images, which are mostly representational, mundane photos. By putting an idealized, imaginary image together with the rest, more realistic ones, I’m hoping to question the meaning and the existence in both.

Gerhard Richter once said something like this in an interview. “At some point you have to convince yourself that painting can change the world. Otherwise the act of painting is pure idiocy.” I believe in the value of my work to shift people’s minds. Towards where? I don’t know.

Artist Statement

At the moment, my artistic practice primarily consists of photographs that illustrate disconnections, displacement and distortions that personally relate to me and past experiences of mine.

Recently, I have been focusing on the idea of distorting reality and questioning what reality means. This concept has stemmed from investigating lucid dreams and nightmares from my past; dreams that I have confused with reality for only a moments time-- briefly believing that what occurred while I was unconscious actually happened and is completely factual. In these dreams, many times I am able to see and watch my own self through a lens and predict my own actions. For example, I once had a nightmare where I was viewing myself sleeping from a night vision security camera, while watching an intruder circle my bed, waiting to attack me. After further investigation, it seemed as if my mind was partially awake and in reality, while the other half was hallucinating. While dreaming, I was also capable of thinking of solutions for what I could do to get the intruder out of my house. This raises the question: are lucid dreams a form of reality? Are dreams merely a distortion of reality? Is it possible to have an “out of body” experience while dreaming? What is the difference? 

Bouncing off of this concept, I have become intrigued by the subjective, psychiactric term derealization and the feeling that the external world seems unreal. In my latest project, I have begun creating scenes where reality has been altered or changed, resembling dream-like states. I’m interested in depicting the hallucinatory quality of a dream while still showing a sense of realism. I’m interested in knowing where the audience is transported when viewing these. I want the audience to question their own dreams and ask themselves what the difference is between dreams and their idea of what reality is. 

Does reality exist only when we observe it?   

Soohyun_Statement

In my photographs, I am acutely aware of the tension between a kind of clarity in “the thing itself” (as discussed by John Szarkowski) and a vagueness toward what it represents. The pictures often have a literal or figurative translucence, adding to or diluting intrinsic meaning. For example, buildings might be embedded in paintings, which are protected by glass. Images reflect off each other. Objects are redefined by each other, in the midst of an ongoing investigation of architectural space.  

Defined spaces or items — street paraphernalia, window displays — are turned into abstract portraits, but their true functional nature, and those of the places I capture — parking garages, horse stables — remain, like echoes. The real slips into the unreal, or surreal. At the same time, these depictions are also a conscious way of addressing personally poignant historical and cultural contexts and conflicts. 

The subjects of my photographs are drawn from concerns arising out of my immediate environment, first in Korea and now here in Chicago. In Korea I was trained over the course of a decade in an apprenticeship with a photographer who believed in traditional methods. I learned to utilize formal photographic elements to convey my innate response to my subjects. I was particularly concerned with capturing the social and political complexities arising as consequences of the fast economic development in my country and the controversial effects of the contemporary, capitalist paradigm.

My recent photographs in Chicago continue these same concerns and explore spaces of political and social tension. As a newcomer, I often wander around the city. I see traces of modernist, utopian experiments, for which Chicago was the testing ground, and yet their failure is often clearly thrown into contrast by a contemporary reality in which there is still so much injustice and inequality. As an outsider, I do not understand in which neighborhood I should feel safe or threatened, or where a certain neighborhood begins or ends. Through the photographer's lens, I delineate for myself the mystery and insecurity I feel against a backdrop of the wonder of being in this great city.