Vintage Portraiture Without An App

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 Kathryn Mayo Winter and Douglas Winter - Photography Kathryn Mayo Winter and Douglas Winter - Photography Kathryn Mayo Winter and Douglas Winter - Photography

Kathryn Mayo and Doug Winter, a husband and wife photography team based in Sacramento, collaborate with their models to create vintage portraits, seemingly of the past, using the traditional wet plate collodion process. This type of photography was born in the 1850s, but soon faded from the foreground, due to the proliferation of more practical, less time consuming processes involving dry gelatin emulsion.

However, in today’s fast-paced iPhone app culture, where formatting is clean, easy, and instantaneous, ironically, the slow painstaking process is exactly what this artistic pair prefer about collodion. Mayo elaborates, “Each image takes about 15-20 minutes to complete from focusing the camera, coating and sensitizing the plate, exposing, and processing. So, models need to have patience as not each image comes out perfect, and it takes a few to get one we like–sometimes, there are times when the chemistry isn’t working up to par and we don’t get anything at all.” Regardless of outcome, their passion is not just about product, but discovery and investigation. Mayo continues, “I love the idea of using a process steeped in history and with the ghosts of photographers who have come before me.  It is a process that is wholly addicting.”

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Lost At E Minor’s New Look

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Our friends over at Lost At E Minor have just launched their sleek new site. We at B/D know all the hard work that goes into a site re-design and we’re loving LAEM’s new look. When you cover visual content it’s important to let the images shine and that’s just what LAEM’s redesign does. You can read about their redesign process here and go check out their new site. 

 

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The Polygonal Street Art Of Sy

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Sy street art 10

Sy street art 9Street artist Sy creates cleanly crafted murals.  Rather than a hurriedly executed work, Sy’s pieces appear to be carefully planned to the extent of nearly seeming more at home in Adobe Illustrator than on an alley wall.  Sy clearly references and draws inspiration from 8-bit graphics and the block y polygons of early computer animation.  However, the simplistic graphics style really betray an expert use of light and perspective.  Subtle color shifts and familiar imagery in a surprising context add depth to the murals of Sy.

 

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Phoebe Washburn’s Fort Installations And Mixed Media Inventions

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Phoebe Washburn - Installation Phoebe Washburn - InstallationPhoebe Washburn - Installation

Phoebe Washburn’s constructions, built from found or discarded objects such as plants, plywood, cardboard, or fish tanks, to name a few, have been gaining critical acclaim and momentum since 2008, when she took part in the coveted Whitney Biennial.

Of her craft and salvage, in W Magazine, Washburn states: “I’m not green; I’m greedy . . . There’s definitely an aspect of hoarding that drives this, absolutely! If I see someone walking down the street with a nice piece of wood, I’m like, Where did they get that?”

Her approach to discussing art is as playful and humble as the structures themselves, or their titles, which range from “Nunderwater Nort Lab” (above, top) to “Baby Brain (Not Safe for Use as Jacuzzi)” (above, below).

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The Sky Illustrations Of Thomas Lamadieu

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Thomas Lamadieu drawing1

While many of us as tourists may walk looking up at the tops of buildings, artist Thomas Lamadieu is looking at the sky.  Lamadieu uses negative space to create playful drawings and illustrations.  Utilizing photographs of a sky squeezed between rooftops, he illustrates within the patches of blue.  The pieces of sky cut out by the buildings are a point of inspiration for Lamadieu culling stories from the shapes he’s dealt.  Rather than being a limit, they become a point of departure.

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Teo “Moneyless” Pirisi’s Mysterious Geometric Installations

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Teo "Moneyless" Pirisi Teo "Moneyless" Pirisi Teo "Moneyless" Pirisi

Born from a complicated mixture of graffiti, typographic abstraction and installation art, the work of Italian street artist Teo “Moneyless” Pirisi differs slightly from what you would expect to find in an outdoor space. His mathematical, geometric sketches are quiet, contemplative—an appropriate precursor to his finished installations. What started as lettering on walls steadily shifted toward pure abstraction, where Pirisi says “my efforts then dropped the symbolic meaning of the letter.”

Pirisi ditched the paint, the letters and the walls for a series of carefully choreographed suspended rope installations. He has traveled the world creating multiple iterations of these works, which are often found suspended in wild or forgotten spaces. Pirisi’s attention to perspective and material are seamless, and his placement is usually quite surprising—providing moments of wonder for curious passerby.

From the artist: “My shapes are reduced to the minimum, at the same time they carry some kind of an intense tension, an invisible movement; most of my patterns hide multiple visions and different perspectives. I think my art now speaks through geometry.”

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A Kassen at Gallery Nicolai Wallner

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Gallery Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen recently opened a new solo exhibition by Copenhagen based art collective A Kassen. The group describes their work as “…performative installation and sculpture. Actions, discretely part of the exhibition space, are characteristc of A Kassen’s works. The actions may even be so discrete, they don’t get noticed. But if they do get noticed, they contain strong elements of humor and surprise.” The group’s discretely humorous style can be found in pieces in which the four sides of the frame have been planed down and the resulting sawdust has been transferred onto paper with glue. Another example is Permanent Reflection, a piece that is described in the press release: “Permanent Reflection consists of four framed photos that are placed perpendicular to each other in two separate corners of the exhibition space. The images appear to be distorted by reflections due to the framing glass, but are in fact photographs capturing the reflection of the site”. The show is on view through May 18th 2013.

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The Masterful Multiplicity Of Christopher Taggart’s Collages

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Christopher Taggart Christopher Taggart Christopher Taggart

Multi-disciplinary artist Christopher Taggart‘s work elegantly investigates ordering systems, photographic dissection and dissemination. Most compelling are his large, meticulously woven collages of carefully selected imagery—a combination of playing cards, personal photos and government archives. Taggart presents these works in such a way that the viewer’s attention is simultaneously swallowed by the physical scale of each piece and lost in the smallness of the individual cuts.

The overwhelming nature of the work does not seem to be accidental, as he plays with the viewer’s sense of curiosity in each bite-sized fragment of imagery. While trying to look for themes or recurrences within the work, at times the subject matter reveals itself and sets a different tone. For example, Taggart’s digital photographic collage Colony combines and restructures aerial photographs of 21 California state prisons—something that casts a darkness over the colorful shards of imagery almost immediately. His latest solo effort, Cuts And Splits, is on view at Eli Ridgway Gallery through May 4.

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