Photographs

Military Pastoral Complex

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

300x446x07596bebc3c79b8c3422f394d34b8903.jpg.pagespeed.ic.t2YHRFCj1DMatthew Flintham says of Gair Dunlop’s work “Photographs and a few texts from a long-term photography and video project documenting the slow closure of RAF Coltishall. Cold War and Battle of Britain mythologies combine. The roots of the Military Pastoral Complex are evident.”

Get the book here.

Gair’s website: www.atomtown.org.uk

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.
It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
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New Exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum! Fritz Haeg

The Aldrich is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition

Fritz Haeg: Something for Everyone

June 27, 2010, to January 2, 2011

Experience Fritz Haeg’s unconventional exhibition, Something for Everyone, a series of participatory projects for plants, animals, and people presented in the Museum’s grounds and atrium. One component, Edible Estate #9, places a productive garden on the Museum’s pristine front lawn in Ridgefield’s historic district, where the Museum staff will grow their own food and create compost, transforming this longstanding symbol of the “American Dream” and questioning definitions of agriculture and art. For updates about programs and events related to the exhibition, as well as time-lapse photographs of the installation, please visit:

www.fritzhaeg.com/studio/projects/aldrich.html

Exhibition Opening

Sunday, June 27, 2010; 2:30 to 5:30 pm

Join us at the reception; explore the work on view; and meet the artist!

New Exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum! Fritz Haeg.

A Picture Can Show a Million? | Unique Scoop

Artist and activist, Chris Jordan creates amazing images that portray America’s consumption. Chris’ hope is that his images will have a different effect than raw numbers alone. Since simple numbers no matter how large can be rather abstract it can be difficult to connect with ones impact. Whereas a visual representation of vast quantities can help make meaning of 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds or two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

via A Picture Can Show a Million? | Unique Scoop.

How social media will change the way the arts present themselves

I have an article in this fortnight’s Arts Professional arguing that the arts need to get to grips with the idea that a mother of a change is a’coming, and about how the arts have a chance to build a strong, resilient network in the face of coming cuts by adopting a new, generous approach:

… we have reached a tipping point. The gap between what new and old media deliver us yawning. This changes how opinions are formed and how audiences are reached. It also raises interesting questions about where high quality criticism is going to come from in the future.

On the surface there’s a simple conclusion to be reached from the arrival of the Twitterati. Arts organisations need to think more about social media. The Barbican website already has a social media networks button on its front page. Fine idea. Twitter can fill empty seats within a couple of  hours of a performace. But at the moment that’s where most people’s thinking stops. This is a mistake because the change is fundamental. Arts organisations, if big enough, used to hire press officers on the strength of their contacts book, but what does that mean now? It’s not just the dipping circulations – accelerated by the recession, newspaper advertising revenues are expected to fall by as much as 21% across the board this year. This means cuts. Emails to old contacts suddenly bounce; they’ve gone freelance. Talent is leaching away from old media. The money spent trying to get column inches is increasingly money less well spent[…] but that’s just the half of it.

Conventional arts websites have become good at doing two things. They list events coming up and sell you tickets to them. If you’re lucky there’s a blog, but it’s often pretty thin fare. These sites exist within a fast-changing internet filled with people sharing news, wit, opinion, photographs, films and music. In comparison arts websites often look staid and monumental […] The key word is “sharing”. If arts websites want to move from the vertical model – telling people what’s good for them – to the horizontal model of using the energy of social networks, then it’s about giving stuff away. As any sociologist will tell you, the basis of any social network, real or virtual, is reciprocity.

Read the whole article HERE.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

The new landscape photography: land and despoilation

memoire-2006
From Baloji Mémoire, 2006 series by Sammy Baloji, Katanga, DRC

Sammy Baloiji is one of twelve photographers shortlisted for the 2009 Prix Pictet, a prize for photography about sustainability. The premise behind his series is simple – to superimpose photographs from the Congo’s colonial past over modern photographs of the consequences of that history. The Congo has been well and truly raped for minerals and other resources over the last century; for that see Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Also this blog post about Mongrel’s Tantalum Memorial.

The theme for the 2009 Prix Pictet was “Earth”. The 2009 shortlist is really phenomenal and includes work from the great Darren Almond, Yao Lu’s remarkable Chinese landscapes constructed from rubbish won the 2008 Paris Photo Prize, Edward Burtynsky’s scary/beautiful quarry photographs, and this series, again from quarries, from Naoya Hatakeyama:
hatakeyamaBlast #5707 by Naoya Hatakeyama, 1998 Japan

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology