Blind Spot Lab is a series of free public events designed as a live exploration of the artists, images, and ideas in each issue, through the modes of installation, performance, and interaction. This program is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Whitney Hubbs (Featured Artist Blind Spot Issue 38)
January 19 — March 09, 2013 at M+B Gallery
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles CA 90069
Opening: Saturday, January 19th, 2013, 6-8PM.
“Dark, raw, powerful and swimming in sensuality, the work of Whitney Hubbs is at once blunt and lyrical, formal and improvised, recognizable to daily experience and yet totally foreign from it. Full of unlikely visual rhythms, Hubbs’ work creates and provokes with aesthetic force. Her images reside in a reticence of feeling. Through profound light and dark, a specific refusal of continuity or seriality, as well as latent eroticism, Hubbs demonstrates over and over her disinterest in generic narratives. Her work persuasively follows its own internal logic through her willingness to challenge the relationship between photographic immediacy and “authenticity.” This is the point of contact where reality and representation become muddled.
Of the twenty-three 2012 Fellows, Barth and Lê were the only two photographers to earn the prestigious “genius grant.” Each artist will receive a “no strings attached” $500,000 award over the next five years, to “provide the maximum freedom [...] to follow their creative vision, whether it is moving forward with their current activities, expanding the scope of their work, or embarking in entirely new directions. There are no restrictions on how the money can be spent, and [The MacArthur Foundation] imposes no reporting obligations.”
Uta Barth, Untitled (2012.LE) from “… and to draw a bright white line with light.”
In addition to being featured in Blind Spot Issues 7, 15, 22, 30, & 32, Barth also recently collaborated with Blind Spot on the production of Blind Spot Series 03: Uta Barth, “to draw with light”. The publication includes work from her series …and to draw a bright white line with light, along with images from Compositions of Light on White and a new series created for the publication of the book. “to draw with light” is available in both a trade and deluxe edition, the latter includes an original print from the artist, Untitled (2012.LE) from “… and to draw a bright white line with light.”
Uta Barth is an artist whose evocative, abstract photographs explore the nature of vision and the difference between how a human sees reality and how a camera records it. In contrast to documentary and confessional modes of photography, Barth intentionally depicts mundane or incidental objects in nondescript surroundings in order to focus attention on the fundamental act of looking and the process of perception. In white blind (bright red) (2002), she investigates both literal and metaphorical modes of perception in ghostly compositions that mimic the afterimages that persist in one’s visual memory after turning away from an object. Her recent series, …and to draw a bright, white line with light (2011), marks the first time Barth has intervened in the staging of her photographs. By manipulating curtains in her home, she created lines and curves of light that expand from a sliver to a wide ribbon across a sequence of large-scale, dramatically cropped images that evoke the subtle passage of time while also highlighting the visceral and intellectual pleasures of seeing. As Barth continues to expand her photographic practice to probe the theme of perception in new and inventive ways, she is encouraging viewers to reconsider the traditional functions and expectations of the photographic image.
Uta Barth received a B.A. (1982) from the University of California at Davis and an M.F.A. (1985) from the University of California at Los Angeles. She is professor emeritus at the University of California at Riverside, where she was a professor in the Department of Art from 1990 to 2008. Her photographs have been exhibited at such national and international venues as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
An-My Lê is an artist whose photographs of landscapes transformed by war or other forms of military activity blur the boundaries between fact and fiction and are rich with layers of meaning. A refugee from Vietnam and resident of the United States since 1975, much of Lê’s work is inspired by her own experience of war and dislocation. From black and white images of her native Vietnam taken on a return visit in 1994 to pictures of Vietnam War battle re-enactments in rural America, her photographs straddle the documentary and the conceptual, creating a neutral perspective that brings the essential ambiguity of the medium to the fore. In her series 29 Palms (2003–2004), Lê documents American soldiers training in a desert in Southern California before their deployment to Iraq. She focuses her camera alternately on young recruits and the harsh terrain in which they practice their drills, lending an obvious artificiality to the photographs that invites speculation about the romance and myth of contemporary warfare. Currently, Lê is documenting the U.S. military’s presence at sites around the world where personnel are undertaking training missions, patrolling international waterways, and offering humanitarian aid. An additional series in progress explores the ongoing ties between Vietnamese nationals who have migrated to southern Louisiana over the past twenty-five years and their homeland in the Mekong Delta. Approaching the subjects of war and landscape from new and powerful perspectives, this accomplished photographer continues to experiment and contribute profoundly to the evolution of her medium.
An-My Lê received B.A.S. (1981) and M.S. (1985) degrees from Stanford University and an M.F.A. (1993) from Yale University. Since 1998, she has been affiliated with Bard College, where she is currently a professor in the Department of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Blind Spot Lab is a series of free public events designed as a live exploration of the artists, images, and ideas in each issue, through the modes of installation, performance, and interaction. This program is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Book launch for Lick Creek Line by Ron Jude (Blind Spot Issues 10 & 35)
@ Dashwood Books
33 Bond Street
New York NY 10012
Tuesday, May 15th from 6 – 8 pm
Ron Jude’s new book, Lick Creek Line, extends and amplifies his ongoing fascination with the vagaries of photographic empiricism, and the gray area between documentation and fiction. In a sequential narrative punctuated by contrasting moments of violence and beauty, Jude follows the rambling journey of a fur trapper, methodically checking his trap line in a remote area of Idaho in the Western United States. Through converging pictures of landscapes, architecture, an encroaching resort community, and the solitary, secretive process of trapping pine marten for their pelts, Lick Creek Line underscores the murky and culturally arbitrary nature of moral critique.
With an undercurrent of mystery and melancholy that echoes Jude’s previous two books about his childhood home of Central Idaho, Lick Creek Line serves as the lynchpin in a multi-faceted, three-part look at the incomprehensibility of self and place through photographic narrative. While Alpine Star functioned as a fictitious sociological archive, and Emmett explored the muddy waters of memory and autobiography, Lick Creek Line finds its tenor through the sleight-of-hand structure of a traditional photo essay.
Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of recent photogenic drawings by Marco Breuer.
For this new series, Breuer worked in and outside of the darkroom, exposing photographic color paper to heat, light, and physical abrasion. Drawing implements included modified hot plates and the guts of electric frying pans. This exhibition presents works ranging from small photographic sketches to heavily burned and distressed 30 by 40-inch prints. Every individual piece constitutes a search, a move away from the given, a test of the materials’ limits. The delicate lines and exquisite surfaces are what make these works so luminous and dynamic.
Thierry-Goldberg Gallery is pleased to present THE USE OF NOISE, Hannah Whitaker’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
In this new body of work, Whitaker presents photographs shot in diverse geographical locales: near a Hawaiian volcano, in an ancient Greek marble quarry, and in her Brooklyn studio. Mixing straight photographs with those confused by controlled light leaks, these images put disembodied textures and natural spaces in conversation with more recognizable photographic imagery.
left: Matthew Brandt Mole sauce, 2009 from “Taste Tests.” Courtesy of the artist. right: Josef Breitenbach, Patricia, 1942. Copyright Josef and Yaye Breitenbach Charitable Foundation New York, Courtesy of Gitterman Gallery, NY.
“The Crystal Chain”, curated by Matthew Porter and Hannah Whitaker (Blind Spot Issue 45)
March 30 – May 6, 2012 at INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
14A Orchard Street
(between Hester and Canal Street)
New York NY 10002
Reception: Friday, March 30, 6-8pm
Featuring work by:
Ellen Auerbach, Matthew Brandt, Josef Breitenbach, Gerard Byrne, Phil Chang, Kate Costello,
Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, John Houck, Margarete Jakschik, Joachim Koester,
Davida Nemeroff, Boru O’Brien O’Connell, Sigmar Polke, Eliot Porter, Torbjørn Rødland, Shirhana Shahbazi, Erin Shirreff, Annika Von Hausswolff
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to present The Crystal Chain, a group exhibition coinciding with Blind Spot magazine’s issue 45, both organized by Matthew Porter and Hannah Whitaker.
* * *
The Crystal Chain takes its name from a correspondence between artists and architects about utopian architecture initiated by Bruno Taut in 1919. Though this exchange predates the photographs shown here, it embodies the struggle of intellectuals in the early part of the twentieth century to get their ideological footing, and in particular to define a future for their medium.
We are pleased to invite you to the Blind Spot Lab
for Issue 44—guest edited by Tim Davis
Tell your story at an “open mic”-style event emceed by Tim Davis about the relationship between humor and photography. Featured storytellers include: Corinne Botz, Ben Coonley, Nancy Davenport, Larry Fink, Christopher Miner, Richard Mosse, Laurel Nakadate, Joel Smith, Penelope Umbrico, and you.
Sunday, March 18 at 3:00 pm
Cabinet
300 Nevins Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Admission is free, but space is limited.
To RSVP, please write to rsvp@blindspot.com.
Please note: Space at this event is very limited and we’re nearing capacity. If you’d like to join us for this event, please be sure to RSVP soon.
Blind Spot Lab is a series of free public events designed as a live exploration of the artists, images, and ideas in each issue, through the modes of installation, performance, and interaction. This program is supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. We’re especially grateful to our friends at Wildcat NYC for their masterful production skills and their long-time assistance with Blind Spot Lab events, and to the intrepid publishers at Cabinet Magazine for the generous use of their Gowanus home to mount the latest installment of the event series.
Jodie Vicenta Jacobson: When did you know you wanted to be an artist?
Daniel Gordon: Without going into too many details I went to an extremely experimental high school that utilized a form of gestalt therapy as a means to teach emotional growth, along with a more traditional curriculum (the school was founded by a real San Francisco 60’s Radical). My first experience in a group setting where kids my own age were talking about some super serious, really personal stuff, and then using physical activity to engage with their emotions was completely off the wall wild! But it drastically altered the course of my life, and opened me up to new possibilities—of which being an artist was one.
