It is hard to imagine the Yale-trained photographer Soi Park sharing tequila with strangers at a day labor pick-up location in Connecticut. Yet that is how she became acquainted with the workers, and subsequently their families, who figure throughout her latest body of work. While she was riding on the Metro North commuter line in August of 2010, the train stopped briefly outside Stamford, giving Park a view of men loitering in a nearby lot. As the train started up again, she watched them run toward an arriving van. The anomaly of the men's urgency within the nondescript setting led her to return to the site with a camera.
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Filtering by Category: Essays
"A Single-Minded Migratory Bird" by Camille Xin
Leonard Contino is the kind of visionary artist described by Rilke as a single-minded migratory bird. Although formally untrained, Contino's mode of geometric and optical art is highly sophisticated, his work a unique blend of spiritual and metaphysical curiosity. He effortlessly switches between different mediums but other than his creativity, nothing is effortless for Contino.
Read MoreHarry J. Weil on Mike Metz
Marcel Duchamp explained that in the midst of creation "the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions." Once the artist is done, it is the spectator who brings it in "contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." That is, the viewer, along with the artist, is responsible for art's success.
Read More"Mapping the Flow: Wopo Holup's River Drawings" by Nicholas Robbins
Rivers are the ostensible subjects of Wopo Holup's drawings, but not in any conventional sense. As they were for Thoreau, rivers are Holup's point of departure for the investigation of an expansive range of questions and concerns-aesthetic, scientific, historical, and ecological. Derived from satellite imaging systems, Holup's drawings present themselves as a kind of hand-crafted, subjectivized mapping, a personalized rendering of landscapes originally captured by a data-driven, all-seeing eye.
Read More"Slyboots : Stephen Schofield and the Making of Believers" by Jake Moore
The "conditional" is a term used to express what would happen given certain events or actions. Equivalents exist in many languages; in English, additional words are required to put potential into linguistic play. In French, the conditional is expressed through a form of conjugation, so the potential for a shift is thus inherent, or rather, structural.
Read More"Liberating the Airwaves: Free Radio's Broadcasting Communities" by Kareem Estefan
Radio is, famously, a location-less medium. It exists in the "ether," neither here nor there. Often it meets listeners in transit: on the road one catches broadcasts from the local station, or tunes in to more remote content from satellite transmissions. Depending on where the dial (or on-screen arrow) lands, one hears either corporate content assembled by automatic playlists or carefully selected regional voices; however uncommon the latter, radio remains a rare haven for independent production. With Free Radio, Brian Gillis and Robin Lambert aim to expand the social space opened by community radio, helping underserved community groups to develop and transmit their "voices" through a DIY radio station that could be heard across the New York metropolitan area from CUE's gallery.
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