This week’s guest blogger is Marcus Trimble, the blogger known as Gravestmor, who writes on what he calls “architectural trivia”. Mr. Trimble will be writing three more posts for The Art Life and begins with a modest introduction…
Dear Art Life readers,
First some disclaimers as I feel it is possibly necessary…
My art world credentials are pitiful and can be summarised as follows: I know little of the Sydney art scene, why John MacDonald is the source of such derision, and nothing of intricate machinations of Sydney College of the Arts vs COFA. If I had to choose a side, if forced, it would be the College of Arts because they are housed in an old asylum.
I go to the MCA and occasionally the AGNSW on Wednesday night on my way home if they have something good on. I find the art galleries of Paddington intimidating. I have been to Danks Street Depo twice and primarily as an excuse to buy overpriced tomatoes and cheese over the road. Have you guys heard of Ricky Swallow? How about Ron Mueck? I like how they make things look really real. I read comic books – but I am not sure they qualify. I once had a flatmate who painted. I do like artists that make work that is spatial, that I can associate with architecture – Richard Serra, James Turrell, Sol Lewitt, Josef Albers, Walter de Maria.
I write a blog called gravestmor in which architecture is the focus, however there have been some posts over the years that may be of interest to to this particular readership. So I thought I would summarise a couple of these posts here. Who knows. There may something new for you in among them.
Felice Varini is a one trick wonder of the highest order. Luckily it is a pretty sweet trick so I feel we can cut him some slack. Planar, highly graphic images are painted over three dimensional surfaces so that when viewed from a single point the image coalesces into a legible image. Repeat over any and every situation you can; offices, hallways, carparks, castles, galleries whatever until the world gets bored. Full entry on Felice Varini
Palla is a crazy (!) dude in Osaka, Japan that carves up photographs of urban grit, copies and pastes and recomposes them in vertiginous compositions of complexity. He is also in putting together the posters for the open source film project A Swarm of Angels, the first of which is shown above. And in a nice circularity you can read The Art Life’s request for me to guest blog – what I am doing right here and now yo – in the comments. Full entry on Palla
Flickr user reciprocity has a wonderful series of photographs detailing the hokey story of the travels and travails of a group of explorers in an unknown land. Crap story but a stunning series of macro photographic landscapes nonetheless. Full entry on Microworlds
I stumbled on an exhibition of Gilbert Garcin’s photography a couple of years ago in Toulouse and really haven’t seen anything about him since. Although, to be honest, I’ve not really tried. I suppose a google search might reveal something. Maybe even Yahoo? Garcin’s photograph places a Jeffrey Smart-esque fatman in a strange abstract environments, where he wanders. Full entry on Gilbert Garcin
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer whose photographs of ocean horizons are well known. As is the Theaters series where a camera is set up at a cinema, the shutter opened at the beginning of the film and closed at when it is over. The resulting image is of a bright white square in the centre of the frame, a feature length film captured in one frame.
The Conceptual Forms series consists of photographs of plaster models of mathematical algorithms as rendered by late 19th Century stereometric machines. Like the example above – Diagonal Clebish surface, cubic with 27 lines – the models are simply framed and lit, revealing the elegance and complexity of the trigonometric equations. Full entry on Sugimoto
That is all for now…
