Jen Beckman
Colleen Plumb
Animals Are Outside Today examines the intersections between humans and animals, studying how animals are woven through the fabric of culture. I began this project looking at fake nature, considering how substitutions for nature might satisfy people. Looking deeper I began photographing real animals, investigating how they provide intangible links to a deeper world of instinct and rawness.
Contradictions define our relationships with animals. We love and admire them; we are entertained and fascinated by them; we take our children to watch and learn about them. Animals are embedded within core human history--evident in our stories, rituals and symbols. At the same time, we eat, wear and cage them with seeming indifference, consuming them in countless ways.
Our connection to animals today is often developed through assimilation and appropriation; we absorb them into our lives, yet we no longer know of their origin. Most people are cut off from the steps involved in their processing or acquisition, shielded from witnessing their death or decay. I am interested in moving within these contradictions, always wondering if the notion of sacred will survive alongside our evolution.
Bio:
Born and raised in Chicago, Colleen Plumb worked as a graphic designer for several years before switching gears to pursue a degree in photography. She holds an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago (1999), where she is currently an adjunct faculty member. She makes photographs ab out connections--or the lack thereof--between humans and the natural world.
Plumb’s work is in several collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL and Fidelity Investments in Boston, MA. Her photographs are part of the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Chicago Project at Catherine Edelman Gallery and are featured online in Photo-Eye’s Photographer’s Showcase. Plumb’s work has been widely published.
She was a 2008 First Edition Hot Shot at Jen Bekman Gallery. She has upcoming solo shows at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO and the Historic Water Tower Gallery in Chicago.
http://www.temastauffer.com/dog_show.html
Tema Stauffer was born in 1973 and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at The School of the International Center of Photography and William Paterson University. Her work is represented by Daniel Cooney Fine Art Gallery in New York City.
Tema graduated from Oberlin College in 1995 and received a Master's Degree in Photography from The University of Illinois at Chicago in 1998. She received CAAP grants for projects in 1999 and 2000 and also contributed a series of photographs shot on ride-alongs with police officers to the CITY2000, an archive of photographs examining the city of Chicago in the year 2000.
In 2001, Tema moved to Minneapolis. She collaborated on projects with a minimalist music ensemble called Smattering, including a fusion of digital photography, drawing, and sound at the Cowles Conservatory of The Walker Art Center in July 2002. A large body of her work was shown in an exhibition with The Minnesota Center for Photography at The Katherine E. Nash Gallery at The University of Minnesota, and in a solo exhibition at The Rochester Art Center in 2004.
She has participated in seven group shows at Jen Bekman Gallery and her solo show, “American Stills”, opened in October 2004. Fifteen images from this body of work were selected by The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago for the Midwest Photographers Project. Her work has also been exhibited at Fotofest 2010 Biennial in Houston, The Chicago Cultural Center, The Terra Museum of American Art, The Musee Departmental d' Art Contemporain de Rouchechourt, The Hyde Park Art Center, The Detroit Contemporary, The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, The 3rd Ward Brooklyn, Tyler School of Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Adrian College Gallery, Central Lakes College Gallery, The Joymore Gallery, The Butcher Shop Gallery, The Gallery 400, The Icebox Gallery, Heaven Gallery, David Allen Gallery, Jon Oulman Gallery, The Lyceum Theatre Gallery, Dean Jenson Gallery, Moti Hasson Gallery, Randall Scott Gallery and Sasha Wolf Gallery.
Tema has shot for The Chicago Reader, The City Pages, The Rake Magazine, Lavender Magazine, The Village Voice, and W Magazine. She has contributed to online publications including Ausgang, A Field Guide to the North American Family and Humble Arts Foundation’s Group Show. Tema was a finalist for the McKnight Photography Fellowship in 2005 and was nominated for the KLM Paul Huf Award in 2008. She is also currently a curator for Culturehall, an online resource for contemporary art.
dog show : Couple with Weimaraner / Porter County Fairgrounds / Valparaiso, IN / June 1998
Bill Charles GallerySage Sohier
www.sagesohier.com
Bharat Sikka
http://www.bharatsikka.com/
Bharat Sikka (b 1973) grew up and then worked as a photographer in India before deciding to study at the Parson's School of Design where he earned a BFA in photography. Establishing a fine art approach to the field of photography, as an art form Bharat documents contemporary visions of India. His portfolio consists of environmental portraits of “Indian men”, “Urban landscapes” in India and a personal project on his family. Since his first exhibition "India n Men" at the Artists Space in NYC, his work has been displayed in numerous national and international exhibitions, including one at the National Museum of India (2008). Bharat has contributed for magazines and publications such as the New Yorker, I.D, Vogue, Vogue Homme International, Details and Time Magazine, where his work was featured as amongst the best photographs of 2005. Bharat now lives and works between Europe and India.
West CoastFahey/Klein Gallery
Jill Greenberg
http://www.manipulator.com/
Jill Greenberg was born in Montreal, Canada in 1967. At the age of 2, her family moved to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan where Greenberg began her arts education while attending Cranbrook’s elementary school where she was in the photo darkroom in 5th grade. Many extra-curricular courses supplemented her arts education: Kingswood, Birmingham Bloomfield Art Association, and the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Before senior year in High School, she enrolled in Rhode Island School of Design’s pre-college program in Illustration 1984. Senior year, she was the recipient of the Traub Scholarship for Art from Andover High School, which afforded her the opportunity to attend Parsons in Paris for Photography the summer before entering college in Providence at RISD.
She earned a BFA with honors, RISD ‘89 Photo with a senior thesis called “The Female Object”; took a class at Brown University, in Semiotics. After graduation, Greenberg moved to New York City. Interned at Pace MacGill, and enrolled in continuing education classes at School of Visual Arts: Studio Art, Contemporary Art History, Photoshop 1.0 in 1991.
Then, after almost-but not quite- getting into the Whitney Program for fine art in 1992, she opted to focus primarily on assignment work until 2001, when the “Monkey Portraits*” series began.
Julie Blackmon
http://www.julieblackmon.com/index.cfm
Domestic Vacations:
The Dutch proverb “a Jan Steen household” originated in the 17th century and is used today to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, helped inspire this body of work. I am the oldest of nine children and now the mother of three. As Steen’s personal narratives of family life depicted nearly 400 yrs. ago, the conflation of art and life is an area I have explored in photographing the everyday life of my family and the lives of my sisters and their families at home. These images are both fictional and auto-biographical, and reflect not only our lives today and as children growing up in a large family, but also move beyond the documentary to explore the fantastic elements of our everyday lives, both imagined and real.
The stress, the chaos, and the need to simultaneously escape and connect are issue that I investigate in this body of work. We live in a culture where we are both “child centered” and “self-obsessed.” The struggle between living in the moment versus escaping to another reality is intense since these two opposites strive to dominate. Caught in the swirl of soccer practices, play dates, work, and trying to find our way in our “make-over” culture, we must still create the space to find ourselves. The expectations of family life have never been more at odds with each other. These issues, as well as the relationship between the domestic landscape of the past and present, are issues I have explored in these photographs. I believe there are moments that can be found throughout any given day that bring sanctuary. It is in finding these moments amidst the stress of the everyday that my life as a mother parallels my work as an artist, and where the dynamics of family life throughout time seem remarkably unchanged. As an artist and as a mother, I believe life’s most poignant moments come from the ability to fuse fantasy and reality: to see the mythic amidst the chaos.
Broken Toy
Pigment Ink Print
22x22"
Kopeikin Gallery
Andrew Miksys
http://www.andrewmiksys.com/
ANDREW MIKSYS is a native of Seattle, Washington. His photography
has been shown internationally including exhibitions at the New Orleans
Museum of Art, Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre, and De Appel Contemporary
Arts Centre in Amsterdam. In 2002 he was selected by Photo District News (PDN)
as one of the "top 30 emerging photographers to watch" and in 2006 he
was featured in Slate magazine as Slate's "Artist of the Month". Miksys has also
been the recipient of grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation (2000), the J. William Fulbright Program (1998 and 2002) and the
Aaron Siskind Foundation (2009). He currently divides his time between Seattle
and Vilnius, Lithuania.
Thomas Wrede
http://thomas-wrede.de/photography/magic-worlds
International
Unit (Netherlands)
Isabella Rozendaal
http://www.isabellarozendaal.com/
http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=dq072&i=&i2=&CFID=11377251&CFTOKEN=35640281
Jasper Buninga
http://www.jasperbuninga.com/
Stills Gallery (Australia)
Sandy Edwards
http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/artists/edwards/index.php?obj_id=about&nav=0
Sandy Edwards is one of Australia's leading documentary photographers. Her images have been widely exhibited and published. Her work focuses on the portrayal of women and Aboriginal issues.
Her best known work Paradise is a Place is an evocative black and white series about a young girl's growth to adulthood set on the far south coast of NSW. This highly successful exhibition has been published by Random House with an accompanying story by Gillian Mears. Her series Welcome to Brewarrina, is an intimate portrait of the Aboriginal community in the NSW country town of Brewarrina.
Indelible (2004), was a 10-year retrospective of her more personal work. The resulting exhibition was a meditation on portraiture, exploring themes at the intersection of human lives: trust and relationships, growing up and ageing. With a magnificent quality of colour and light, Edwards' work tells the story of not just her life, but touches on universal truths about our interconnectedness and the ultimate importance of relationships in life. From July 2005 - July 2006 Sleep late from Indelible is the feature image on Melbourne's Mirvac Yarra's Edge Tower billboard.
First Love (1999), a series on a first long term relationship, was exhibited as part of Close Relations at the Australian Centre for Photography and Self Assured, on teenage girls, which marked a move into colour.
Her work is held in collections at the Art Gallery of NSW, Parliament House Canberra and the National Gallery of Australia. Sandy Edwards is also the curator of two major photographic public art programs - Sydney Airport 2000 Art Project with Linda Slutzkin, and Sydney Looking Forward, part of AMP and Sydney City Council's project Art & About.
Alasdair and Peter, both blue, backyard, Clifton Hill, Melbourne, 1999
Beverley Veasey
http://home.zipworld.com.au/~bev/
This work presents a number of artificial habitats for animals. These purpose built spaces are found in zoos, shows and aquariums around the world. The inhabitants of these spaces are absent and so we are left to ponder what animal may reside there. As more of their natural habitat is destroyed, these simulated environments may be the only way that we can engage with other animal species of the natural world in the future.
Habitat #1, 2008
from Habitats
Lightjet print
Throughout her art practice Beverley Veasey makes wry and gentle observations on the relations of humans to the world around them - the landscapes we build for ourselves and our engagement with the natural world.
Beverley Veasey's previous exhibitions, Natural History and Natural History #2 depicted animals and birds in artificial environments. In Habitats, exhibited at Stills Gallery in 2008, she is still interested in the artificial however this time the inhabitants, the animals, are nowhere to be found. We are left to gaze at the man made spaces created to replicate the wild - taking us 'into the wild'.
There are monkey bars, but no orangutans; forests, but no bears; and token logs absent of reptiles lizards or snakes. Water holes suggest life just out of sight, but no matter how much our eyes search the crevices amongst fake rocks and grass, we find nothing. At the back of the habitats, positioned in rock faces and painted landscapes, are doors - leading nowhere. Most remarkable are the painted landscapes reminiscent of Namatjira paintings or American recreations of the Grand Canyon. These mythic landscapes are the stuff of postcard dreams of travel beyond the limitations of the urban.
In 2008/09, a selection of works from Habitats were featured in Dubbo Regional Gallery's exhibition, In Captivity, which focused on the theme 'the animal in art'. Dubbo Regional Gallery acquired a number of these works for its permanent collection. In 2008 works from Habitats also featured in the exhibitions Beastly, MOP gallery, Sydney and It must be love, Mars Gallery Melbourne and Veasey was selected as a finalist in the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2008, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne.
Natural History 2006 and its continuation Natural History #2 2007, are a collection of images depicting animals and birds in artificial environments. Unlike the animals in a zoo amongst fake rocks and ponds, these animals are in stark white enclosures. In removing all traces of a natural habitat Veasey's works amplify our often-mediated experience of the natural world in a subtle and potent way.
In isolating animals such as monkeys and goats and presenting them almost as if they were subjects of a studio portrait she also creates pathos. Their animal expressions have a melancholy air that we could read as a response to their spare and finite world, an effect enhanced by the subtle tonal quality of the works.
Beverley Veasey has been a practising artist and teacher for over 10 years. She currently lectures in Photomedia at the National Art School in Sydney. Her work has been selected in many major prizes including the Citigroup Portrait Prize, the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize and the Olive Cotton Prize and continues to be featured in numerous exhibitions both in Australia and overseas.
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