Hiroshi Sugimoto images

Henry the VIII and Anne Boleyn, photos taken at Madame Tussuad's Wax Museum!


This is an image from the show I saw. He exposed film directly to a 400,000 volt generator. The prints are huge!!!




This is from a series called History of History. Amazing

More on Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. In 1970, Sugimoto studied politics and sociology at St. Paul’s University in Tokyo. Two years later, in 1972, he retrained as an artist and received his BFA in Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California. Afterward, Sugimoto settled in New York City. Sugimoto has spoken of his work as an expression of ‘time exposed’, or photographs serving as a time capsule for a series of events in time. His work also focuses on transience of life, and the conflict between life and death.


For his 2009 series Lightning Fields he abandoned the use of the camera, producing photographs using a 400,000 volt Van de Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto the film.^[1] The highly detailed results combine bristling textures and branching sparks into highly evocative images.

“

I try to never be satisfied; this way I will always be challenging my spirit.[2]

”

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

Holy moly. Two weeks ago I saw the Hiroshi Sugimoto show at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea and it blew my mind.....

More Helmut Smits

The whole notion that advertising and brand worship today is almost comparable to religion in the middle ages. At least in a sense that most art is commisioned for advertising. Advertising is a truely fascinating science. The use of text or imagery to provoke emotion, be it nostalgia or confidence, is an interesting practice. I find that a lot of Helmuts work contains similar components or concept as advertising but playfully with one of the key components removed or changed.

Artist of the week- Helmut Smits

So I've been about shitty about updating this. I blame my roommate's dog. Anywho, this time I want to share about a lesser obvious contemporary artist.

Helmut Smits. I couldn't find much about his bio, all I know is tht he ws born in 1974 and is based out of the Netherlands. He graduated Hertogenbosch Academy for Visual Arts in 2001 and has rarely shown his work in the US. Ironically a lot of his work is coping with American, consumerist and advertising culture.  The first piece of his I found was machine that turns Coca Cola into clean drinking water

Laurie Simmons video

Laurie Simmons brief bio

Laurie Simmons



Laurie Simmons is one of the first contemporary American photographers to have created elaborately staged narrative photographs. Using dolls to act out piquant scenarios within specially constructed environments, she has slyly commented on contemporary culture while re-creating “a sense of the 50s that I knew was both beautiful and lethal.” Prodigiously creative, she has produced fourteen fully developed series since the 1970s.
 

Laurie Simmons was born on Long Island, New York, on October 3, 1949. She received a BFA from Tyler School of Art in 1971.^[1]

Since the mid 1970s, Simmons has staged scenes for her camera with dolls, ventriloquist dummies, objects on legs and occasionally people, to create images with intensely psychological subtexts.

Along with Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons is counted as a core member of the Pictures Generation, whose appropriations, manipulations and simulations of various photographic genres profoundly altered the course of late-20th-century art. In the mid-1970s, however, Ms. Simmons was a young art school graduate in New York hoping to support herself as a freelance commercial photographer. Aiming to get a job illustrating a toy company catalog, she photographed dollhouse furniture. She didn’t get the assignment, but she found a vision whose resonant possibilities can be seen in this enchanting exhibition of black-and-white images dating mostly from 1976 and ’77.^[3]

Simmons is particularly interesting and inspiring to me. I feel like categorizing one's art as "feminist art" is similar to categorizing black artists work as "black art". Every thought and interaction can affect your mind, perhaps only subconciously, and whether one is trying or not, unless you are completely dettached it will eventually find its way into your work. We forget what it must have been like for women and African Americans in that time. I still complain now...Simmons work plays with a lot of the 1950's familial ideals, but somewhat objectively and usually humorously. The puppets themselves are art objects which with we "empathize" and are playfully nostalgic. Her work is dark but not violent or forceful.