Michiko Kon: Mistress of the dark

Michiko Kon: Mistress of the dark

BY JOHN L. TRAN

The abominable beauty of Michiko Kon’s work is back.

In the early 1990s Kon was one of the first female photographic artists from Japan to achieve widespread international recognition. Her work combined a shocking use of animal parts with meticulous technique in a way that was both unsettling and visually seductive. She reached prominence around the time that Damien Hirst first exhibited his shark in a tank of formaldehyde, but some years after Joel-Peter Witkin had started using animal and human body parts in staged photographic tableaux in the ’80s.

Kon’s “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” vibe, however, makes the British superstar’s butterfly works look like the self-comforting behavior of Frankenstein’s monster sticking stuff to a wall, while compared to Witkin’s darker and more stridently transgressive work, there is a Rococo-like decorativeness and wit to what she does.

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Vanity featured in Must-See Art Guide: New York on Artnet

Must-See Art Guide: New York
BY Tatiana Berg

Are you ready for Armory week? Ready or not, here it is: You’ve got NADA, you’ve got VOLTA, you’ve got SCOPE, and last but certainly not least, you’ve got the Armory Show. That’s a lot! If you want help navigating it all, we’ve got you covered with our comprehensive go-to guide of the fairs.

But art was not meant to live in art fairs alone. So pull on your snow and/or rain boots, and get traipsing out to New York’s local galleries to find out what else is going on out there.

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Aesthetica Interviews Maroesjka Lavigne

Sublime Topographies

The second edition of PHOTOFAIRS San Francisco brings together a diverse range of practitioners that investigate landscapes and subject matter from a multitude of perspectives. Maroesjka Lavigne (b. 1989) records remote corners of the earth. Land of Nothingness – a series which possesses a similar uncanny quality – captures the sublime topography of Namibia, one of the least populated regions in the world.

A: Your work covers themes of beauty, identity and varying landscapes, often drawing on a minimalistic, muted colour scheme. What can we expect to see from you during the San Francisco Photo Fair? 
ML: There will be a piece of my new work at the fair. In a way, it’s an extension of my previous work. I’m still looking for a specific type of landscape, but this series specifically focuses on the colour, shape and the overall tactility and texture of the land.

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Musee Magazine Reviews Murray Fredericks: Vanity

Exhibition Review: Vanity By Murray Fredericks

By Ilana Jael

In Act 3, Scene 2, of Hamlet, William Shakespeare suggests that great art must hold “a mirror up to nature”.  And over 400 years later, photographer Murray Fredericks has more or less taken this suggestion literally to sublime result in his photo series Vanity, on view from now until April 7th at the Robert Mann Gallery in Chelsea. The “nature” in question being reflected upon  is Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, the largest lake and lowest natural point in Frederick’s native Australia. This exhibition is the first chance the photographer has been granted to share his substantial gifts with the United States, and his appearance across the pond with such awe-striking images in tow is certainly a welcome one.

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Holly Andres installation at Museum of Northwest Art

The Homecoming
When photographs tell stories

By Stephen Hunter

A sophisticated artist and professor in Portland, Oregon, Holly Andres remains refreshingly modest about her sudden success. She receives commissions for photo shoots from mainstream publications like the New York Times, Time, and the New Yorker, and her fine art gets attention in Art in America, Art Forum, Glamour, and beyond.

In her current Museum of Northwest Art installation in La Conner, “The Homecoming,” Andres’ still photographs tell three stories: “Summer of the Hornets,” “River Road,” and “The Fall of Spring Hill.”

Andres stages her dramas in woodlands, meadows, dirt roads and carefully prepared interiors. The scenes with professional actors are interspersed with richly colored and textured still lifes, which subtly advance the action. The bright colors and simplicity of her compositions lure the viewer into what soon proves to be a darker, even menacing, subject matter. 

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B & H Podcast: Cig Harvey—Think, See, Make, Listen

What a start to the New Year for the B&H Photography Podcast. We are incredibly fortunate to kick off our year with photographer Cig Harvey and gallerist Caroline Wall, director of the Robert Mann Gallery. In conjunction with her new book, You an Orchestra, You a Bomb, Harvey is currently exhibiting at the Robert Mann Gallery, and we were able to speak with artist and gallerist to discuss the making of her latest portfolio and the collaborative process of exhibition.

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Cig Harvey featured in NY Mag's The Cut

The Beauty of Stillness

By Jane Drinkard

"Photographer Cig Harvey’s photographs allow her viewers to stop for a moment. Serene, mundane, tantalizingly still, and disruptive all at once, her images portray the natural world, families, and the present moment. 'I started looking at this idea of the gasp and awe,' Harvey told the Cut. 'We gasp when something is beautiful, and we gasp when something is terrible. I’m searching for that push/pull in each image.'"

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NYT announces installation by Mary Mattingly at Storm King

A rendering of Mary Mattingly’s proposed work using tropical trees for “Indicators: Artists on Climate Change,” which will open at Storm King Art Center in May.

Storm King Show to Focus on Climate Change in 2018

By Daniel McDermon

Storm King Art Center is best known for its grand landscape of rolling hills and its display of large-scale outdoor sculpture, including works by the likes of Richard Serra and Maya Lin. But for a special exhibition in 2018, this bucolic sculpture park in Orange County, N.Y., will focus directly on a hot political topic: climate change.

That subject “has always been very close to Storm King,” said the curator Nora Lawrence in an interview. “This is something that is very urgent for us, and we have seen some smaller changes already in our environment.”

“Indicators: Artists on Climate Change,” which opens May 19, will include work from more than a dozen artists, including several pieces newly created for the exhibition. It was organized by Ms. Lawrence, along with David Collens, Storm King’s director and chief curator, and Sarah Diver.

One participating artist is Mary Mattingly, the founder of Swale, a floating food forest on a barge that toured New York City in the summer, allowing visitors to harvest fresh produce for free. For Storm King, she is preparing an as-yet-untitled work in which she will bring trees from a tropical climate — mango, coconut and fig are in contention — to the Hudson River Valley, calling attention to the way that changing temperatures may affect the future of food.

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Maroesjka Lavigne from Robert Mann Gallery speaks to PHOTOFAIRS

PHOTOFAIRS | San Francisco is excited to announce Robert Mann Gallery will be taking part in this years fair, the gallery represents 20th century masters and an international cadre of emerging and mid-career artists working in photo-based art.

Hi Maroesjka, Can you tell us a bit about how you first got into photography?
I studied Audio-visual Arts in Secondary School but it only hit me how interesting photography was when I started studying Photography in High school (school of arts, Ghent- Belgium). When I saw how many different paths you could choose in photography and how you can really tell your story, something that otherwise perhaps would be inexplicable. I got very interested. Photography as an art medium is lovely. You can do it everywhere and whenever. It’s the perfect reason to travel, to look around and enrich your life. It’s perfect for curious people, I think.

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Artist Talk: Michael Kenna at Princeton University

Artist talk with Michael Kenna
Saturday, December 2nd at 2pm in McCosh 10

Widely considered one of the foremost landscape photographers of his generation, Michael Kenna has been looking at our world in ways quite out of the ordinary for more than forty years. In conjunction with the exhibition Rouge: Michael Kenna, the artist will speak to the experiences and influences of his photographic explorations. A reception in the Museum will follow.