Category Archives: Constructed Illusions

Noriko Furunishi – constructed texture of place

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Noriko Furunishi .  “…how [the] images end up don’t really exist but, the texture and place exists [in the image]…”

The image of the human being within the landscape is of course important feedback on scale and helps the “viewer / audience” place themselves within the imagined context – a surrogate of sorts I suppose.

Noriko Furunishi Untitled (Rock), 2006 C-Print

Noriko Furunishi
Untitled (Rock), 2006
C-Print
edition of 10
40 x 30 inches  (image via: Murry Guy)

Consider how different landscapes appear though with and without human scale – an overt occupation.   We (as viewers) project a lot with regard to our own physical understanding and sense of size, scale and measure with the inclusion of the human figure within the image – almost as an aid to imagining ourselves with-in the image – a way into the picture…

What I like about Furunishi’s pictures is that odd sense of vertigo – something about comparing what I expect the landscape to look like – what if feels to be in the landscape – by this I mean feet on the ground -standing and perhaps looking out over the horizon….  and what the landscape scene looks like as imagined by Furunishi.

A Link to an interview with Noriko Furunishi and a blog on past exhibits…MIA (Minneapolis Institue of Art) and the  MIA’s “New Pictures” feature….  great stuff and worth the time to browse.  Nice to see the work get more exposure and to see new work!

Previous post of mine on Furunishi work that I found interesting via Blind Spot …

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What’s new…? Beni Bischof

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BENI BISCHOF

Kirche #1 - Beni Bischof

Above images from “BRICKED CASTLES” / Beni Bischof

New work to me…  I like how these images defy easy categorization – perhaps it is best to simply say these are very good critical pictures.

My impression is that these works float in almost pure picture form. The picture contains the elements of  a photograph, a drawing, a painting – and it is incidental upon what medium the image rests…  That is something new and exciting.

What’s so great?

These pictures are modern and potent.

Rather than admiring the laborious recreation of “what has already been”, Bishcof’s pictures (at least those in the “Bricked Castles series” ) move beyond recollection, imitation, or sorry re-creation and reference. Quite unlike for example this work posted on Conscientious by Jörg Colberg- which rests quite heavily on someone else’s shoulders.  In my opinion the referencing sort of approach / process as exampled by Hiroyuki Masuyama recreating Caspar David Friedrich leads only to diluting the potential potency of both…

Bischof‘s Bricked Castles series for me has that potent quality of allowing one to postulate multiple meanings… especially considering the current context of world affairs for example between the “eastern” and the “western” cultural (religion) views of the world…

See more about Bischof here.

John Gerrard – Sculpture / Photography in Video

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Sow Farm, animation still by John Gerrard

Animation still from “Sow Farm” by John Gerrard

More on Gerrard’s website

Currently showing at the Thomas Dane Gallery

Combination of cinematography, sculpture and a quite nice example of creating a sense of mood with lighting and motion to reveal the subject.  Highly recommend visiting this link to a sample vid for a sense of the work – albeit a “web” experience – which not having seen it in person myself I wonder if it has more presence.  Wonderful application of the “inherent” qualities of many computer generated realities – that of being a “bit too clean” and eerily sterile which fits perfectly with the subject matter in my opinion and to great effect.

John Gerrard_ Sow Farm (near Libbey OK)

John Gerrard_ Sow Farm (near Libbey OK) – (animation)

This is the opposite in a sense of the escapism embodied in many popular animations (thinking of that place called Pandora that has the vital element unobtanium – so needed on this ruined earth)  unfortunately this is a reality modeled in  a 3-D world we don’t have to go far experience in real life.  Yet another example of the artist and the “mental model”…