I was inspired by some pictures Laura El Tantawy showed us from In the Shadow of the Pyramids at her recent presentation at POST, to start shooting very close up. I got out my 60mm f/2.4 macro lens and started using it as a walking around lens in the street to see what I might come up with. This is an atypical way to use such a lens so I’m really just experimenting to see what I can learn about shooting this way.
In October we visited the Kiefer / Van Gogh exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Not previously familiar with more than Kiefer’s name, the work and its relationship to van Gogh was stunning. Entirely different, one can nevertheless feel how Kiefer has responded to van Gogh in every image.
“In 1963, aged 18, Anselm Kiefer received a travel bursary that allowed him to follow in Vincent van Gogh’s footsteps through the Netherlands Belgium, and France, first in Paris and ending up in Arles and the neighbouring village of Fourques in Provence. On his travels, which he termed an ‘initiation journey, Kiefer kept a daiary filled with notes and drawings.” ï¹£from the exhibition guide.
A memorial installation at Jubilee Square to count the number of Gazan children killed in the last 2 years.
On the advice of a recent acquaintance we visited the Kellie Miller Arts Gallery in Church Street and saw these lovely ceramics by Elizabeth Price, among many other interesting pieces.
“I Don’t Have Another Land is a contemporary text sculpture by the internationally renowned and Turner Prize-shortlisted artist Nathan Coley. Coley creates these monumental sculptures using existing phrases that come from overheard conversations, song lyrics, news report, books or any found text. I Don’t Have Another Land was a piece of graffiti found on a wall in Jerusalem in the early 2000s. The phrases used in Coley’s artwork take on new meaning in each place they’re exhibited.”
– from the Towner website
Whilst in Barrio Logan we visited Bread & Salt, “a 45,000 square-foot gallery and experimental center for the arts with strong community ties,” and I naturally found a variety of aspects of the space to photograph.
Click any of the images below to enlarge them all.
We passed this sculpture several times on our way to and back from the hotel but I was never able to find any placard or other source of information on it.
.. update. Thanks to eagle-eyed and dedicated blog-follower Lois A Jay, I can now link to more information on the background of this sculpture, All Hands.
I took several shots of this installation but chose this one where I shot straight on, reducing the most central elements, perpendicular to the side I stood on, to mere lines.
“Conceived as a dynamic chess set, Institution vs. The Mass builds on [Anna] Boghiguian’s interest in the cycles of revolution and sociopolitical change throughout history.” see more on the Tate site…
Hanging in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, El Anatsui’s Behind the Red Moon is immense.
Our next stop, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Click into the images for captions on the works (you may need to click the post title first if you’re not seeing this directly on the website). No doubt I’ll look like Duane Hansen’s tourist in a few years.
Bruges’ Groeninge Museum was excellent. Laid out in a somewhat traditional chronological fashion, century by century, it offered laminated placards in every room with explanations for most of the artworks so you didn’t need to bend over to read ill-placed, scantily illuminated placards and block other visitors’ view. Of course, as I’ve been doing in almost every museum we’ve visited, I found the mirrors tto photograph myself in.
Click on the pictures to see them all full-sized (if you’re seeing this in email you may need to click the post title first to make this work).
These large tapestries, Posh Cloths, by Grayson Perry at Victoria Milo, in London were eye-opening. I think the designs are made on a computer using graphics software, then translated to looms that weave the actual tapestry. Note the way text is woven into the images, especially in the map-like tapestries below. A definite inspiration for the text-based work I want to do on inequality. Click into any of the groups of images to see all the pictures in that group enlarged.
