This video was filmed during Viktoria Sorochinski’s 2012 exhibition “Anna & Eve”. Individual movie clips and images from the show can be found here. Enjoy!

This video was filmed during Gary Briechle’s 2011 exhibition “Photographs”. Individual movie clips and images from the show can be found here. Enjoy!

Joel-Peter Witkin: An Objective Eye
Directed by Thomas Marino
Executive Producer B.C. Furtney
Written by B.C. Furtney & Thomas Marino
Produced by Sid Wimbish, Shawn Leyva & Thomas Marino
Director of Photography Nickolas Rossi
Audio & Lighting Supervisor Ernesto Galan
Music by Trevin Pinto

This video was filmed during Kelli Connell’s 2011 exhibition “Double Life”. Individual movie clips and images from the show can be found here. Enjoy!

Gregory Scott's studio during production of art work for Art Toronto

Gregory Scott's studio during production of art work for Art Toronto

Greg’s newest piece, Thanks for the Scribbles, 2011, which is based on the work of Cy Twombly, will premier at Art Toronto. If you are in Toronto, be sure to visit our booth [#824] to see it in person!

Thanks for the Scribbles, 2011 © Gregory Scott

Art Toronto 2011 – Booth #824
October 28 – October 31, 2011
Opening Night Preview, Thursday, October 27

Location:
Metro Toronto Convention Centre
North Building, Exhibit Hall A & B
255 Front Street West
Toronto, ON M5V 2X7

Click here for two complimentary tickets.
Download show guide here.
www.tiafair.com

Below are three images by Chicago Project artist, Matt Austin, along with his artist statement. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit the show page and click on the film clapper next to his images.

Lamp, 2009 © Matt Austin

Wake is a photographic narrative that represents the struggles that have affected my family over the past few years. The work began with my father being violently evicted while I was studying at a college in Ireland. It has now continued throughout the difficult following two years that have brought his resultant homelessness and three deaths in our extended family. The narrative is comprised of my photographs and writing, along with excerpts of e-mails from my dad while I was abroad. By making metaphorical connections between our present economic time and physical death, I use this work to serve as a kind of elegiac ceremony for these trying experiences. Wake functions as my personal understanding of our situation and an example of a story that is unfortunately familiar to so many others living in this generation.

—Matt Austin

Dad looking up at the trees in Boston, 2009 © Matt Austin

Slippers and Flannel, 2009 © Matt Austin

Below are two images by Chicago Project artist, Wm. Bradley Johnson, along with his artist statement. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit the show page and click on the film clapper next to his images.

Greg and Linda, 2009 © Wm. Bradley Johnson

Proxemics is a series that deals with entering into someone else’s personal relationship and space. When one walks into a home that he or she is unfamiliar with personal territory is broken. In essence, an uncomfortable feeling can arise within the outsider, a sensitivity that one would not get upon entering his or her own home. Creating photographs in these places helps define the feeling of proxemics, by taking the viewer into a stranger’s space. Using upper class society in these photographs makes it difficult for the everyday, economically sound person to relate. Additionally, difficulty arises in getting over feelings of discomfort or uneasiness when the surroundings portray another’s personal territory that is so unfamiliar. The use of bright color within these stages of reality further pushes the viewer to feel anxiety when viewing proxemics. The color of these photos defines a deeper perspective into the individual personalities as does the interior of each character’s space.  Including subjects and creating dramatic scenarios between the couple within their homes further pursues that uncomfortable feeling for viewers, allowing them to enter into the strangers’ physical territory. Whether my subjects are up close and in the viewer’s personal space or far back, expressions and interactions within the photograph define who the couple really is, and it is only then that the ideal suburban lifestyle reveals a true face.

—Wm. Bradley Johnson

Bill and Kerry, 2009 © Wm. Bradley Johnson

Sphere, 2009 © Bill O'Donnell

These pictures are shot in a rusting tin dollhouse. This home functions as a metaphor for an afterlife, the dwelling place of human ideals. The scenes are inspired by three themes of the Western philosophical tradition: Knowledge, Conduct and Governance. The work treats these essential questions: What is the nature of reality? How does one live a virtuous life? How is one related to one’s society? While inspired by the formal, particular structure of Western philosophical inquiry, these are undeniably haunting uncertainties that have been pondered throughout human history.

The cyclical acquisition, loss and regaining of a culture’s knowledge can be seen in events ranging from the maturation and death of a wise individual to the building and destruction of a great library. In my pictures, piles of dust, ash and books suggest the frailty of both the human body and any ephemeral treasury of insights. The indispensable utility of wisdom is represented in Greek mythology as a golden thread; the one that leads Theseus safely back from the depths of the Minotaur’s labyrinth is repeated as Plato’s golden cord, a path of Reason that guides us safely through the maze of appetite and emotion. A golden cord weaves its way throughout the dollhouse in this work.

The ideal world of geometric forms has been used for centuries to suggest the existence of immutable truths. Apparently transcendent geometric forms appear in a number of these pictures.

The tension between individual liberty and societal responsibility is often viewed as a threshold to be honored or crossed. In many images, I use windows and doors, the liminal membranes between public and private domains, to address questions of tension between society and the individual.

—Bill O’Donnell

Escape, 2008 © Bill O'Donnell

Books, 2007 © Bill O'Donnell

Arnold, 2011 © Justyna Badach

“Inwardness as a place of absolute freedom within one’s own self was discovered in late antiquity by those who had no place of their own in the world.” Hannah Arendt (Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

My images are an investigation of rejection, isolation, marginalization and expression of individual desires. As an artist that came to the United States as a refugee, I am trying to make sense of personal displacement and a fragmented personal history. As a woman, I am curious about what my life would be like if I were a man and the possibility of inhabiting a masculine space. Having spent my childhood under a totalitarian regime, I have little faith in the veracity of photographic documents. My interest in images lay in their subjectivity and their relationship to individual experience.

For the past 5 years I have been collaborating on a series of portraits with bachelors. These men tend to exist on the margins of culture and are often considered invisible by society. I usually meet the men for the first time when I arrive at their home to collaborate on a picture. The images we construct together depict the safety of places where they withdraw from the world to think, meditate and act out their fantasies. I am interested in the way that these personal spaces serve as both portrait and the junction between masculine and feminine, the man and myself.

Like bachelorhood, these spaces are both a refuge and a prison; the place where the men get back in touch with themselves by depriving themselves of an emotional connection with the outside world.  To gain access into this solitary world I must give up control of my environment and perhaps my safety. By relinquishing a level of control to the men, I am able to engage our mutual vulnerability, loneliness and discomfort.

The process of making these images embodies a form of role reversal, a feminine penetration into a masculine space. Many of the men expand a great deal of effort to arrange their living space, developing a kind of personal iconography or domestic vernacular. At times, this space is so profoundly personal, that it feels like I am standing in someone else’s skin, a space too uncomfortable for anyone other than the bachelor to occupy. I am very interested in this part of the process, the juncture where the man’s personal experience, their discomfort, collapses into my own and their voice becomes mine. This interaction is rooted in a symbiotic exchange of power or the engendering of other. The images/text represent the boundaries of what the man and I choose to reveal/conceal about ourselves to each other and the camera.

—Justyna Badach

John, 2011 © Justyna Badach