Category: Art & Design

Focus on Vernacular: Greg Sand: Chronicle - LENSCRATCH

To begin this week of celebrating artists using vernacular or found photographs, we need to describe this ever expanding genre. We use the term vernacular to illustrate this week’s images because they employ the visual language of the everyday, photograph

Artist Greg Sand has a legacy of considering other people’s photographs, transforming the images in new ways to speak about memory, the passage of time, mortality, and the photograph’s role in shaping our experience of loss. We are thrilled to have Greg as our juror this month for the Vernacular Exhibition which will run on Saturday. Greg shares his own thoughts on the subject and Roland Barthes words from Camera Lucida, “Photography’s unique ability to capture a fleeting moment allows it to expose the temporality of life. “By giving me the absolute past of the pose… the photograph tells me death in the future… I shudder over a catastrophe which has already occurred.” These words from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida precisely describe how I feel when I consider a photograph so old that the subject must be dead. My response has a number of layers: I feel an immediate connection to the living person in the photograph, followed by a dread of what inevitably is to come for them, completed by a sense of grief over what has, of course, already transpired. This reaction is why my work utilizes found photographs, which I manipulate to create a narrative exploring mortality. My work aims to question the nature of photographs and challenge the traditional definition of photography.

The Artist Intervenes: Kevin Hoth - LENSCRATCH

In Immortal Chromatic, artist Kevin Hoth transforms the process of destruction into a cathartic act. Initially serving as a coping mechanism to a singular traumatic event, the project explores the inherent fragility and impermanence of life, and our inabi

Joe Rudko: Tiny Mirrors

I recently curated an exhibition, Beyond the Surface,  that will open at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in January about artists who intervene with the surface of a photograph. In the process of considering work to include, gallerist Tarrah Von Lintel introduce

Dan Eldon and the power of creative activism

On July 12, 1993, Kathy Eldon attempted to process the news that no mother ever wants to hear – that her 22-year-old son had been murdered. Earlier that day, American-led UN forces had launched an aerial attack on the suspected headquarters of Somali warl

Juxtapoz Magazine - KAWS: Art Louder Than Words

It’s hard not to notice the astronomical change in the art landscape over the past 25 years. The notoriety and fame that a generation of artists ...

From toys to graffiti, fine art to fashion, art collecting and public art that bridges American pop culture to an international audience, KAWS has defined an era where the artist can be whatever he or she wants to be without compromise. And, in many ways, KAWS has achieved success as an artist without being shackled to a particular thing, a genre, if you will. He really is known as just KAWS, and by and large, he is quite content.