Left To My Own Devices – Inspace

Sachiko Kodama, Morpho Tower

A trip to Edinburgh’s Inspace gallery is a little like going to the Apple store. Filled with futuristic technologies, you’ll probably leave wanting to take everything with you, and the staff there know everything there is to know about what’s on display. This is not your typical gallery: the normal hush is broken by frenetic, irregular melodies, the works are more like inventions, and interaction is actively encouraged.

Left To My Own Devices (ends 4 September) explores the new wave of ‘device art’ – media art that champions the use of audio or visual electronics – and focuses on the emergence of device art between technologists in China, Japan and Scotland.

FOUND, Cybraphon

‘The key here is that technology should not be feared. The works presented may have entertainment value, but they can still be read positively with the same value systems applied to traditional Western art practice.’

The works are – according to convention – unartstic in nature, yet despite this still rely on visual or audible immediacy for effect. Their attraction, therefore, is based on the contrast between innovation and aesthetic appeal. The emphasis is on form tied up with function, and in device art the two come together to create the aesthetic experience.

Device art embodies new technologies and asks that the artist’s concept forms part of everyday lives, extending beyond the gallery walls and its confines. In this way, device art is just another strand of art that responds to the late 20th century dematerialisation and democratisation of the art object.

Toshio Iwai, Tenori-On

Of note is Toshio Iwai’s Tenori-on, an electronic musical grid consisting of 16 x 16 illuminated push button switches that can be activated to make sound. Marrying sound with image, the work recreates a reverberating DIY sounsdcape.

Sachiko Kodama‘s Morpho Tower is entrancing; the reaction of ferrofluids to magnetic fields creates an abstract tower of peaks and valleys that gives the illusion of solidity.

Sachiko Kodama, Morpho Tower

Sachiko Kodama, Morpho Tower

Other highlights include FOUND’s Cybraphon, an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box, whose performance is affected by online community opinion as it searches for web reviews of itself.

FOUND, Cybraphon

Ellie Harrison‘s A Brief History of Privatisation consists of a circle of six electronic massage chairs that represent a key public service of industry, such as health, telecoms and electricity. Behind is an illuminated neon display that scrolls through the years from 1900 to the present, activating the vibrations of the chairs whenever the years are displayed that correspond to the years that specific industry was taken into public ownership.

Ellie Harrison, A Brief History of Privatisation

The exhibition is eclectic, and gives a disparate – but probably intentionally so – account of the ambiguously named ‘device art’. If anything, the massage chairs are at least a good way of killing 15 minutes…

David Mach: coat hangers and collages

David Mach, The Plague of Frogs (Belfast) (2011), image courtesy of Richard Riddick

David Mach, The Plague of Frogs (Detail)

Coat-hanger crucifixes, a matchstick Jesus and Satan, and kitsch collages of biblical scenes form this audacious and intense exhibition of the Scottish Turner-nominated artist David Mach at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre (David Mach: Precious Light, ends 16 October). The exhibition explores Mach’s diverse career and his use of contrasting mediums, which, in this case, all respond to one central theme: the Bible, in particular, the King James Bible, which celebrates its 400^th anniversary this year.

David Mach, The Nativity (Florence), image courtesy of David Mach

The exhibition is not overtly religious, but is filled with social commentary. Mach’s dense, large-scale and fascinating cinematic collages evoke the culture of excess, hedonism and chaos of contemporary society. Filled to the rim with images taken from magazines and other mass media, the scenes are condensed and exaggerated, with people and cluttered objects bustling for space and attention inside the frame. Themes from the bible are treated literally – whether the plague of frogs, the red sea parting, or heaven and hell. Mach used such themes, combined with the familiarity of popular culture, as a springboard to comment on the artificiality, greed and destruction brought by contemporary civilization.

David Mach, Golgotha, image courtesy of David Mach

Meanwhile, Mach’s colossal, explosive crucifixes – Golgotha and Die Harder – capture agony and drama with such realism. Made from coat hangers, the larger-than-life forms scream in agony down at the viewer; their puncturing, explosive forms carrying such intensity in comparison to the more intricate, analytical effect of his collages.

David Mach, Die Harder

Also on view is a bust of Jesus Christ made entirely of matchsticks, which is paired with a version of the head of Satan, burned in a performance on August 4. Mach uses the process of burning as a creative and metamorphic force, which transforms his pop-like sculptures in a cathartic move. Perhaps what’s most interesting is the contrast between his everyday, potentially humorous or abasing materials with the drama and impact of what he is portraying. The two almost work together and feed off each other’s mutual antagonism, adding to the tension of his work.

David Mach, Jesus Christ, image courtesy of David Mach

One floor of the gallery has been transformed into a studio, where Mach and his team are working on a new monumental collage, The Last Supper, throughout August, which will be unveiled on September 20. For its intensity and controversy alone, this exhibition is unlike anything else in Edinburgh at the moment.

Ingrid Calame’s colour maps – the Fruitmarket Gallery

Ingrid Calame, …puEEP... (2001), enamel paint on aluminium

Making an art out of the ground we walk on, American artist Ingrid Calame produces beautifully abstract drawings and paintings with such meticulousness. Currently on show at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery (ends 9 October), these works – made between 1994 and 2011 – are the result of an intricate and obsessive process of tracing the marks, stains and cracks on the ground of urban locations, and layering these into rich arrangements, or what she calls ‘constellations’.

Ingrid Calame, #346 Drawing (Tracing from the Perry Street Projects Wading Pool, Buffalo, NY) (2011), colour pencil on trace Mylar

 

Ingrid Calame, sspspss…UM biddle BOP (1997), enamel paint on trace Mylar

Her pencil drawings on architectural tracing paper (trace Mylar) are delicate and topographical, like abstract maps of weather maps. Her polished enamel paintings on aluminum – made subsequent to the trace Mylar works – have bold, beautiful colour palettes. For these, Calame did not paint one colour on top of the other, but instead painted in each minute detail bit by bit.

Ingrid Calame, detail, #334 Drawing (Tracings from the L.A. River and ArcelorMittal Steel) (2011), coloured pencil on trace Mylar

Ingrid Calame, Lup Bup Zhir POW! (1994/1997), enamel paint on aluminium

Calame created a special site-specific wall drawing for the Gallery, which occupies one entire wall of the upper floor. Calame punched tiny holes in the trace Mylar, through which she pushed pure pigment. The result is a fascinating work, which lines have an eery glow and subtle variation of colour modulation.

Although these works are repetitive in their visual vocabulary, losing yourself in these wild landscapes of lines, shapes and colour is an entrancing visual experience.

The poet of the mirror and the architect of space: Michelangelo Pistoletto and Peter Zumthor at the Serpentine

Michelangelo Pistoletto, The Mirror of Judgement, Serpentine Gallery

London’s Serpentine Gallery is currently combining the work of renowned Italian Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (in The Mirror of Judgement, ends 17 September) – which consumes the entire gallery space in a site-specific, space altering installation – alongside the Gallery’s 11^th pavilion, designed this year by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor (Hortus Conclusus, ends 16 October). These two ‘constructions’ both use the idea of space, our relationship to it and movements through it, as their subject.

In 1967 the Italian critic Germano Celant coined the term Arte Povera, meaning ‘poor art’. Arte Povera artists used everyday, natural and fragile materials to explore the relationship between art and life. Form and material were engaged in a celebration of a more rural, pre-industrial and non-materialized world, which resulted in artworks that were simultaneously playful yet serious, exaggerated yet intensely real.

Pistoletto has installed a labyrinthine arrangement of rolls of loosely folded, intertwining corrugated card through the galleries, which directs the visitors’ paths and engages them with the space. The installation asks that you think about the building’s original architecture and the viewer, in turn, becomes an intrinsic part of the installation as they meander through its passageways and turn the exhibition into a personal experience. His economy of materials evokes a relationship between the natural and unnatural worlds; a series of mirrors situated around the installation reflect their surroundings and the viewers, linking art and life together.

Meanwhile, four hidden sculptures representing the four major world religions are tucked around the exhibition: a prayer mat, a statue of Buddha, a prie-dieu, and arched mirrors representing the Torah. All are united by the labyrinthine passageways and are reflected back out by the mirrors. His work The Third Passage (2004), found in the central room, is composed of a large mirrored obelisk flanked by three floating ovals. Representing the Earthly combined with the Artificial, this was Pisoletto’s symbol for an imagined and ideal new level of human civilization.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, The Third Passage (2004), Serpentine Gallery

These conceptual spaces invite the viewers to choose their own paths around the exhibition, to face themselves and engage in an act of self-perception and meditation that Pistoletto believes is intrinsic to the process of judgment. Combining the human and the natural, his works seek your participation and reflect judgment back on us in a potentially socially mobilizing way; he wanted his art to be socially conscious, to enact a process of self-scrutiny that inspires social change, both on an individual and collective level. It is, he says, ‘a winding and unforeseeable road that leads us to the place of revelation, of knowledge’.

If we move on outside the Gallery to Zumthor’s pavilion, it is a tranquil haven for reflection and contemplation. Centered around an inner, hidden garden, a hortus conclusus designed by Piet Oudolf, the austere black box if punctured by doorways that lead you into darkness; four slender, symmetrical corridors, which in turn take you into the garden hidden inside.

Peter Zumthor, Hortus Conclusus, Serpentine Pavilion

Like Pistoletto, it is this emphasis on discovered, hidden space that provides the conceptual backbone to the work. The design is restrained, the building offering a protective shield around the garden, a place of intimacy and seclusion. Inside the slanting roof opens up to the sky, a fragment of blue and some floating clouds appear isolated from the ground and horizon, from all outside commotion. ‘The hortus conclusus that I dream of is enclosed all around and open to the sky,’ says Zumthor. ‘Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place’.

Photography by Hufton and Crow

This pavilion emphasizes space; we walk into a compressed space – a dark corridor – to find ourselves in an open space. This contrast between compression and expansion complements the stark contrast between dark and light that accompanies these spaces, and with it the sense of being trapped and then free.

Both structures at the Serpentine manipulate our reception of space. They guide their viewers through and into places of revelation and knowledge, as well as through both natural and artificial surroundings. They impose upon them a sense of self-reflection, offering a type of space that is contemplative as well as an escape into a more ideal society where personal spirituality and freedom are the priority.

An unguarded snapshot of human experience – Nan Goldin at London’s Sprovieri Gallery

Nan Goldin, 'Nan and Brian in bed, New York City' (1983)

Nan Goldin is most famed for her expressive documentary photographs that are imbued always with a rawness that has the ability to depict human life in its uninhibited, despondent and seedy reality. Documenting 1980s New York – drag queens, drugs, AIDS and sexual experimentation – Godin’s work is a multi-faceted portrait of her life and the changing world around her.

Yet the new show at London’s Sprovieri Gallery shows that Goldin was also interested in photographing children – a subject that seems immediately at odds with her usual repertoire, but which in fact comes from her consistent wish to document the spontaneity and primal basis of human nature, something that children symbolize well. Whether photographing adults or children, Goldin has always been invested in the people behind the lens, and mixes shock with beauty in a way that forges empathy, affection and understanding. Utterly candid, her work – no matter the subject – has an honest quality that makes it irresistible.

Nan Goldin, 'Ava twirling, NYC' (2007), from 'Fireleap'

Fireleap – Goldin’s seventh slideshow – is currently being exhibited at the Sprovieri. Taken from 1978 onwards, the 15 minute slideshow contains a series of photographs of children, either her own or her friends’, which document their life in day-to-day activities. The snapshots are not posed or pre-determined, giving them a voyeuristic, unguarded and spontaneous quality, a style that perfectly complements the nature of the subjects she photographs. A way of documenting their growing up, Fireleap creates a narrative that captures life and all its little nuances, looks and movements.

Fireleap ‘has a lot of different emotions and it’s all about people and the experience of being human,’ said Goldin of her work in an interview with Dazed Digital. Like her renowned slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979-86), Fireleap is a visual diary that captures the relationships and moments that have shaped her life. Whether documenting 1980s New York subcultures – her surrogate family of friends and lovers – or the children in her life, the slideshows are both shaped by themes such as love and gender, innocence and growing up, identity and self-perception, raw emotion and wildness. The private made public, Goldin’s photography is a portrait of her multi-faceted life as she experiences it, and is inextricably bound up with her own biography.

Elsewhere in the Sprovieri exhibition are actual photographs of landscapes and nature, beautiful in their use of light and unfocused, abstract composition. A rich sunset, a flock of seagulls hovering delicately at dawn, one lonely, solitary tree; these works contrast in subject with the scenes of escapades and sexuality in the three grid-photographs they are immediately juxtaposed with – scenes of empty bedrooms, a naked body, and hallucinogenic states of being.

Nan Goldin, 'Seagulls at dawn, Brighton, England' (2007)

Nan Goldin, 'The Lonely Tree, Sweden' (2008)

Nan Goldin, 'Shape Shifting 2' (2010)

Nan Goldin, 'Empty Rooms, Berlin/Hamburg', (1983-96)

Despite this contrast, the works all portray some feeling of loneliness and desperation, due to Goldin’s concentration on atmosphere over narrative. The sense of alienation despite intimacy is palpable, adding to this sense of personal experience and biography that she portrays in her slideshows: ‘They have been my secret work metaphors for loneliness…[I was] trying to break the glass between the outside world and me. I had lived in a dark space for 15 years so the landscape was unfamiliar to me, a fascination with an unknown world outside,’ says Goldin. The works all portray a heightened sense of reality and emotion, testifying to the experiences and places that have been intimate parts of Goldin’s life.

Issue IV: Designed Cities

 

 

We are proud to present Bareface Magazine Issue IV!

You can click the above image to read the magazine online.

Micro-architecture and the ghost of artworks past: Atelier 37.2 at the MAK Museum

Atelier 37.2, 'The Space of Art', MAK Museum, Vienna. Images courtesy of Nicolas Guiraud

The French ‘micro-architecture’ firm Atelier 37.2 created an original installation for Vienna’s MAK Museum, entitled The Space of Art. Using old transport crates that once transported works from the Museum’s impressive collection of contemporary art, Atelier 37.2 transformed these into compartments for visitors to enter, lie in and even nap in!

With the names of renowned international artists stamped on the sides of these crates, the installation oozes a conceptual charm that makes us consider the life of the artwork when not hung on the gallery wall or mounted on the pedestal. It recalls the mystical value we attach to artworks – to famous names in particular – and the instrumental role of the museum in giving these names status and value. The empty crates are the ghosts of the artworks they once contained, and therefore retain a figment of this value themselves. Brandished with ‘Donald Judd’, ‘Anish Kapoor’ or ‘Jenny Holzer’, this installation is a sort of dream-team exhibition, bringing together an illustrious set of artists that would make for a true blockbuster exhibition.

The crates are no longer de-functionalised, but are instead put to use in the gallery space in which they were never designed to inhabit, replacing the actual artwork they would store as the main attraction. Ranging in scale, the crates have steps leading up to them and are filled with packing peanuts and pillows, allowing visitors to climb up and enter into them, transforming them into makeshift sofas or beds. They are given a new purpose and make for an interactive museum experience, asking visitors to engage with the space and ‘artworks’.

‘We like the idea of an installation combining various layers of significations together with a playful and ephemera geography of art (instead of a history). To suggest unlikely encounters between artists, artworks (both invisible) and the public. The space of art is working with the enigma related to each artist and its work,’ says Atelier 37.2.

Atelier 37.2 has inverted the Museum space, making us look at what is normally hidden and asking us to interact in a new way with the gallery, and to therefore think about the value we attach to artworks and to names. The Space of Art successfully highlights the role of the museum in this process of assigning selective value, but also of the viewer, who by visiting the gallery and looking at (but not touching) the artwork, participates in this ritual.

‘Through its very familiarity a large part of our daily life remains invisible to us, compromising our ability to see and feel anything significant,’ argues Atelier 37.2. ‘Our approach consists of creating and applying spatial layouts that provoke a shift in our everyday perception. Through a minimal language, raw and subtle at the same time, we create space within space.’

Check out these visitors getting up close and personal with The Space of Art:

Art, language and metropolitan dystopia – Ed Ruscha’s ‘On the Road’

Ed Ruscha, California Grapeskins (2009), all images courtesy of the artist and the Gagosian Gallery

Currently on show at LA’s Hammer Museum is Ed Ruscha: On the Road (until 2 October), an exhibition that amalgamates photography, paintings, and drawings with language in a documentation of America’s changing cultural landscape. Taking inspiration from On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s radical and original 1957 documentary novel of his road trips in America, Ruscha has created a series of paintings that borrow passages from this novel, in an ironic and irreverent commentary on the rapidly developing metropolitan life of post-war America. These new works follow the limited edition artist book version of the novel that Ruscha created in 2009 with the support of the Gagosian Gallery and Steidl, which was illustrated with photographs that he took, commissioned or found.

‘It is completely fitting that Ed Ruscha would take up the challenge of looking at Kerouac’s On the Road. In many ways Ruscha’s entire career has offered an artistic corollary to Kerouac’s linguistic portrait of the American landscape, giving concrete visual form to the poetry of our vernacular roadside. These new works are no different except that they channel one of the greatest chroniclers of the American landscape by appropriating and artistically framing fragmented instances of Kerouac’s language,’ notes Douglas Fogle, chief curator of the Hammer Museum.

Ruscha’s works are deadpan, laconic, and use only all-caps lettering. Commenting on cultural shifts in post-war metropolitan American society such as consumerism, Protestantism and car-dependency, and observing trends such as censorship, drug criminalization and social conservatism, they speak to the banality of metropolitan life in a fitting ambivalence that is neither overtly critical yet hardly celebratory. His combination of typography with abstract images highlight America’s obsession with the booming media and slogan culture; Ruscha’s tone of indifference speaks of the general alienation of an American society caught between poverty and capitalist boom:

‘I was gasping for contact’

‘Cold beer beautiful girls’

‘He didn’t care and neither did she’…

Ed Rushca, Mañana (2009), acrylic on canvas

Ed Ruscha, Greatest Passers (2010), acrylic on canvas

Joan Miró to Yayoi Kusama; or Surrealism to surrealism

Joan Miró, Blue I-II-III (1961)

Installation view of 'Yayoi Kusama: New Paintings and Sculptures', Victoria Miro, London

Confused? So was I, at first, when after having spent a couple of hours at the Tate Modern’s summer blockbuster retrospective on the Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró, I entered the Victoria Miro gallery to be told that Yayoi Kusama’s work shows ‘affinities with movements such as Surrealism’. And Abstract Expressionsim, Pop, Performance Art, Minimalism, Feminist Art and installation art…Whoa, those are certainly some big art historical shoes to fill.

And whilst it is true that Kusama’s work certainly displays features typical of these movements (other-worldly, anthropomorphised sculptures), it struck me how much we rely on art historical terms or paradigms in order to define what is happening now. Rather than making Kusama’s work legible, more easily understandable, it only serves to muddy our ability to read her work clearly, for what it is – for how Kusama intended it.

While Kusama might be considered a proto-surrealist, she is in no way to be thought of as a Surrealist, a term which very precisely denotes the cultural revolutionary movement begun in André Breton in 1924. Since then, many cultural practices have grown out of Surrealism, giving the term surrealism (with a small ‘s’) a very ubiquitous, malleable (and often overused) meaning. This historical concept has been subject to reuse and reinterpretation, that we risk losing the true, historical meaning of the term.

Surrealism was invested in a kind of automated state of being through which the artist could escape reality, tap into the subconscious and reach a dream state. Surrealist works – as embodied by Miró – were often metaphysical, abstract, and had a close link to man’s inner psyche; they were antagonistic to the alienation of the modernist period.

Miró: The Ladder of Escape is currently on show at the Tate Modern (ends 11 September). The exhibition’s overwhelming success lies in its coherent portrayal of Miró as an artist who is inherently political and who had strong tied to his Catalan roots. Brushing away the assumption that Miró is a whimsical artist who likes to paint squiggly lines in bold colours, the Tate really underlined the traumatic effects that the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship, and the Second World War had on his work. What emerges is an oeuvre so inextricable twinned with the politics of its time, which is imbued with such a heavy psychological reaction to those events, and which is therefore often nightmarish and savage in nature.

Miró’s work is private and introverted, growing out of his real experiences in modern Spain and Paris, yet also outward looking in its relevance to human experience in times of trauma. His use of repeated symbolism – stars and ladders in particular – create a rich syntax, a visual language that illustrates his desire to escape, to drift into a dream state and abandon the destructive forces that were controlling Europe. Perhaps, then, Miró was not so much a painter of the subconscious – as standardised definition of Surrealism lead us to believe – but a painter that was very much tuned into the reality of his time, and whose art emerged from the real traumas engulfing Europe. Of particular note are his ‘savage works’ of the 1930s and the ‘Constellations’ series (1940-1941), with wild imagery and dense compositions that were produced during his ‘inner exile’ in Spain.

Joan Miró, The Escape Ladder (1940)

The Tate’s retrospective reveals another side to Miró. Not the trippy, whimsical and innocent artist we might presume him to be, he was a political painter whose reduced visual language has huge symbolic potency. ‘Dreams, hysteria and even madness are the paths to truth,’ Miró said.

With this in mind, the Kusama exhibition at the (aptly named) Victoria Miro Gallery presents a different understanding of this word ‘surrealism’, detached from the politics and revolutionary tone of Miró’s time (ends 29 July). Kusama’s large, grossly anthropomorphised sculptures, colourful and cartoon-like, are compulsive and repetitively adorned with spots. Kusama, who has suffered from mental illness since childhood, produces art with psychoanalytic tendencies, a ‘surrealist’ hallucinatory quality that renders her work the visual embodiment of the inner mind.

Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin

In this way, Kusama’s art is highly personal; it is a working through of her own compulsive mental fixations, and this singularity is, and must be the focus of her practice. Her private mind is the one source out of which her art grew, making for a very unique and instinctual practice that must be accounted for in such a way, and not in terms of what art historical movements we might loosely assimilate her with. What makes Kusama’s practice stand out is precisely this specificity and singularity, the way it is entirely indebted to her.

The Gabriela Herman Interview

Gabriela Herman, from the 'Self Portraits Studies' series

I first discovered Gabriela Herman’s photographs earlier this year after her online project The Bloggers became viral, spreading round the blogosphere like wildfire and raising important questions about human interaction in the digital age. The Brooklyn-based photographer, whose practice is concerned overwhelmingly with portraiture, creates visually beautiful, intimate and thoughtful works.

Bareface: How do you describe your practice in general?

Gabriela Herman: I like to think of my experience with photography as a puzzle where I’m constantly adding new pieces to form a collective whole.

B: How did you begin practicing photography?

GH: I started in high school, where I would spend most of my afternoons slaving away in the darkroom, jamming to my Discman and working on my craft. When in college at Wesleyan University, I began shooting for the school newspaper and working as a darkroom assistant.

While studying abroad, I broadened my knowledge based on my surroundings, adding more pieces to the puzzle. I moved to Mexico for a semester and was introduced to the color darkroom. In São Paulo, I learned the history of photography from an old Brazilian master. In Salvador, Bahia, I turned to documentary work.

After college I moved to São Paulo and it was there that I decided to pursue a career in the field. From that moment I have completely invested myself in that pursuit. After working with several acclaimed Brazilian photographers I made the move to New York and started again from scratch. Since then, as a freelancer in the field, I’ve assisted with some phenomenal masters, produced complex shoots, dipped my toes in the editorial world, been honored with several accolades and am currently starting to exhibit my work.

B: Why is self-portraiture so important to you?

GH: My high school photo mentor took me to a see a small show of Francesca Woodman in downtown Boston when I was an impressionable fifteen year old. Never having been exposed to her work before, I was stunned at how her approach was oddly similar to mine at the time. Her art focused heavily on self-portraits, movement, and body imagery. That was a defining moment in my journey through self-portraiture. Seeing her works on a gallery wall made it plausible that someday my own images could be on display in a similar fashion.

Since I began photographing, I have always insisted on being in front of the lens, becoming part of the construction of my images. Photography has become my therapy, an exclusive dialogue between myself and the camera where we push each other to a point of exhaustion, both emotionally and physically. My work reveals this intimate process, a process I invite the viewer to partake in. Photographing also allows for a great opportunity to focus through my uncertainty, create some sanity in the chaos and explore my sense of self in a defined manner.

In my portraiture, as I approach other subjects, I take this comfort with me and try to recreate the same intimate setting. This process from subject to intimate confidant is what drives me to keep creating. I tend to photograph what I know; people close to me, subjects I am passionate about.

B: Tell us about Bloggers and how the idea for it came about.

GH: Unlike my self-portraits, which are more open ended and exploratory, my Bloggers series has been my first truly complete project with a sort of beginning middle and end.

I have been photographing portraits of bloggers in their homes, bringing their private worlds to the outside public. I want people to rethink the way we experience the world by looking at how we live and spend our time. Tackling this subject was such an obvious choice for me, as I am highly invested in the blogosphere. Blogs have become my go-to source for information; they feed and comfort me. Today, bloggers are widely respected within their industries and have become our new decision makers as they showcase, analyze and filter information for us.

B: Do you think that the digital age – and its influence on our communicative and social lives – is helping us grow closer?

GH: I honestly feel that the online world brings people together, and through Bloggers I wanted to spotlight the people who are making that happen. While it is heavily debated how modern technology can isolate us, there are undeniably many upsides to this online evolution. I believe bloggers are connecting us, bringing us closer. In some ways, bloggers are helping create a reverse wave in our technological age by forming an authentic exchange between blogger and reader. They allow for an interactive platform, a dialogue that allows for both online and offline relationships to form.

I started with one blogger and got them to recommend my next subject from someone on their blogroll, so that in the same way that their blogs are linked to each other online, the photos are linked to each other in the series. It is through our screens – these beacons of light – that the world opens up and we become literally linked to one another. I began photographing bloggers with this idea in mind, giving the viewer a peek into their intimate worlds by using their screens as the sole light source.

B: Tell us about your Holding On series.

GH: In the fall of 2010, when my beloved childhood home abruptly sold, I was given a weekend to clear out the 25+ years of belongings that had remained largely untouched. I felt the need to capture some of these artifacts, an act which played out like revisiting my childhood in fast forward, frame by frame. The stuff that we accumulate, however valuable at the time, in fact ends up being just stuff, eventually all garbage bound. I had preserved the memories of the past through these objects, but once documented, their physical presence became unnecessary. It is through these images that the nostalgia remains, and I continue to hold on.

B: How does this nostalgia relate to the debates on the digital age?

GH: I’m not sure if it’s that closely related, other than the fact that most of the items were trashed after clicking the shutter, and thus they now only live in a digital form. For the most part I feel there is a certain sense of hopefulness and looking to the future in my work.

B: Who influences your photographic practice?

GH: Currently, I am widely influenced by contemporary female photographers who allow me to see my own possibilities. Elinor Carucci is someone whose work I closely follow. She has been extremely successful in creating her own voice using subject matter close to her, whilst still appealing to a broader audience. I admire her vulnerability and transparency of emotions. She touches on areas that I perhaps may still be too timid to attempt.

Similarly this could be said for Tierney Gearon, whose family work I greatly admire; particularly her work with her mother. I admire Amy Stein for the way she immerses herself in her series and Michal Chelbin, whose portraiture carries a piercing intensity and beautiful use of color.

B: What are you currently working on, and do you have any future ideas in mind?

GH: For the past three years I’ve been shooting a series of portraits of my sister and I together in the frame, stemming from my self-portrait work. It’s been a sort of examination of our past, present and future relationship. I’m still trying to figure out what it’s all about. I have another series I also recently shot that could be considered and extension of the Bloggers work, but I’m not ready to talk about it just yet.

Gabriela Herman, thank you.

Gabriela Herman, from the 'Self Portraits Studies' series