TPP checks in with our favorite artists on their inspiration, work in progress and studio practice.

Sophie Mörner was born in 1976 in Stockholm, Sweden and attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Most often regarded for the founding of Capricious Magazine and later Capricious Publishing and Space, venues for presenting emerging fine art photography, Mörner is first a photographer herself. Her work blends idyllic elements of an imagined female utopia: individuals in bucolic, pastoral settings unencumbered by gender pressures, with aspects of contemporary portraiture and realism.

Sophie shares her inspiration along with a look into her studio, Capricious Space and a selection of images from her upcoming solo exhibition titled The Name of a Song.  The Name of a Song opens Friday, September 10th at Capricious Space.

Selected works

*all images copyright Sophie Mörner

Inspiration

Andrew Wyeth

Emmeline de Mooij

Collier Schorr

Robin Schwartz

Susan Sontag

Paul P.

KUTT & BUTT

Fantastic Man & Wolfgang Tillmans

Forest

Studio & Capricious Space

* Studio & Capricious Space images copyright Jonas Marguet

Every Tuesday, TPP picks the top 5 events/call for entries that show up on our radar. TPP welcomes submissions. Please e-mail us at submissions@thephotographypost.com. From now on Go Here! Do This! will be combined with the TPP Ten in a master list of awesomeness to optimize your chances of seeing and doing the most photo-related fun stuff each week!

1. KLOMPCHING GALLERY is pleased to present A New Kind Of Beauty, by the artist Phillip Toledano. Opening Reception, Sept. 8, 6:00pm – 8:00pm.

Phillip Toledano, Yvette

2. If you are in Berlin this Friday, don’t miss AIDS 3D at Autocenter (Eldenaer Straße 34 a, 10247, Entrance via James-Hobrecht Straße. Berlin, Germany).  Friday Sept. 3rd at 8:00pm – Sept. 4th at 6:00am.

AIDS 3D

3. Not only have P.O.C. taken over iheartphotograph for the week but there was just a slew of fantastic work and writing posted by both Jason Lazarus and Daniel Everett. Spend some time with here and take it all in.

4. If you love Supermassive Blackhole, go ahead and NOMINATE the magazine for the Irish Web Awards. ANYONE ANYWHERE can vote. It’s easy to do and takes just 5 minutes… Go  here: http://webawards.ie/nominations/ and scroll half way down the page to “Best Web Only Publication”. (via Supermassive Blackhole)

5. Kaugummi Books has just released new titles by Massimiliano Bomba / Jimi Franklin / Gergő Szinyova / Aleksandra Waliszewska / Jaakko Pallasvuo / Alexander Binder / Marcus Oakley / Will Adler. (via Bevel and Boss)

6. UPCOMING DEADLINE: The Clarence John Laughlin Award was created by the New Orleans Photo Alliance (NOPA) to support the work of photographers who use the medium as a means of creative expression. It honors the life and work of Clarence John Laughlin (1905-1985), a New Orleans photographer best known for his surrealist images of the American South. The Clarence John Laughlin Award grants one $5000 prize annually to a photographer whose work exhibits sustained artistic excellence and creative vision. Deadline Sept. 15th.

7. Are you an emerging or mid-career artist with a unique, powerful voice interested in competing on a future season of Work of Art: The Next Great Artist? Don’t miss your chance to be on the next season of Work of Art!

8. Do you like art?  Do you like Swiss people?  Do you like islands?  Haunted sailor’s barracks and captain’s houses? Great!  Come play on Governor’s island at the 2010 Governor’s Island Art Fair! (via Michelle Meier)

9. C/O Berlin is seeking young photographers and art critics for their 2011 Talents series of exhibitions. The theme this year is Cinematic Thinking and applications will be accepted until December 31, 2010. (via horses think)

10. GO TO THE BEACH, HAVE A BBQ, DRINK SOME ICY COLD BREWS!

The Friday Round Up is a weekly feature highlighting the weird and the wonderful around the web.

via 4chan

via alderson

via boingboing

via boxforstanding

via collect

via erikcarter

via fernsatdusk

via islayme

via kenmat

via projectguttenberg

via risingtensions

via risingtensions

via suffervacation

via w33d

I found Holly Lynton’s work today, and I’m intrigued. I especially like the images in the series In Between, which feel to me like vaguely related film stills. Or even like a visual notion of remembering.

From Lynton’s statement:

I make large-scale, color photographs that address how disconnected we are from the natural world, and express my longing to be more connected through fantasies where a balance has been struck. Sometimes, I respond spontaneously to an event. Other times, I recreate one.

This work feels fresh and new and playful, and yet deeply meaningful. Have a look. I can almost smell the grass.

This is the fourth installment in a conversation series initiated by Lucas Blalock with contemporary artists concerning materiality in regards to current photographic practice.

“Why is there no brown nor grey light?”

“A natural history of colors would have to report on their occurrence in nature, not on their essence. Its propositions would have to be temporal ones.”

“In everyday life we are virtually surrounded by impure colours. All the more remarkable that we have formed a concept of pure colours.”

…”internal properties” of a colour gradually occur to us, which we hadn’t thought of at the outset. And that can show us the course of a philosophical investigation…“

“Brown light”. Suppose someone were to suggest that a traffic light be brown.”

“Imagine we were told that a substance burns with a grey flame. You don’t know the colours of the flames of all substances: so why shouldn’t such a thing be possible?”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Remarks On Colour

Corin Hewitt is currently exhibiting The Grey Flame and The Brown Light until the end of August in his home state of Vermont. Like Hewitt’s other projects of recent years, he transforms the exhibition space into a studio in which he labors publicly to create objects and pictures that relate to an interconnected set of concerns including aesthetics, local history, and geology. In his current project Hewitt is working below a staged floor (that of a theater stage or gymnasium) amongst a collection of objects relating to Vermont’s “natural” environment. The project focuses on an investigation of the colors brown and gray as basic states with tremendous generative possibilities seen through their relation to the life cycle of the forest floor.

The Grey Flame and The Brown Light

LB: Can you give an introduction to your current project?

CH: I have made a color generating machine. The “machine” extracts the composted colors of browns and greys from the forest floor and generates vibrant colors using that material. I created a process where I use a group of flatbed scanners to scan the surfaces that I find in the rocks, ash, sand, soil, and decaying vegetal matter. I then use Photoshop to compress these scans into a single color. Using that single color, which is always somewhere in the brown or gray range, supersaturate it to make vibrant monochromes. These monochromes are printed on a digital pigment printer to create bright monochrome photographs. These photographs are finally “shed” into the piece only to slowly dissolve again into the soil. As the piece progresses the monochromes compost into the soil and then they become part of the material getting scanned. In many ways this “machine” is like a flowering plant. Or like the flowering plant in reverse, as it is the “dissolved” or “composted” states that have has the greatest potential instead of the flowers or vibrant monochromes.

The Grey Flame and The Brown Light

LB: I am curious about the role of the studio in your practice (which also functions here as a terrarium, laboratory, performance space, and optical device). I am interested in the way that the studio for you becomes a primary condition through which all of the resulting production can be viewed.

CH: I like to think of it in terms of figure and ground. The “ground” is the fertile history that is being both worked, struggled, and stewarded. The “figure” is studio where there is a more perceptible relationship in time between ideas, the maker, and the material.

The Grey Flame and The Brown Light

LB: Do you see this practice in terms of model making? In that the studio becomes a model for a greater set of relationships and actions in the world at large?

CH: If by model making you mean an example that needs to be imitated, I would say no. But if you mean a type of interaction that emphasizes the processes of formation, I would agree. As I have said before, I really value the verbs that go into making. The shaping as the shape. History as the tool that is used to shape the present as well as a form that action stands in relation to.

In this piece I am asserting the value of the hues of brown and gray. Examining how those are luminous colors. Colors full of the history of their formation. In the model of the color sphere they are closer to the center of the sphere as they are comprised of mixtures. Using rock, soil, leaf mulch, sand, and ash as materials in where those colors are evidenced in the ground. Thinking about how those materials contain specific and dense histories that are compressed making them perceptually difficult to engage. They are fertile materials I use as a way to think about scaling of firmament in time.

The Grey Flame and The Brown Light

LB: Once in the studio situation your practice works on the materials amassed in a way that lends itself to being seen as “at hand”. I am thinking of the way that the “studio as figure” brings basic relationships between you, your materials, and your tools into focus. For example, your use of the most basic natural materials (dirt, rock, ash), which have often been used allegorically, instead here feel grounded in their material relationship/particular usefulness in regards the dual life cycles of color and the forest. Can you talk a bit about this?

CH: It is the process that has use value. A process that rethinks material “loss”or “depletion”. The process forms a figure or a body that circulates material through it. Using that circulation to create new types of energy through color.

I would also agree that I don’t see them as allegorical if you are thinking of allegory as having a purely symbolic function. They are “useful” materials. The use value that I see in them here in this process. Like all things they contain history and I use a few tools to mine an investigate the current “tendencies” of that history. Their lean.

LB: Amongst the Wittgenstein quotes in the press release he writes; “A natural history of colors would have to report on their occurrence in nature, not on their essence. Its propositions would have to be temporal ones.” This speaks to this notion of usefulness or materiality for me. Did Wittgenstein’s writings on color act as an impetus for you?

CH: Well…I have been working with dirt as a material for many years. Growing up the colors of the browns of soil were important to us in our gardens as it told a lot about the fertility of the soil. I later starting using dirt as a sculptural material that I then cast in a variety of ways. Following this process of thought, I used worms and soil to compost photographs in my Seed Stage piece at the Whitney. I became really interested how the soil and the worms shifted the color values of those photographs towards the browns of the castings and soil. Also during the process of making Seed Stage, in an attempt to figure out how to deal with surface in the piece, I had collected a bunch of recycled paint. The colors of these paints were mostly unused seasonal colors from the last ten or so years. Designer paints including things such as Martha Stewart’s Spring Lavender 2003 or Calvin Klein’s Fall Mist 2006. I mixed all of these paints together to make greys that I could use to paint the stage and the worm bins. I liked the variety of greys that I could produce. I ended up choosing one for the surface of the stage which I then modulated from one end to a brown on the back side which covered the root cellar.

So…a long answer, but when I read Wittgenstein’s remarks on color last year I was struck by his similar preoccupation with browns and grays. He came to these colors through an attempt to apply logic to color concepts. One thing he seemed really fascinated by was how some colors can seem to be luminous while others can only be illuminated. For example he pondered whether one could imagine a gray ghost or since it was lit from within it would actually would have to be a dim white which was making it luminous. He asserted that gray was color that could only be lit from outside. He also became very curious about the concept of brown light. Anyhow, these were really interesting to me to as I have been experiencing these colors for years as the most luminous. They contained the richest histories of content which included material compressing itself in time to form these colors. So I felt a shared fascination with him, but with the opposite conclusion about the the luminosity of the these colors.

The Grey Flame and The Brown Light

LB: In earlier projects you have used photography as a kind of output from the system. Here the system appears closed, at least in terms of material excretion. Was this a major question in developing this project?

CH: We’ll it is not exactly closed as the vibrant colors that are generated from these browns and grays will be shown at a future point. As I said previously, there is the aspect of them cycling back into the literal ground of the work, but they are also stored as digital color fields which I will show at some point. There is just a greater delay as they go into “hard drive” storage for a period instead of directly up on the wall.

LB: Before we finish, I would like to ask a bit about the architecture of The Brown Light and The Grey Flame. The work is being made underneath a sloped wooden structure that relates to a gymnasium floor. This element really emphasizes the front/back relationship of the corresponding presentation area/studio which makes the working space into a kind of “behind the scenes” situation. How did you develop this structure?

CH: This structure is a fusion of gymnasium floor and theatrical stage. The front of the stage is covered with wainscoting and the stage itself is made of gymnasium flooring. The gymnasium flooring is constantly being shifted so that the sport demarcations on the wooden sections become abstracted. I was interested in making a “ground” that I could be intermittently underneath and then penetrate to sort “till” it. Like an earthworm.

When you see me through the holes, in the flooring, as well as the sides and back there is a bit of the ant farm to it. A subterranean space that seems at first to reveal itself. A compressed surface that still contains hidden space.

Also like a desktop on a computer screen. A synthetic surface that is a tool, a structure, and a background.

LB: I am really taken with the structure of your metaphors which develop fluidly across technological and biological demarcations. This opens the work up to talking about technology in relation to our own biology(computer/body) or to ecology (society/natural world). I feel in this a retaking of agency as concerns our relationship to the contemporary situation and the mapping of a new set of coordinates. I was wondering how you felt your work relates to these ideas?

CH: This whole idea of nature as existing outside of us is a problematic distinction. Conversations about the natural world often seem to be based on one of two historical assumptions. One is that there is a fixed or steady state of things and that nature is a sort of edenic precondition that we have domesticated and corrupted. The other is that nature is a material that can be shaped to bring about a sort of permaculture which will create a perpetual state of balance. These preconceptions bring those who think about ethical relationships with the natural world into a sort of false dialectic between a search for a permaculture (steady state) or a return to “native” ways (beginnings). Since there is no permanence in the natural world nor was there any such thing as a fixed native culture, I believe we must think in other ways.

I think that looking at the tools we make and use is a really interesting way of considering these relationships. Tools are a type of organic form. As a combined extensions of both the mind and the body, they contain evolving histories of consciousness and use. They also contain potential. Tools are momentary stoppages of larger processes as well as carriers of those processes. I feel agency when I engage with these shifting forms and use of tools in time.

In this piece I wanted to make a immersive tool which uses forms of compressed time(soil, ash, rock) and acts to assert its existence in the present tense. This move from the interior of the color sphere to the surface is an attempt to use color to do that.

*all images copyright Corin Hewitt

Every Tuesday, TPP picks the top 5 events/call for entries that show up on our radar. TPP welcomes submissions. Please e-mail us at submissions@thephotographypost.com. From now on Go Here! Do This! will be combined with the TPP Ten in a master list of awesomeness to optimize your chances of seeing and doing the most photo-related fun stuff each week!

1. Get your work seen! Project 5 is hosting their third group portfolio review. Submissions are due by Sept. 3rd.
Guidelines are here.

2. Are you The Next Photoshop Evangelist?

3. A new initiative by the New York Photo Festival, Capture Brooklyn is a juried exhibition of contemporary photography that seeks to capture the spirit and essence of Brooklyn as a way of promoting and celebrating New York-based photographers.

Matthew Nedbalsky

4. Humble Arts Foundation is currently accepting submissions for group show TASCHEN, a partnership with TASCHEN Books in New York for an upcoming exhibition. Submission deadline Aug. 29th!

5. TONIGHT: Half Gallery presents Miles Mendenhall, the recent runner-up in Bravo’s “Work of Art” show in which Bill Powers was a judge.

6. Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann and Jörg M. Colberg have launched a publishing venture called Meier und Mueller.

Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann from Conditions

7. Kinda sick of digital? The Mpls Photo Center has a call for entry just for you; “A call for all things alternative with occasional forays into future processes.”

8. TONIGHT: The Secret Science Club presents a mind-blowing screening of “Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives” Tuesday, August 24 @ the Bell House, 8 pm, FREE!

9. Bid on some great art at Daniel Cooney’s latest Emerging Artists Auction

Matt Licari, Boys At a Barbeque

10. Did you know about The Creators Project? I did not.

via dump.fm

Dump.fm allows pictures “to be used for realtime communication and collaboration. Users can send image URLs (which display instantly in the chat), upload locally from their hard drive or post pics right from their webcam. Every image gets stored in your DUMP.FM log, similarly, a log is kept of the entire collaboration.” TPP July 8, 2010

Peter Puklus got in touch to share a new project called Budapest, Eden. A slight departure from his earlier projects both in mood and aesthetic, the project is a contemplative somewhat brooding document of a Budapest often overlooked. Seemingly from another era, the low contrast black and white images are peppered by a few dreamy color images evoking the same hazy stillness. Here is a selection of my favorites from the project.

*all images copyright Peter Puklus

The Friday Round Up is a weekly feature highlighting the weird and the wonderful around the web. Due to technical difficulties over the weekend, this special round-up comes to you on a Sunday! Hooray!

In slight breaking with round-up tradition, I have decided, this week to feature the strangeness produced by one particularly talented human. Behold, Crookedruler!

David Schoerner launched Hassla Books in January of 2007. The independent publishing company has released 14 titles to date with another handful in the works. I had the pleasure of looking through the nearly-full collection of Hassla books – several titles have sold out – and asked Schoerner to characterize the project.

DS: I publish small artist books that are limited-edition. I don’t do reprints and I try to keep the books affordable – the majority are around $20.

LN: What was the impetus for starting Hassla?

DS: I’d seen some small artist books that other people had done and I really loved them. I started by making my own very small book and I continued by working with other artists.

From David Schoerner, Hassla, 2007

LN: Since this is The Photography Post, could you speak about the relationship between your press and photography?

DS: Well, a lot of the books I’ve done have been photo-based. I am a photographer, I come from a photography background, so many of the artists I know best are photographers or artists working with photography. I tend toward photographic work, which happens to lend itself particularly well to book form. When you get into drawing and painting it can be difficult to make a publication that functions as more than simply a catalogue, whereas with photography it can very easily stand alone.

LN: In the instances where you’ve published drawing or painting, is there an overt relationship to photography beyond the fact that the work is being selected by you?

DS: Dan McCarthy, for example, is making drawings from photographs of friends, or using magazine images as points of reference. There is definitely a connection, a sensibility that all of the books share.

From Dan McCarthy, Hassla, 2009

LN: Hassla is in part a curatorial project. Are there other small presses that influenced you, where you were aware of a unique sensibility permeating all of the publications?

DS: Nieves is the first small press I was aware of doing this type of artist’s book. They had been around for at least 6 years before I got started and they are involved in the culture of photocopied zines as well, not something I do. Nieves had a really big influence on me, especially Tokyo and my Daughter, a book they published with Takashi Homma.

LN: And you were able to eventually do a book with Homma, First, Jay Comes, a combination of photographs and drawings.

From First, Jay Comes by Takashi Homma, Hassla, 2009

From First, Jay Comes by Takashi Homma, Hassla, 2009

DS: Yes. He told me that he had been working on some new photographs but also a series of drawings, which he seemed to find amusing. They work well together, there is a violence but also an incredible beauty in the photography and seemingly quick, gestural paintings of blood in snow.

LN: Can you speak about working with some of the artists you’ve published?

DS: When I contacted Anne Collier, she was in residence at Artpace San Antonio working on a slideshow of stills from the 1970s film, The Eyes of Laura Mars. Happily, she thought it could work well as a book. I met Dan McCarthy a couple of years before starting Hassla and we’ve since become good friends. I did my second book with him. I liked his work immediately when I first saw it. I am attracted to his visual sensibility. The first pieces I saw were naked women standing on skateboards or surfing. I grew up skateboarding and surfing and the subject matter speaks to me. When I contacted him about doing a book he was working on an exhibition in France, so this became a companion piece.

From Woman With A Camera (35mm) by Anne Collier, Hassla, 2009

LN: How does the conception and layout of a project work?

DS: In many different ways. For The Strangeness of This Idea by Kate Steciw, the most recent publication, it was extremely collaborative. I would shoot her an idea and she would respond. I’d work on pacing and image sequence and show her; there was a lot of back and forth.

From The Strangeness of This Idea by Kate Steciw, Hassla, 2010

LN: What’s it like making an approach to photographers as a Publisher?

DS: It’s one of the best things. Especially when some of the artists whose work I looked at when I was studying to be a photographer love Hassla and want to do a project. It’s fantastic!

LN: What’s on deck for Hassla?

DS: I’m working on a book with New York-based photographer Pierre Le Hors. We’re exploring some unusual printing techniques for this book which will probably be around 300 pages. I’m also hosting a warehouse sale in my apartment tomorrow from 12pm to 6pm (171 Ave C, 2D)! All titles will be half price for one day only!

Lisa Naftolin was most recently Creative Director of Art + Commerce and will be Executive Director, Creative Branding for Nars beginning in September. She has been a visiting artist at Cooper Union, a visiting critic in Design at Yale, and a mentor in the Photography program at SVA.

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