SOMEDAYS

Wang Ningde is one of my favorite contemporary photographers in China. Perhaps not surprisingly, he spends most of his time as a photojournalist. These are from his "Somedays" series, which has gotten play abroad. See the Goedhuis Contemporary on him, and this SF Camerawork piece.

magazine: Eyemazing #4 2011

NAIL BITER

Working across a range of media, Cuban-American artist Anthony Goicolea is concerned with issues of the body, beauty, chaos and the perverse. In Goicolea’s video Nail Biter (2002), a young boy sits in bed in a darkened cabin in the middle of the woods, nervously biting his nails. As he chews, they continue to grow at an abnormal rate. His repetitive motions are compulsive, exaggerated as the pace quickens and hundreds of nail shards accumulate around him. The boy’s frenetic actions are accompanied by a soundtrack comprised of an amplified heartbeat, owls and other woodland noises which combine to mimic the effect of a metronome. As the video progresses the tension mounts, and a seemingly everyday, nervous habit unfolds into a sinister portrait. 

film: Nail Biter,  Anthony Goicolea

MIRKA

Mïrka is a photo book, which reads like an adult fairy tale. Mïrka, the muse of photographer Gilles Berquet, revered by eroticism aficionados, embodies several characters: a forest eerie playing with trees and animals, a strange masked doll or a sophisticated blond. The book includes a DVD with some of Mïrkas adventures on screen ranging somewhere between movies of the silent era and surrealist short films.

book:  Mïrka, Gilles Berquet

PERVASIVE LANGUAGE

Petrina Hicks gently subverts the pervasive language of photography as it is used in advertising and publicity, creating edgy images that intrigue and disturb. While she primarily works with people, her works transcend the boundaries of portraiture as she finds beauty in perceived imperfections and renders idealized beauty strange.

http://www.petrinahicks.com/

EXTERNAL & INTERNAL

 

Christina Lerner. That's what she says about her works: "The main thing for me - is to feel the point of coincidence of external and internal and to be able to catch it in time and bring in photography. Every moment has it's own feeling and it’s own sound. No matter what I photograph: a portrait or the city’s scene - the picture should be filled with emotion and atmosphere of this unique second."

http://kristinalerner.com/

TEICHMANN

Within large scale photographic and film works of fragmented bodies in hues of pale blues and liquid, inky blacks or staged images within sweaty jungle undergrowth painted with psychadelic dripping inks, Esther Teichmann examines ideas of loss and an impossible return, of grief and a sense of inherited home-sickness.

Magazine: Eyemagazine #4 2011

DU LEVANDE

Filmmaker Roy Andersson draws the viewer into the world of a woman whose most uplifting moments are always balanced by tragedy, and whose joy is constantly offset by sorrow. In laughing along at the good times and shedding a tear at the bad, the comic tragedy of life manifests itself in a manner that all can surely relate to. In other words You, the Living is a film about humankind, its greatness and its baseness, joy and sorrow, its self-confidence and anxiety, its desire to love and be loved.

Film: You, The Living (Du Levande) by Roy Andersson