Search results for ""author russell ferguson""

Bottles aligned on shelves or suspended in the air, jars of marbles and dye-filled tubes: form, substance and structure emerge from deceptively humble means in the sculpture of Tony Feher. His work uses gravity, light and repetition to isolate and animate everyday objects, creating a sculptural territory that Feher can rightfully claim as entirely his own. Published in conjunction with a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Blaffer Art Museum, this is the first publication to explore work from throughout the artist’s significant and influential career. This comprehensive book reproduces his many sculptures, site-specific installations and two-dimensional works and includes major new texts on Feher’s practice from Blaffer Director Claudia Schmuckli and curator and writer Russell Ferguson. Superbly realized by renowned New York design studio Matsumoto Incorporated, this publication is the definitive book on the work of a vanguard American artist.

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A new form of still life: the first full survey of Lucas Blalock’s humorous and mesmerizing manipulated photographs The acclaimed New York-based photographer Lucas Blalock (born 1978) creates surreal still lifes, often digitally manipulated. From bundles of raw hot dogs to watermelons smothered by plastic wrap to cactus leaves duplicated many times over, Blalock’s eye-catching tableaux reveal more bizarre details the longer one looks. The intentionally ham-fisted photographic manipulations are created in Photoshop after Blalock shoots with a large-format camera on film and then scans the images. The result is a layered network of colorful visual references, careening from the tragicomic to the absurd as they depict everyday objects in unfamiliar contexts. Underlying all of his work is Blalock’s eagerness to revel in the inherent failure connected to any attempt to revive the avant-garde. The artist’s first full survey, this publication accompanies a solo exhibition at the Museum Kurhaus Kleve in Germany. The exhibit’s curator, Susanne Figner, provides commentary alongside essays by professor Russell Ferguson, Institute of Contemporary Art LA curator Jamillah James and Museum of Modern Art curatorial assistant Phil Taylor. The book is available in three different colors.

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British artist Gillian Wearing, winner of the 1997 Turner Prize, uses photography and video to explore the intimacies and complexities of everyday life. Borrowing from popular culture, her work is disturbing and confessional. In 1992 she began the acclaimed series Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants them to say', in which random passers-by are photographed holding messages they've written, such as the mild-mannered young businessman whose sign unexpectedly reads 'I'm Desperate'.Wearing's work borrows from familiar forms of popular culture to produce direct, revealing records of deep-seated human trauma and emotion, often adopting the methods of television documentaries for her 'fly-on-the-wall' view of people's lives. Her videos can be alarming, as in Confess All ... in which masked individuals confess their darkest secrets, or humorous, as in (Slight) Reprise - a sampler of adults playing 'air guitar' in the fantasy rock stadium of their bedrooms. Her art can be disconcerting or uplifting: an honest portrait of the many sides to contemporary life.With exhibitions in Britain, the US, Europe and Japan, Wearing is among the best-known and most internationally recognized of the recent generation of British artists. This is the first publication ever to survey this remarkable young artist's gripping work in its entirety.Russell Ferguson of UCLA's Hammer Museum contextualizes Wearing's work in relation to historical precedents in painting, photography and video art. Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art Donna De Salvo discusses with the artist her collaborative approach towards her work and its subjects. London-based critic John Slyce focuses on Wearing's work 10-16, a remarkable video installation that charts our transition from childhood to adolescence. The artist has selected transcripts from director Michael Apted's acclaimed British television documentary series Seven Up, an important influence on the process Wearing uses in her own work. Published here for the first time in full are the transcripts of the artist's video works.

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Against the Grain Since its beginnings in Paris in the mid-19th century, the idea of bohemia, an urban community of artists and intellectuals living outside bourgeois norms, has been a potent trope of artistic identity. It was here that the notion of an unconventional, free-spirited life, precarious yet filled with idealism, was codified and romanticized. Bohemia: History of an Idea, 1950 – 2000 shows the continuities and differences between the scenes and subcultures of the second half of the twentieth century, when the mainstream began to appropriate and thereby erode a way of life predicated on its rejection. Nonetheless, as an alternative to conformity the bohemian idea has exerted an enduring fascination. Through works by 39 artists, including Alice Neel, PeterHujar, John Deakin, David Wojnarowicz, Ed van der Elsken, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, William Gedney, Libuše Jarcovjáková, Nan Goldin, Zhang Huan and Wolfgang Tillmans, the publication explores the diversity of expressions in various cities in Europe, North America and Asia and shows that the bohemian idea continues to galvanize and inspire.

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A fully updated and expanded edition of the artist's first comprehensive monograph, more than a decade since its original publication Francis Alÿs examines the patterns of various urban sites before weaving his own fables into their tangled social fabric with wit, sensitivity, and an acutely personal connection to his subject matter. A scene such as a Volkswagen Beetle struggling up a hill or a man pushing a block of ice can carry a message that resonates far beyond the work's simple parameters. As Alÿs puts it, 'Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.'

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