[AGL] Starn twins and Earth exhibitors

[Connie Clark]

  Earth is the other theme of fotofest this year.  In Artists Responding to Violence, I saw a lot of photos of people - cultural and political, real and/or dummied up.  The Earth theme shows us more landscape and still life type work - but nothing cliched or traditional about any of them.
   
  Artist Heidi Bradner traveled to Siberia and recorded in black and white the Nenets life, constantly on the move in the Artic circle, following reindeer. People like this still exist. 
  http://www.heidibradner.com/galleries/nenets/index.html
   
  Vesselina Nikolaeva walked the Bulgarian-Turkish border, the southeastern edge of the Soviet bloc to gather photographic evidence of what was once there.
http://www.vesselinanikolaeva.com/
  Her soft eye-pleasing compositions of abandoned guard stations and broken, penetrated border fences are printed on watercolor paper giving the color photos texture, and a painted quality.
   
  I noticed that in the various fotofest exhibits that ink jet prints of digital photos can be printed on just about any surface that will run through the printer.
   
  The reknowned NYC photographers, twins, Doug and Mike Starn used mulberry paper to print a series of photos of a very old, large Thai mulberry tree in the northeastern US.  Since this paper is somewhat translucent, they were able to frame a printed photo over another printed photo with a pocket of airspace between them. One could see the blue-grey photo behind the bare limbed knarlly tree on top. There were some very large pieces. One delicate and vein rich leaf photo covered an entire wall.  This one was printed on rolls of shiny photo paper, in strips hung side by side, matching, much like a bilboard poster. Spectacular.  Better yet, was their trippy one-minute video of dried fall leaves.  The video was created with one of those laparoscopy cameras that is used in surgery - it wiggled and swiveled, twisted through the leaves intimately in quiet seduction.
  http://www.newworldmuseum.org/starn.html
   
  Several of the artist exhibits showed beautiful natural spaces ruined by man or industry, like the gas fields that are poised soon to invade the Nenets' "land of the second sun".
   
  See works of Masaki Hirano (Tasmanian old growth forests), Martin Stupich ( the Red Desert) and John Ganis (Oregon clear cutting).
   
  And this Korean guys work jumped out with gorgeous color.
  http://mcserver.gold.ac.uk/media_showcase/ma_image/0405/ma_ic_0405.php?name=hyung-geun_park
   
  Photographic art seems to take the viewer on a trip somewhere that one might not ever go, or be able to go.  That's what I like about this big show.  I'm about half-way through the main exhibits.  
   
  Connie
   
  http://www.fotofest.org/

		
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