Sergey Sonin & Elena Samorodova . Egyptian pack. Part one

Man-elk
© Sergey Sonin & Elena Samorodova
Technique: Silver-gelatin print. Hand imprint
Sergey Sonin & Elena Samorodova
Egyptian Pack. Part one
POBEDA gallery
Red October Chocolate factory - Bolotnaya naberezhnaya 3 b. 4
119072 Moscow - Russia
pobeda@pobedagallery.com www.pobedagallery.com
















Man-crane
© Sergey Sonin & Elena Samorodova
Technique: Silver-gelatin print. Hand imprint

Sergey Sonin & Elena Samorodova | Egyptian pack. Part one
«Egyptian pack» evokes many associations - here are both Petersburgers favorite topic of werewolves (see the movie of E. Yufit «Corpsmen werewolves») and references to the Perm animal style. Also we can recall British film «The Wicker Man» (1973) with its ritual procession of the man-beasts, however Sonin himself watched it when the work on the first part was about to end. A year ago, Sergey Sonin and Elena Samorodova, who always had a weakness for Mask culture, began to make masks of key players, the "national - romantic mythological hallucinosis» as they call it, or in short, - the living totems. It was necessary to show their impact with land-marks. Actually, «Pack»– is a marked territory.

















Owls-sisters
© Sergey Sonin & Elena Samorodova
Technique: Silver-gelatin print. Hand imprint

«Egyptian pack» contains humor in Kierkegaard's sense of the word. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, the heroes of this shooting are not humorists, but, apparently, they are comedians. Sometimes it's really quite funny, especially if you know who is hiding behind the masks (for example, Man-moose - actor and director Konstantin Murzenko, Man-boar - artist Alexey Belyaev-Gintovt, etc.).
However, it does not stop at laughing. The last project of the creative duo - «Generals of the 70’s», was also devoted to the game with disguises, but there the heroes were, at least, in harmony with their environment. The characters of «Egyptian pack», probably, are in limbo – they are some kind of anthropomorphic incognito, which to the full no longer belong to nature, but are moving somewhere beyond it.
Sonin himself, talking about the exhibition, says more about the lost Russian Gothic and calls his style «guerrilla photorealism.» To my taste, «Egyptian pack» - is rather a fable, in which instead of morality there is a hallucination, as optical experience. Hallucinations of the field artists, rather than the routine of everyday life nonsense. And this hallucinations are more Anglo-Saxon. This is seen especially in the second part of « Egyptian pack», which is now in operation.
However, the imperative hallucinations of artists, in the end, purge from the mind all redundant interpretations, so that we can only confidentially state – saw a man-beast.
Maxim Semelyak, December 2011
















Man-badger
© Sergey Sonin & Elena Samorodova
Technique: Silver-gelatin print. Hand imprint

Emmanuelle Bousquet. Illusion

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© Emmanuelle Bousquet Illusion#5
courtesy acte2galerie

Emmanuelle Bousquet | Illusion
February 2 - March 2, 2012
du 2 février au 2 mars 2012
courtesy acte2galerie








Emmanuelle Bousquet . Illusion
“I began my first self-portraits at the age of 10. My maternal grandmother was the spark for this new passion. She was the one who bought me a little red Kodak, even if I remember having to go to great lengths in order to get it. In my first snapshots, I took center stage in front of the camera. I just reproduced what I knew: fashion models. Born to a family of designers, fashion was my only reference point.“
As a teenager, Emmanuelle Bousquet approached photography in a more serious manner, essentially using the medium as a form of expression. She began to photograph the two women closest to her, her mother and her sister, and herself as well. It seemed to her logical to use her own body in the same way that a painter uses his paint.
In so doing, she passed to the other side of the mirror and made her first attempt at a photographic series, in black and white, in which all three women appear.
In 2004, she meet the photographer Antoine d’Agata, who suggested that she dive right into the universe of self-portraiture in a more direct, refined way, with the least amount of references to fashion or society possible. Hence, a timeless style is born; from that point on, the crude underlying realism that emanates from Emmanuelle’s photographs is visible. Taking refuge for several weeks thereafter in places of comfort to the artist, she produced her first true series of self-portraits, entitled “Troubles.”
Subsequently, she has continued to develop this approach, while deepening her work on the femininity seen through the evolutions of her body. Enabled by the introspection acquired with Antoine d'Agata, Emmanuelle cultivated more aesthetic, symbolic concepts in her work, and defined the mise-en-scene that has become the marker of her photographic style.
"Illusion" is her third series of photographic self-portraits. Composing a group of pictorial, mystical, timeless images, they are the fruits of indeth aesthetic and existential study; the product is the worldview of an artist seen through the prism of her own reflection.
















© Emmanuelle Bousquet Illusion#15
courtesy acte2galerie

















© Emmanuelle Bousquet Illusion#30
courtesy acte2galerie
photography-now.com
Torstr. 218 | 10115 Berlin | Editor: Claudia Stein
contact@photography-now.com | T +49.30.24 34 27 80

ARCTIC HYSTERIA. CONTEMPORARY ART FROM FINLAND

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© Salla Tykkä







State Russian Museum and Exhibition Centre for Photography ROSPHOTO
Artists' Association of Finland (AAF)
Ministry for Culture of the Russian Federation
ARCTIC HYSTERIA. CONTEMPORARY ART FROM FINLAND

Veli Granö | Ilkka Halso | Pekka Jylhä | Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen | Reijo Kela | Erkki Kurenniemi | Tea Mäkipää | Pink Twins | Petri Sirviö/The Screaming Men | Anni Rapinoja | Jari Silomäki | Mika Taanila | Salla Tykkä
3 february 2012 - 1 april 2012
Opening: 2 February 2012 at 18:00
ROSPHOTO Fron Building exhibition hall, 2 floor
ROSPHOTO State Museum and Exhibition Centre for Photography
Ministry for Culture of the Russian Federation
35 Bolshaya Morskaya , 191186 Saint-Petersburg
office@rosphoto.org www.rosphoto.org


















© Tea Mäkipää

ARCTIC HYSTERIA. CONTEMPORARY ART FROM FINLAND
Applying cultural clichés as a catalyst, the exhibition focuses on stereotypes, which has given cultural meaning to the specificities of a given region, Finland. Literally speaking Finland does not belong to the Arctic in a geographic sense, but the Finns are – as are, say, the Russians, the French and the English – believed to have specific national characteristics. A cliché often repeated, when discussing Finnish people, is their supposedly close connection with nature.
In fact, the humanity-nature relationship emerges as a sort of connecting thread throughout Arctic Hysteria, bridging generations and boundaries of genre in Finnish contemporary art. The utopian optimism of the 1960s and 1970s concerning technological progress is confronted with an anxiety about the environment and future in the works of younger artists. This reflects a general change that has happened in the world at large during the last four decades: From the science-fiction utopia of a new era, a space age, we have to get back to Earth and acknowledge a reality in which, after centuries of neglect, we have no choice but to take seriously environmental threats such as the climate change.















© Jari Silomäki

Arctic Hysteria is an intriguing review of Finnish contemporary art curated by Alanna Heiss (New York) and Marketta Seppälä (Helsinki). The exhibition is comprised of the works of over 15 contemporary Finnish artists focusing especially on mediums of photo, film, video and sound installation: Veli Granö, Ilkka Halso, Pekka Jylhä, Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Reijo Kela, Erkki Kurenniemi, Tea Mäkipää, Pink Twins, Petri Sirviö/The Screaming Men, Anni Rapinoja, Jari Silomäki, Mika Taanila and Salla Tykkä. Curators: Alanna Heiss (USA) and Marketta Haila (Finland).
The exhibition is organized in St. Petersburg by State Museum and Exhibition Centre ROSPHOTO and the Artists’ Association of Finland with the support of FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange.The exhibition is made possible by the Ministry of Education and Culture Finland, Gerda and Salomo Wuorio Foundation, Alfred Kordelin Foundation, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Finnish Film Foundation, Arts Council of Finland, AVEK (The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture), and Finnish Cultural Institute in St. Petersburg.

photography-now.com
Torstr. 218 | 10115 Berlin | Editor: Claudia Stein
contact@photography-now.com | T +49.30.24 34 27 80

Lynn Davis.theme of water: Icebergs (1986-2007), Evening/Northumberland Strait (1993-1996) and China (2001)

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Iceberg IV, Disko Bay, Greenland, 2004.
Gold toned gelatin silver print.
© Lynn Davis, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York/Zurich

Lynn Davis
2 February – 19 May 2012
Vernissage | Thursday | 2 February | 6 – 8 pm
Stockerstr. 33, CH-8022 Zurich Switzerland
+41 (0)44 202 69 25 zuerich@houkgallery.com http://www.houkgallery.com
Opening hours: Tues-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 11am-5pm






















Evening/Northumberland Strait XI, 1994.
Selenium toned gelatin silver print.
© Lynn Davis, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York/Zurich

Lynn Davis
Galerie Edwynn Houk Zurich is pleased to announce an exhibition of important photographs by Lynn Davis (American, b. 1944). The show takes place from 2 February to 19 May 2012 and draws from three series that span the artist’s prolific career and are based around the theme of water: Icebergs (1986-2007), Evening/Northumberland Strait (1993-1996) and China (2001).
Water in its various forms and spectacular manifestations around the globe has been a recurring subject and source of inspiration for Lynn Davis. She approaches every place intuitively and photographs each with a minimalist sensibility, stripping it bare of content and meaning in an attempt to capture its essence. She meticulously extracts basic geometric compositions that in return link one site with another, one body of work with the next. Davis transforms her negatives into luminous and exquisite black-and-white prints, painstakingly toning each with gold or selenium in order to achieve an even richer, more detailed photograph.
When Davis was first learning to make photographs together with her close friend and co-conspirator, Robert Mapplethorpe, her work focused on the nude form. These formative works were made with the same visual style and formal rigor that ultimately became Davis’ hallmark, which suited her perfectly when she eventually abandoned the studio in favor of the world at large.
After Davis’ first trip to Greenland in 1986, her work changed dramatically in response to finding a sense of placidity in the forms and illuminations of icebergs. Subsequently, Davis has travelled to more than 70 countries and sought out some of the most remote monuments—both, natural and human-made—on a quest to portray these timeless places “of all cultures in every country.” However, over time her journeys to a world of wonders became less about exhaustive documentation than the search for an inner, almost spiritual connection with the universality of their basic forms.
In 2005, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Davis an Academy Award in Art, making her the first photographer ever to earn such an honor. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and collected widely. Her work appears in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which held an important exhibition of Davis’ photographs in 1999.























Iceberg VI, Disko Bay, Greenland, 2004.
Selenium toned gelatin silver enlargement print.
© Lynn Davis, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York/Zurich
photography-now.com
Torstr. 218 | 10115 Berlin | Editor: Claudia Stein
contact@photography-now.com | T +49.30.24 34 27 80

Chris Engman. The Artist as an Explorer

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The Haul, 2006
© Chris Engman /Courtesy Galerie Clair

Chris Engman
The Artist as an Explorer
January 26 - February 25 2012
Opening: Thursday, January 26 2012, 7 pm
Franz-Joseph-Str. 10, 80801 Munichm +49 (0)89 38 66 74 42
info@clair.me http://www.clair.me




















The Audience, 2004
© Chris Engman /Courtesy Galerie Clair

Chris Engman | The Artist as an Explorer
"My work calls attention to our misperceptions: the gulf that exists between how we see and how we think we see, how we think and how we think we think, and the inconstant and constructed nature of memory. My photographs are documentations of sculptures and installations but also records of actions and elaborate processes. They are acts of reverence and participation in a deep and reassuring natural order much larger than myself. " Chris Engman
Chris Engman's images are not quite what they seem. They make use of the language of landscape photography to create a feeling of familiarity on first glance. A second look suggests that not all is as it should be. By intervening in the natural landscape to create installations for the camera, Engman makes photographs that challenge the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial and are a subtle commentary on the act of taking a photograph.



















The Meeting, 2004
© Chris Engman /Courtesy Galerie Clair

Based in Seattle, Engman uses the vast empty landscapes of eastern Washington as both the backdrop and the focus of his images. Although his medium is photography, his artistic process is quite different from that of the 'traditional' landscape photographer. Rather than taking his camera out to respond to the environment around him, Engman's images begin with an idea. "I write about it, turn it over in my mind, and gradually the requirements for a site take shape." He does not look to sublimate the beauty of the natural landscape or to document or comment on its transformation. Instead Engman uses the landscape as his toolbox, as the raw material with which to give form to his ideas.
In some ways his approach could be considered anti-photographic. Rather than using the camera to record or document reality, he manipulates the physical world to create an image specifically for the camera. Self-described as "a sculptor or installation artist who uses photography as a tool", Engman's approach is closer to that of Land artists such as Robert Smithson or Richard Long than to much of contemporary landscape photography.
[ ... ] Whereas most manipulation in photography today is camouflaged or hidden, Engman's interventions are designed to remind us of the fact that photography—and perhaps even the act of looking itself—is inherently a process of visual manipulation. He uses the basic tools of the medium (perspective, framing, light and shadow) not as a comment on the authenticity of analog photography versus the fabrication of digital, but rather as a reminder that photography can never be an objective or truthful medium.
Marc Feustel, Author and Curator, Paris




















Variations, 2010
© Chris Engman /Courtesy Galerie Clair

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manolis Kassimatis: fotografando musicante P.J. Harvey

μανολης κασιματης: φωτογραφιζοντας την μουσικο P. J. HARVEY