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BEN MATTHEWS
Ellis Crimsby - 2001
acrylic on canvas
46 x 40 inches (116.84 x 101.6 cm)
Ben Matthews There is nothing complicated about my work. Basically, I try to create exciting images that lead to the use of one's imagination. I like to think of my paintings as being short movies that the viewer directs in their own head. Working in a poster format, I try to give the impression that my paintings have already served their purpose. They are documentation's of people, places, events, products, and moments in time that did, did not, or will exist. For my characters, I use antique photographs collected at flea markets. These people who have been sold for a few bucks are recreated in my work. They are given new names and meaning. The final step to completing a work is to age it. By doing so, I try to give them a sense of reality. They exist as used objects with mysterious pasts. They may have been in someone's basement collecting dust, found at an abandoned museum, or bought at a pawnshop for $2.00.
Ben Matthews - November, 2000
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DANIEL
LEE
Ruth & Alonzo - 2001
digital C-print (edition 1/6)
50 x 35 inches (127 x 88.9 cm)
Daniel Lee NIGHTLIFE The setting sun often awakens a new landscape of wild life activity, one that is carefully watched by the eyes of predator, scavenger and prey... My latest work "Nightlife" is a contemporary portrayal of the intrinsic animal interac-tions between people in today's urban environment. The centerpiece is a mural depicting the diversity found within a street side cafe. There are ten additional portraits that segregate the scene into smaller habitats. All models were photographed with strobe lighting in front of seamless paper using a Lite Phase digital camera back on a Hasselblad camera. Thanks to digital technology, I was able to photograph each model separately in my studio. I digitally arranged the furniture and incorporated a Soho restaurant as the background. The 60" x 216" mural was printed with a Vutex Inkjet on vinyl canvas (limited edition of three). The individual portraits are digital C-print, 35" X 50" mounted on acid-free Sintra board with UV lamination (limited edition of six).
Daniel Lee, 2001
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BURLEIGH KRONQUIST
Onstage Jack Performing While Offstage Jack Raises and Lowers the
Curtain - 1999
oil on playing card
3.5 x 2.5 inches (8.89 x 6.35 cm)
Burleigh Kronquist JACK PAINTINGS I want my art to come at the viewer from as many levels as I can manage. From another perspective (to slightly alter a phrase from Robert Frost), I want my work to begin in delight and end, hopefully, in a moment of perception. The Jack series started on a whim, but I quickly felt that Jack was both an Everyman and also, more specifically, a representative of a kind of art explorer. My one self-imposed rule in doing these was that some element of the playing card had to show through. I wanted the painterly surfaces to animate and underscore a stage presence or dramatic situation in which "Jack" plays out, or perhaps stumbles into, a variety of conditions that face anyone who tries to keep a creative openness in his/her comings and goings. I never begin a painting with a pre-cooked plan or intention; rather, I work out of a deliberate chaos and confusion toward a precarious moment of stasis. My titles usually come in the process of working, just as I begin to reach that moment of clarity, and thus they are quite important to me. But they are never meant to "explain" the painting - only to enhance meanings I hope the painting already contains.
Burleigh Kronquist, November 2001
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STEVEN
SIEGEL
Kingsbridge Swimming Pool - 1988
ilfochrome print
11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56 cm)
Steven Siegel New York Streetscapes/Dreamscapes All of the photographs presented here are "traditional" photographs. By this I mean these photographs were produced through the silver-based chemical process and thereafter developed and printed in a darkroom using photographic chemicals. Put another way, digital imaging and processing was not used in any phase of the production of these images. For many years I have been photographing the New York streets and the astounding variety of people who populate them. The New York street, it has been often said, is a place of extremes. It is a metaphor for human diversity, tolerance and the First Amendment; just as surely, it is a metaphor for alienation and despair. For the photographer, the choice of metaphor is often a matter of waiting a few extra seconds. Or the metaphors may be presented side-by-side, a composition for which the New York street is particularly well-suited. The dynamism of the New York street produces a wealth of detail not just for those photographers who think of themselves as photojournalists but also for those who have no agenda other than producing interesting, provocative or disturbing images. It may seem paradoxical that a place that many associate with documentary realism is also a bubbling cauldron of surrealistic images. I have no single approach to taking a "street" photograph. If any form of picture-making defies rigid rules, it is this one. But most often I will begin by selecting a building, wall or sign as a static background and wait for interesting dynamic elements to appear. Usually the process is one of exclusion, that is, the removal of extraneous elements through careful framing or waiting for some elements (such as cars) to leave the frame. In this context, the photographer's art derives almost entirely from the selection of the moment in which to trip the shutter. Yet, on the New York street in particular, this margin of discretion is enormous. Whether this process reveals an essential truth or is as manipulative in its own way as the digital interposition of objects in a photograph, I leave for others to decide.
Steven Siegel, November 2001
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DON CELENDER
Conceptual Documentation: Two Surveys
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