Artist 6

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy appealed to me for a number of reasons. Formost, He was cutting edge for his time in the realm of art, design and photography due to his experimental methods. Russian Constructivism, Moholy-Nagy’s primary leaning, was a political and artistic movement influenced by the 19th century’s industrial revolution. Among its main principals was the belief that art should use industrial machinery. Coming out of Bauhaus, which believed that design could help serve humanity in forging a new world, utopian indeed. In 1937, Moholy-Nagy was invited by Walter Paeckpe to open the New Bauhaus school in Chicago. The school operated for just one year and was shut down due to a lack of funding, but Paeckpe stuck with Moholy-Nagy, who in 1939 established the School of Design, renamed the Institute of Design in 1944, one of the world’s most important design education institutions. Moholy-Nagy passed away in Chicago in 1946. His work is original and even holds it's freshness in out contemporary times.

Personal Project 2

Artist 5

Hiroshi Sugimoto. “Lightning Fields”

I've always loved photography that takes us to the micro or macro world of natural 

phenomena. Sugimoto's lighting field stops time and shows us the micro world of static electricity.

To create each image, Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a Van De Graaff 400,000-volt generator to apply electrical charge directly onto film. The result in each case is a unique, instantaneous image of an electrical current. 

Tech 3

Artist 4

James Welling, New Abstractions #30, 2000, gelatin silver print. 

The reduction of the image into an abstraction is what attracted my to this work. It's complex and beautiful to me, like an idea just forming or perhaps an escape from some self-imposed paradigm. Maybe this is the idea of liberation, at least for me it is. What i love about dividing space up into pure black and white is that the negative space and the positive space become interchangeable, mutually dependent. Maybe this is a love story after all.

Tech 2

Artist 3

Arnulf Rainer

Rainer is an Austrian painter/photographer. Somehow,  knowing that he is Austrian helps me make sense of his work.  In general, Austrians are a traditional, polite and formal bunch. They are a proud, cultured people and have a great symphonic tradition.  For me, Rainer's work is a kind of emotional rebellion from tradition and perhaps his own temperament (or maybe his family's temperament?).  Like skinheads crashing a society party.   It's somewhat juvenile yet liberating, mocking yet idolizing.

I like the idea of drawing/ painting on photos. It kind of has the feeling of breaking an unwritten rule, or debasing a psychological authoritative mindset.  Breaking rules can be devilishly fun, boyishly destructive, and in Rainer's case, passionately creative.