Round Up Week of February 11
/The Producer’s picks for this week’s news relevant to the photography, art, design and production industries:
1) Rania Matar's hauntingly beautiful lockdown portraits
Minty, Kayla, Leyah, Layla, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2020). Courtesy of Rania Matar.
A Lebanese-American photographer captured images of her neighbors at their homes in Massachusetts and collected their stories along the way.
In a scenario that many can probably relate to, the Boston-based photographer Rania Matar found herself stuck at home last April during the coronavirus lockdown, working with six restless young adults in the background. While trying to focus on her forthcoming book Rania Matar: She, the artist found herself looking across her yard and into her neighbour's kitchen window—where she saw a similar scene playing out. In that moment, she decided on her next project: photographing the local community through their windows.
Matar took to Instagram and posted one of her signature portraits with this message: "The last few days/weeks have been unsettling for everyone. We are all getting used to being isolated [in] our own cocoons and our communication has been through FaceTime, Zoom and whatever other available digital media. I miss seeing people [...] if you live within a 30-minute drive from Brookline and have access to a ground floor door or window at your house or apartment, I would love to come and say hello and make a photograph."
"I was surprised by the amount of responses I got," the Lebanese-American photographer tells The Art Newspaper. "It proved to me that people were really craving human connection on some level." Matar began driving round her neighbourhood and ended up taking hundreds of socially distanced photographs that captured the bizarre—but common—coronavirus experience.
"The beauty of it is that nobody was rushed; nobody had anywhere to go. I completely bonded with people and ended up doing full photoshoots," Matar says. She published the photographs regularly on her Instagram account, where she could tell the stories of her sitters and also reach more people who were interested in taking part in the project.
2) Pandemic prompts New York artists to leave the city in search of more affordable space
© Tara Donovan, Courtesy of Pace Gallery
Tara Donovan, GaHee Park and artist-owners of Brooklyn's Elijah Wheat Showroom are among those who are leaving in pursuit of nature.
Tara Donovan may have recently opened a new exhibition at Pace gallery in New York—but the artist herself is getting ready to leave the city for good.
Donovan, known for sculptures whose optical effects are created using everyday mass-produced materials, is in the final stages of closing her Queens studio of seven years to permanently relocate to Los Angeles. “Moving to California has been a long-term plan,” she tells The Art Newspaper, “but the pandemic accelerated this intention based on a desire to have better access to nature.”
New York, Donovan says, is also no longer rich in the industrial waste materials that have fed her practice. “Twenty-five years ago the city was abound with surplus places,” she adds, “but all those industries are gone.”
Read more…
3) Immortalizing Mexican American gang members in 80s LA with tender portraits
Janette Beckman, El Hoyo Maravilla (1983), Photography Janette Beckman
Documentary photographer Janette Beckman’s intimate pictures of El Hoyo Maravilla reveal LA’s gangland community in a bygone era.
As a documentary photographer known for chronicling subcultures, Beckman was naturally drawn to the marginal aspects of the city that usually elided popular representations of LA at that time. “I just wanted to document the East LA culture and style. It was a part of Los Angeles that no one seemed to acknowledge. Back in the day, before the internet, if you thought of LA it was Hollywood, the movies, Beverly Hills, and the music scene.”
You might expect this hidden side of Los Angeles, operating in the everyday space of the city but also quite detatched from it, would be difficult to infiltrate with a camera, but Beckman’s portraits depict people with a surprising willingness and openness to being in front of the lens. “I was the first British person they had met,” she tells me, remembering the “mutual curiosity” that developed between herself and the gang members. Beckman explains how she ingratiated herself with HM, “I brought a box of photos I had taken of British youth, punks, skinheads, two-tone, mods, rockabilly, reggae, and ska fans,” she recalls. “I explained I had been photographing the ‘gangs’ of the UK and I wanted to show the Hoyo Maravilla to people back in England.”
4) SOHO after dark
© Joshua K. Jackson, Sleepless In Soho (2020)
These cinematic photographs capture the allure of Soho after dark. Joshua K. Jackson spent three years exploring London at night, taking pictures of Soho’s neon-lit streets.
Exploring nocturnal London has been a tradition in art and literature ever since the Victorians reclaimed the night by illuminating it with gaslight. Writers such as Charles Dickens and Jack London documented their night walks through the city like pioneers making their way through previously unexplored territory. Perhaps it’s something about darkness and its connection with concealment and disclosure that creates such an alluring space for possibility and secrecy, but the idea of nighttime embodies a whole range of attractive associations in our imaginations – danger, illicitness, romance, criminality, or simply being out-of-step with the waking life of the majority.
Photographer Joshua K. Jackson has spent three years walking the fluorescent-lit streets of London’s Soho at night. What began as a reaction to his chronic insomnia has evolved into Sleepless in Soho, a book chronicling his dreamless nights in this labyrinthine district of the city. Jackson’s highly cinematic images are a compelling document of Soho nightlife before COVID-19 transformed, possibly irrevocably, the way we occupy the streets at night. Taken between January 2017 and December 2019, the photographs capture Soho at its neon-saturated best: through the steamy windows of bars and passing busses, reflections in the wet pavements, beleaguered taxi-drivers cruising for a fare, and late-night inhabitants of the city silhouetted against the light of an all-night coffee shop, or kissing in a doorway.
Read more…
5) In the Absence of Light: Celebrating the history of black artists in America
Untitled (Club Couple), Kerry James Marshall, 2014.
In a compelling new HBO documentary, film-maker Sam Pollard speaks to prominent creatives to tell the struggle and success of African American art.
“I get up at 7.30 in the morning, and then I’m at my computer working, thinking about new ideas, pushing along the projects that I’m involved in,” 70-year-old Sam Pollard explains. The documentary film-maker, as an editor, frequently collaborated with Spike Lee on films such as Mo’ Better Blues, 4 Little Girls and Bamboozled. His storied directing career features the seminal civil rights docuseries Eyes on the Prize, the electrifying blues documentary Two Trains Runnin’, and the Academy Award-shortlisted MLK/FBI.
His new HBO-produced film Black Art: In the Absence of Light, in that same spirit, recounts David Driskell’s groundbreaking Two Centuries of Black American Art. First mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) in 1976, it’s an engrossing survey of African American art since 1750 that inspired attendees and future artists, and spurred questions surrounding representation.
6) Yayoi Kusama’s delayed Botanical Garden show is set to open this spring
Yayoi Kusama, Courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden
The artist’s new Infinity Room could also debut at the New York Botanical Garden in summer, depending on COVID-19 guidelines.
Back in 2019, the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) announced an upcoming Yayoi Kusama show titled Kusama: Cosmic Nature, featuring her first ever participatory installation, intended to change with the seasons. Unfortunately, the show’s 2020 run was subsequently cancelled, as we watched spring, summer, and autumn pass by outside our windows during quarantine.
Now, in good news for art and selfie fans alike, the postponed show has a new opening date. The Bronx-based NYBG has announced that Kusama: Cosmic Nature will open on April 10, 2021, with new considerations for coronavirus guidelines. Tickets, for example, will be limited, and staggered to prevent crowding in certain areas.