#mark feeney

Well the Missus and I trundled over to The Fens the other day to check out Songs for Modern Japan: Popular Music and Graphic Design, 1900–1950 (through September 2) and say, it was swell. “Songs for Modern Japan: Popular Music and Graphic Design, 1900–1950” explores how sheet music covers provide a window into Japanese society and culture during this period of immense transformation. Visitors…

This is the final week of the New England Portfolio Review Showcase at the Boston Photographic Resource Center.  If you are in the area, please stop by.  The last day to see the exhibit is this coming Saturday.  Click here to find more info about the Showcase.

 Read the review of the show written for the Boston Globe by the Pulitzer-winning art and photography critic Mark Feeney.  For me, the most moving lines in the article arrive in the form of Feeney's observation of light in Phillip Jones's glowing potent images: 

"Philip Jones takes black-and-white photographs of urban structures or sites at night: the Tobin Bridge, Times Square, the Unisphere in New York’s Flushing Meadow, and so on. The images are cool, pristine, and extremely handsome, with a slight air of mystery. Both the handsomeness and the mystery owe a great deal to the pearliness of Jones’s light. It’s almost as if the shutter has clicked just as the bridge or underpass or whatever has exhaled." 

 ...And as if Jones's camera was enlivened with this exhaled breath.  These night photographs are far from being still, they seem to push through the limitations of the medium, and imbue the two-dimensional photographic canvas with energy, pulsating and breathing in time. 

Flame Towers by Phillip Jones

Steel Cylinder by Phillip Jones

Logan Airport.  10 Minutes, by Phillip Jones

Liz Devlin's review of the NEPR Showcase for the Photo Nights Boston Blog highlights, along other artists' work, the powerful and emotionally captivating and cinematic installation, Unrelenting Silence, by Cambridge-based photographer and artist Beth Hankes.    In Beth's words:

"This installation documents what is felt during the arc of passionate experience –that which is only visceral, but still familiar. What begins as something unruly and beautifully consuming turns into disillusion. The connection dissolves - not in an instant, but many: affection segments and shatters, joy recedes, pain surges. After the fallout, looking back, the memories become hazy. Some disappear, but others remain, still blurred but insistent, obsessive and silent."

If you are to stand in front of this installation you will feel the energy of the captured encounter.  It dominates the space around it, creating its own aura, mysterious, tense and questioning.  It's not as much about satisfying your curiosity, answering *your* questions, but more about pushing you to your own comfort limits, with the questions coming *your* way. 

Unrelenting Silence, Installation shot by Beth Hankes

And of course, there was my own work, with its more ephemeral and temporal presence.  I consciously chose not to frame my assemblies for the exhibition, to emphasize the fragility of the medium and the ephemeral, ever-changing context of the images themselves.  As I wrote in my previous post, these pieces are printed on now almost extinct airmail paper and then painstakingly pieced together.  I am debating however whether to frame them for more permanent installations.  A permanent ephemeron it would be, wouldn't it?  An oxymoron in itself.    

I would like to say a *huge* Thank You to the other five artists for sharing their amazing work, to the PRC staff for mounting this impressive exhibition, and especially to Glenn Ruga and Julie Kukharenko for helping me with selection of the series for the exhibition.  Julie, you saved me by putting out fires when some of my airmail pieces wanted to become airborne! Thank you!  

Here are a couple of photographs Julie took during the installation of one of my two series on display, 'Many Loving Kisses!' on August 2nd, with the art installer extraordinaire, Vinnie.  

Mark Feeney: "Four Photographers on Three Wheels: William Eggleston's Tricycle and Before."