#photographerinterview

Anne Skoogfors Floral Intimations

In her artmaking, Anne Skoogfors draws on the complex yet familiar attributes of flowers that are shared by many cultures. Her distinctive mode of creation lends each floral arrangement qualities that are both graphic and elusive. Untethered from the earth, they float in a netherworld of deepest black, their vibrant colours dissolving into shadow as if they are already in the process of quietly departing – the intimacy of non-becoming forever stilled by a sweep of light.

Anne Skoogfors discusses her unconventional approach to image making at Talking Pictures.

Diana Nicholette Jeon American Grotesque

The mix-media images of the Hawai‘i-based artist Diana Nicholette Jeon push back hard against the ideological and commercial misrepresentation of women. The counterfeit notions of ideal womanhood touted by media and advertising to create aspirations and anxieties that drive rampant consumerism and seek to justify the external control of female behaviours and bodies. Her collage process is complex and multilayered and, while these images speak to the wider state of society, they find their genesis in the personal.

It takes courage to draw so openly on one’s personal life in order to speak to the tropes of societal injustice – and to do so by turning one’s own image into the allegorical grotesques she employs to personify those tropes. But then Diana Nicholette Jeon’s creative practice is as feisty as it is experimental.

Diana Nicholette Jeon discussed the impetus and technical experimentation behind her distinctive imagery ay Talking Pictures.

Vic Bakin Past Imperfect, Present Tense

Much of the work of the Ukrainian photographer Vic Bakin explores the nature of fading and of becoming. In his early work he captured that brief period when an adolescent male reaches maturity – images that suggest the crosscurrents of newfound physicality and the undertow of uncertainty, of vulnerability.

As Russia’s full-scale invasion plunged Ukraine into outright war, he began a body of work that was to become ‘Epitome’. Recently published in book form, this award-winning series is an evocation of fading memories haunted by present realities. An elegy on a coming of age overwhelmed by the coming of war, of the landscapes of youth laid waste.

Vic Bakin discusses his expressively layered images at Talking Pictures.

Dulce Pinzón Practical Magic

Named one of the fifty most creative Mexicans in the world by Forbes Magazine, Dulce Pinzón’s photographs hover in the liminal space between reality and fantasy. The concerns addressed in each image are very real – racial prejudice, low-paid workers, environmental damage – but they are presented as latter-day fables that entice the eye with a view to capturing the imagination and so engaging the mind.

Dulce Pinzón reveals the stories behind her magical imagery at Talking Pictures.

Hillerbrand+Magsamen The Stuff of Dreams

Launching the family into orbit…

The artists Hillerbrand+Magsamen have variously blockaded the garage, tunnelled their way through the house, sawn the family couch in half, and built a rocket to take the family into outer space.

Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen live in suburban Houston with their daughter Madeleine and son Emmett. Harnessing photography, video, performance, and installation they explore the paradoxes of rampant domestic consumerism, critiquing the modern mythologies of the Perfect Family and the American Dream.

For them, all the home’s a stage, and all the family members merely players…

Hillerbrand+Magsamen navigate the domestic light and dark at Talking Pictures.

Antonio Briceño The Marvel of Boundless Diversity

For the Venezuelan photographic artist Antonio Briceño, the manifold diversity of humanity and of Nature is not something to fear, but something to celebrate and from which to learn. His images make visible the powerful mythologies and metaphors by which the various indigenous peoples of the southern Americas wove the narratives that gave life meaning. Narratives that emphasise the interdependence of humankind and nature, and the moral imperatives that this mutuality bring with it. In these images, people are not separate from nature, but part of it; just as the indigenous peoples do not see themselves as the masters of nature, but among its subjects.

Antonio Briceño reflects upon his work, and the cultural diversity it portrays, at Talking Pictures.