UH Photo/Digital Blog

  

 

FREE public lecture by award winning photographer, journalist and videographer Donna De Cesare!   As the speaker for the Spring 2009 VISUAL STUDIES Lenses of our Perception, De Cesare will discuss her approach to creating visual narratives in photography and video, journalistic ethics and her work in conflict zones.  De Cesare has worked all over the globe—but has a special passion for Latin America where her work has focused on children growing up in challenging and sometimes violent circumstances.  Timely and compelling, De Cesare will share poignant visual narratives from her stunning portfolio and discuss the importance of images in increasing our global understanding. The event is free and open to the public. Please also share this announcement with your students and consider offering extra credit if appropriate.  De Cesare’s talk will be relevant to the study of images, Latin America, children, photography, film, journalism or cultures…  her work is inspiring and compelling!  Please join us for what promises to be a memorable evening,  Tracy Xavia Karner 

Donna De Cesare April 28th, 2009Reception with Donna De Cesare at 6:30pmPresentation begins at 7pmBrown Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts Houston   

   Award winning photographer, journalist and videographer, Donna De Cesare’s (www.donnadecesare.com) groundbreaking reportage about the spread of US gang culture to Central America has won national and international awards including an Alfred Eistendstadt magazine photography award, a Canon photo essay award, Pictures of the Year, a top prize in the NPPA, the Dorothea Lange Prize, the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, the Mother Jones International Photo Fund Award, and an Emmy award (1996) for her video documentary “Killer Virus.” A consultant to UNICEF, De Cesare’s is the recipient of the Soros Independent project fellowship and a Fulbright fellowship.     The Lenses of Our Perception lecture is co-sponsored by Visual Studies with UH partners: 

Visualistas (the Friends of Visual Studies), Tenneco Lecture series,Texas Learning & Computation Center (TLC²),  Jack J. Valenti School of Communication,Mexican American Studies, Center for Immigration Research,Department of Sociology,  and Women’s Studies. 

And Community partners: 

Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Fotofest, the Institute for Hispanic Culture,Houston Center for Photography, the DeSantos Gallery, and C-47 magazine. For more information:www.visualstudies.uh.edu

Visiting artist Andy Fedak (http://andyfedak.com)will be talking today Thursday April 9 at 10:30 am.  He currently applying for the faculty position Digital Media in the School of Art at the University of Houston.

It is very important for us to get your feedback and learn your opinions on possible future faculty.  Your survey responses to the candidates lecture will be strictly confidential. Your information will be coded and will remain anonymous.

Thank you again for your feedback.  Please click on the link below to begin the survey.

Click Here to take the survey

Relational Dialectics is a concept from communication theory which describes the challenging and often conflicted nature of relationships. The UH Photography/Digital Media exhibition explores the relationships between artists and their work, their viewers, and the world at large. The work explores issues of femininity, environment, cultural heritage, family, fear, absence, and mediation.

The fourteen graduating artists of the program come together at Box 13 ArtSpace, opening March 28th from 7-9:30 pm and will run through April 30th. Come and participate in our innovative dialogue.

http://www.relationaldialectics.org/
http://www.box13artspace.com/

 

Relational Dialectics

http://www.ricegallery.org/

Creepy Block Séance to bring Minor White back from the dead or cool multi cultural performance group that investigates our relationship to gender, technology and sustainability (What the @#$*!).

You decide!

Sound Forms
Saturday, January 31, 8pm
Location: Aurora Theater, 800 Aurora Street
$6 admission
Members and Students with Valid ID Admitted Free

The next generation of Texas video artists brings us a cacophony of sound, performance and playful experimentation with video. This fourty-five minute program showcases engaging and expressive works by University of Houston School of Art students who demonstrate innovative approaches to technology and the genre of video art.

Curated by Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hilllerbrand, a husband/wife collaborative team working with video and installation. For more info www.maryandstephan.com.

January 21, 2009,  7:30pm
Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex
2201 Preston Houston, TX 77003

On the occasion of the publication of his new book, Performance, Technology, and Science (cover pictured, New York, PAJ Publications, 2008), theatre director/choreographer Johannes Birringer will address ideas and suggestions for the interrelationship of digital media art, performance, and choreography, show film excerpts from his latest production, Corpo, Carne e Espírito, which premiered in Brasil last June, as well as from Suna no Onna, his collaborative dance work with fashion and interactive/smart garment designers, which was shown at London’s Laban Centre.

He will address the recent history of dance and technology and the emergence of interactive art and bio art in an international context of art & science collaboration.

Birringer is artistic director of the Houston-based AlienNation Co. and directs the Center for Contemporary and Digital Performance at Brunel University, London. He has created numerous multimedia dance-theatre productions in Houston since moving here in 1987, including Invisible Cities, Ad Mortem, North by South, Parachute, and Mirak, and his digital dance and screen-based works have been shown at festivals around the world. He is the author several books including Dance & Cognition, Media and Performance, and Performance on the Edge.

wonderful links for sound effects you can use in your projects:

http://www.freesound.org/

http://www.frogstar.com/

http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/pir/PIRsfx.shtml

http://www.soundsnap.com/

hey look they wrote about us!

 http://waxbythefire.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/2008-university-of-houston-school-of-art-annual-student-exhibition/ 

DON’T PASS THIS UP!  The Houston Center for Photography is looking for interns for next Spring.  You would do the following:

1)   Assist us with lighting the exhibition (2-3 hrs)

2)   Assist with installation of vinyl (1-2 hrs)

3)   Photograph opening reception (2 hrs)

4)   Create installation images of exhibition (2 hrs)

5)   Create press kit for artists after exhibition closes (4-6 hrs)

a.    Copy of sign in book, all press material, installation images and opening reception images; will accompany a complimentary HCP membership

Contact Stephan Hillerbrand at schillerbrand@uh.edu for more info!

from The New York Times

NEW HAVEN — Photographs are shameless. They’ll do anything to get your attention. They’ll show you celebrities in and out of their clothes, exotic creatures and objects, places and events that you would never otherwise see.

Another, paradoxical strategy for captivating viewers is to show them something they can’t immediately understand. Whether because of its visual complexity, its oblique perspective, its lighting, its degree of abstraction or the unfamiliarity of its subject, it’s the kind of photograph that makes you stop and think, “What the heck is that?” And it keeps you looking until you’ve figured out what it is you’re looking at.

The confounding photograph is the subject of an absorbing and thought-provoking exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery here called “First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography.” Organized by Joshua Chuang, the gallery’s assistant curator of photographs, the exhibition presents more than 100 pieces dating from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century. It was drawn mostly from the collection of Allan Chasanoff, who focused on acquiring confusing pictures, and is supplemented by photographs from the gallery’s collection.

All the photographs are straight. There is no technical trickery involved — no darkroom magic, no multiple exposures and no digital manipulation. Every picture is the result of what the photographer saw through a lens. Nor do any of the pictures belong in the genre of the accidental, anonymous snapshot. Almost all are by professional artists, including many famous ones, like Bill Brandt, Larry Fink, Lee Friedlander and Andre Kertesz.

A big part of the fun is the experience of figuring out what at first seems to make no sense. Find the cow lurking behind the thicket in John Szarkowski’s “Young Steer” (1994). Guess what the bizarre, twisted, bulbous form in a 1961 photograph by Shomei Tomatsu is before you read the wall label, which explains, “ ‘Beer Bottle after the Atomic Bomb Explosion’ from the series ‘Nagasaki 11:02.’ ”

For serious photographers, however, producing optical confusion is not just for the amusement of visual puzzling. In the context of mid-20th-century art history it was a way to substantiate photography as a significant art form at a time when abstraction and formalism were the main vehicles of innovation. Like a sophisticated modern painting, a photograph could be seen first as an arrangement of dark and light shapes on a flat surface and second as a representational picture.

So Clarence John Laughlin’s “Still Life With Calla Lily and Mirror” (May 16, 1937) looks initially like a luminous, Cubist composition of round and pod-shaped forms and flattened, wood-grained shapes before it becomes decipherable as a traditional still life.

Optical confusion in photography was also in sympathy with Surrealism. Seen from the right perspective, the ordinary could turn strange, dreamlike and hauntingly ambiguous. A nocturnal landscape of sand and water turns out to be the body of a nude woman half submerged in water in “Belly Landscape” (1980), by Karin Rosenthal.

A richly grainy picture by William Klein (”Four Heads, New York, 1954”) catches four pedestrians looking in four different directions. There’s a policeman in the upper left corner and a woman in a pillbox hat and sheer veil looking sideways and grinning mightily for no apparent reason in the lower right. A hallucinatory, Boschian quality overrides the social realism; the familiar becomes unnervingly unfamiliar.

But while optical confusion makes photographs more interesting as art, it also reflects something fundamental in human experience. Because we become expert at making sense of visual situations early in life, we may assume that encounters with things we can’t readily assimilate are fairly rare.

But if you think about it, there is almost always a gap in time — however infinitesimal it may seem — between seeing and comprehending. That moment just before we file a perception away into a conventional category, when our senses and minds are fully alert to what lies before us — that is the sweet spot of art.

This is the group show I went to New York for in November.
For those that are traveling this break, the show runs thru 12/21
at Participant, Inc.

http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/psychology_of_a_pawn/