The golden mask...Pianistic memories

Special thanks to Connie Yau, model & Onyema Okolo, make-up artist

Interview with photographer Anne Chan

Title: New Works by Anne Chan, Jonathan B. French and Michael Dax

Opening Reception: 11.08.2008 @ 7-10pm

Dates: 11.08.2008 - 12.07.2008
Where: Hamiltonian Gallery, 1353 U Street, NW, Washington, DC
Website: www.annechanenterprises.com

video coming soon...

Photo shoot in Mt. Vernon

Nostalgia hit me the other day when walking down N. Charles Street quite some time ago. I remember turning to look at a young chic girl walking down the steps out of the appartment building as if in a hurry. That's when my eyes wandered past her and I noticed the wooden door, the colored tiles, the smallness of the space. Images of the ornate Plaza de España in Seville, Spain came to mind. And so I returned to N. Charles Street with my model, unable to return to Seville...

Special thanks to Emma Needell, model

Photo shoot in a Baltimore alley

Beauty meets art in a tucked away alley (not to mention the numerous encounters, while shooting, with wandering souls after their afternoon beer or two or three...)

 

 

  

 

 

Special thanks to Sara Tincher, model

Review of "A Girl Cut in Two"

Title: La fille coupée en deux

Dates: No longer showing

Where: Charles Theatre, 1711 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21201

French master of suspense, Claude Chabrol, delivers a stereotypical tale albeit incisive critique on male-female relationships...

Young perky blue-eyed television weather girl falls for an old married distinguished author, Charles Saint-Denis (played by François Berléand), and for an eccentric psychopathic boyish young bachelor, Paul Gaudens (played by Benoît Magimel). A young woman, an old man, and a young man!? What’s new about this film, you might ask? As a general plot line about a stereotypical triangular love affair between one doll face blond and two dominating men, nothing. What is new is its brutally honest and incisive look into this pretty but mentally insipid young girl’s love life. The film is a critique on female submissiveness as much as it is an homage to female beauty.

Like many French films, there’s no decisive beginning, middle, or end. The viewer is literally thrown right into Charles' luxurious house in the suburbs as his publisher arrives -slim, sleek, and sexy all in black- during the first few minutes of the film to discuss his current work. The ease with which she walks around and sits on the couch makes you wonder if their relationship is purely business. And then when Charles' wife appears all in white and all three are seated around the house's outdoor pool, wearing ultra figure-flattering suits, your suspicions only get heightened.

Even the arrival of the always stunning light-headed weather girl of Lyon, Gabrielle Deneige, doesn't help to turn your attention to Charles' apparently well-received intellectual merits. Au contraire, the viewer is forced to forget whatever Charles has just written and been lauded for and watch how he "charmingly" yet greedily looks at Gabrielle and how she flirtatiously gives in. Forward one third into the film and she's what you expected: the old man’s sex toy, literally, as she lovingly crawls to him from the lowest edge of the screen with pouting lips in a bustier and belt with peacock feathers that hardly cover her bare derrière.

But being young and coquettish, yes, you guessed it, means simultaneously attracting the attention of a man her own age. Unfortunately for her, she's aggressively sought after by Paul, the flamboyant son of a wealthy pharmaceutical family. Despite her futile attempts to escape his intrusive and ridiculously cynical advances, she hesitantly yields in chic colorful dresses and immaculate rouge on her lips, becoming the young man’s Barbie.

Two thirds into the film and there's no pitying this girl, this doll. Despite her warm smile, every corner is dark as the camera consistently slithers around the actors from either waist or eye level. Charles takes Gabrielle on the eve of her birthday, as if to an initiation ceremony, to a swanky bordel filled with the usual prime suspects: designer clad fat balding men accompanied by tan back-bearing gorgeous women. The stereotypes are obvious, purposefully placed in every frame to remind the viewer that women are objects precisely because of their beauty. And in this film, the availability of breasts in every scene is all inclusive. The screen breathes female sexuality. From the framed photographs of nude female statues in Charles' house to the camera's consistent gaze on all the women's chests. Neither Charles, nor Paul, nor the viewer can flee from the omnipresent female figure.

In spite of the visual aesthetics of the female form, it is sad and quite pathetic to watch Gabrielle being cut in two by the film's conclusion. She has certainly not learned her lesson as she poses adorned in vulgar stage makeup for her uncle as his showgirl doll, assisting him on stage while he performs one of his magic tricks. One never really knows and understands why Gabrielle falls for these men. Perhaps at some unconscious level Charles stands in as a father figure to the fatherless Gabrielle. After all, he is the only one the viewer witnesses caressing her. Perhaps because Paul is able to proportion her with expensive dinners, a chic red sports car, and whisk her off to a marble-encased hotel in Lisbon she is able to escape her annoying lustful boss and distressed mother who do nothing to relax the mounting stress surrounding her as the love affairs take over her life. To this effect, Chabrol remains Chabrolian by engulfing the viewer with unanswerable questions and unpredictable moments.

Consistent since the beginnings of the nouvelle vague, Chabrol has never failed to showcase beautiful and talented actresses in his films. To name a few, there’s the porcelain red-haired Marlène Jobert in La décade prodigieuse (Ten days wonder), the mysterious sensual Romy Schneider in Les innocents aux mains sales (Innocents with dirty hands), the naughty adolescent-like Isabelle Huppert in La cérémonie (The ceremony), the thin dainty Sandrine Bonnaire in Au coeur du mensonge (The color of lies), and the Chanel suit-clad Isabelle Huppert in Merci pour le chocolat (Nightcap). In this film, rising star Ludivine Sagnier embodies the coquettish heroine beautifully as she gets tossed back and forth like a pelele by everyone she knows. A pity, however, that neither the story nor the camera ever care to zoom in on Sagnier's character's emotional development. Not even the final tears on her painted face leave you sympathizing with her. She was just a rag doll after all.

For those of you who have never seen a Chabrol film, don’t waste your time, it is definitely one of his weaker works. But for those of you who are die-hard Chabrol fans, go ahead and watch it. You'll probably get bored with the whole storyline, but you’ll most certainly appreciate his murderously satiric view into the pathetic love life of the bourgeoisie.

Interview with artist Kini Collins

Title: Blackbird Thirteen Ways

Dates: 09.21.2008-01.09.2009

Where: Student Center Gallery, University of Baltimore, 21 W. Mt. Royal Ave., Baltimore, MD 21201

...

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

...

Reads the 3rd stanza of Wallace Stevens' poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. For Kini, "the poem itself, um, has fascinated me, confused me, confounded me, made me laugh, made me cry."

Image of Blackbird 2

The beginnings of the final work pose in her studio:

Kini talks about how the poem influenced her final piece and the search for movement on paper...

And Kini's story doesn't end with her blackbirds. That is, the technique she developed to create movement from layering Japanese paper together and drawing and scraping and waxing almost ad infinitum each piece has directly influenced her most current work for the past 8 months. Her new series of backbones and silhouettes of torsos and spines are multi-layered paintings on long thin tapestry-like canvases. "If you touch them," she says, "they feel like skin, they feel like something that maybe once was alive."

Interview with painter Rosetta DeBerardinis

(Slices from Rosetta's paintings)

Considered an abstract expressionist painter, amongst other things, Rosetta finds color to be very important to her. "I like to paint sort of responses to the energy as opposed to just painting flat," she remarks. More often then not she does not start painting with a concept in mind, rather "many times I go to sleep ... or I wake up with a color in my mind: do I want to start with black? Do I want to start with red today? And basically it's sort of a dance with the pigment...and it's sort of a spiritual thing between me, the surface, and the pigment and the paint speaks to me and it tells me what it wants me to do... And it's...magical, very exciting, because the paint just does what it wants to do and I'm sort of just the conduit."

Artist in residence from New York City, city-dweller Rosetta, talks about what inspires her work, the technique she uses, the magic of paint, and what projects she's been up to...

Interview with photographer Andy Cook

Title: Scenes from Long Roads, New photographs by Andy Cook
Dates: 09.17.2008-10.18.2008
Where: School 33 Art Center, 1427 Light Street, Baltimore, MD 21230
Website: www.school33.org

In an informal dialogue Andy talks about his current show:

Q: Why did you title your show Scenes From Long Roads?
A: Many of these images were taken while traveling, so I wanted a title that could somehow reflect that. It's also a body of work that I imagine I'll continue to work on, so the long road image leaves it kind of open to that. I also took a lot of these pictures and think of them as establishing shots for scenes in movies. Using the word "scenes" made sense because it gave it something of a cinematic feeling.

Q: Have you always photographed with this documentary style eye?
A: My day job is shooting for a newspaper, so documentary these days is something I do a lot of. My earliest work however was more experimental and involved a lot of long exposures and multiple exposures taken at night. I still do that work, but I started this second strain of work sometime during college after being introduced to photographers like Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore, and William Eggleston. I like how they used landscape photography to comment on American society. Right now I'm enthralled with the work of Taryn Simon, who I think blends documentary and fine art photography really well.

Q: On the technical aspect, what camera did you use and why?
A: I shoot with a Mamiya 7. It's a medium format camera that looks and functions like a 35mm. It's much better suited to shooting in the field than in a studio, which a lot of medium format cameras are better for. I've had it for 6 years, so I guess I'm pretty comfortable with it. It feels casual to use, but at the same time I get a really nice big 6x7 negative to work with.

The video (below) shows Andy's currently exhibited artwork...

Interview with Baltimore-based painter Daniel Stuelpnagel

Daniel talks about his works, his artistic influences, the inside scoop of curating, and the emerging Baltimore art scene...

Interview with artist Laura Vernon Russell

Title: Blackbird Thirteen Ways
Dates: 09.21.2008-01.09.2009
Where: Student Center Gallery, University of Baltimore, 21 W. Mt. Royal Ave., Baltimore, MD 21201

Laura discusses the inspiration behind her artwork (Once a fear pierced him...) and the techniques she uses...

He road over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds

...

Reads the 11th stanza from Wallace Stevens' poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Stevens' poem was the inspiration for 13 Maryland artists currently exhibiting their works in the exhibit Blackbird Thirteen Ways. Laura Vernon Russell, one of the 13 artists, was randomly assigned the 11th stanza. A die-hard bird fan, Laura's Once a fear pierced him... work is an elegant and intricately made 24" x 24" piece from wax mixed with pigment and photographs on wood. The poem was hardly unknown to her, Laura was quick to add, when she was invited to participate, "I've loved that poem for years and years. My best friend showed it to me...I don't know...15, 16 years ago, something like that, and I've always thought it would be really fun to illustrate the poem."

Image of Once a fear pierced him...