antonio martinez

Martinez will be showing a 6.5-minute film entitled Near The Egress, which is a compiled stop-motion animation using a series of black-and-white film prints.

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jim vecchi

Jim Vecchi creates conceptual photographic images which focus on minute details; his latest series — and the series on display at Blue Sky Photography Gallery — is entitled so much depends… and revolves around the poetry of American poet William Carlos Williams whose “poems centered on the quotidian aspects of life.” Read Vecchi’s notes behind the series here.

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lori waselchuk

Grace Before Dying is a series of black-and-white wide-format images photo-documenting a maximum-security prison in Louisiana. The series was created over the period of three years, focusing on a prisoner-run hospice program at the penitentiary.

I guess it seemed only inevitable that Vice Magazine and Scion (purveyors of some pretty rad multi-disciplinary art shows these days) would converge on a project, and that they have. August 14th through September 4th, The 2010 Vice Photo Show will be taking place, and for any of you who’ve ever picked up a copy of Vice’s annual photo issue, you know you’re guaranteed to see a wide array of photos, from the gnarliest and crustiest to the most beautiful and demure. Well, maybe not so demure.

Opening reception: Saturday, August 14th, from 7:00pm to 10:00pm. Open bar and complimentary valet. Fancy!

Featuring:
Angela Boatwright, Asger Carlsen, Jonnie Craig, Jackson Eaton, Seth Fluker, Nicholas Haggard, Jerry Hsu, Kevin Long, Ross McDonnell, Sophie Mörner, Patrick O’Dell, Alex Olson, Valerie Phillips, Jared Ritz, Lele Saveri, RJ Shaugnessy, David Benjamin Sherry, Peter Sutherland, Patrick Tsai, Sean Vegezzi and Gavin Watson.

Scion Installation L.A.
3521 Helms Ave (at National)
Culver City, CA. 90232

Scion Presents: The 2010 Vice Photo Show from Scion ART on Vimeo.

Portland conceptual artist Abraham Ingle’s first solo show is quite a curious one. Starting today at False Front Studio in Portland, Ingle will be displayed his socially-inspired art. The show, entitled If A Tree Falls… consists of all new practice projects which explore notions of presence in the age of “always on.” You should definitely visit this blog post on Ingle’s website to view more of the summary, but I’ll pick and choose a couple of interesting components to the six-part show:

Interruptions is a series of three videos that mix content from social media, drama, and real life to explore interaction. Interruptions was made in collaboration with Dustin Zemel.

A collaboration with The Portrait Booth Project, This is How I See You uses portraiture to juxtapose states of hyper-awareness and obliviousness.

The entire show will be streaming on Chat Roulette the entire time. YES.

This is sure to be a fascinating show.

I get a little bit tird of hipster art photography sometimes (not to say that Miss Scarpulla is necessarily a hipster). You know the type — the type that takes over all Tumblr pages ad nauseum, with bleached out colors of pretty people, set against sunshiny backdrops. Well, they’re pretty photos, but they’re generally pretty photos that are indistinguishable from hoards of other pretty photos.

But every once in a while, you find photography by certain artists that might fall under that bracket on the surface, but really are much, much more interesting once you look closer.

Alison Scarpulla fits this description. She has two Flickr accounts — her popular one (aliscarpulla) and her less conceptual, more abstract one (freebliss). Both are brilliant. The photos from the former are often dark, haunting, and hazy tromps into smoky worlds:

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Here are some photos from the latter — in particular, some glitched out lovelies:

Lily McElroy throws herself at men and she is not shy about her leaping! Lily photographs herself flying through the air with impressive force and one imagines that from time to time she must end up tackling the men she hurls herself towards. On her website she describes these photographs as an exploration of an overused phrase and gesture: “Through these performances I attempt to develop authentic ties, to give the cliche new and personal meaning.”

I first saw Hollis Brown Thornton’s work on Tumblr and was immediately enamored with it. Her pieces have the aesthetic of a good collage, but with a much more organic quality thanks to the inherent randomness of pigment transfers.

Her acrylic paintings and ink drawings have the same kind of feel to them as well, and you can scope them out on her website.

Two artists, Xia XiaoWan and Nobu Nakanish, have both decided to use thin sheets of material arranged like dominoes to create visual depth. While both explore the use of visuals and space in similar manners, the resulting works are dramatically different, in terms of mood and overall vibe.

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Xiao XiaoWan

Painting From The Inside Series
Xiao XiaoWan’s finished product feels heavy, in a powerful, laboratory science experiment kind of way. It’s reflected in his use of materials as well, opting to go for a heavy plastic.

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Nobu Nakanishi

Time + Space
Unlike XiaoWan, Nakanishi’s finished product is light and airy, in material and subject matter.

Almost missed this show by Ariana Page Russell, who works taking photographs of skin.

“How can that possibly be interesting?” you ask?

Judging by the description, I would have imagined some kind of macro biological photography analysis of skin, but Russell’s photographs of skin are just as much about the human being their stuck onto than the skin itself. Her work is conceptually creative and visually engrossing.

This show at Platform Gallery (114 Third Avenue S, Seattle, WA) closes out tomorrow, so catch it quickly!