Matthew Porter

Choosing to tackle iconic, clichéd subject matter is loaded with risk, and young American photographer Matthew Porter’s series of 60s and 70s muscle cars should be inviting stock photography comparisons at best, disaster at worst. But translating his adolescent fascination with classic road movies like Vanishing Point and Two Lane Blacktop (and the lure of the supercharged petrol-head life) into a photographic  exploration, Porter has created a striking, subversive and tongue-in-cheek body of work, which has helped establish his reputation as a talent to watch. 

The traditional stereotypes of raw power, macho aggression  and burnin’ rubber are undermined by the extremity of the situations, or the sheer gloss and sheen of the compositions. There is no way the car in ‘Downtown’  is really making that Bullitt-style jump on the streets of San Francisco, but it remains a jaw-dropping image, something more rooted in Hollywood than reality. The detail shots of the supercharged engines render them almost abstract; all that chrome engineering against those vivid planes of colour making for some very intriguing Pop objects. And a portrait of an ambiguous, almost sinister female driver mixed into the series, or the rusted decaying body panels of abandoned dream projects, provide unexpected turns.

A student of Bard and ICP, Porter continues his subversion of American clichés with his next project ‘High Lonesome’, which will show later this year at the M+B gallery in Los Angeles. This plays with romantic imagery of both American cowboys and zeppelins! An unlikely combination, the show will explore how these once-idealised stereotypes have become tainted by their appropriation and representation over time.

Supercharged 2, 2006

Burnout 2, 2006

Downtown, 2008

Supercharged 4, 2007

Bayview, 2006

Untitled, 2008

Untitled, 2008

The Driver, 2008

Supercharged 1, 2006

Untitled, 2008

The Heights, 2006

All images © Matthew Porter

Back online mid-October...

Mat Collishaw

Shown here are the latest photographic works from British artist Mat Collishaw, new additions to his Insecticide series, originally started in 2006.

Many photographers have documented natural specimens over the years in many different ways, but they are invariably of complete, near-perfect ‘record’ specimens. Collishaw’s work is something very different and dark indeed; the insects looks like they met their deaths moments before the shutter was pressed, with their guts spilled out across the image. The beautiful, lush colours and velvet-like textures of their wings and bodies are in stark contrast to their mangled, torn forms. The actual prints become almost abstract when seen in person (each print measures nearly 2metres x 2metres, and again the limitations of the computer screen really don’t convey this experience) and you get lost in the rich colours and textures, almost forgetting the tragedy of the subject matter.

Collishaw is fascinated by imagery which is at once alluring and disturbing, and he describes this series as "degraded and violent memorials to a once living form". He goes on: "I'm interested in the way imagery affects me subliminally. Whether I like it or not, there are mechanisms within us that are primed to respond to all kinds of visual material, leaving us with no real say over what we happen to find stimulating. The dark side of my work primarily concerns the internal mechanisms of visual imagery and how these mechanisms address the mind.”

 

This series is on show at The Haunch of Venison in Berlin from Sept 12^th – December 19^th.

Insecticide 13, 2009

Insecticide 16, 2009

Insecticide 14, 2009

Insecticide 17, 2009

Insecticide 15, 2009

All images © Mat Collishaw

Ben Turnbull

'I Don’t Like Mondays' is the title of British artist Ben Turnbull’s new series of work, a collection of school desks into which various lethal weapons have been carefully carved. A vivid statement on the sad reality of contemporary school life for the kids of today – the ever-present threat of violence, weekly knifings in London schools, massacres such as those at Columbine and Virgina Tech – the desks bring something new and unexpected to the traditional technique of carving.  The way the objects partly emerge from the wood makes them seem like half buried artefacts, waiting for an archaeologist of the future to unearth them and try and guess what a chaotic, violent time the early Twenty-First Century was.

Apparently Turnbull himself was something of an unruly pupil and was expelled from two schools, so it seems there’s also something autobiographical about these works; carving your name in school property is surely a right of passage for any young misfit. With this series he takes that idea much further, and creates something striking and very unsettling.

Lesson 3, 2009

Lesson 5, 2009

Lesson 6, 2009

Lesson 4, 2009

Lesson 1, 2009

All images © Ben Turnbull/Eleven Fine Art

Florian Maier-Aichen

Florian Maier-Aichen is a 36 year-old German photographer whose interesting experimental landscape work positions him somewhere very different from his more famous peers, such as Gursky and Strüth. Based between California and Cologne, his images are an individual, unique reinterpretation of classic landscape and cityscape photography. Referencing the work of masters of the field such as Carleton Watkins or Ansel Adams, Maier-Aichen often shoots clichéd scenes but does something strange with them. Aerial views, subtle comping of pictures, or odd effects applied to the final print create images that feel both familiar and ‘off’, playing with our sense of perception.

Using different techniques for different projects, Maier-Aichen questions what an idealized landscape photograph should look like. In 2005 he shot images in California on colour infra-red film, rendering well-known American vistas like the Pacific Coast Highway or the popular tourist location Lake June as inhospitable, martian landscapes. His 2004 photograph of Long Beach is like an industrialized Ansel Adams take on a huge, mechanized city; a view no human eye could ever see. Deliberately choosing the industrial backside of Los Angeles and adding the mountain range in post-production, Maier-Aichen, shows us a strange, dystopian, sprawling view of an instantly recognisable city in a new and unexpected way.

In ‘Chamonix, 2007’ he mimics a Kodachrome postcard of an idyllic alpine scene, but shoots the image from a dirt car park, complete with tyre tracks in the foreground. Another mountain scene from that year shows a winding alpine pass zig-zagging under a sky whose clouds are all printed out of register, creating a psychedelic sky above the snowy peaks.

Other images are shot at night from the air, with only twinkling lights alluding to the presence of a city, or in an alpine valley in the middle of a snowstorm, all but obscuring the view. The Maersk tanker photographs are also disconcerting – one showing a vessel seemingly reflected in glassily calm water, the other showing a capsized tanker with its cargo bobbing in the ocean…or does it?

Unfortunately a computer screen really doesn’t do these photographs justice. Some of the prints are 1 or 2 meters wide, and the level of detail is breathtaking. If you’re ever somewhere like The Whitney, MOCA or the Saatchi Gallery they are definitely worth seeing in person.

Untitled, 2005

Above Lake June, 2005

Untitled, 2005

Untitled, 2005

Untitled (Long Beach), 2004

Untitled, 2007

Untitled, 2005

Spiral Jetty, 2009

Chamonix, 2007

Untitled (Capsized), 2001

Untitled (Maersk), 2001

The Best General View, 2007

Untitled, 2007

All images © Florian Maier-Aichen

Emmanuel Polanco

A fairly brief post today, about French illustrator and collagist Emmanuel Polanco. I don’t know much about Polanco, except that he’s based in Paris and has been crafting his peculiar, nostalgic pieces of art for the last eight years or so. His is an odd, macabre world of disconnected figures, and allusive symbols and marks, using muted tones and aged papers. The images are like strange old family portraits, discovered in a box in the dusty attic of a distant, eccentric uncle. His work reminds me of some of the collages of Hannah Hoch and Max Ernst - although Polanco’s images are less aggressive and more wistful than the Dadaists’ pieces. The vitrines and collections of Joseph Cornell also seem influential, and his more commercial work – book covers, for instance  - has hints of some of Saul Bass’s iconic work. 

Examples of work by Hannah Hoch, Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell

From the series 'Lune'

From the series 'Poe' for the US Postal Service

An illustration for CSO magazine

From the series  'Tarot of Marseille'

From the series 'Tarot of Marseille'

From the series 'Tarot of Marseille'

From the series 'Tarot of Marseille'

An illustration for 'Milk'

From the series 'Costumes'

From the series 'Lune'

From the series 'Square'

'Moby Dick' book cover

'Macbeth' book cover

'Remember'

All images © Emmanuel Polcano