The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits. The monumental and unnatural aspect of the baobabs turns them into strange and anthropomorphic personalities. Adding to the descriptive aspect of the film, the sound is a recording of the environment, of sounds made by animals, and participates in this peaceful contemplation. The still, almost fossilized aspect of the landscape makes it look majestic and eternal. « The camera, which examines in Baobab the ancestral and imposing trees of Madagascar, tries to capture the shadow and light effects, specific to photography. » (Essay by Julia Garimorth, in « Tacita Dean: Seven Books », published by Steidl / ARC/ Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2003).
Although Tacita Dean works with all kinds of media, her 16mm films are probably among her most well-known works. While they deal with the specificities of the medium – like the notions of time and narrative, through the use of still shots – the aesthetic quality of her films remind of photography or painting (maybe because she had studied painting in school). Memories and atmospheres are conveyed through sensual images, colors and light. In her work, Tacita Dean relates the past to the present, often creating a certain melancholy: the artist focuses on stories, characters or architectural relics, and questions the notion of narrative by using both documentary and fiction devices. Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury, UK, in 1965. She lives and works in Berlin.
“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective...
Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994)...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence...
In No Title (Blue Chapel) Therrien has reduced the image of a chapel to a polygon...
The Fifth Quarter might have taken its mysterious inspiration from the eponymous Stephen King story collated into the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection...
Conrad Ruiz loves to paint subjects related to the “boy zone”: video games, weapons, games, science fiction, fantasy, and special effects...
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
John Houck’s multi-layered photographic compositions immortalize nostalgic objects from the artist’s childhood, manipulated in the studio and in post-production into unreal still-life arrangements...
Baby Shoes, Never Worn is part of photographer John Houck’s series of restrained still-life photographs capturing objects from his childhood...