in acrylic by night. His family’s home is filled with dozens and dozens of paintings that measure 8 × 10 inches, as well as a handful of even smaller ones placed on shelves. Some of these paintings are made from postcards depicting the Nashville skyline, because the skyline is pretty and familiar, while other paintings depict his wife’s guitars because he likes painting guitars and Betsy owns quite a few.
Like other artists who have chosen to live far from the Chelsea galleries, he regularly posts his paintings on Facebook and Instagram. His paintings are just the right scale for documenting with his Samsung Galaxy 6 and posting on social media sites. Friends and strangers see and like his work: they give him encouragement and, sometimes, they reach out to him about purchasing a piece. Essentially, Shear is happier than you are. You’re way too fucking precious about your work.
These stunning images of sidewalk litter shot in nature highlight our undeniable impact on the environment, including the urban environment. My interest in repurposing trash in the service of art began on the day I volunteered to chaperone my son’s Cub Scouts troop on their community service day, collecting litter. While the boys removed the refuse from the sidewalk, placing it in trash and recycling receptacles, I watched, struck by the beauty of a crushed Fanta can backlit in the gold tones of the early morning light.
I began transforming garbage into art. I shot cigarette butts, straws, latex balloons, Styrofoam cups, used condoms, and an old set of flip-flops, leaving each where I found it. These images bring attention to the environmental issue of trash, beautifully rendered trash. All the items imaged began as useful objects, but as a result of human behavior, negligence, or forgetfulness, they ended up on the street. I transform this trash into art with an important message: I am a special person who sees beauty everywhere.
Fans of my street photography often ask me, “Is that real, or did you use Photoshop?” I do not “mess with nature.” I create art. I am a photographer who posts final images straight from my camera to Flack Photo’s Facebook page. These images are true in the truest sense and fully express who I am and what I see in the most literal sense. When I take a picture of a seagull soaring over Bay Harbor, I am not speaking about elevated consciousness or self-confidence or whatever else you’ve written in my comments section; I am taking a great picture of a bird, by panning my camera along in time with this moving subject so that the bird is a relatively sharp subject but the background is blurred. Panning is a technique that can produce amazing results if you perfect it, which I have.
Some say the term “photographer” fails to accurately describe the vast majority of artists working with cameras. These people are wrong. A real photographer is able to perfectly capture the scene in front of him and share it with his online community. If he is honest and open, he will also share his ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. This technical information is the artist’s real artist statement. “Artist statements” as the liberal elite are taught to write them, in their nurseries of “higher learning,” add nothing to the photographic image, which should speak for itself.
May the light be with you!
Gustav M. Christoffersen (b. 1992, Oakland) is a space artist who creates photo-based pulp sculptures as an architectural stage for his social practice, which is concerned with the narrative of cyclical realities. Christoffersen urges us to renegotiate physical realities as being part of oppressing themes in our post-contemporary, image-based society. By choosing formal non-solutions, he creates hyper-personal moments born by means of omissions, refusal, and Elmer’s glue. He invites the viewer round and round in circles of photographic sculptural matter. He manipulates these structures in order to deconstruct socially defined spaces and their uses and post-possibilities.
Multilayered conceptualism arises in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly real reality is queried. The results are deconstructed so that meaning is soaked in possible interpretations of impossibility. With an under-conceptual approach, he creates with daily, recognizable photographic imagery an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is shown the conditioning of his or her own image space and has to reconsider their own life.
The artist’s forms do not follow logical criteria but are constructed through subjective associations and formal realities, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations by rejecting and re-rejecting seemingly objective narratives. His works directly respond to the surrounding environment and frame instances that would go unnoticed outside of his constructed context. By applying anti-abstraction techniques, he tries to approach a broad range of subjects in a multilayered way, likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes physical, and believes in the idea of function following form in an anti-work.
Indycay Ermanshay established name recognition with a once-innovative brand of self-portraiture. Her series Untitled Movie Posters (1979) pictured the artist herself in re-creations of 1940s and 1950s film noir movie posters. Always in meticulous costumes, wigs, and makeup, she enacted female clichés from film posters of stylish Hollywood crime dramas for the camera. These works reexamine women’s roles in history and contemporary society.
Pinup Girl (1998) is a series of photographs of the artist herself enacting female clichés present in 1960s pinup posters. Always in meticulous costumes, wigs and makeup, she enacted female clichés from pinup-girl posters of the 1960s. These works continually reexamine women’s roles in history and contemporary society.
Dutch Mistresses (1988) is a series of photographs of the artist herself enacting female roles from the Dutch Golden Age of painting. Always in meticulous costumes, wigs, and makeup, she enacted female clichés from 17th-century Europe. These works continually reexamine women’s roles in history and contemporary society over and over and over and over and fucking over again.
Customer (2008) is a series of photographs of the artist herself dressed up like wealthy art collectors. Always in meticulous costumes, wigs, and makeup, she produced a series in which she dresses like the women who champion and patronize her work. These works give credence to the adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Vlad the Impaler (b. 1431, Sighişoara, Transylvania) is an artist who mainly works with photography. By employing flat formal solutions, his photography has a distinct lack of visual drama in a way that echoes his undead soul. In turn, the image approaches an objective gaze where the subject, rather than the photographer’s perspective on it, is paramount.
The Impaler’s images are flattened out, formally and dramatically, in the manner of the typologies and straight photography espoused by his teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Impaler’s best-known project is Mina, a series of 60 frontal, identically framed photographs of Wilhelmina Harker, the reincarnation of the artist’s centuries-dead wife, Elisabeta, staring deadpan into the camera. As a lifeless monster, he does not believe in psychological portrait photography the way his colleagues do. He is not trying to capture the character of his subject. He believes he can only show the surface; everything beyond that is up to the viewer.
Due to his interest
