Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P150 - Compact Digital Camera

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P150

SONY Cyber-shot DSC-P150

Photo (c) Sony

SONY Cyber-shot DSC-P150

Photo (c) Sony

SONY Cyber-shot DSC-P150

Photo (c) Sony

Sony's new Cyber-shot® DSC-P150 is the world's first compact point-and-shoot digital camera in the marketplace loaded with 7.2 megapixels, putting breathtaking, near-professional-quality photos in your shirt pocket or handbag. It will be available in September 2004 for less than $500.

The P150 camera yields an image size of 3072 x 2304 - making it the first pocketable camera capable of capturing enough pixels to make 300-dpi 8" x 10" enlargements.

The P150 has also been empowered with Sony's own recently introduced Real Imaging Processor™ circuitry that ensures fast start-up and shot-to-shot times, and puts extra speed and performance behind automatic features such as auto focus and auto exposure. That means you'll never miss that one-in-a-million shot because the camera is always ready to take great pictures.

"Not only does the Cyber-shot P150 camera offer tremendous value, it takes incredibly vivid and lifelike digital photos, capturing color and detail previously unavailable in such a compact camera," said Greg Young, general manager for Sony Electronics Digital Still Camera marketing.

Compact in Size and Feature-Filled

The Cyber-shot P150 digital camera is equipped with features typically found only on more full-sized cameras. At just 1 inch thin, it's easy to hold, use, and carry with you in your pocket or purse.

The Cyber-shot P150 features a Carl Zeiss® Vario Tessar® 3X optical zoom lens to complement and maximize the benefit of the camera's high resolution.

The P150 also has a bird-like appetite when it comes to consuming battery power. With up to 310 shots per charge of the InfoLithium™ battery the Cyber-shot P150 lets you snap away and preview images on the 1.8-inch LCD screen without fear of running down the charge.

Beyond the easy point-and-shoot features, the Cyber-shot P150 also has manual flash and exposure settings, and nine preset scene modes such as twilight, landscape, snow, beach and fireworks, letting the user quickly select the best setting based on shooting conditions.

With the optional Cyber-shot Marine Pack (MPK-PHB), the Cyber-shot P150 becomes an underwater camera with water resistance to a depth of up to 132 feet. For those who want greater flexibility, the P150 can be used with optional telephoto and wide-angle conversion lenses.

Cyber-shot Station: A Perfect Resting Place

Finally there's a better place to put your digital camera other than a desk or table drawer. Fitting in next to a TV or PC, the new Cyber-shot Station CSS-PHA camera accessory, available now for about $80, accommodates the Cyber-shot DSC-P150 camera for playing back slideshows on a TV or transferring images to your PC while charging the camera's batteries.

The bundled infrared remote controller intelligently commands the docked camera via the Cyber-shot Station to toggle between captured videos and still pictures. And when connected to a PictBridge™ -compatible printer such as Sony's PictureStation® DPP-EX50 digital photo printer, printing a specific image is as easy as a press of the remote controller's button.

The Cyber-shot P150 camera includes a 32MB Memory Stick® media card, and is also compatible with Memory Stick PRO® high-capacity media cards.

SONY ELECRONICS INC.
www.sony.com

The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein at FAMSF, The Legion of Honor, San Francisco

The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein

FAMSF, The Legion of Honor, San Francisco

31 July – 28 November 2004

The presentation at the Legion of Honor of The Child: Works by Gottfried Helnwein marks the first one-man museum showing in the United States of the work of Internationally-known Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein (b. Vienna, 1948). The display of approximately 19 paintings, 13 drawings and watercolors, and over 20 photographs spanning a 35-year period from the early 1970s until the present, features a major theme that has consistently appeared in his work: innocence as embodied by the child.

The subject matter of Gottfried Helnwein’s art concerning the child ranges from subtle inscrutability to stark brutality. Many of his works are large format, which further increases the impact of his themes, which are often difficult and shaded with menacing undertones. Says Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator in Charge, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art, "Despite the technical beauty and virtuosity of Helnwein’s art, what makes his art significant is, instead, its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the pertinent subjects he chooses." He adds, "Many people feel that museums should be a refuge to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness and brutality of the world. This notion sometimes sells short the purposes of art, the function of museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public. While this exhibition will inspire and enlighten many, it may also upset others, as sometimes does art that deals with important themes in our society."

Innocence and the Betrayal of Innocence

The child, for Gottfried Helnwein, is the symbol of innocence, but also innocence betrayed.

In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, sexual exploitation, and the numbing predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children. Helnwein--who grew up in Austria in the years following World War II in the somber atmosphere of a defeated country that had embraced Nazism--has an emotional tie to children who have been robbed of experiencing childhood without trauma. Since his earliest works, he has linked children with pain, or the suggestion of pain. The wounded child became for him a metaphor for the chaos of an emotionally vacant world.

Frequently his works suggest to viewers that they are witnessing a scene taking place in the midst of a disturbing drama that is sometimes heightened by the inclusion of Nazi officers or Nazi symbols. The drama, however, is presented without narrative, which creates the uncomfortable effect of raising but not answering difficult questions. The tension thus created puts the viewer in the position of having to examine his or her own responses to provocative and ambiguous vignettes.

Epiphany II (Adoration of the Shepherds)

The exhibition is also the occasion for the inaugural showing of Helnwein’s 1998 painting Epiphany II (Adoration of the Shepherds), a major gift to the Fine Arts Museums from San Francisco gallery owner Martin Muller. This imposing (8 ft. x 10 ft.) painting is a key work in Helnwein’s oeuvre during the 1990s and in his continuing involvement with the theme of the child.

Epiphany II is from an important series of three paintings created by Helnwein over a three-year period and in which he refers directly to his "own (our) historical background." Says the artist, "The most significant issue on the time track of the occident is Christianity and the male dominated world of conquering and oppression. The constant slaughter of the "weak--women, children, the Jews, and other ethnic minorities through holy wars, crusades and …constant extermination…."

The seamless melding in Epiphany II of a version of the Adoration of the Magi with a scenario out of the Third Reich is in keeping with Helnwein’s desire to press the limits of juxtaposed imagery. Says Robert Flynn Johnson, "The apparent blasphemy of this scene of Nazi evil encountering the Madonna and Child in a stadium setting is not so clear cut for Helnwein. Rather it is a more symbolic case of unconditional evil, the Third Reich, meeting "conditional evil," the Catholic Church, particularly in light of Pope Pius XII’s alleged moral complicity during World War II." The surreal atmosphere within the picture is attributable to Helnwein’s insertion of the veracity of a carefully composed news photo into a traditional Renaissance composition.

Post-Nazi-Era Childhood Informs Gottfried Helnwein’s Art

Gottfried Henlwein describes his childhood as "a horror, " and "a world of deep depres-sion and unlimited boredom" that was permeated with the knowledge that something had happened about which no one wanted to speak. One of his signal memories is being given his first Mickey Mouse comic book from an American. Receiving the cartoon book was tantamount to being released from a two-dimensional world without color and being propelled into a three-dimensional world full of colors and wonders. Comics and Mickey Mouse, his childhood vehicle for escaping from what he refers to as "the cold Nazi-country into a world of joy and wonder," still figure in his mature work. An example is his signal painting, MIckey Mouse (1995), a 12-foot-long canvas. Even a cartoon character, however, in Helnwein’s vernacular becomes ambiguous. In this case, Mickey looks both benignly sweet and threateningly sinister. He could represent either the wondrous fantasy world of the child or the global reach of a powerful corporation that, in Helnwein’s view, "smothers the world."

Gottfried Helnwein began his formal training in art when he was admitted in1969 to the Vienna Academy of Art, where for four years he immersed himself in the structure and the process of making art. There, in one of the great ateliers of the world, he interacted with fellow artists and expanded his creative imagination into the areas for which he is best known today. He explored the use of politics, society, history, media, news, and the so-called trivial world of comics, advertising, and rock and roll as a means of addressing in his work the subject matter of war, violence, and a manipulative ruling society. Building on painting and drawing, the foundation of his work, he added the medium of photography. At this time he also became interested in taking his art out into the streets and confronting the world in an a form of art called Aktions, which now is generally referred to as performance art. All these pursuits interacted in Helnwein’s work, with a photograph inspiring a watercolor or a painting inspiring an Aktion. The result is a multi-layered body of work that delivers in a variety of mediums the same message of resistance and challenge to the dysfunctional post-war society in which Helnwein came of age.

Catalogue: A fully illustrated catalogue printed in color with black and white documentary illustrations will be available in the Museum Stores. 152 pages, approximately 70 images; 9" x 12". Cloth edition with special binding.

FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO - FAMSF

Legion of Honor, Galleries 1 & 2

www.thinker.org

Jac Leirner, Miami Art Museum - Adhesive 44

Jac Leirner — Adhesive 44
Miami Art Museum
July 16 – October 10, 2004

Miami Art Museum presents the work of São Paulo-based artist JAC LEIRNER in her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. in over a decade. Jac Leirner creates sophisticated abstractions out of mundane objects. She collects what most of us usually throw away—cigarette packs, airline tickets, envelopes, brochures, museum store shopping bags—and turns them into graceful objects. Jac Leirner has created a new piece for MAM entitled Adhesive 44, her 44th sticker-based work and the largest to date.

Jac Leirner — Adhesive 44 is organized by Miami Art Museum and curated by MAM Associate Curator Cheryl Hartup as part of its New Work series of projects by leading contemporary artists.

Adhesive 44 consists of window panes arranged in two 40-foot-long rows and covered with stickers.  Jac Leirner has been collecting stickers for 20 years and draws on her vast personal collection for this exhibition. The windows are of the domestic type found at hardware stores and this is the first time Jac Leirner has used them in her work. Previously, Jac Leirner applied stickers to free-standing bus windows and colored sheets of Plexiglas.

The stickers in Adhesive 44 are divided into categories based on color, subject, material, and form. They are mostly promotional in nature, advertising museums, art fairs, hotels, airlines, and punk rock bands, among others. Adhesive 44 also includes stickers made for children and stickers affixed to crates that transport art. Jac Leirner works with mass-produced stickers such as mailing labels, as well as stickers for one-time only events, and highly specialized stickers with beautiful designs, which she refers to as “small jewels.” Such a “jewel” might comprise the outstanding element in one of her compositions. The artist purchases some stickers, most in the course of her worldwide travels. She also receives many as gifts. Since each sticker has its own history, Jac Leirner’s work is a record of her personal experiences and encounters. Her work also reflects her abiding interest in visual design and the ways commerce and culture interact. The formal rigor of her arrangements gives these random, everyday found objects a sense of ordered beauty.

Adhesive 44 is a harmonious whole comprised of enormously varied parts. The work is at once painting-like and sculptural, and it vividly demonstrates how stylized, mass-disseminated systems of information can be made to seem extraordinary and unique.

Jac Leirner grew up in São Paulo surrounded by her parents' important collection of Brazilian art from the 1950s and 60s, which influenced her ways of thinking and seeing. She arranges shape and color with formal rigor and clarity much like the highly rational geometric abstractions created in Brazil in the 1950s. A decade later, in the 1960s, Brazilian artists strove to break down barriers between art and everyday life and Jac Leirner's choice of materials reflects a similar sensibility.

Jac Leirner also sees her work connected to the generation of artists in Brazil that preceded her own, which includes Cildo Meireles, Tunga, Waltércio Caldas, and José Resende. Her works convey the physicality and sense of refinement found in the works of this generation from the 1970s.

“Jac Leirner is one of the most important artists of her generation working in Brazil today,” notes Cheryl Hartup. “Like Cildo Meireles, whose work was exhibited at MAM last year, Jac Leirner is a pivotal figure in the history of Brazilian art, and Miami Art Museum is delighted to present her work to a wider audience in South Florida.”

JACQUELINE LEIRNER was born in São Paulo in 1961. She studied at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo from 1979 to 1984 and taught there from 1987 to 1989. Jac Leirner’s work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (2002); Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2001, 1998); Sala Mendoza, Caracas (1998); The Bohen Foundation, New York (1998); Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva (1993); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1992); and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1991). Jac Leirner's work has been included in the Venice Biennale (1997, 1990), Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany (1992), and the São Paulo Bienal (1994, 1989, 1983). In 1991 she was a visiting fellow at University College in Oxford, England, and an artist in residence at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she had solo exhibitions. In 2001 she received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in New York. Jac Leirner lives and works in São Paulo.

About the Curator: CHERYL HARTUP is Associate Curator at Miami Art Museum. Before joining MAM in September 2000, Ms. Hartup served as the McDermott Curatorial Assistant at the Dallas Museum of Art from 1998-2000. Among the exhibitions she has organized for MAM are Light and Atmosphere (2004); Visual Poetics: Art and the Word (2003); New Work: Cildo Meireles (2003); and New Work: Odili Donald Odita (2002). She is currently working on the upcoming exhibitions Fabian Marcaccio and Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s–70s. Ms. Hartup received a M.A. in Latin American Studies and Museum Studies from New York University and a M.A. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin.

MIAMI ART MUSEUM
101 West Flagler Street, Miami, FL 33130
www.miamiartmuseum.org

Juan Perdiguero, Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta - Canes

Juan Perdiguero: Canes
Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
July 16 - August 14, 2004

Marcia Wood Gallery presents it’s first solo exhibition with Spanish artist, Juan Perdiguero. A Madrid native, Juan Perdiguero earned degrees in painting and art conservation in Spain and S.U.N.Y., Buffalo, NY, where he currently lives and works. He has lived in the U.S. and exhibited internationally for the past fourteen years. He had a solo exhibition in 2002 at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery.

The word “Can” is the Spanish zoological/ scientific name for dog (perro); “Canes” is the plural form and means dogs. As the title suggests, Juan Perdiguero’s paintings of mixed media on photo emulsion are renderings of dogs, primarily greyhounds. Larger than life size silhouette’s race around the gallery walls with a startling intensity. The animal’s form is cut out of the picture plane and mounted directly onto the gallery walls which unleashes the image from the traditional ground and creates a vivid frozen moment of action as the dogs seem on the verge of leaping off the wall and into the room. In translating his training and regard for Baroque painting into a contemporary practice of mixed media the artist adheres to the appreciable importance of the dramatic rendering of motion in Baroque art. As well, Baroque works are the opposite of minimal and often considered productions in themselves. Perdiguero has derived a complex process that relies heavily on chiaroscuro to define the 3-dimensional quality of the dogs. Using photographs of hounds, he draws the dogs’ contours on acetate and makes cutouts onto which he collages images of flowers, lichen and other organic material he has photographed. Each patch, a wide range of vibrating color, size, and depth is placed to describe the precise form of a dog in action. He then covers the image with etching ink and linseed oil which is then carefully wiped off - reductively drawing the dogs features. The resulting chiaroscuro effect defines the dogs musculature and features by pulling out the darks and using the underlying photographs that are uncovered as the lights.

Juan Perdiguero is interested in the duality of the dog’s animal nature and the human qualities that we project onto them as well as the instinctive, subconscious animal qualities that are a part of human psychology. The artist states, “The energy in this new work is shifting. The greyhounds are part of a larger universe of images where emotions are diverse, isolation and alienation coexist with nostalgia and with curiosity always threatened by a sense of vulnerability…they speak about the animalistic side so much a part of their nature (the one they project onto us so we acknowledge the inner animal that lives in us) but also of a subtle human quality ( the one we project on to them).”

MARCIA WOOD GALLERY
263 Walker Street, Atlanta, GA 30313
www.marciawoodgallery.com

Edith Beaucage, Julie Gross, Asuka Ohsawa, Maria Park at Andrew Shire Gallery, Los Angeles - Refraction

Edith Beaucage, Julie Gross, Asuka Ohsawa, Maria Park: Refraction

Andrew Shire Gallery, Los Angeles

July 17 – August 2, 2004

Raised in Montreal, Quebec, Edith Beaucage was exposed at the tender age of five, to the seminal body of work, “Man And His World,” at the International World Fair. Buckminster Fuller’s American pavilion, and the German pavilion designed by Frei Otto and Bodo Rasch made an indelible mark on her psyche, stark contrast indeed, to the small, sheltered agrarian community that was her bubble. That influence, no question, lingers, and in many ways, shades Edith Beaucage’s filters on the world.

Philosophically, Edith Beaucage’s work is a sublime exercise in freewill, drawing deeply from the new “Agent Theory of Free Will,” (Ref: Freedom Evolves: Daniel Dennett) and from her conviction that the spirit and body are fundamentally one. She articulates deliberate choice on multiple levels, from format, to color palette, from the cutting of shapes and patterns, to the whimsical geometric design, and the warm optimistic filters of color. Everything is planned ... including the infectious sense of optimism that embraces the viewer in warm colors.

In Julie Gross’ work, drawing precedes painting. She uses compasses to tautly choreograph a network of circular forms, reflecting her passion for centripetal forces. The edges set up the tension as well as the flow. Symmetrical forms expand and contract, interconnect, and vie for prominence in rhythmic dance. Circles morph into “bubble slices,” reflective patterns of the soul.

Julie Gross invokes the discreet relationships that emerge from the interplay of color and form, in a tense field where subject and ground continually alternate. The images appear suspended in isolation, and yet, are intricately connected slices of light, breathing, tense and emergent. In the paintings, these forms serve as vessels for color. The painted surface is precise and uninflected allowing spatial interaction to reveal itself simply and clearly, establishing a balance between surface tension and movement.

Born in California, Asuka Ohsawa draws viscerally from the traditional Japanese ukiyo-e images of the 17th -19th centuries, a long tradition of image making, in which works by old Japanese masters are carefully studied, copied, and altered by successive generations of artists. While she claims a direct artistic lineage to the tradition of her native culture, she also subverts such canonized aesthetics by fusing it with the language of contemporary popular culture.

In her new series of tightly rendered gouache-on-paper drawings, Asuka Ohsawa uses the framework of animal cartoons to examine behavioral patterns that are formed, transmitted, and/or challenged within a particular culture. Her narratives evolve around the theme of a mother and child. At first glance, her images appear playful and whimsical. But that first impression quickly fades in the glare of the implied conflicts, and the ominous presence of suspicious voyeurs from different animal species lurking behind the windows. The open-ended ness of the narrative prompts deep introspection of the consequences of the depicted actions, re-evaluating generally accepted socio-cultural mores, while alluding to an implicit acceptance of the deviant and unfamiliar.

Maria Park challenges her Muse to bridge the vast gulf between utopian ideology and the vices that haunt human existence. From Alaskan glaciers, to Hawaiian shores and alluvial plains, fully simulated and automated environments are preserved and vacuum-packed into tiny capsules, ingested daily, vigilantes seeking retribution for the tragic humor and the sad frailties of the human spirit.

The Mindscape, uploaded onto the Database, surfs the alternating currents that surge though the shifting sands of our subconscious. Inertia dissipates as velocity and sight converge to hone image and awareness. With the pathogenesis of artificial life, promises of infinite variety and random access await. Flanked by war machines in a technocratic landscape, fragile hope is vested in the medium of paint on discrete objects and surfaces, poetry in motion, camouflage against innovation, holding-out against the remorseless exchange of energy and information.

ANDREWSHIRE GALLERY

3850 Wilshire Blvd #107, Los Angeles, CA 90010

www.andrewshiregallery.com

David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality

David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality
ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA
September 8 - December 12, 2004

This exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia draws attention to the late-1960s film and media installations of Argentinean artist DAVID LAMELAS (Buenos Aires, 1946) at a moment when they can speak with renewed urgency. "Exhibiting Mediality" reconstructs and recontextualizes a seminal work from this period to address the conditions under which images are produced and decoded; to consider what it means to exhibit not the image, but mediation. The concept of exhibiting pure mediality/mediation is further explored through collaborations with the University Archive and Records Center, and the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and International House, Philadelphia. This exhibition is organized by ICA's 2003-2004 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Tanya Leighton.

Image: David Lamelas, Límite de una proyección I (Limit of a Projection I),

1967 Installation View, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires
Courtesy of the artist and Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

DAVID LAMELAS is a pioneer of the radical repositioning of sculpture in the sixties and seventies that abandoned traditional definitions of sculpture, displacing its materials and modes of production. In doing so a redefinition of the status of art and its "sites of display" took place. Situated within an emerging aesthetic of institutional critique (that addressed conditions of spectator behavior as forms of social experience within the public institution of art), and opposed to the false neutrality of minimalist sculpture, Lamelas' sought to analyze art as a means of communication, relating it to how information was conveyed by the film and television industry, and to the discourses around public space and media technology. In light of current discussions on the relationship between cinema, art, the media, and politics, his work re-presented thirty years later has lost none of its relevance. 

David Lamelas's work proposes an extreme focus on self-awareness, an aesthetic of pure information—unfettered and laconic. The transformation of the space of the exhibition is one of the most overlooked and critical dimensions of his work, and the often alienating effects that Lamelas realizes through his use of media, challenge us to distance ourselves and to question the role of film, television and the media. In Límite de una Proyección aka Light Projection in a Dark Room, David Lamelas divides the exhibition space into two distinct zones of light and dark by reducing the art object to a single beam of light: the projection of a spotlight in an otherwise completely dark space. The work is almost non-existent, David Lamelas offers only its illusion: "a (dark) space occupied by another (illuminated) space." He poetically and succinctly creates a work that exists for itself, in "undisguised violence," only within its own consciousness and self-awareness. The object upon which light is shed is deliberately erased, paradoxically highlighting the act of "shedding light" itself. The political implication of which is that the work always has the possibility of change, existing as it does as nothing other than the product of the spectator; it exceeds the prefigured meanings imposed by the artist as producer and challenges the restrictions of the aesthetic structure itself. 

In the context of this exhibition, David Lamelas' simple gesture of "shedding light" is understood "in the light" of cinema. Tracing the origins and pre-history of cinema we find that the act of "spotlighting" (the "fonction éclairagiste du cinéma" as French critic Serge Daney wrote) is the very genesis of cinema. The spotlit, illuminated 19th Century vitrine is widely understood as an essential component of cinema's birth. From a diametrically opposed perspective we could say that cinema's birth coincides with a notion of "blocked vision," a blocking-out, that is, a context in which the observer sees one thing, and then another successively in darkness; his/her vision directed only to what is being spotlit and to nothing else.

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE: Animal Locomotion plates, 1884

Parallel to David Lamelas's work, and as a means to elucidate the constitutive elements of cinema, "Exhibiting Mediality" draws attention to Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion plates, created in 1884 in Philadelphia, and preserved at the University Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania. Eadweard Muybridge's photogravures offer another reflection on the essential elements of cinema and in a sense complete the sentence that Lamelas' spotlight opens. Cinema is one image after another, each image disappearing for the apparition of a third invisible image in the mind of the spectator. This invisible image is again what David Lamelas's work is spotlighting.

Exhibiting Mediality is a collaboration with the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and International House, Philadelphia. For details of talks and film/video screenings visit http://www.icaphila.org

The curator, Tanya Leighton, is the ICA 2003-2004 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow. David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality is the culmination of a year-long fellowship offered by the Lauder Foundation, in collaboration with the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) in New York.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - ICA
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
September 8 - December 12, 2004
Exhibition Walkthrough: Friday, September 10, 5-6pm, ICA Members Only, join on-site
Opening Reception: Friday, September 10, 6 - 8pm, free and open to the public.

Samsung SPH- S2300 : 3,2 megapixels camera phone

SAMSUNG 3.2 megapixel Digital Camera Phone: the SPH- S2300 

Samsung S2300 Camera phone

Samsung unveiled its first 3.2 megapixel digital camera phone (SPH- S2300) with 3 times optical linear zoom today. The SPH-S2300 is the world’s first camera phone with optical linear 3X zoom.

Linear Zoom, an upgrade from the stage-type of non-linear zoom, allows users to zoom into subjects at a more precise magnification. Most digital cameras on the market have adopted this format to improve picture quality. By adopting a 3X linear zoom, as well as operations expected of a high quality digital camera, Samsung was able to raise the functionality of its camera phone to that of digital cameras.

Along with a 4X digital zoom, the S2300 can magnify pictures up to 12 times. It allows users to choose an image size from a maximum of 2,048 x 1,536 to a minimum of 640 x 480 and between an ISO setting of automatic, 100, 200 and 400. White balance can be used automatically or manually and a manual setting allows users to alter settings to accommodate weather and lighting.

Instead of a LED flash, a camera flash, whose brightness can be adjusted, is installed, allowing users to take pictures of subjects that are in darker settings with outputs that are similar to that of a digital camera. The S2300 also has an auto focusing function that allows the user to take pictures where the main image is in focus and the background out of focus to produce pictures that were only possible with manual focus cameras.

Like a high quality digital camera, the S2300 offers camcorder functions and a high quality microphone. Users are able to record images for more than 2 hours and with Samsung’s unrivaled TV-out function, they can connect the phone to a TV to view video and images directly through a TV.

Users are able to extend the memory capacity with a mini SD card, which can be used as a portable storage device when connected to the PC through a USB cable.

The phone adopts a design that salvages the special features of a digital camera. The front is designed like a digital camera with a zoom lens that projects up to 3 cm out of the device and boasts a hidden antenna (so called ‘intenna’ design). Because menu, zoom, shutter and ok buttons are arranged similar to a digital camera, users are able to operate the S2300 like a digital camera. The rear looks like a mobile phone with a slide-down panel that contains keys for functions, such as menu, send and ok, and covers two rows of dial buttons.

Kitae Lee, President and CEO of Samsung Electronics stated, “Although the number of pixels of camera phones were a widely debated issue, it is meaningless to simply compare camera phones based on this parameter. The key is how efficiently and harmoniously a camera phone can embody the functions of a digital camera with identical number of pixels.” He adds, “The S2300 is a totally new product that offers the functions of both a high quality digital camera and phone.”

The S2300 is currently being tested and with the carrier’s approval, Samsung plans to start selling the S2300 in the Korean market in July.

www.samsung.com

Laurent Boccara, McClain Gallery, Houston - "Encore" Exhibition

Laurent Boccara - Encore 

McClain Gallery, Houston

July 10 - 31, 2004 

Sandy Axelrad Boccara and McClain Gallery have organized an exhibition of selected works from the estate of noted Houston artist, Laurent Boccara. The exhibition explores works of Boccara¹s representative aesthetic concerns from his last 10 years of art making.

Laurent Boccara was an explorer of ideas. His work sprung from a lifetime of curiosity about the human condition. His artistic vocabulary directly correlated to a highly organized view of the world. Ultimately a color field painter with an eye for geometry, Laurent Boccara injected an inevitable natural randomness into his finished works. His highly recognizable "squiggled lines" were referred to as meandering, the messy bits of humanity upsetting the tranquility in solid colors and the perfection of geometric grids. Always aware and sensitive to human presence, Laurent Boccara often worked with diptychs and triptychs to show multiple sides of a single idea and to invite the interaction of different ideas.

A native of Tunisia, Laurent Bocarra was raised and educated in France. He studied law and economics at The Sorbonne University in Paris but found a career as a field archeologist. With over ten years experience, Laurent Boccara participated in excavations throughout Israel, Greece, Switzerland and the United States. He moved to the United States in the early 1970's where he studied painting at the University of Houston in the mid eighties.

McCLAIN GALLERY

2242 Richmond Avenue, Houston, TX 77098

www.mcclaingallery.com

Chip Hooper, Robert Mann Gallery, NYC - California's Pacific

Chip Hooper: California's Pacific
Robert Mann Gallery, New York
July 8 - September 18, 2004

Robert Mann Gallery presents Chip Hooper: California's Pacific. The exhibition includes fifteen 20x24 inch silver gelatin prints and three 48x60 inch silver gelatin prints; it coincides with the publication of a new catalog, Chip Hooper: California's Pacific.

Chip Hooper's photographs of the Pacific Ocean capture transient moments when light and water coalesce in transcendent beauty. The images included in California's Pacific are the distillation of Hooper's artistic career - having found his ideal subject matter, he has produced his most accomplished work to date. Hooper felt a kinship with the ocean from a young age; he began making prints at age 12 and constructed a darkroom in the basement of his childhood home. Chip Hooper settled in Carmel Valley, California, in 1988 and became a regular visitor to the coast, lured by the majesty and tranquility of the Pacific Ocean - and by the unique quality of light found there. Through his use of a large-format 8x10 inch view camera, he has embraced the patient and meticulous approach that it demands and has achieved technical mastery of the flawless, highly detailed prints it makes possible. His subject matter joins him with a lineage of artists who have been profoundly inspired by the Pacific Ocean, including Ansel Adams and Minor White. Yet Chip Hooper has developed his own unique contemporary vision and in doing so, he has refined the expressive power of landscape photography through his meditative studies of sea and sky.

California's Pacific is the first installment of a series of photographs that Chip Hooper is making of oceans around the world. Over the past two years, he has worked in Iceland and New Zealand.

The ocean provides artists with one of the purest forms of light which is a challenge to capture due to its state of constant flux, reflecting and refracting light as it moves. Chip Hooper speaks about the ocean - and his photographs - in terms of emotion. His work is about more than the physical landscape, it is about the emotive possibilites of the landscape. California's Pacific balances lush, descriptive pieces with minimalist, abstract images in which light and water are the only subjects. In Afternoon, Big Sur, 2003, a delicate bank of clouds casts shadows across the flat, metallic surface of the waves; the atmosphere is one of quiet contemplation. Hooper's images are often imbued with a sense of mystery. In Tide, Pescadero, 2003, an expanse of water is bathed in soft light, but whether it is day or night is uncertain. California's Pacific is an evocative study of the ocean; this first chapter in Chip Hooper's lyrical story of light and water charts a path through diverse emotional terrain, finally leaving us in a state of awe at the natural world.

Chip Hooper was born in Miami in 1962; he was raised in Chicago. His work has been reproduced in ARTnews, reviewed in The New York Times and is in permanent collections at the Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, California; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon; and the Tokyo Photographic Cultural Center, Tokyo, Japan. Among his publications are Chip Hooper: Photographs (1997) and Chip Hooper: California's Pacific (2004). He lives in Carmel Valley, California.

ROBERT MANN GALLERY
210 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001
www.robertmann.com

Jasper Johns, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh - "Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns Since 1983" Exhibition

Past Things and Present  

Jasper Johns Since 1983

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

10 July – 19 September 2004

A major exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art includes more than 90 works by the iconic American artist JASPER JOHNS: this is their first and only showing at a UK venue and it is Johns’s first exhibition in Britain in almost thirty years. Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns Since 1983 explores the artist’s work of the last two decades through a selection of related paintings, prints and drawings that demonstrate his continually evolving and innovative talent. The exhibition introduces new motifs that present a marked shift in his approach to image-making. 

One of the forerunners of Pop Art, Jasper Johns has exercised a profound influence on western painting of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930, he moved to New York in the early 1950s and quickly earned critical acclaim for his paintings of flags, targets, letters and numbers.

Past Things and Present highlights Jasper Johns’s practice of reworking motifs – which include faces, watches and his mysterious ‘Green Angel’ – in different media. The exhibition will include numerous works related to The Seasons, Jasper Johns’s four-part cycle of images begun in 1985 as well as a series of works which incorporate traced outlines from paintings by Holbein, Grünewald and Picasso.

Jasper Johns has consistently reinvented himself in response to new stimuli and since the early 1980s his imagery has become increasingly autobiographical. His recent work is full of references to his studio and home, to his childhood and to his own work and the work of other artists. In 1984 he stated:

“In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions… I sort of stuck to my guns for a while, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally, one must simply drop the reserve.”

Past Things and Present is part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Year of American Art. Throughout 2004–5, the Gallery is showing work by some of the giants of post-war and contemporary American art including Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Cindy Sherman.

The exhibition is organised by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and has toured to Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina. Following its European debut at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, it will travel to Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) in Valencia and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

An illustrated catalogue for the exhibition is available.

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART 

75 Belford Road, Edinburgh 

www.nationalgalleries.org

William Kentridge: Shadow Procession at Seattle Art Museum

William Kentridge: Shadow Procession 
Seattle Art Museum
July 1, 2004 – October 17, 2004

Seattle Art Museum (SAM) presents South African artist William Kentridge’s video, Shadow Procession (1999). This seven-minute long video was recently added to SAM’s permanent collection as the museum continues to update its collection of international contemporary art.

William Kentridge is widely recognized for his handcrafted animated films, drawings and theatrical productions. Influenced by South Africa’s political policies, Kentridge once stated that it was the job of the artist to escape the “immovable rock of apartheid”. His art forms focus attention less on the specifics of apartheid and more on the disorienting effects of living amidst prolonged violence.

Shadow Procession is an animated film that illustrates how William Kentridge rebels against the seduction of special effects and returns to techniques of shadow-theatre. He depicts a procession of strange shadow figures slowly struggling to advance through a deserted landscape. This haunting parade of figures is made from cardboard cutouts that move across the screen, hauling their belongings—donkeys, carts, chairs, sacks, and even whole towns on their backs—as if in an exodus. Interrupting the exodus is a grotesque strutting buffoon, William Kentridge’s version of Ubu, a ridiculous dictator created by the French writer Alfred Jarry for a play entitled Ubu Roi in the late 19th century. An unexpected musical score accents the visual contrasts as “What a Friend I Have in Jesus” is sung by Alfred Makgalemele.

While Shadow Procession can be seen literally as a statement about the forced migrations of laborers in South Africa, it also questions two urban personalities- the person who stumbles from carrying too much of the world in their minds and the authority figure who doesn’t realize how bumbling his brute force seems to those around him. William Kentridge states, “I am trying to capture a moral terrain in which there aren’t really any heroes, but there are victims. A world in which compassion just isn’t enough.”

Fascination with William Kentridge’s expressive drawing and filmmaking techniques has inspired a documentary entitled Drawing the Passing. This 56-minute documentary, based on a collaboration between a filmmaker and an art historian in 1999, is available for viewing in the 4th floor resource room. Curated by Pamela McClusky, Art of African and Oceanic Curator.

SAM - SEATTLE ART MUSEUM
Seattle, WA 98101
www.seattleartmuseum.org

Evolution of American Modernist Art - Exhibition at SAM

 Modern in America, is an installation of more than 90 works drawn from Seattle Art Museum's (SAM) permanent collection. It is a selective survey of American modernist movements from 1905 to the present day. Organized by Susan Rosenberg, SAM’s associate curator of modern and contemporary art, the installation includes paintings, photographs and mixed art.

Modern in America begins with the museum’s remarkably rich collection of paintings by the earliest exponents of modernism in America: artists who participated in the circles of Alfred Stieglitz’s pioneering “291” gallery (1905-17) and Louis and Walter Arensberg’s New York Dada Salon during World War I. Featured are major works by Georgia O’Keeffe’s (including A Celebration, 1924), John Marin and Marsden Hartley, as well as photographs by those who waged the first battles for photography’s status as fine art, including images from Camera Work by Edward Steichen and Paul Strand. The installation also presents oil paintings from the museum’s unmatched collection of works by John Covert, cousin of Walter Arensberg and an artist now widely recognized for his idiosyncratic and distinctive contribution to the New York Dada movement.

A post-World War II generation went about reinventing modernism for itself in the form of a return to primitivism and the unconscious, as embodied in the exquisitely crafted signature paintings reflected in SAM’s celebrated collection of Abstract Expressionism, including Jackson Pollock’s Sea Change (1947), Mark Rothko’s Number 11 (1947), and Willem de Kooning’s Woman (1943). The radically altered vocabulary of art-making reflected in a successive generation of artists is represented with several works from SAM’s collection by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly. The exhibition also includes two major works borrowed from local collections: Ellsworth Kelly’s Red and White, 1963, Jasper Johns’, Harlem Light, 1967, and Robert Rauschenberg’s Manuscript, 1963, a partial and promised gift to the museum. These artists individually and collectively displaced art-making to art perception, moving away from the subjective, unconscious and personal to embrace the cerebral, the systematic and the everyday.

Also featured is a selection of prints from The Stockholm Project, a portfolio conceived by the New York-based “Experiments in Art and Technology” (E.A.T.) - which had a Seattle branch in the late 1960s. Made in 1971, and donated to the Seattle Art Museum by Robert Rauschenberg, it provides a mini-survey of artists of the minimal, conceptual and fluxus movements, including Sol Lewitt, Hans Haacke, Nam June Paik and others, demonstrating the profound shift to an art of mechanical reproduction. A rich collection of works by Andy Warhol includes Double Elvis, 1964, and the rare multiple Kiss, 1966. Warhol’s embrace of photographic reproduction, as well as American typologies, looks simultaneously backward and forward. The deep and continuing influence of cinema on painting emanates from Andy Warhol to Edward Ruscha (with An Exhibition of Gasoline Powered Engines, 1993) and John Baldessari (in Blue Pole: Two Men With Guns and Woman (Hands to Ears), 1997).

Cinematic influences are also evident in works by Sue de beers, Deborah Mesa Pelli and Catherine Opie, younger photographers included in the installation. Their large-scale photographic works, which conclude Modern in America, not only declare the warm embrace of photography as just one art form among many today, but also the evolution of photographic technologies and its status as manipulated versus true.

Seattle Art Museum Fourth-Floor Installation
100 University St., downtown Seattle
July 8, 2004 – January 4, 2006