Fiona Pardington

An artist I have so far failed to mention...

Fiona Pardington, NZ photographer, DocFA at Elam. A major show of 100 of her photographs was on display at the Wellington City Gallery recently.

Her work has "a painterly quality that visually reference seventeenth century painting traditions as well as the 16th century vanitas traditions. The images are not only memento mori ['remember that you have to die'] in the provision of poetic signs of time passing and things dying - from dandelion clocks to gecko skins - but of cultures meeting across seas"

Aesthetically they are quite similar to my white-on-black prints (this is why Judy suggested her as a reference to look at.)

Our exhibition was in Artsdiary!

And I had no idea until now. Fantastic!

http://www.artsdiary.co.nz/70/1867.html

VEGGIES IN SPACE

Fresh food grown in the microgravity environment of space officially is on the menu for the first time for NASA astronauts on the International Space Station. Expedition 44 crew members, including NASA's one-year astronaut Scott Kelly, are ready to sample the fruits of their labor after harvesting a crop of "Outredgeous" red romaine lettuce Monday, Aug. 10, from the Veggie plant growth system on the nation’s orbiting laboratory.

From this article

Here is the official page about the 'Veggie' mission on NASA's website 

Red lettuce...

Marilene Oliver - the human 3D printer

Virtual gallery: Le Corps En Questions

Some of Marilene's works…

Some excerpts from her artist statement

My material is digitised bodies. Concepts such as Hans Moravec's 1988 call to 'download our consciousness to the datascape in order to survive' serve as springboards to create artworks that speculate how we might survive, refigure and evolve in the Digital Age. ...At first my work attempted to repair the fragmentation and dislocation brought about by medical imaging and to reclaim the body from the contemporary medical and digital gaze in order to poetically subvert it and offer future relics of our digitised selves. ...Most recently since moving to Sub Saharan Africa I find myself struggling with a new understanding of the medically scanned body. Whereas before the scan dataset was something I took more or less for granted, I now recognise its strong symbolic resonance signifying privilege both in terms of wealth and access to digital technology that is far from global. 

And from her research statement

The aims of my practice based research project are to examine from an artist’s perspective, the processes needed to digitize the body - how flesh can be translated to pixel (digital photography), to voxel (Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Computerised Tomography, Positron Emission Tomography and Ultrasound) and to xyz co-ordinate (3D laser scanning). By looking at the history and evolution of these technologies as well as working closely with radiologists, scientists and technicians to acquire medical imaging datasets and 3D laser scans, I seek out metaphors and poetic readings of the translations that take place as well as finding ways to repair the fragmentation they promote.

Riusuke Fukahori

深堀隆介 - Riusuke Fukahori

Japanese artist Riusuke Fukahori paints layers of acrylic on resin to create incredibly realistic sculptural/3D paintings of goldfish in water

Artist Klaus Pichler Showcases Rotting Food In Still Life Series

Full Article Here

The project, titled "One Third," takes its name from the 1.3 billion tons of food -- roughly a third of the total world supply -- that regularly goes to waste according to a 2011 study by the United Nations. At the same time, 925 million people worldwide live with the threat of starvation.

The images, beautifully composed but often stomach turning, are accompanied by statistics regarding the food's origin, time of harvest, means of transportation, distance traveled and its carbon footprint.
In a statement accompanying the work, Pichler writes about the disparity in food waste between industrialized and non-industrialized nations.

Artist website here - "One Third" project -  "Skeletons in the closet"

12 Course Meal in a Can: Chris Godfrey

All in One

"Questioning the novelty nature of our consumer culture. This 12 course meal in a can offers the average joe, the chance to dine like royalty without the washing up." - Chris Godfrey's website

Daily Mail article here

Jacqueline Fahey

Paintings by Jacqueline Fayey. I became interested in Fahey's work after being mesmerised by an excerpt of her second memoirs, Before I Forget, during her interview on national radio a couple of weeks ago.

These are the very paintings I'd make if I could. Fahey is everything I aspire to.

a few thoughts…
-appearance of 'flattening'
-collage effect - seemingly jumbled objects - movement? through composition?
-colour clusters and pattern fields - patchwork effect
-narrative - domestic scenes

Barbara Tuck II

Some more by Barbara Tuck… [website]

I'm really enjoying this 'flattened landscape' thing - it seems a really successful way of portraying the quality of interconnectedness, which I'm interested in.

Barbara Tuck: Orients and Mortals

Barbara Tuck: 'Orients and Mortals'

A recent exhibition at Anna Miles Gallery. The curator was fine with me taking snapshots of the paintings I liked (i.e. all of them...):

Barbara Tuck has been at work on paintings indebted to specific ecologies for the past decade. Each year she has made autumnal trips to wild places before returning to the studio to distill her experiences. Over this period she has partaken of a geological and vegetative feast. Previous paintings have referred to single locations only, but in Orients and Mortals, Tuck has given herself license to riffle across the full variety of geographies she has immersed herself in to date.

Notes:

-Patchwork / collage aesthetic

-Illustrative, representational images meshed with patterns, abstraction, colour fields. Like a wide painterly vocabulary.

-Colour palette - consistent across the suite of works

-Size of canvas, amount of detail - also consistent

-Composition - organic? Balanced but doesn't looked 'planned'