Moderator, BoredPanda staff
Anywayyy, my favorite part here is introducing you to creative people who deserve just as much recognition as famous celebrities. Besides that, I also enjoy memes and funny, lighthearted posts, and occasionally, I find myself drawn to a bit of internet drama.
Octopus is delighted to present a curated selection of Tom Bunning‘s recent photographic works, inviting viewers on a journey through his diverse portfolio since the beginning of 2024. Tom’s adept eye captures a range of subjects, from the sleek lines of automotive design to the intricate details of homeware and the rustic charm of a biodynamic farm.
The showcase commences with Tom’s collaboration with luxury automotive leader Aston Martin, where he skilfully captures the essence of innovation embodied in the new Vantage. Commissioned by FMS Global and meticulously directed by Deep London, Tom’s photography breathes life into the dynamic allure of the Vantage, setting a new standard in automotive imagery.
Continuing his exploration of automotive excellence, Tom ventures into the realm of Aston Martin’s iconic DB12 Volante and Coupe, crafting an immersive visual narrative against the picturesque backdrop of Kent’s landscapes. Each frame exudes elegance and performance, showcasing Tom’s unparalleled ability to encapsulate the essence of automotive excellence.
Transitioning seamlessly to the world of craftsmanship, Tom collaborates with Ralph Lauren and Burleigh for the ‘All Made Here’ project, offering a glimpse into the heart of artisanal creation at their esteemed factory. Through his lens, Tom unveils the intricate beauty of craftsmanship, weaving a tale of tradition and innovation in each meticulously composed shot.
Concluding this captivating showcase is Tom’s evocative portrayal of Fern Verrow II, an enchanting biodynamic farm nestled in the tranquil foothills of the Black Mountains. Amidst nature’s bounty, Tom captures the indomitable spirit of farmer Jane Scotter as she tends to spring tasks with unwavering dedication, showcasing the timeless allure of farming life.
Tom’s latest collection serves as a testament to his artistic vision and unwavering commitment to storytelling through the lens. Each photograph invites viewers to embark on an immersive visual journey, offering a glimpse into a world of creativity and craftsmanship.
Newly reimagined and relaunched this year, Dazed’s biannual men’s fashion and culture sibling Another Man is back. In celebration of this revival, Another Man is taking over the Dazed Space at 180 The Strand, mere metres away from the Another Man HQ, for new exhibition Shashin Ron (On Photography).
The exhibition features printed works and moving image from the global array of artists and photographers that have contributed to its Summer/Autumn 2024 issue, including Keizo Kitajima, Gabriel Moses, Viviane Sassen and JH Engström. Another Man’s editor-in-chief, Ellie Grace Cumming, explains, “Photography and visual-essays are the heart and focus of the newly reimagined magazine and with this exhibition we wanted to honour the remarkable global talent collectively responsible for making it a dynamic and thought provoking first issue.”
The Summer/Autumn 2024 edition hit shelves last month and includes features ranging from the intrepid, Mongolian-born and Tokyo-raised artist-director Nigo, shot by Ryu Ika and styled by Shotaro Yamaguchi, to the Herculean tailored shoulders of Prada’s Spring/Summer 2024 menswear show, documented by Paul Kooiker. Imagery from both of which will be featured in the exhibition at Dazed Space this month. Visit the gallery above for a closer look.
Shashin Ron (On Photography) is free and open to the public, running from Thursday 16 to Thursday 23 May, at Dazed Space, Surrey Street, London, WC2R 2ND, 12pm-7pm daily.
“Angus” (2023), oil on canvas, 61 x 47 inches. All photos by Andris Søndrol Visdal, courtesy of the artist
and Perrotin, shared with permission
“For me, the studio is a place of discovery,” says Jason Boyd Kinsella (previously). “It maybe sounds silly, but it’s a little bit like a Christmas morning when you get a gift, and you’re excited to open it because you don’t know what’s inside… Something is going to be revealed, and I am excited to see what it is.”
The unexpected encounters Kinsella describes arise naturally in his Oslo studio as he conjures enigmatic characters. Large-scale canvases—his preferred size is 20 x 100 centimeters—line the walls of the airy, industrial space and allow him to envision life-sized figures he confronts as he paints. This positioning creates a sort of dialogue between the two, which he approaches with openness and curiosity as if meeting someone for the first time.
Kinsella often begins with a rough, preliminary sketch that pulls on a few emotional threads and helps to lay the foundation for a temperament to emerge. “Looking back at (the sketches), very often I’m struck with the feeling that the person I’m looking at in one of these drawings is someone that’s very familiar to me. It’s really about discovering feeling as opposed to being super rational,” he adds.
“Mille (One)” (2023), oil on canvas, 73 x 61 inches
Like a jazz musician who practices improvisation and gains confidence in spontaneity, Kinsella has learned to follow his intuition. He might layer a pair of bubblegum pink planks or bisect a face with two peach columns, decisions that, like chord progressions and syncopation in an unrehearsed run, are made more interesting by their surrounding components. “You can look at sheet music and understand the individual notes themselves,” the artist says, “but it’s only when they’re assembled and played that you really get the true magic of it.”
He constructs a persona in the way that many of us build the public-facing identities flooding our social media profiles. His figures are complex but not messy, their feelings compartmentalized in perfectly round spheres and angled forms. Based on the 16 possible outcomes of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, the subjects fit into neat constructions that resemble something familiar but are uniquely puzzled together, each shape nested into an individual spot.
The artist first encountered the personality test after his mother gifted him a book with the questions when he was growing up in Toronto. He answered the prompts and recognized himself in the outcomes: his introversion, intuition, and empathy were all easily identifiable. “There was this realization that we’re all made up of the same stuff, right? All of these simple components are very interchangeable depending on how you answer these questions,” he says. Although he didn’t think much about the book after that, it followed him around and slowly seeped into his practice, eventually becoming the backbone of his work.
“Connection” (2023), oil on canvas, 87 x 138 inches
Earlier this year, Kinsella opened Emotional Moonscapes at Perrotin in New York, where his painted portraits were on view alongside sculptures and video. In addition to singular figures, pairs of people appeared in this show for the first time. “The Twins” depicts siblings in pink and blue plainly conjoined by a horizontal bar, while “Connection” is more eager and complicated. Two seated characters inch forward in hopes of interacting, only to find the other just out of reach.
Like realistic portraits, these abstract personalities aren’t static. Experiences offer new perspectives, and over time, our understandings of ourselves and the world shift. Kinsella’s “Mille” portraits draw on the inevitability of change and portray a figure at varying points in life. The first in the series features a disjointed face that plays outward, while the second is tightly constructed, the same shapes rearranged into a recognizable but new configuration.
Stripping away outward appearances in favor of fundamentals, Kinsella looks to emotional DNA, how it sequences within an individual and replicates over time. As Max Lakin writes about the body of work, the artist’s “presence wrapped up in his pictures… a feeling that hangs between the shapes.” The portraits suggest that intimacy is about filling in the gaps and finding space where connections flourish. “If you want to know what’s happening in my life, just look at my work. I’m baked into every single piece,” Kinsella says.
In August, he will open his next exhibition, Ghost in the Machine, at Perrotin in Seoul. Until then, find more of his work on his website and Instagram.
“Mille (Two)” (2023), oil on canvas, 73 x 61 inches
“Rob” (2024), oil on canvas, 73 x 61 inches
“Susan” (2023), oil on canvas, 39 x 61 inches
“The Twins” (2023), acrylic and oil on canvas, 45 x 71 inches
“Michael” (2023), oil on canvas, 73 x 61 inches
The artist in his studio
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Using the Building Blocks of Myers-Briggs, Jason Boyd Kinsella Puzzles Together an Expressive Cast appeared first on Colossal.
WORCESTER — It’s in the nature of landscapes to alter over time. Wind and rain erode them. Development turns some into real estate. Climate change affects all of them.
Less obviously, it’s in the nature of landscape photography to alter over time. Drawing a line from Carleton Watkins to Ansel Adams to Robert Adams is easy enough. Yet looking at their work you see how that line can zig, zag, curve, even corkscrew, as a result of changes in equipment, technique, emphasis, locale, even opportunity. Imagine how differently Watkins would have photographed Yosemite if he’d had a station wagon for transport, as Ansel Adams did, instead of pack mules.
The title of “New Terrain: 21st-Century Landscape Photography,” which runs at the Worcester Art Museum through July 7, puts newness, which is to say, alteration, front and center. WAM’s Nancy Kathryn Burns curated the show.
That newness extends to subject, process, approach, media, even materiality. David Emitt Adams’s “111 Degrees, Facing West” takes a traditional process, tintype, and uses it in a very non-traditional way. Tintypes were popular in the mid-19th century, with the photographic images printed on a metal plate. Adams’s metal “plate” is a rusted gas can he found in the Sonoran Desert. A sense of place and use of tactility, albeit in no way similar, also inform Sarah Sense’s “A Plan of Boston.” Sense, who’s of Chitimacha and Choctaw descent, combines photographs with two 18th-century maps (one of Boston, hence the title) and, most strikingly, basket-weaving techniques from her Indigenous heritage.
Sense’s work is a reminder that landscape, old or new, consists of more than just land. It’s figurative as well, and the conceptual element can matter as much as the literal — or even more, as what one might call a moral terroir. Coming into play are matters of heritage, possession, legacy — which is related to heritage and possession but different.
There are some 30 photographs in “New Terrain,” ranging in date from 2003-2023, and in their various ways nearly all can be seen to touch on that multiplicity of meanings. Among the exceptions is Adam Ekberg’s marvelously deadpan “Lawn Chair Catapult” — the title is head-scratchingly self-explanatory — which is a different kind of layering, of perception and expectation.
Sometimes the treatment of those other, more freighted layers of meaning, and the politics thereof, is subdued. Dawoud Bey’s “Untitled #19 (Creek and Trees)” from his “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” series, may be the most moving instance. The series, which shows sites from the Underground Railroad, takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem “Dream Variations.” Bey’s unconventional visual approach might also be seen as a version of Milton’s “darkness visible.”
Photographs in the series are notably underlit. This has the seemingly paradoxical effect of involving the viewer more with the image, both in giving a sense of the experience of someone in flight under cover of darkness and requiring a greater attentiveness to appreciate what’s within the frame. Sometimes the treatment is anything but subdued, as in Dread Scott’s “Obliterated Power (Supreme Court),” which shows a darkened, printed-over Supreme Court building ominously looming over an empty plaza in the foreground. The message is plain.
Scott’s image recalls Christo and Jeanne-Claudes’s “Wrapped Reichstag,” another presentation, if far less menacing, of monumental power occluded. One of the more interesting aspects of “New Terrain” is how often the photographs relate to the work of other artists. Sometimes that’s in terms of subject. Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman‘s “Cola Sea,” from their series “Processed Views,” takes as point of departure Watkins’s photograph “Sugarloaf Islands.” Ciurej and Lochman don’t photograph the islands. They construct a close simulacrum, out of sugar. The image is a commentary on junk food, right down to tiny decayed teeth substituting for the birds visible in Watkins’s original.
The land artist Robert Smithson created his “Spiral Jetty” earthwork in Utah’s Great Salt Lake in 1970. The aerial views of the lake and environs in David Maisel’s “Terminal Mirage” take Smithson as a point of departure. In fact, “Spiral Jetty,” seen very small, is visible in one of the two photos from the series in the show. What most stands out are the pictures’ almost-radioactive colors, which jump out all the more, with the photographs measuring 4 feet by 4 feet.
The tradition of Chinese shan shui landscape painting inspires both Wu Chi-Tsung’s “Cyano-Collage 1919” and Yang Yongliang’s video “The Clouds,” which incorporates both photography and animation. Wu uses scale to even greater effect than Maisel does: The work measures more than 7 feet tall and slightly less than 2 feet wide. Glanced at, Yang’s video looks like a rendering of mountains partially covered by clouds. Closer inspection reveals waterfalls, automobiles, pedestrian traffic, high-tension wires, construction cranes. Landscape as static? Not hardly. In a show consistently full of surprises, nothing may be more surprising than Yang’s video.
Sometimes the relation to the work of other artists is visual. Paul Vinet’s “Infinite Landscape #6″ uses gilding in such a way that a contemporary cityscape seems to emerge from a Byzantine or early Renaissance painting. The effect is unnervingly surreal. Silvio Wolf’s “Horizon F.” is very Rothko, as Kate Greene’s “Seascape study no. 3″ is very Turner and Matthew Brandt’s “Lake Dillon, CO1,” from his “Lakes and Reservoirs” series, is very Frankenthaler.
As distinctive as the Brandt is in appearance, it’s even more so in execution. In the darkroom, he used water from the lake to bathe the developing image (can’t do that with digital). For her diptych “Littoral Drift #3 (Rodeo Beach, CA),” Meghann Riepenhoff did something similar. She took prepared cyanotype paper, like that used by Wu, and held it in the Pacific, using waves and sediment to “develop” the image.
The example here from Anderson & Low’s “Voyages (20022)” series also partakes of the ocean, at least by association. They photograph museum-quality ship models in storage. The in-storage part matters, because seen through plastic the vessel here seems lost in fog. One thinks of Emily Dickinson’s line “There is no Frigate like a Book” — or, in this case, photograph. The realm that Anderson & Low take us to, dreamscape, is very different from landscape, but by no means unrelated to it.
NEW TERRAIN: 21st-Century Landscape Photography
At Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury St., Worcester, through July 7. 508-799-4406, www.worcesterart.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.
As photographers, we often find ourselves searching for inspiration and fresh perspectives. Stepping outside of our comfort zones and exploring new environments can be the key to unlocking creativity and pushing our boundaries.
Coming to you from Ben Maclean, this interesting video explores the value of content trips for photographers and content creators (note: there is some strong language). Maclean, along with his friends Andrea and Tommy, embark on a journey through the Scottish Highlands, documenting their experiences and sharing valuable lessons along the way. The video emphasizes the importance of collaboration and splitting the workload during these trips, allowing each individual to focus on their strengths and capture the best possible content.
Maclean discusses the practical aspects of planning a content trip, including budgeting and collaborating with brands. He highlights the potential for partnering with companies that align with the trip’s theme, such as outdoor gear manufacturers. This approach not only helps offset costs but also provides an opportunity to create high-quality content for potential clients.
Beyond the logistical and financial benefits, the video underscores the personal growth and fulfillment that content trips can offer. Maclean reflects on the challenges and rewards of pushing his limits, both physically and creatively. He emphasizes the importance of appreciating the present moment and making the most of opportunities while we have them. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Maclean.
Last month, under the helm of editor-in-chief Ellie Grace Cumming, the cult menswear publication Another Man returned for Volume II after a three-year hiatus. In a new size, a renovated direction and an updated perspective on the future of menswear, Issue I beckoned a new era for the publication, with Challengers star Mike Faist on the cover, fashion stories capturing John Galliano’s opulent couture collection for Maison Margiela, and a Nan Goldin-curated retrospective of her seminal Thanksgiving series.
This month, from May 16 to 23, Another Man will be hosting a free exhibition titled SHASHIN RON (ON PHOTOGRAPHY), taking place directly below where the magazine was crafted inside London’s 180 Strand. “Photography and visual essays are the heart and focus of the newly reimagined magazine,” says Ellie Grace Cumming. “With this exhibition, we wanted to honour the remarkable global talent collectively responsible for making it a dynamic and thought-provoking first issue.”
Supported by Studio RM, the exhibition will feature printed works and moving image taken from the new issue, from global artists and photographers including Lucas Blalock, Trinity Ellis, JH Engström, Ryu Ika, Douglas Irvine, Keizo Kitajima, Paul Kooiker, Thomas Mailaender, Gabriel Moses, Momo Okabe, Jack Pierson, Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Viviane Sassen, Paul Sepuya, Nick Sethi, Chris Shaw, Marie Valognes, Kandis Williams and Julian Klincewicz.
The title of the exhibition draws from Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s rare, seminal book of the same name first published in 1989, which delves into the history, aesthetics, and evolving practices of Japanese photography, containing provocative photographs and text which traces the image maker’s expressive visual dialect.
SHASHIN RON (ON PHOTOGRAPHY) opens to the public from Thursday 16 to Thursday 23 May, at Dazed Space, Surrey Street, London, WC2R 2ND, 12pm-7pm daily. Entry is free and open to all.
Starts 5/21
Roman Fox, Faizal Westcott, Eren Sarigul, Adam Benedicto, Tommaso Negri, Alex Munoz, Jason Garcia, Eiji Paul, Daiki Hosaka, Takumi Matsuo et al.
Our aim at Tokyo Streets is to highlight the myriad of different perspectives on Tokyo and Japan from both local and international photographers, using both film and digital cameras to bring their artistic visions to life. Explore each photographer’s unique viewpoint and gain insights into their creative processes by engaging with them in person at the gallery.
We are excited to have a dedicated gallery featuring a collective project entitled ‘Floating Moments’, a journey through urban life. We are hosting a documentary film night on Wednesday 22nd featuring work from local and international short filmmakers. On Friday 24th there will be a photo walk hosted by the participating photographers, of the surrounding local area in Shibuya. The reception party will be held on the evening of Saturday 25th from 7 pm – 11 pm featuring DJs playing soul, funk and hip-hop.
Visit Gallery Conceal at the end of May for an enriching journey into the artistry of photography.
[Related Event]Documentary Film Night
