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Lecture by John Paul Caponigro
Wednesday, April 12, 7:30 p.m.,
Jonsson Performance Hall, free
Reflections presents highlights from John
Paul Caponigro's images of water, one of
the planet's most precious resources. John
Paul shares his experiences with and thoughts
on photography during a time when the medium
is undergoing extraordinary changes. His
social concerns include not only environmental
issues, but the uses, abuses, and influences
of visual media. While answering questions
from the audience, John Paul displays an
alternate body of work - Wastelands.
John Paul Caponigro, author of Adobe
Photoshop Master Class, is an internationally
renowned artist. A contributing editor for
Camera Arts and View Camera, columnist
for PhotoTechniques and Digital
Photo Pro, he teaches workshops both
privately and at select venues including
The Santa Fe Workshops and The Maine Photographic
Workshops. A Canon Explorer of Light and
an Epson Stylus Pro, his clients include
Adobe, Apple, and Kodak. See www.johnpaulcaponigro.com
for more information.
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Distance & Trace
explores tension between copy and original.
Distance & Trace, an exhibition
curated by Associate Professor Marilyn
Waligore, examines the distance
between the original and copy produced as
a result of processes of reproduction. Distance
& Trace, on view in the Visual
Arts Gallery of the University of Texas
at Dallas from March 17 through
April 15, 2006, features the work of eight
artists: Texas artists Debora Hunter and
Kevin Todora of Dallas, and Elizabeth Mellott-Carreón
of Denton; Edwin Jager and John O. Smith
of Wisconsin; Anni Holm, Chicago, Illinois;
Steven H. Silberg, Baltimore, Maryland;
and Stephanie Dinkins, New York. These
artists have embraced processes of reproduction
and have exploited their potential for creative
possibilities, for investigating how a particular
subject or material is altered or changed
through lens-based, digitally-based, or
print-based processes--from artists' books
to digital projections to unique photograms.
Chicago artist Anni Holm will present
an artist's talk on Friday, March 17, in
the Visual Arts Gallery, at 3:30 p.m.
The exhibition opening reception
is scheduled for Friday, March 17, 6:30
p.m., in the Visual Arts Gallery.
In Distance & Trace, lens-based
or light-based technologies are adopted
by these artists, but the tension between
copy and original varies greatly among the
works on view. Kevin Todora
uses an exaggerated overlay of half-tone
dot pattern to overwhelm the subject, Warholian
celebrity-like portraits, while he also
references processes of print reproduction.
Anni Holm embraces a matrix
to generate her portraits of international
students, deriving a pattern from the fingerprints
of her subjects, to fuse commentary on identity
with that of homeland security. Her large-scale
portraits recall the gridded works of Chuck
Close. However, her passport portraits,
with their obsessive reference to the subject
through the use of 4000 life-size fingerprints
to comprise the final image, parallel the
massive collection of information on foreign
visitors and the merging of photographic
and electronic means of monitoring the individual.
Steven H. Silberg pushes
at the margins of new technologies through
study of the degradation of data. For Silberg,
"Degradation can be considered a constructive
process; noise becomes a tool of creative
expression." In his DVD projection
Bit Transformation, the image visually
disintegrates through the introduction of
noise, hinting at our reliance upon potentially
fugitive digital archives. Stephanie
Dinkins challenges our assumptions
about distinctions made between drawing
and digital "direct image acquisition
technique." Her Hair Drawings,
"derived from random configurations
of hair scanned directly into the computer,"
suggest commonplace subjects while they
also represent the sinuous black lines of
discarded body hair, encouraging readings
on more than one level. Debora Hunter
photographs model planes, which populated
the previous Frontiers of Flight Museum,
at Dallas Love Field, a place in which "real
artifacts are mingled with reproductions."
The former museum of replicas documented
by Hunter has now been replaced by an expansive,
new, relocated structure, the latter which
finally houses actual aircraft. Hunter has
documented a site which no longer exists,
and model objects which have been replaced
by their originals.
Elizabeth Mellott-Carreón, John
O. Smith, and Edwin Jager explore the power
of objects to promote associations and narratives,
making connections between the real and
the replica, or between lived experience
and the dream. Edwin Jager's and
John O. Smith's collaborative book
project, Threshold, has its point
of origin in a poem, and its virtual counterpart
in an elaborate website. The voices of two
fictional characters lead the viewer through
this visual narrative as they "interact
in a world where the borders between the
real and the imagined are tenuous."
The multiple, gridded pages adopt geometry
as a visual code. The characters engage
in rituals to construct transitory sculptural
objects--paper rings and floating cubes
of light--evoking poetic language through
visual association. Elizabeth Mellott-Carreón
mines the distance between the experiences
of her husband, a U.S. soldier serving in
the Iraq/Afghanistan War, and her "imagination
of what the war is like." Her constructed
dioramas include photograms, shadows collected
from objects placed in arrangements, which
reference the artist's dreams, stories told
by her husband and his friends, and news
from the Middle East.
These artists practice methods that we
use to duplicate, to archive, to record,
and to document our everyday existence.
Their insistence upon process both affirms
our reliance upon methods of reproduction
and duplication, and also acknowledges,
despite herculean efforts, our inability
to permanently and exactly fix the image
or archive information, both remnants of
our lives.
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