Week #57 Elemental Forms in Landscape: a photographic series

Sometimes there’s no explanation for how something makes you feel. Of course, marrying the land to your eye takes specify, some would say even technical nuance. It’s certainly a quality that requires the artist to hunt out form, after which immersion is necessary before a final distillation. What is captured in simplicity will be profoundly and wholly complex. Balance and depth will prove to be perfect.

The sense of it then, and only then, rises rather than distracts from an image. That’s what Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer has achieved here with Elemental Forms, a photographic series of landscape. She has done the work. Scoping for a particular structure, its configuration in space, in an instant you can interpret the scene, have it sink in and soften you. Let the simple form, textured but basic, have its effect. Let the lack of colour, the lines and shapes build their invitation to you in equal measure of push and pull. Let the sensation increase.

If you want to follow up with more, go here and here.

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Week #56 Toward the Low Sun: an album

I have loved listening to The Dirty Three from the first time I heard their music.

This contribution, Toward the Low Sun, is no exception. The closest thing to improvised jazz in a rock form, it enters the soul through enlisting the brain. In the same way that absorbing un-metered beats and swirling notes in the very best of extemporised music does (it’s as if the notes are travelling through the musician as they’re playing) listening to this syntax of sound invites the mind to dance. A wonderful spool of sounds and lines and unclear rhythms, it’s the mesh that needs unravelling, the maze that needs walking, the terrain that needs to be covered. And, as you follow the bridges, and keep up with the disparities, as you catch the multitude of tonal chains and flutters, and feel the roll of percussive drums, you are in a visceral gateway. Soak up the nourishment, the harsh urban drill, the macabre perpetual eerie lilt. Go here to feast on some of their other albums: Ocean Songs, Horse Stories, and Cinder.

Week #55 Human in Geometry: a photographic series

When I first started taking photographs, I was fascinated by the geometry of lines: the dense spaces they held, their ability to create change while delivering calmness. Jolanta Mazur has put together a series of photos that allow both space and density to bloom in the eye together. Geometry is the key. The shots dish up a swath of positivity that grounds around in the brain of the recipient. It is symmetry sitting on the shoulders of simpatico.

Colour and place play a part here, not only in the possibility of these photographs but in the richness they produce. Just as importantly, these images tell us something of the people who appear in them. People, after all, are what make this series work. And Jolanta Mazur has organised their placement with structural poignancy, utilising repetition and form to capture the design of life. For more delicious mouthfuls go here and here.

 

Week #54 Caravan Story: a novel

Wayne Macauley is one of my favourite authors. His writing has that daring capacity to capture the bizarre in the ordinary, the absurd in the everyday, and the laughable in the direst of circumstance. Simply put, it champions the urbane among the chaos. All this occurs, not at the expense of poignancy, but as its procurer. Navigating through spiky, offbeat scenes, the stories – all of which I recommend – cruise along the suburban streets of our wealthy and poor alike, conjuring the macabre while managing to do “absolute telling”.

Caravan Story is no exception. Like all his work, metaphor and menace play a part. The ideas are intrinsic from the beginning, and the prose, which is joyously full, creates a calm absurdity that slowly builds into a far darker momentum. Caught in a world of rules and regulations, the young couple at the centre of the narrative have no option but to carry on as things around them become increasingly difficult. This is writing that remains with you in the manifestation of warning bells. Put on your helmet and ride the wave. It’s cause and effect at its best.

Week #53 Los Angeles Unmasked: a photographic series

Mike Murphy is a photographer with an unfussed MO. His canvas is the raw and lacking streets of Los Angeles. Confronting, sometimes even brutal, his pictures nonetheless project a poetic synergy that makes these barren, even ugly views, quite beautiful. Taken with an iPhone that he sometimes straps to his car, Murphy has developed the canny idea of triggering the shutter with a selfie styled button.

But while his technique calls for spontaneity, equally what emerges is not slapdash. The best is purposely framed, shockingly clear, and pricelessly honest. We owe photographers like Murphy for showing us the backend of our polished lives, while giving us the form and the softness to want to look. This is beauty in the ugly. This is seeing in the miss-able. This is an uncut depiction that often tells a whole story.

Week #52 Lost Boy: a dance

Merrick Hanna is an 11-year-old who has perfected the art of expressing himself through dance. His is not a show of body-beauty or muscle-strength, and it’s certainly not a feat of repeated and perfected vigour and force. Rather it is a play of nuance, a subtle progression of movement that catches emotion and wraps it in a net.

The story of Lost Boy is simplistic. And the music is necessary for the experience to resonate. But the seamless ability of Hanna to pivot and pull, to hinge and swivel, to be sharp and fluid, is a portal into meaning. It feels precious and poignant. It feels rare and affectionate. It is defined by its residual buoyancy.

Week #51 Absence of Being: a series of photographs

Susan Burnstine has that artistic touch. More than at arms-length, her photography is work that makes you think you’re inside the image, shifting through it, even as you claw to get closer. The shots are custodians of time and emotion, mirages of our dwindling capacity to hold onto the world while we walk through it. They are barely there and yet wholly haunting. They make perfect sense and yet defy the eye. They are full of depth and pull and clarity and distortion. They are harsh while blindingly gentle.

Dedicated to the pursuit of producing what she needs, Susan has built her own cameras, many of them from a mixture of household objects and second-hand camera parts. Is it any wonder then that the photographs have that loved feeling, that sense of uniqueness? They look crafted not shot, put together not triggered, and seem both created and found simultaneously.

Check out the entire Absence of Being series and her other series: On Waking Dreams, Between, Flight, Instinct, through the links on the same page.