Thomas Kneubühler

Untitled#4 (2003-2008)

Office 2000 provides the stuff of an archeological dig: remnants of the inhabitants are evident through personal effects, humanizing the otherwise generic and mundane office environment.

Larry Glawson

Text taken from Thomas Kneubuhler

Oscar Oliver

VII
The Belgo Building Series (2008)
C-Print
19.5" x 19.5"

***Sorry for the poor quality, I'm too lazy to take a decent picture of my own work***

Oscar Oliver

III
The Belgo Building Series (2008)
C-Print
19.5" x 19.5"

***Sorry for the poor quality, I'm too lazy to take a decent picture of my own work***

Oscar Oliver

II
The Belgo Building Series (2008)
C-Print
19.5" x 19.5"

***Sorry for the poor quality, I'm too lazy to take a decent picture of my own work***

Oscar Oliver

VII (Detail*)
From The Belgo Building Series (2008)

*256 C-Prints mounted on a black cardboard
2" each

***Sorry for the poor quality, I'm too lazy to take a decent picture of my own work***

Bill Durgin

Swann 3 (2005)

My photographs reflect a fascination with the body as form. The complex figurations, undulating arrangements of flesh, as the body seems to collapse onto itself, image an almost abstracted figure lacking appendages and hair. The physical structure becomes not just a shell, but a moving sculpture of skin, muscle, fat, and bone.

The gesture within each photograph is created through exploring my own physical limitations and collaborative improvisation with dancers and performers. Often I will come up with a pose and demonstrate it and then ask the model to repeat or respond to it. Each pose transmogrifies the figure towards abstraction; exaggerating or diminishing the skeletal structure until it approaches an amorphic form. I want the bodies to be recognized as bodies, but also to be detached from common perceptions of the figure. Bound within each singular view, the uncanny figures convey the body as both abject and marvelous.

Composed through a 4x5 view camera, I place the figure within the location and select an angle to shoot from. I remove furnishings to create a perspective which foregrounds the rudiments of the architecture, the light, and the figure itself. Each space is empty, but not anonymous. It is a setting not a set, within which the figure is grounded in a particular environment revealed by the traces of the doorway, ceiling, or floor. Suspended along the edges of the space, along the edges of figuration, these photographs also move along the edges of the photographic genres of narrative, portraiture, and environment.

Bill Durgin

Text taken from: Saatchi Gallery

Jeff Wall

The Destroyed Room (1978)

Wall's work is underpinned by the considerable body of his own theoretical writing that advances an argument for the necessity of a pictorial art. Much of the work pictures social tension, cities with changing demographics, intersections, suburbs and dead zones. Other work is much more enigmatic, fantastic and seemingly personal. Wall's photographs are complicated productions involving cast, sets and crews as well as digital and computer postshoot manipulation. They have been characterized as one-frame cinematic productions rather than photographs in the ordinary sense. They address the history of painting more than the history of photography.

Text taken from: The Canadian Encyclopedia

Louis Joncas

Detritus 4 (2003)

These are not still lives of flowers and fresh fruit; quite the opposite. These are images of the banana peels and apple cores after the fruit has been consumed. In fact, these are images of everything Joncas has consumed over the past few years: food, cigarettes, drugs, medicine - and men.

Joncas says this intense scrutiny places him in a decidedly vulnerable position. "Everything is on view, from my addictions to my sexuality to my pastimes, what I consume and what I need to consume."

Detritus is informed in large part by Joncas' fascination with vanitas, a genre of 16th and 17th century still life painting consisting of objects that symbolize the fugitive nature of human life and pursuit of pleasure. While Detritus is faithful to the idea of vanitas, it is made for a 21st-century reality.

"The symbolism is more contemporary but the message remains the same: the passage of time, our experiences, our luxuries are all in vain," says Joncas.

A bright red food tray serves as a receptacle for used condoms and empty vials of the drug Special K, remnants of a circuit party weekend; a sunshine yellow tray becomes a coroner's table for a mutilated GI Joe doll, a victim of his dog's insatiable chewing.

The photographs are grotesque and gorgeous. Greasy black peels and egg shells, plastic food wrap and cigarette butts, half-eaten noodles and a NicoDerm box, a pile of dog hair - all are retrieved from the dustbin and elevated to the gallery wall.

"In many ways the whole body of work goes against all of the conventions of photography, the whole abject side of it. The hair, the dust balls, they are just so anti-photography, they are the enemy. You are always trying to avoid hair and dust and here I am making them larger than life."

Text taken from: Xtra

Beatrice Helg

Crépuscule IV (2004)

With simple materials – light, frosted glass, sheets of rusted metal, blocks of concrete and architectural drawings – Béatrice Helg constructs her images for the camera and creates the illusion of monumental spaces. Sculpture or ephemeral architecture, her photographs have a spiritual quality and make a case for calm, harmony and equilibrium.

Text taken from: Promethee

David Williams

Is: Ecstasies I-XXII (1988)

The points of light and recurring signs and symbols, with their vague reference to archetypes, are the notes of harmony and discord in a musical pattern that resolve unease into calm assurance.

Text taken from: David Williams