Any Surface You Like: Unseen Fair, 2016

Christiane Feser, Partition 48, 2016 ( Detail )

Christiane Feser, Partition 48, 2016. Represented by Anita Beckers. This is an angled detailed view of a work that is cut, layered and built well above the plain surface. One of many pieces deliberately shown for the first time as an Unseen Fair Premiere.

It’s a rare thing – for those of us in the business of extrapolating tendencies from the amorphous bulk of any creative activity – to see an unmistakable trend. I’m sure the fashion writer who says “Roman legionary sandals will be in this year” worries that no such sandal will be seen again. For once, at the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam, there was no mistake. It’s not quite a rule, because there are still plenty of exceptions, but it’s all-but a rule: You want to be taken seriously as an artist using photography? Any surface you like so long as it’s not flat. Continue reading

Making a Mark

Caroline Fellowes. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral 8. 2014

Caroline Fellowes.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral 8. 2014

Caroline Fellowes. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral 1. 2014

Caroline Fellowes.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral 1. 2014

These extraordinary pictures are by Caroline Fellowes, an artist who lives in France but is represented by a gallery in Derry, in Northern Ireland.   They are wonderful things, and I post them today because they happen to sit right in the middle of a number of conversations I seem to be having with increasingly frequency of late. Continue reading

Making It Up Is So Very Hard To Do

[Some thoughts on the show Making It Up: Photographic Fictions.] Continue reading

W.G.Sebald – Not so Great with Pictures

[” Pictures are pictures, not shorthand for words.“] Continue reading