┐ Davide Maione └

© Davide Maione, Reaching

© Davide Maione, Beaten (left) and Appeal (right), from Outlines and Annotations

© Davide Maione, What it takes to keep a young girl alive

“What It Takes to Keep a Young Girl Alive is a diptych of photographs that takes its title from a short story by Jayne Anne Phillips. Whilst being the departing point for creating a link between portraiture, narrative and performance, Phillips’ short story functions as fictional milieu for exploring notions of selfhood and subjectivity.

The diptych seizes on the very essence of Phillips’ story: the repetitive gestures of menial labour, the dead end job when there should be a future and the withdrawal from public space to avoid being looked at.

The juxtaposition of the title of the story with the spare photographs succinctly suggests a life of meagre means and a metaphorical expression of a banal and yet tragic predicament. The young girl in the photograph counts and marks the days in the manner of a prisoner. And yet as she does so, she also creates a picture out of the blank wall -perhaps an answer to what could be a question: ‘What does it take to keep a young girl alive?”

More of David’s work here

┐ Kevin Van Aelst └

I don’t usually post on photographers whose work is being highlighted by other photography bloggers, since people who visit this place are often the same. I like to offer something else, and for that I trust my own parallel research. There are times like this when I shred that “rule” to pieces given the impact the work has on me. Here’s Kevin’s work, found in Lenscratch

© Kevin Van Aelst, Tragedies, 2009

© Kevin Van Aelst, Cemetery, 2010

Artist Kevin Van Aelst is not one to cry over spilled milk. More likely, Van Aelst has “spilled” the milk himself and is diligently coaxing the white drops into a semblance of order. Van Aelst’s specialty is something he calls “conceptual photography.” His large color prints are treats for the eye; Van Aelst’s strong design sense is garnering him increasing commercial work. But what engages Van Aelst more than the act of photography is the play of ideas and their realization in visual form.
“Something very important to me is the idea of randomness, taking something that should be random and applying a very specific order to it,” says Van Aelst.
(…)
“If conceptual art didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have any interest in making art. I respond much more to ideas than purely visual things,” Van Aelst says. His overarching idea is the use of everyday objects and materials to illustrate and represent more profound concepts. Milk spills in a logarithmic spiral. Gummy worms represent human chromosomes and gummy bears make up the periodic table. Hair in the bottom of a sink is arranged in the graph of a human heartbeat. An Oreo cookie’s cream filling is cut away to reveal the yin yang symbol.
Hearkening back to his undergraduate studies in psychology, Van Aelst recalls that he took classes in cognition and perception – how people view stimuli differently. Much of his work operates on two levels of perception, the conceptual and the material. Referring to his photograph “Periodic Table of the Elements,” now part of the permanent collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Van Aelst has found there is the viewer “who sees gummy bears and has to read the title to see the periodic table and (the viewer) who sees the periodic table and has to get real close to see that they’re gummy bears.”

source: article by Hank Hoffman

More of his work here

┐ So Hing Keung └

© So Hing Keung, Reincarnation of Matter #4, 2010

© So Hing Keung, Reincarnation of Matter #4, 2010

So Hing Keung’s photographs are full of humor. He is trying to bridge the Taoist idea of reincarnation and recycle together with the act of ChouDu (超渡), which means aiding the idling or loitering spirits to detach their grudges and ultimately step into the tunnel of reincarnation by an act, or a ritual.

In Mr. So photographs, the non-decomposed garbages found in somewhere were “detached” with the “offerings”, suggesting the non-decomposed garbages also have grudges, if we didn’t dispose them befittingly. Injecting the Taoist idea into the environmental issue is quite clever.

text from Richie Tse’s visual diary

So’s complete “Reincarnation of Matter” here