Elger Esser
Esser’s monochromatic photographs are delectable in their beauty yet utterly void of human interaction. In them, nature has taken on a minimal effect while maintaining its pure enormity. Unlike Gursky, Esser does not use digital manipulation to alter the view of the world but takes the landscape in for what it is.
Olivo Barbieri
On the other hand Bariberi’s pictures blur to look like miniature worlds they are in fact photos of our cities taken from a helicopter, with the use of a tilt-shift-lens.
Barbieri convinces us that the world we live in can also be seen on a tiny scale.
Monuments are made to look artificial giving our space an innate sense of unreality.
Andreas Gursky
Gursky, who studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher in Germany explores subjects that can range from contemporary industrial plants, to local tourism, to weekend leisure. The sheer size of these compositions is a reminder of how small we can be in a manmade landscape, how diminished we make ourselves in the realm of nature as well as by our own hand.
As in the prints of housing projects, or seas of corporate logos, or North Korea’s Mass Game.
Within the magnitude of our surroundings the anonymous individual is but one among many.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
The McCoy’s use scale models complete with tiny cameras which also serve as part of the cinematic aesthetic. On the walls are huge plasma screens, which capture the mechanically moving miniatures. These pieces at once clone and reinvent the viewer’s experience.
‘Traffic’ is a series based on Goddard’s film Weekend, an apocalyptic movie from the 60’s in which the camera pans across a country road compressed with cars in a paniced traffic jam.
the artists saw this film on a first date and thus reinvent their experience as well as the happenings of the cinema here with the use of miniatures and cameras.
Ron Meuck
Ron’s extraordinary lifelike sculptures are finely molded using silicone and fiberglass. So real looking are the sculptures with their pored wrinkled hairy skin and lifelike expressions one almost has the urge to speak with them. Not one of Mueck’s pieces are human in scale, but range from a few feet long, to 20 feet high. Aside from scale Mueck takes us to a more contemplative level. Each hyper-real figure stands alone and seems to hold within it a kind of anxiety, or a sense of isolation.
Robyn O'Neil
In these drawings solitary figures are tossed into an abyss, dealing directly with the idea of death and anxiety. They are drifting without intention, without destination on a flat monochromatic sea. Or perched alone atop a mountainous island. There is a sense of loss and desperation to her drawings, as well as an intimacy with the medium and an epic romance with the scale of their environments.
Ryan MacDonald
With the use of melted wax, constructed toy models, furniture, film and other disparate objects, I create pieces referring to both the immensity of the landscape as well as the vulnerability of the body. These pieces deal with a longing for, or loss of childhood innocence. At the same time, each represent either the precise moment before a historical disaster, such as the sinking of the Titanic, the crash of the Hindenburg, the Korean War, World War II…or a notion of individual sublimity,
such as solitary figures inherently connected to a vast and overwhelming landscape.
In forming rippling wax landscapes across common domestic furniture as well as giant platforms.Carefully constructed models painted to match the color of wax, are meticulously placed throughout these landscape.
By photographing details, I hang large prints of the pieces to create significant shifts in scale, destabilizing our familiar associations to the objects they symbolize, causing the viewer to enter the piece at a more intimate level.
Some pieces carry political connotations such as global warming, or the depletion of natural energy, or the state of our current economy, and the most recent war generated by such occurrences.
Within these structures is an ever-present underlining theme of solitude and independency existing within impossibly sublime surroundings.
Edward Burtynsky
Burtynsky’s photos capture vast areas of color lending to their presence a painterly quality. His work is often dealing with environmental issues correlating with our dependency on Industry. His works bring to mind the force we have on nature
As well as the emptiness generated by such great expanses.
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