Liz Huston

I attended a wonderful exhibition, The Illusionists, at the George Billis Gallery in Los Angeles Saturday Night. Three artists were represented: photographer Liz Huston (featured today), photographer Carol Gomlemboski (featured later this week), and painter Jared Joslin (who happens to be the brother of photographer and Editor of SHOTS Magazine, Russell Joslin). All of the imagery had a sense of magic, and Liz's work, printed on aluminum and hand painted to enhance color and texture, had an other worldly quality that was thoroughly engaging.

Liz Huston, lives and works in Venice, California, and has worked as a commercial and fine art photographer for almost two decades. After producing traditional photography for most her career, she discovered digital assemblage three years ago and instantly fell in love with the process. Using scanned tintypes from her extensive personal collection and images amassed from thousands of her own stock photographs (lovingly referred to as "firewood"), Liz creates fantastical and nostalgic images that are personal reflections of her life and interests.

I create photomontages to reveal strange new worlds; worlds which weave the past through the present and into a new future. I am fascinated with aspects of time, reality, collective memory, love and loss, and it is these themes which quite often settle themselves into my work. The process of creating photomontages is long, glorious, and extremely rewarding. I have spent upwards of 40 hours creating a single image, crafting and perfecting every pixel to tedious detail.

Catch & Release, 2009


Betwixt and Between, 2009


Familiar Wound, New Instrument, 2009


From Death, The Seeds Of Life, 2009


The Collector, 2009


Many Hands Make Light Work, 2009


When I Found You I Thought There Was Nothing Left, 2009


Borrowed Memories, Stolen Lives, 2009


Blind Love's Embrace, 2009

Byron Wolfe and Mark Klett

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe have been collaborating on a series, Charting the Canyon, since 2007. The photographers have been re-photographing a variety of iconic views of the Grand Canyon and using digital technology to present old images in new contexts. The old images, which include paintings and drawings as well as photographs, are superimposed on new photographs—and vice versa—with provocative results.

Klett is a Regents Professor at Arizona State University, and Wolfe, a former student of Klett’s, is now a Lantis’ University Professor at California State University at Chico. Byron's images of his family, Everyday: A Year Long Diary, won the Santa Fe Prize for Photography in 2004. He continues to rediscover the photographic landscape with projects like Lava Beds and the Modoc War and Lassen Volcanic National Park. Mark Klett has produced a number of series about the American West since the 1970's, including his series (and book) of Saguaro typologies.

"We call them mash-ups of different times, experiences and ways of looking at the place," Wolfe says. "It looks like we had the intention of revealing something about the medium, but that's not the driving question behind what we're doing. It's more about being curious, having fun, and posing questions." he explains.

"This is about making pictures that respond to our own personal experience, making pictures that respond to how a place has been represented in the past, wondering what's changed, what connections can be made, and out of that comes how people represented a place over time."

Mark and Byron found two images made by 19th century photographer William Bell (see below) while on a geological expedition. The sepia-toned images show two adjacent buttes. Klett and Wolfe located the scene and Bell's precise vantage point, then re-photographed a panoramic view in color. That contemporary image shows an RV cruising down a road that doesn't exist in Bell's images, which are superimposed on the panorama like windows looking into the past. The juxtaposition underscores a jarring sign of progress.



The Grand Canyon project started about two years ago when they were looking for new venues beyond Yosemite, where they had done a lot of previous work, and new ways to re-invent the methodology of re-photography. Rather than simply present before-and-after images, they started re-contextualizing the old and new images by combining them.

"By the time we got to the Grand Canyon, we were tired of a methodical [before and after] approach. We were wondering what we could do to push it. We were rethinking everything. It became more playful," Klett says.

Trick or Treat

This year, I decided to take charge of my Halloween and photograph everyone that came to the door (that would allow me). It wasn't easy handing out candy and then running outside to photograph kids in a totally funky set-up, who only wanted to run to the next house and get more candy. I allowed myself only one shot (using film), and with a handheld Rolleiflex, I discovered that I honestly had no memory of any of these trick or treaters until I scanned in the images...as they were in my presence for less than 5 minutes.

Margriet Smulders

Margriet Smulders was born in the Netherlands, where she continues to reside, surrounded by flowers and influenced by Dutch masters. In 1999, Margriet experienced an exhibition of sumptuous Dutch floral still-lives from the Golden Age, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, that set her photographic course in motion. At that time I began to 'paint' floral still-life compositions with the help of a mirror, so that the total looked richer, more generous and more highly scented, with purple irises, ragged orange tulips and crumpled lips of full-blown petals that appear to be moving in the rippled waters. The effect is like looking into a clear pond, where rivulets of pure water descend from glacial protrusions.

Endless garlands of flowers curled around the borders of my note pads when I was a school girl. And thousands of roses were cut out from my mother’s gardening books. At the Academy of Arts, flowers as large as life were painted on my canvasses. There were always flowers. They flourished in the self-portraits of the eighties and grew bigger in the flower wallpapers made in the nineties. You can see a whole world in my flowers. Lush and strangely erotic tableaux entice you into another dimension. Huge mirrors, elaborate glass vases, rich draperies, fruit and cut blooms are used to make these 'paintings'.

As Baudelaire says “Get drunk: on wine, poetry or virtue”. Imagine lingering and languishing in these fresh, sultry and lucid landscapes. I love this sensual state. To lose myself, to deliver myself as in a love affair. Reality doesn't matter. When making photos I get lost in the scenes as if the flowers were caressing me in the gulfs of the sea.

Brittany Lynne Jones and Mitchell Scott Rouse

I met Brittany Jones a couple of years ago, when she was working with photographer, Melanie Pullen, on Melanie's series, Violent Times. I ran into her on a studio tour this spring and had the great pleasure of being exposed to the wonderful Noir work she was producing with Mitchell Rouse. These images are large and engaging, especially the images that leave much to the imagination. Selected images from the Noir Series work are on exhibition at the 400 South Main Gallery in Los Angeles and will be open for the Downtown Art Walk on November 12th.

Brittany and Mitchell met at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where she studied graphic arts and photography, and Mitch earned a degree in film production. Both pursued their independent visions until they decided to establish the M&B Studio in 2009.

Inspired by films of the early and mid-20th century, Brittany and Mitch work in collaboration to produce their fine art photography series, NOIR. These still images are created with a cinematic approach by directing subjects through a scripted scene that includes both action and dialogue. Each photograph leaves its narrative open to interpretation.

Midnight Train, Brittany & Mitch 2009


Signal, Brittany & Mitch 2009


The Trouble with Katharine, Brittany & Mitch 2009


Dead End, Brittany & Mitch 2009


Echo, Brittany & Mitch 2009


Framed, Brittany & Mitch 2009


One-Way Ticket, Brittany & Mitch 2009


The Windmill Affair, Brittany & Mitch 2009

Vanishing Point II, Brittany & Mitch 2009


Mylinda, Brittany & Mitch 2009


Secret Rendezvous, Brittany & Mitch 2009


A Sunday Afternoon, Brittany & Mitch 2009

Jan Koster

Dutch photographer, Jan Koster, lives and works in Amsterdam. After studying at the University of Amsterdam, and Photographic Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, Jan began photographing the Dutch river landscape in the early 1990's. This early work not only explored the river landscape, but the idea of photo collage.

His newer series, follows the Dutch coast, and is titled, Dutchscapes. He has recently published a book of this work under the same title. Personal and autobiographical elements play a major role in his work. He began to look at the Netherlands in yet another way, through the eyes of his wife, a Cuban emigrant.

His newest work, Havana, takes an unsentimental look at a city and a culture that is in it's last incarnation.

Jan Koster’s landscapes are constructions of reality; they are composed of various views on reality, which are made up of geographical, autobiographical, and metaphorical elements. Therefore the question whether anyone would see Koster’s landscapes the way he has registered them with his camera is in this context irrelevant. What counts is that his personal view, which is the combination of the earlier mentioned elements, conveys the landscapes in such a way that it does not matter whether they are what they seem to be or not. It is Koster’s photographic perception that makes them exist – more than that even, that gives them the right to exist.


Images from Dutchscapes

Images from Havana

Jane Tam

Photographer, Jane Tam, 譚 珍 玲, grew up in Brooklyn after her parents immigrated to New York City in the mid 1970s from Guangdong, China. Many of Jane's projects reflect the intersection of Chinese and American cultures and how it defines the next generation of working class immigrants. She received for BFA in photography (with honors) from Syracuse University , and has returned to Brooklyn to become an active member of Nymphoto, a women's photography collective in NYC. Jane's project (featured below) Foreigner's in Paradise, will be featured at the Nemo Design Gallery in Portland (along with photographs by Shen Wei) opening November 6th. Her work will also be featured in the exhibit, Whatever Was Splendid, at the Fotofest Biennial 2010. Jane helps us understand the experience of having a foot in two cultures, and her intelligent and personal observations help raise our consciousness to an ever integrated world.

My grandmother told me she had plans to go with my grandfather to pick ginkgo nuts at Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn during a gloomy and rainy day and I was more than welcome to join her. The nuts have all fallen to the ground due to the rain and wind so we better pick them before somebody else does. With a cart rolling behind us, I climbed the hill with them behind me, capturing my grandfather helping her walk up the wet and grassy knoll. The glistening yellow ginkgo nuts were like gold, against the wet and black ground and overwhelmed the space my grandmother inhabited.

The overwhelming mix of identities my Chinese American home possess began in this series with a portrait of one of the many tin-foiled stovetops my family installs. Never realizing how odd it might look to the non-Chinese population, the enlargement of such a portrait did register alien to my American identity when I was no longer living in my childhood home. Exploring the relationships my grandparents have with their American landscape and traditional Chinese mentality, the portraits and spaces dictate a décor of their own.

The inherited decoration from Guangdong, China to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn is encapsulated in the homes and in the people. With the mix of visual language in these liminal spaces, the iconography of the Chinese is marked by its specificity to the culture. The enclosures create a diversion to light in the household, making the home a place that seems to be “stuck” between two worlds.

The weavings of different Eastern and Western idioms hold the generational conflict for my Chinese American identity. The series has been a therapeutic study of my family through the American landscape, how it can be seen as a paradise but difficult to call a home. It is the understanding of the knots that tie into the hybrid culture of being Chinese American. The generations of children, like myself, born in America are caught in a complex mix of old and new ideas. Foreigners in Paradise continues on to seek the intricate identities woven into a Chinese American home.

Images from foreigners in paradise
Grand Aunt


Aunt's Kitchen Counter


Dining Room Table


Dim Sum on Newspaper


Grandmother


Grandfather


Chloe


Sara


Aunt's Tin-foiled Kitchen


Grandmother's Swollen Foot and Sweet Potatoes Leaves


Grandfather Taking a Break in Our Back Porch