Joseph Casciano

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Bobby Doherty

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Mitch Epstein, New York Arbor

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Mitch Epstein, American Power

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Hieronymus Bosch, St. John the Evangelist on Patmos, circa 1500, oil on oak panel, 63 cm × 43.3 cm (25 in × 17.0 in), Staatliche Museen.

The second image is a grisaille on the reverse of the painting.

[josephcasciano]

Viviane Sassen, Pikin Slee

Read the full, incisive, anti-colonialist critique from the always-great @greatleapsideways:

We are thus invited to consider the extent to which these images, in their repetitive subjugation of nubile black bodies, might expand our sense of ourselves or of the photographer’s perspective – that is, we are invited to consider ‘Africa’ as an expression of the West. On this logic, Africa’s representational function is purely to mirror the pressing nature of largely western preoccupations. And so the bodies in these images exist purely to serve.

[...]

It is precisely in the lack of any reflexive critical capacity that Sassen’s portraits are most problematic, because they indulge a derogatory trope in an unquestioning manner, suggesting themselves to be a cultural celebration which devolves into theatrical fetish. They are a sort of arresting, colourful reprieve from the homogeneity of the industrialised landscape, or from the characteristic western disjuncture of body from mind. They purport to ennoble an inscrutable and endlessly malleable body by heightening its lushness and its fertility, but in so doing the portraits reconfirm an essentialist worldview in which blackness is commensurate with inanimacy and animality.

[josephcasciano]

Elena Anosova, Saagan Sag [White time]

«A rare sense of elevation and inspiration is experienced at the Baikal, as if at the sight of eternity and perfection you were touched by the secret fingerprint of these magic notions, and the close breath of the almighty presence poured over you, and a bit of magic secret of all became your second nature» 

–Valentine Rasputin

«I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn’t talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there?» –Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

[josephcasciano]

Liz Orton, A Handful of Soil for the Whole Horizon

My ongoing series of work, A Handful of Soil for the Whole Horizon, uses an idea of gestural excess to propose an expanded natural history in which the body becomes irretrievably entangled with the specimen. The body is drawn into action, through touch or observation. Through small acts of force of anxiety I to produce disturbances that sabotage all notions of a still, isolated nature.

I appropriate a language of display from diverse sources, using the influences of found photos, text and diagrams to produce a new ecology of images.

[josephcasciano]

Adam Golfer, A House Without a Roof

A House Without a Roof considers the fractures of the overlapping histories of violence and displacement connecting Europe, Israel, and Palestine. With photographs, archival imagery, and original texts, Golfer weaves together fictions of his family history with representations from Israel’s founding and ongoing military occupation. Ethnic and national identities are ruptured and reassembled as the project interrogates contradictory histories and notions of selfhood. The book explores strands which connect the Jewish Diaspora out of Europe and forced mass migrations from Palestine following WWII.

Golfer situates this inquiry by way of the triangular relationship between his grandfather–a survivor of Dachau, his father–who lived on a kibbutz in the early 1970s, and himself. A House Without a Roof questions the way that an individual perceives interconnected conflicts that are simultaneously personal and global in scale. Histories and time fold into one another as the mythologies and memories of Golfer’s family become entangled with the ongoing narratives of violence and trauma in Israel and Palestine.

A House Without a Roof was shortlisted for the 2016 Mack First Book Award >

[josephcasciano]

Aikaterini Gegisian, A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas

2015 - 65 collages on paper & 100 copies limited edition artist's book - Dimensions Variable (Produced for The National Pavilion of the Republic of Armenia - 56th Venice Biennale, 2015)

A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas is based on photographic albums of Soviet Armenia, Turkey and Greece dating from the 1960s to the early 1980s, collected over a period of 4 years. The albums sometimes acting as documentation of changing landscapes and other times as tourist catalogues function as nation building mechanisms: they narrate through photography an image of each nation. A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas assembles these heterogeneous images produced in diverse geographical, ideological and historical contexts into a series of collages and an artist's book that together construct a new landscape unearthing an invisible topography. The project offers a metaphysical and gendered reading of the nation building forces shaping the original material, a reading that both mimics narratives of cosmic inception (the birth of the nation) and echoes feminine and masculine metaphors (mother Armenia, the father of the nation). Divided into seven chapters that follow the logic of the Seven Seas (an idea used over centuries to describe a diverse set of geographical settings), the guide translates the narrative of genesis not as an evolutionary progression but as a circular and synchronous connection between bodies of water. These seven seas (of echoes, reflections, passions, departures, actions, waves and images) also reflect on a particular moment in the history of photography, when printed images became a marker of modernity, aiding the development of a visual culture that turned the world into an image to be consumed. A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas is not the enactment of a type of visual archaeology were a series of comparisons unveils the connections between different sets of commodity images, but challenges the documentary value of images of the past through the layering of inappropriate symbolic references. Following an essayistic logic were various thinking processes coexist, images of different sizes and textures are placed on top of each other creating frames within frames, sometimes building on repetitions and reflections and other times following formal patterns or the movement of people in the image. Similar to the interlinking of the seven seas that forms the new invisible landscape, the images are collaged as if interweaving bodies, inscribed by symbolic forces and multiple codes. Forcing past temporalities and geographies to collapse into a single space the collages bring together images that recognize each other. Communicating and cooperating, images find their perfect match, as if 'everything is in play and in place'.

[josephcasciano]

Daniel Castro Garcia, Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015-2016

Help fund the Kickstarter in support of this book.

[josephcasciano]

Benoît Jeannet, A geological index of the landscape

[josephcasciano]

Elena Anosova, Section

Project about women in prison is part of a trilogy about women's penal institutions. I take interest in processes of isolation and supervision, relationship and restrictions in women's societies. For several months I was in several prison colonies for women in the Siberia. In Russia almost exultant romanticization of the prison with all rogue romanticism coexists hand in hand with fastidious antagonism of everyday life and living habits of inmates. Working on the project I realized that prison community is a model of our socium. With the development of technologies and Internet various monitoring systems became part of our everyday life. Total surveillance of all the aspects of social, economis, private life became possible. Everybody can become an object of surveillance with further public accessibility to the private and intimate. Nobody is protected. This situation lies at the root of paranoid psychosis that penetrates a considerable part of our society. In the enclosed space of prison a woman is always in the position of being watched, deprived of physical and even supposed possibility to be alone. Years long state of complete nudity and loss of intimate space cripples personality put in the society as merciless as the cruelty of crimes she committed. In the project I don't concentrate on the details of the convicted women's everyday life. It is more important for me to show their gaze trying to isolate themselves, faces and gestures changed by constant watch by the public authorities and cellmates. Details of the private and the intimate, brought out forcedly to the public view and judgement.

“A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation [...] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribed in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” ― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

[josephcasciano]

Mathieu Asselin, Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation

Monsanto®'s dozens of Superfund sites (large contaminated sites of hight priority for the US Environmental Protection Agency) across the United States alone are affecting hundreds of communities and their environment with terrifying health and ecological consequences. Monsanto® maintains strong ties with the US- government, and especially with the FDA (United States Food and Drugs Administration). It is a bed-fellow with many other economical and political power houses around the world. The company engages in campaigns of misinformation, the persecution of institutions and individuals, including scientists, farmers and activists that dare to disclose their crimes. Monsanto® is spreading new technologies and products, while scientists, ecological institutions and human rights organization are putting out alerts for issues like public health, food safety and ecological sustainability – issues on which our future on this planet depends. This is all particularly troublesome since Monsanto® is entering a new chapter of disregard for our planet through the creation and commercialization of GMOs.

Visiting its past and presents, this project aims to picture what Monsanto®'s near future will look like.

[magictransistor]

The Great Moon Hoax of 1835.

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William Henry Fox Talbot

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William Henry Fox Talbot

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William Henry Fox Talbot, from the Museum of Photographic Arts