#christopher schreck

[theleoisallinthemind]

Christopher Schreck

[publiccollectors]

Congratulations to Christopher Schreck on the successful completion of his Public Collectors Joong Boo Residency! [Christopher preferred not to have a portrait photo with this post.]

Christopher is from Chicago but moved to New York about six years ago. He describes himself as a writer, editor, and publisher who has also done work in music and photography. Though we have never met in person before, it turns out that I did see Christopher play about ten years ago when he was a member of the band Icy Demons and that group opened for The Ex at the Logan Square Auditorium.

Usually I buy lunch for residents but today we decided to have dinner, which is also a perfectly valid option. We arrived at a busy Joong Boo Snack Corner that gradually opened up a bit so that Christopher could enjoy the U-Dong, and I could eat the Spicy Squid without having to squeeze my arms in tight, possibly elbowing the woman next to me who also ordered the Spicy Squid. Christopher had a lot of questions for me about my practice, its history, and how I perceive the mix of things I do. Though he has been writing for more art-focused publications, as well as crafting press releases for galleries, Christopher's approach has a definite flexibility and he seems similarly unworried about the range of things he does.

In addition to reflecting on and asking about each others’ various ways of working, we realized that we have many friends in common including a couple of the upcoming Joong Boo Residents (who will not be announced until they complete their residencies!). Christopher was kind enough to bring me one his publications and we made a booklet exchange. He gave me "Press Release Poems". It is a chapbook published last year that reconfigures fragments from art exhibition press releases to create thoughtfully structured works that I'm enjoying, I suspect, a lot more than I'd probably like the source material they derive from.

After eating in the Snack Corner, we stopped at the dumpling stand in the parking lot and I sprang for a Kimchi dumpling for Christopher to take for later. He also wisely grabbed one of the pork dumplings. Two of those dumplings is basically a second dinner, so hopefully he will pace himself.

You can see more of Christopher's work on his website. The next openings for Joong Boo Residencies are not until May, and because I'm a pushover and love all of the applicants, there are actually three more residencies scheduled for March. One of them, however, might be a trial for a residency at a different location. Could it be that the Joong Boo Residency Program might shift to a new spot and become the 'Something Else' Residency Program? Stay tuned.

[archivecollective]

Expanding on Kitsch

All images courtesy of the artist and Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia. © Sara Cwynar

(From the Aperture Blog, April 3rd, 2014 HERE )

Christopher Schreck speaks with Sara Cwynar about her recent exhibition Flat Death at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia.

Blending elements of photography, sculpture, collage, and design, Sara Cwynar’s work explores the processes by which images and objects acquire, change, and lose their meaning over time. In her most recent series, “Flat Death,” the New York—based artist reimagines vernacular images as dense arrangements of found objects. By employing various analog and digital methods of intervention, she produces striking, highly textured imagery that confirms the expressive potential of seemingly archaic materials through the subtle subversion of photographic tropes. In addition to her recent second monograph, Kitsch Encyclopedia, Cwynar will follow her current exhibition at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia with her first solo showing in New York. Flat Death will open at Foxy Production on Friday, April 4th.

Christopher Schreck: Until recently, you were a staff graphic designer at the New York Times Magazine, where you produced the same brand of imagery you’re dealing with in your work. How would you say that experience has informed your practice?

Sara Cwynar: Working at the Times was a really formative experience for me. Producing content for commercial and editorial purposes gave me a much better understanding of the way images work, how they’re affected by context and time. Commercial imagery is really about reflecting a particular moment—some images might stand the test of time, but many become dated almost immediately after they’re made. But I also feel like that’s become complicated by the fact that there seems to be a lot of nostalgia in design and photography right now. There’s a lot of combing through image archives for inspiration, talking about how cool and kitschy and funny these old images are to us now. What’s interesting is that people often don’t seem to think about how the images they’re currently making will inevitably share the same fate. It’s something I try to build into my work now. I like the idea of my pictures embracing that process, of retaining this sense of bad taste, while still being contemporary.

CS: It’s interesting, because while it’s a given that commercial images are both driven and ultimately superseded by these cycles of fashion, it seems to me that artworks often function the same way.

SC: Exactly! I’m very interested in the idea that the highly produced art images we see in galleries are subject to the same degradation in value and taste as anything else—that they can become just another item we use and leave behind. It’s something I actively try to build into my images, where they look at first like simple recastings of throwaway imagery, but then, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves as being something else entirely, almost like a trompe l’œil painting.

All the images we make are subject to some sort of change in value and reading as soon as we put them out into the world. It’s really clear when you look at how images circulate online: they enter the stream and end up in unpredictable places. For example, when you see my pictures at reduced sizes on a screen, you really can’t tell what’s going on. They just look like the original, mundane images, so people might not realize they’re really looking at an intricately composed artwork. If you look at how my work has progressed, my images have been getting denser and denser, and that’s in part because I wanted to make them harder to read in passing, online. My earlier “Color Study” pieces flipped around the internet too easily. There was no reason to think you weren’t getting the full experience of the work by viewing it on the computer—which is fine, since not everyone is in New York and can see the works in person. It’s a different way of experiencing the work. It’s hard to get much information out of a 600-pixel-wide jpeg. So in moving forward, I’ve wanted to make sure that what you’re seeing online is not the whole story.

CS: You seem to be asserting a more pronounced materiality in this body of work: rather than using straight shots or scans as in previous series, many of these latest images were composed like mosaics, with separate sheets connected with colored tape. In other instances, you’ve layered post-it notes or stickers directly onto the print’s surface before re-photographing it. What led you to experiment with these new techniques?

SC: One of the major themes in my work is this idea of construction, which speaks not only to the way I physically combine objects and rebuild images, but also to how photography uses framing to create narratives, and how we as viewers draw meaning from those narratives. I see these new techniques as a literal way of reinforcing these ideas.

With some of these new pieces, I scan the original found image and use InDesign to make a much larger, segmented version of the file. Once that was printed out and arranged on the studio floor, I then re-build the images with various objects and shoot the piece from above. Working this way, I was able to get much deeper into the details and the tones of the original printed matter.

Incorporating these different techniques further confuses what’s already a complicated viewing experience, where each image initially reads as a kind of collage, but upon closer inspection is revealed to be a photograph of a still-life arrangement, a single image rather than multiple parts. The tiling approach allowed me to introduce another imaging technology into the process: these pictures now go from found pieces of printed matter to digital files, to low-quality laser prints, and back to high-quality analog film negatives before they are finally printed.

CS: As you’re composing these still-life arrangements, are you selecting items thematically? Do you expect your audience to find—or to invent—associations between those particular objects or images?

SC: What ties them together isn’t necessarily their specific content, but rather that they show how content and function can change or be lost over time. I think a lot about how these images were once the height of style, or that these objects once served a particular function. They will inevitably lose their relevance and get left behind, but they never physically go away. They’re still around, clogging up household junk drawers and remaining in our collective psyches, and that’s what I’m looking to as my source material.

I’m working with this huge, democratic archive that’s waiting there to be drawn from, making still-lifes from the debris I’ve collected, and re-presenting it all in a contemporary art context. Having said that, it’s also possible that certain aspects of the content might work its way into my pictures. I am drawn to the modernist idealism you find in mid-century printed matter: this sense of optimism that seems foreign, even naïve to us today. If you look through old issues of Life or National Geographic, it’s palpable, and it really captures something about the culture at that time. The same goes for book covers. I like to think that in reconstructing those images, my work might somehow retain that tone, because the truth is that I love this material. The items may be considered “tasteless,” but they genuinely appeal to my own taste, and I like the idea that by resurrecting them as subjects for art, I’m putting them back in “good taste,” so that others might find value in them again.

CS: Your first New York solo show opens at Foxy Production later this week. What can audiences expect from this new set of images?

SC: I really wanted the work in this show to span the tropes of the photographic canon, so I worked with a much broader range of imagery: there are commercial still-lifes, floral arrangements, nature photographs, tourist landmarks, encyclopedia images, printing tests, images from how-to manuals, and, for the first time, portraits. I think it’s a much more comprehensive overview of the medium. I’ve also been experimenting with new ways of approximating the tones of the original printed matter. In the “Display Stand” pictures, for instance, I isolate individual sections of the original image and construct still-lifes of those details using other objects. I then shoot those arrangements, shrink the photos down to 4×6 quick prints, and place them on top of the original image before making the final photograph, combining up to thirty different still-lifes to produce a single work.

Christopher Schreck is a New York based writer and poet.

[rematerializationchamber]

Visit Original Link

I'm quite excited to be contributing to a new project that Christopher Schreck is putting together. Launch date is in March, details under wraps til then. :-)

[definedpleasures]

look at this, walk with christopher schreck

[darwinmagazine-blog]

DARWIN MAGAZINES INTERVIEW WITH PHOTOGRAPHER, WRITER AND IMAGE MAKER CHRISTOPHER SCHRECK

DM :Firstly, when was the first time you started using a camera to the effect you have with series like No Shore? 

          CS : The approach for shooting No Shore really couldn’t have been more straightforward: All of the images in that series were taken with a Samsung SL201 that I bought from a street vendor in rural Argentina. The SL201 is an extremely basic, consumer-level digital point-and-shoot camera. But it was great because its limitations really forced me to be inventive in achieving a desired effect. 

            The fact that it was cheap and small enough to fit in my front pocket was nice too, because I felt comfortable having it with me everywhere I went - which was important as I happened to be doing a fair amount of traveling during the period in which I shot these images. I had to retire that camera recently, but it definitely served its purpose - It had a lot to do with both the process and the aesthetic behind “No Shore.”

  There’s a strong relationship between nature and the man made within this series of images.  Can you explain in more depth your feelings and attitude towards these two themes?

             I grew up in Chicago and now live in New York. In both cities ones    experience of nature almost always feels in some way mediated by man-made elements – nothing ever really feels untouched. For obvious reasons, that can get you down. At the same time it can make for some interesting scenes. Man’s attempts to accommodate, facilitate, and even replicate natural environments can be so off-point and overwhelming that they become sort of surreal.

One of the interesting things about No Shore is that the earliest photos in the series were taken whilst living in South America. Specifically, there are a few shots I took of waterfalls along the Argentina/Brazil border while I was living in the surrounding forested area. This being the first and really only time I’ve ever been in that kind of unadulterated, vibrant natural environment. On both a visual and personal level, it was a stunning genuinely awesome experience for me. I suppose part of what you see in “No Shore” is me, having moved back home to these cities trying to maintain the same level of engagement to find the same visual potential in my everyday surroundings. Walking through the city became an exercise in paying real attention to what was around me. Not taking anything for granted visually speaking. Reinforcing in my own mind how weird and exciting and genuinely beautiful even the grimiest urban environments can be if one’s open to thinking that way.

  Many photographers have a long list of people who inspire them, make them want to take photographs and create new and exciting pieces of work. Who are yours if any?

 I tend to get my ideas from sources outside of photography: artwork I see, books I read and things I come across during my day. I will say that when I first started taking pictures in 2009, Sam Falls, Peter Sutherland, and Jason Nocito were big inspirations - and they each remain among my favorite photographers today. 

What are your views on the relevance and importance of photographs; people are bombarded with visual imagery so much how do you navigate through the jungle that is photography? For example websites such as Tumblr, Facebook and Flickr give us so many references to the world around us, do we need to keep taking photographs as much as we do?

         Well, to begin with. The relevance or importance of photography has become more popular, more relevant, and more culturally dominant than it’s ever been.

It can be overwhelming to think about it in the abstract – so many people producing, publishing, and disseminating so many images - But I’m not sure how overwhelming it really is in practice. Personally, I feel like my experience of this world is far richer for having access to so many different perspectives of it. 

 If anything, I suppose you could argue that photography is losing its preciousness. As much of what has traditionally defined the medium is brought into question – The physicality of the photographic print; the need for a certain level of technical sophistication; the static nature of the captured image; the relative expense of the equipment, and so on we’re forced to reexamine our notions of what photography is, and what makes it (and the photographer) special. The people who respond to these developments with talk of “anxiety” or “crisis” often frame the discussion in terms of photography’s limitations, or in terms of what it’s ostensibly “losing” but I don’t find that line of thinking to be particularly useful, interesting, or even accurate.

Photography’s development has always been dictated to a great extent by its relationship with consumer technology, which is in a constant state of innovation. As the world changes so must photography. So while this does seem like (and, I think, actually is) a crucial and revolutionary moment in photography’s history, it’s still just a continuation of an ongoing process. The important part to remember is that as the medium changes, so does the way we think about, talk about, and create within photography, which is something I find exciting rather than threatening. These developments come as opportunities for us to refine and expand our sense of what photography can be. For me the most interesting photographers right now are the ones who are riding these waves and treating each change as a point of departure.

Within the project 'No Shore' how did you go about creating the Images? There seems to be a strong balance in each pairing, do you find things in your day to day and then think of ways of coupling the image with another visually similar scene? 

             I feel like photography is so much about the editing process – images function according to context. So for me it’s usually a matter of accumulating photos first and then afterwards selecting and sequencing them in way that reflects (and hopefully translates) a particular idea. 

No Shore came about like that - none of those photos were shot with diptychs in mind. It was only later, as the concept began to take shape that I started pairing them up and saw that certain motifs were echoed in so many of the images.

I do think the visual mirroring you see throughout the series is interesting in its self. But my intentions for the series definitely went beyond achieving formal similarities. I guess I was really thinking about perception and entertaining the notion of truly seeing things, rather than merely recognizing or “understanding” them. On a grand scale that might reflect an interest in concepts like nondualism and interconnectivity, but on a more basic level it’s about how one chooses to perceive and engage with what surrounds him. A while back, my friend Stanley showed me a quote from a writer named Don Paterson and it definitely resonated with me as I was putting No Shore together.

 I’m paraphrasing, but Paterson basically says this:

“When we allow words to fall away from the things of the world, they repossess something of their mystery, their infinite possibility, and we in turn awaken a little to the realm of symmetries. When the things that we have contemplated in this wordless silence reenter the world of asymmetrical concept and discrete definition, they return as strangers: they declare wholly unexpected allegiances and reveal wholly unsuspected valencies. They are, in other words, redreamt, reimagined, remade.”

 Click HERE for more images, projects and words from Schreck 

[paper-journal]

In Conversation: Christopher Schreck and Jimmy Limit, where their discussion of Jimmy's most recent body of work opened into a broader conversation about stock photography, art documentation, and how images circulate online - PAPER JOURNAL

[paper-journal]

In Conversation: Jimmy Limit and Christopher Schreck, up on Paper Journal today