Sonja Thomsen's Nexus

Sonja Thomsen "Oil Self Portrait" inkjet print © 2013

Milwaukee artist Sonja Thomsen visited Lawrence University Department of Art & Art History on April 9-10, 2013 to talk about her projects and critique student work in conjunction with her Nexus installation at the Wriston Art Center Galleries. Her last visit to LU was April 28, 2010, for a lecture on her water-related work and to meet with students. The Nexus series (an ongoing project since 2010) creates the "skin between memory, place and the present." Her Epson inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle paper are mounted and displayed on shelves hung at varying heights to "play with the perceptual shifting of scales" and are sometimes purposely disorienting to viewers. We first met Sonja in 2005 at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design just after she received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. We were visiting artists brought in to critique senior work. She had just started teaching photography courses part-time and was critiquing with us. Since then, her work has evolved to include installation and sculpture. Her images have become more abstract while functioning as critical views of the important issues of our time, ranging from family life to big oil. These investigations exist in an intellectual space that combines philosophy, science, and aesthetics. Her work is in the permanent collections of Milwaukee Art Museum, Ljosmyndasafn Reykjavikur, and the Midwest Photographers Project at MoCP. She has won numerous prestigious grants and fellowships including the Greater Milwaukee Mary Nohl Fellowship for Established Artists

Sonja Thomsen critiques Digital Processes student
Emma Moss's inkjet prints on April 10, 2013 in Steitz Hall

Basic Reality: Can You Say Simulacra?

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007): French postmodernist
sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist,
political commentator, and photographer.
He is the author of our text this term: Simluations.

From Rockabillies embracing the fashions and ethos of pre-Civil Rights America to the Olive Garden Italian Restaurant capturing the "welcoming atmosphere of a Tuscan farmhouse," contemporary American pop cultlure is built from cinematic fantasies and strip mall stucco to simulate another time and place as predicted by Jean Baudrillard in his 30-year-old book Simulations (1983).

Wisconsin Death Trip Hommage

"Family Outside House" circa 1910 by Charles J. Van Schaick
Wisconsin Historical Society Visual Archive

Wisconsin Darkness & Picturesque:

A Multimedia Response to

Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip

Saturday, March 9, 2013 @ 8:00 PM

Esch Hurvis Studio @ Warch Campus Center

Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin

This 1-hour program features videos by LU ART 240 Digital Processes students

accompanied by improvisational performances by LU faculty: Jesse Dochnahl '06 (sax),

John T. Gates (voice), Brian Pertl '86 (Tibetan horn & didgeridoo), John Shimon (guitar).

The artists are responding to the seminal book, Wisconsin Death Trip (1973) by

Michael Lesy (American, b. 1945). WDT juxtaposes archival photographs by

Charles Van Schaik (made 1890-1910 in Black River Falls, WI) with 19th-century stories

published in the Badger State Banner newspaper. Lesy wrote in his introduction:

“It is as much an exercise of history as it is an experiment of alchemy.”

PROGRAM 1 – EAST SCREEN

Yoga Exorcism by Rose “Brosie” Broll ’14

Manipulated/Insanity by Shea Love ’14

Reversal of Fortune by Amber Latimer ’15

Kid Play by Amalie Ludwig ‘15

Foxes are Common by Renee Kargleder ’13

A Stroll in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, by Xian Qu ’14

Insanity by Frank “Frankie” Lieberman ’14

Adam’s Death Rib: Eve’s Trip to Genesisby Alfredo Duque ’14

Shoemakers by Sarah Jane Rennick ’15

Shitfaced Voyeurism by Emma Moss ’14

BFF by Htee Moo ’15

PROGRAM 2 – WEST SCREEN

Shitfaced Voyeurism by Emma Moss ’14

Insanity by Frank “Frankie” Lieberman ’14

Yoga Exorcism by Rose “Brosie” Broll ’14

Shoemakers by Sarah Jane Rennick ’15

Adam’s Death Rib: Eve’s Trip to Genesis by Alfredo Duque ’14

BFF by Htee Moo ’15

Reversal of Fortune by Amber Latimer ’15

Foxes are Common by Renee Kargleder ’13

Kid Play by Amalie Ludwig ‘15

Manipulated/Insanity by Shea Love ’14

A Stroll in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, by Xian Qu ’14

Sponsored by the Lawrence University

Department of Art & Art History and the Conservatory of Music

 

 Alfredo Duque Vocalizes to His Video:
"Adam's Death Rib:
Eve's Trip to Genesis" © March 2013

 

 Renee Kargleder Dances to Her Video:
 "Foxes are Common" © March 2013

Evan Baden & the Digital Natives

Evan Baden with his photographs, circa 2011

Milwaukee Art Museum curator Lisa Hostetler showed us Evan Baden's Illuminati series on a visit to the MAM Print Room. He'd made the work while an undergraduate at the College for Visual Studies in St. Paul (to close in June 30, 2013). We emailed Evan to arrange a visit to his studio in Minneapolis/St. Paul in June of 2011 where he showed us his provocative Technically Intimate series that we'd seen excerpts of in various glossy magazines. The walls of his small studio were covered with blow ups of his best images and he pulled out a few work prints of experiments. The Lawrence University Photography Club, lead by the dynamic Will Melnick, invited Evan to speak on his work and visit with students March 5-6, 2013. In his lecture, Evan pointed to the painstaking detail to convey his understanding of his extensive Internet research of online phenomena. His photographs ultimately critique how online experience is shaping real world relationships. He covered his resourceful technical practices too. Most memorable was adding supplemental light with three iPods to most convincingly simulate the illumination provided by the handheld electronic devices shown in Illuminati. His latest series, Under the Influence, examines how teens perform themselves and their sexuality for the camera (see below image). His 4x5 format view camera and use of color negative film heightens the intensity of such coreographed performances embellished by props and supervised by parents. The prints are titled with captions taken directly from mainstream magazines. Museums and galleries in the US and Europe have included his work in exhibitions interrogating technology and its impact. Baden ships rolled-up prints or uploads files to servers for output on location. The venue mounts the print on aluminum, exhibits then destroys it. Some prints make their way into museum collections rather than face destruction or the expense of crating and return shipping. Evan is working on an MFA at Columbia College in Chicago and lives in Oak Park while he juggles the demands of an international speaking/exhibition schedule, making work, and teaching.

"It's All About Me. I Mean You. I Mean Me." © 2012 Evan Baden, panoramic inkjet print

We simply are not equipped with earlids

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), the most important and
controversial electronic composer of the 20th and 21st centuries

"Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships," writes Marshall McLuhan in The Medium is the Massage (1967). The "ear world" influence of German electronic composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, trickled down to the pop level via The Beatles and others bands of the 1960s creating many "simultaneous relationships". His electronic, spatial, and chance compositions (e.g. "variable form") influenced other 1960s pop musicians as well, including Frank Zappa and Pete Townsend. The Beatles included his face on the cover montage image of their album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Inspired by Stockhausen and the Fluxus sound experiments of Yoko Ono (now 80 years old and a huge Twitter and Instagram user), Beatle John Lennon wanted to make his own experimental sound piece. Lasting more than 8 minutes, Revolution 9, contained random everyday sounds and tape loops (some from the archives of EMI ) of cheering crowds, cooing babies, random conversation, orchestral music, and laughter. The Stockhausen-influence as heard in Hymnen (1967), made up of electronically manipulated national anthems, is obvious. After some controversy, Revolution 9 (1968) was included on THE BEATLES (a/k/a "The White Album"). The most accessible Stockhausen sound continuum may very well be the Beatles' A Day in the Life. The culminating track on their Sgt. Pepper's album, it includes sounds of an alarm clock, panting, and piano strings aggressively banged and left to decay. "The ringing of the piano went on and on and on...with an 18 kHz track for dogs to listen to," said producer George Martin in a video interview (below). Marshall McLuhan writes of the Beatles influence on "musical effects":

Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one's environment.
The Beatles do this. They are a group of people who suddenly
were able to put on their audience and the English language
with musical effects--putting on a vesture, a whole time, a Zeit. (p. 114)

George Martin talks about "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles

It Is What It Is: Image + Book

TV Room from Suburbia © Bill Owens, 1973, revised 1999

The generally affable Bill Owens (American 1938- ) had just returned from a stint in the Peace Corps. He observed the normalcy yet strangeness of the burgeoning American suburbs. While working for the Livermore Independent as a photojournalist, he became intrigued by suburban Livermore. He photographed on assignment and made pictures of people in their homes doing what they do for work and leisure. After he had enough material and was laid off, he collected quotes as text to make something substantial, a book titled Suburbia published in 1973. Though his photographs were collected and exhibited by prestigious museums from the MOMA to the Getty, it wasn't a living. He had a family to support. Always entrepreneurial and a believer in self-publishing, he wrote a book about making books (extremely rare) after his own experiences. He later quit pursuing the "art world" to put his energy into more economically viable projects like a brew pub (1983) and later distilling (2004). As Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan wrote in his 1967 book, The Medium is the Massage: "The poet, the artist, the sleuth--whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well adjusted," he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are." (p. 88). Owens did exactly that in his books and ongoing projects. Entering suburban space in earnest to photograph, he left us with a critique of a lifestyle that today may strike us as comic yet coaxes feelings of pity. McLuhan continued, "Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment--of what's really going on--affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal with theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions." (p. 92). Perusing the Suburbia work today becomes an act of discovery, a probe of a mental space and a place that once was. Decades later, suburbia has mutated throughout America into a boundless sprawl of fast food restaurants, faux artisinal boutique stores, big box stores, parking lots, seemingly infinite beige, gray, and white cookie cutter houses, and vacant McMansions. 

Tupperware Party from Suburbia © Bill Owens, 1973, revised 1999

Lynda Barry's Digits

Lynda Barry, author and cartoonist

Cartoonist and author Lynda Barry presented an evocative convocation at Lawrence University on Thursday, January 24, 2013 wearing smart velvet hat and long braids. She has been a keen observer of digital culture noting that parents spend more time looking at their smart phones than looking at their children's faces. Holding her arms up in the air and wiggling her fingers, she pointed out that fingers are the original digital media. Telling a naughty joke about snoring and balls that her farmer neighbors told her, she amused the audience but made the college president squirm. Barry let her freak flag fly and the audience loved it on a cold January day.