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ABOUT THE
ARTISTS
Rita Ackermann
(b.1968) is an artist born in Hungary, trained in Budapest and Vienna,
and currently working in New York. Her work first became prominent in
the mid-1990s as the result of her seductive paintings of
semi-autobiographical nymphets and her close association with musical
groups such as Sonic Youth. Over the years her style has evolved to
include more metaphysical themes, still populated by svelte waifs,
fashionable nymphs, and other girlish sprites combined and recombined
in an almost serial fashion, albeit with a very contemporary take. In
1974,
Italian photographer Gusmano
Cesaretti embarked on a documentary photography project
exploring the streets of East LA. These rarely seen photographs of
Chicano life in the '70s, including images of graffiti filled stores,
walls and garages become, in their harsh black and white austerity,
almost like abstract paintings. These photos were eventually published
in a small run book, 'Street Writers' (1975) which included a
transcribed audio tour of East Los Angeles and became a pioneer book in
Chicano culture.
Daniel Higgs
(b.1965) is an artist/musician best known as the lead singer for the
Baltimore band Lungfish, but in recent years has begun recording and
performing as a solo artist with increasing frequency. His
rarely-exhibited, highly detailed, visual art is legendary in
underground circles for it's scarcity and has been identified by the
artist as "one's own experience of reality offered in reckless
worship."
Becca Mann
(b.1980) is a Los Angeles artist who combines abstraction with both
found and invented images to create spaces in which the dead may
reside. Consistent in her paintings, elements of light and atmosphere
emerge as narrative tools. Becca Mann is a recent graduate of The
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a BFA in
painting and critical writing. While living and working in Chicago she
organized a series of group shows in "alternative venues," including a
ballroom and a crumbling 19th century mansion.
Ryan McGinley's
(b.1977) photographs of his friends exuberantly indulging in irreverent
behavior are neither sullen nor saccharine. His early photographs were
influenced by subjects such as graffiti, queer culture, skateboarding,
and sloppy parties. Since then his work has taken on a more playful
approach, featuring young people in various states of undress and
abandon, usually interacting with themselves and nature. His
photographs have been exhibited internationally, including being the
youngest artist in history to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum in
2002.
The works of Japanese
photographer Daido Moriyama (b.1938) often show
everyday people and everyday things in a manner not to be found in the
average Tokyo tourist guidebook. Whether by using blur or cropping,
Moriyama's bleak and lonely, highly grained, black-and-white pictures
expose a seedy, yet hauntingly beautiful underbelly of 20th Century
Japan. His fifty-year photographic career as led him to be considered
one of Japan's great modern photographers.
Swedish artist Jockum
Nordström (b.1963) combines naive-folk collages and
drawings to become visual streams of consciousness. He makes drawings
of ships, tiny dioramas of cities, and men in uncomfortable suits, all
rendered in a deliberately crude folk-art style. His compositions are
spatially dimensionless, but the figures that populate his odd, rickety
landscapes are vividly robust.
Raymond
Pettibon (b.1957) is a cult figure among underground music
devotees for his early work associated with the Los Angeles punk rock
scene, designing logos, flyers and albums for bands such as Black Flag
and Circle Jerks. Since then, Pettibon has acquired an international
reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working
with drawing, text, and artist's books.
Gee Vaucher
(b.1945) is perhaps best known for the extensive body of work she
created during the late seventies and early eighties. As designer of
albums and propaganda for the renowned English punk band 'Crass', she
created some of the most disturbing and acclaimed images of the time.
Her work is generally accepted as having been seminal to the
iconography of the 'Punk Generation.' When 'Crass' disbanded in 1984,
Vaucher felt the need to explore other areas of work, abandoning the
tightness of her more 'overt' political statements in favor of a more
loosely expressed personal politic.
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