Critics Choice: Salvador Alanis escribe sobre el trabajo fotográfico de Alejandro Cartagena.

Lo que no se ve en la fotografía de Alejandro Cartagena
por Salvador Alanis

Una preocupación común en la expresión contemporánea es reflejar con un lenguaje directo lo que no se puede ver de forma inmediata. Ante la evidencia y obscenidad de los medios, al artista se le presenta la alternativa de jugar con los mismos valores de una articulación formal que pretende mostrarlo todo para referirse a lo que subyace en la imagen. Dentro de lo aparentemente cotidiano, el artista presenta un subtexto que trasciende la formalidad. Alejandro Cartagena (República Dominicana, 1977), juega con los valores formales de la fotografía documental para subvertir el discurso y señalar la discontinuidad en lo que vemos retratado. Para Cartagena, el llamado fotodocumento es una herramienta valiosa para la expresión personal, o como lo dijera el crítico de fotografía mexicano José Antonio Rodríguez, significa el trabajo de “la circunstancia externa como pulsión individual” (28).

En principio, Cartagena, quien reside en México, participa de la tradición fotográfica mexicana que toma el paisaje como objetivo principal para estructurar su discurso. Dicha tradición se ha actualizado a lo largo de las diferentes generaciones, integrando las preocupaciones correspondientes a la época. En el caso del trabajo de Cartagena, el punto de partida evidente es el reflejo de las diversas transformaciones del paisaje, las marcas que dejan los diferentes estadios de las ciudades, las cicatrices del crecimiento y actividad humanas. Por eso, en primera instancia la lectura del trabajo de Cartagena es sin lugar a dudas relacionado con la responsabilidad ambiental, el desgaste del entorno, la multiplicación casi absurda de la mancha urbana sobre terrenos naturales mancillados.

Cartagena muestra en sus series fotográficas sobre la Suburbia Mexicana diferentes manifestaciones del desarrollo de las grandes metrópolis, basándose en el crecimiento de Monterrey, la tercera ciudad más grande de México. Cartagena toma la inserción de la ciudad a partir de viviendas en serie en la periferia inhabitada; dibuja el paso de las vías rápidas sobre espacios parafuncionales; da fe de la desaparición de los ríos al abastecer de agua las ciudades. La serie que Cartagena expone en Circuit Gallery, Lost Rivers, sigue la premisa documental que denuncia el daño ecológico que la ciudad infringe a las redes fluviales; muestra de arroyos y ríos secos de una forma visualmente muy afortunada. Sin embargo, más allá de esta preocupación evidente acerca del fenómeno, el documento pone de manifiesto instancias adicionales que pueden escaparse si solamente nos atenemos a lo eminentemente anecdótico del trabajo. Las fotografías de Alejandro Cartagena se centran en el registro de la discontinuidad, a partir de poner en evidencia espacios perdidos o mecanismos de sobreposición. Lo que importa en el trabajo a la vez paisajístico y documental de Cartagena es lo que no está, el elemento faltante. La falta se da como un encuentro formal, pero también como expresiones de la violencia. La discontinuidad genera un subtexto hacia lo antifuncional, aquello de lo que solamente queda el rasgo y que al mismo tiempo nos hace ver lo que realmente está en el paisaje. El crecimiento de la ciudad pone en evidencia lo faltante, el espacio inhabitable, lo perdido.

En otra serie del artista, llamada Urban Holes, Cartagena registra lotes sin construcción, los cuales de una forma o de otra escapan al continuo de las calles. En Symbolic Layering, el artista muestra capas y huecos en pasos a desnivel. Es lo que que no está lo que importa; lo que vemos es simulación, artificialidad, forma delirante que olvida espacios significativamente más importantes. La eficacia visual del trabajo de Cartagena logra poner en el mismo plano lo que no está en la fotografía de una manera que si bien, desde una perspectiva documental podría apuntar a una cierta nostalgia, en un nivel más profundo no es la nostalgia lo que opera, sino la presencia manifiesta de lo que no se ve, con todo su poder y misterio.

Rodríguez, José Antonio. “Los procesos de la fotografía contemporánea mexicana”, Huesca Imagen. Huesca: Huesca Imagen, 2004. 12-29.

Salvador Alanis (Mexico, 1964), is a writer. He has developed his work in the literary arena, as well as in the electronic media. He has been awarded by the National Fund for the Arts in Mexico and has been an artist in residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Salvador Alanis won the Multimedia Prize at the Video and Electronic Arts Biennial of Mexico, Vidarte, in 1999. He collaborates with major newspapers and magazines in Mexico, Spain and Canada. His published works include: “Del Paralaje” (Ediciones del Equilibrista, 1997), “Reojo” (Libros del Dragón, 1998), “Tránsito” (Libros del Dragón, 1999), “Fronteras, Borders” (La mano izquierda press, 2005), “De cuerpo presente”(Artes de Mexico, 2007), and “Fragilidad de las Fronteras” (K Editores, 2009). His visual work has been shown in several art spaces in solo and group exhibitions. He lives in Toronto.

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See more work by Alejandro Cartagena available through Circuit Gallery:

CRITICS CHOICE: Allen Topolski writes about Circuit Gallery artist Heather Layton’s body of work entitled “Preparing to Lose” as part of our ongoing blog series.

Preparing to Continue
by Allen Topolski

Second place is so tragic. Third and all the rest hardly matter.

The Winter Olympic medal count just ran across the bottom of the TV screen – as if that is all we needed to sum it up. Who decided that the list’s order should be based on the over-all number of metals (US), as opposed to the most gold (Canada)? Aren’t we just altering the data so as to win?

Can’t we just say that ‘trying’ is all that matters and that losing only makes us stronger? Perhaps we’re not trying hard enough though; and who is to say if we are? And wouldn’t that be just a different strategy for winning?

Okay – ‘process.’ We can rest in the comfort of the ongoing. I like process. But process still does imply work toward an end. I’m afraid I have adopted process only because it continually poses the potential to become about trying or winning.

If only we could truly embrace continual transformation as a resolve… (It’s a paradox – I know – but we live plenty of them anyway.) Transition pushed to constancy bears out continuation. If we could desire that as a means of existence, we’d be happy to prepare to lose. Just as happy to practice to win or arrange our own downfall. Because the ‘endings’ would only exist in this scenario as points along a continuum, I guess what I’m talking about is just ‘being’ – but importantly, active ‘being’ and being a part for its own sake.

What Heather Layton is usually ‘talking about’ in her art – and what is so expertly presented in her ‘Preparing to Lose’ series, is ‘active being’ – the constancy or persistence employed by the collective and the splendor of contribution. Forget losing individuality to the collective, it doesn’t happen in the spaces of Heather’s art. If one truly commits to the role of the active participant, one’s desire for individuality – and the pride that comes with it – dissolves with the urge to conquer. Individuality is still there though – determined by fair distribution of different roles and separate objects – the weight of the buckets (Hospice) or the pattern of the bundles (Beautiful Burden).

Layton’s Circuit Gallery drawings look tragic to me – familiar and funny illustrations of futility – but that is only because I remain mired in finality. The parachute softens the landing and upon the landing it immediately becomes the – um, – burden? Nope. It immediately becomes the tool to manage a burden. Objects here are the same as people – they are what they can do or choose to do. By our common standards it may not be the best tool (that would be too similar to winning) and it may not be the best process (that would emphasize trying) but it is what it is and it is pointed not to a result divided and ranked but a shared experience, a story very worthy of telling.

Allen C. Topolski is a practicing artist, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester (Rochester, New York). He teaches a variety of interdisciplinary courses. Topolski was raised in the coal region of central Pennsylvania. He was formally trained in painting and later realized the importance of artifacts from his post-industrial childhood town – they prompted the investigations of nostalgia and domesticity that dominate his work today. Topolski received his BA from Bucknell University and his MFA in 1990 from Penn State University. Topolski has a national exhibition record and is currently involved in a number of public art initiatives in the city of Rochester.

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See more work by Heather Layton:

March 2010

Circuit Gallery is very pleased to present work by Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena from his award winning Lost Rivers series.

Coming from a deeply felt love and concern for the landscape, Cartagena’s Lost Rivers series presents exquisite images of dried-up streams and river beds, visually rich in detail, colour, and light. While aesthetically alluring, these photographs simultaneously offer a poignant social commentary on the ecological and environmental effects of untempered urban expansion.

Lost Rivers is one part of a larger project entitled Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect, which seeks to tell a complex story of contemporary Mexican urban development and expansion: from urban gentrification and inner-city ‘ghettoization,’ to the seemingly unplanned and unhampered suburban sprawl emanating from many of its fast growing cities.

In Lost Rivers, Cartagena turns his attention specifically to the unintended environmental consequences of such rapid and unplanned growth, in this case in the region surrounding the northern city of Monterrey. (Monterrey, the third largest city in Mexico, has witnessed explosive growth over the past two decades with a current estimated population of 5.1 million in the metropolitan region). In order to meet increased demand for water from the fast expanding suburbs of Monterrey, many of the region’s rivers were re-routed and dammed, and as a consequence many of the rivers and streams have dried out, or are in the process of drying up.

The images in this series subtly document the direct effects of “wrongly implemented economical strategies” on the local ecosystem, all the while exposing a beauty that, despite this, inheres in the landscape. As the river beds become scars, and trash and graffiti punctuate quasi-picturesque scenes, Cartagena gives us a poignant yet ambivalent testament to the absolute interdependence of humans and our environment.

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See more photographic work from this series by Alejandro Cartagena available through Circuit Gallery:

Circuit Gallery artist Susana Reisman is featured in EMERGENCE, a new publication by Gallery 44 that celebrates contemporary Canadian photography. It is an attractive volume with solid essays by Matthew Brower, Liz Park, Gabrielle Moser, Marie Fraser and Katy McCormick.

Reisman was selected by Suzy Lake.

I chose Susana Reisman because of her interest in how we see, counter to assumptions of photographic information. There is a sense of extended duration in her works Camera Lucida and On the Scale of History that allows us to accrue detail towards a subjective experience of her photographs. These works are sequenced to a “panorama” for space or movement, rather than a topical narrative.

The subject matter in both of these series us a staging or sculptural construction of seminal texts on photography. To photographers, our past moves linearly present. Thought becomes material. And this emphasis on materiality brings poetry to “about photography.” Form and content marry.
— SUZY LAKE

Congratulations Susana!

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See more photographic work by Susana Reisman available through Circuit Gallery:

NEWS RELEASE

The More Is More Collection, Gallery TPW And Circuit Gallery Partner To Offer Affordable Art

Toronto, ON – December 17, 2009 — Circuit Gallery and Gallery TPW are pleased to announce the launch of The More Is More Collection, an innovative fundraising enterprise for the artist-run centre.

Toronto’s Gallery TPW is an artist-run center that has played a significant role for over thirty years in supporting both contemporary Canadian and International artists, working in still and moving images, and developing audiences through its gallery exhibitions, online programming, public events, and promotional activities. Circuit Gallery is an innovative web-based gallery whose mission is to make high-quality contemporary art more accessible by making it more affordable.

The two galleries have joined forces to offer a series of very affordable limited editions drawn from the work of past exhibiting artists, members of the Board, and friends of Gallery TPW.

Artwork currently available includes special editions by Nadia Belerique, the FASTWÜRMS, Micah Lexier, Kelly Lycan, and Annie MacDonell. New additions to this collection by Dean Baldwin, Cecilia Berkovic, Diane Borsato, and Lindsay Page will be added in the near future.

All of the photographs in this collection are exclusively available for purchase online through the Circuit Gallery website – www.circuitgallery.com/tpw – and are available as 16″ x 20″ prints at a very wallet-friendly $120.

“We are really excited to be partnering with Gallery TPW and supporting their programming mission,” says Susana Reisman, Circuit Gallery co-director. “We have an solid infrastructure that can both help in raising funds for Gallery TPW and in making available, indeed accessible, some great artwork.”

According to Gary Hall, Gallery TPW Executive Director, “Circuit Gallery has created a hassle-free system for expanding our affordable art program with year-round on-line sales in aid of our fundraising goals.”

An exhibition and reception to mark the launch of this new collaboration is planned for early 2010 at Gallery TPW.

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About Gallery TPW

Gallery TPW is located at 56 Ossington Avenue. For more information, visit them online at www.gallerytpw.ca.

About Circuit Gallery

Circuit Gallery is the shared vision and collaborative product of Susana Reisman and Claire Sykes. The gallery specializes in high-end editions of works by emerging and established contemporary artists with an emphasis on photographic, digital and print-based works on paper. For more information, visit www.circuitgallery.com or follow the daily conversation at www.twitter.com/circuitgallery.

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For more information, contact:

Claire Sykes, Partner, Circuit Gallery

Tel: 647-477-2487

There’s an art to cyberspace

Circuit Gallery exists only online, specializing in affordable works from a stable of artists

By Peter Goddard
Visual Arts Reporter

The article was originally filed on November 19, 2009.

Derek Flack has written a good article about Circuit Gallery for BlogTO. We are grateful for the attention and excited that people are “getting” the concept – which is all about making interesting, quality, contemporary art more accessible by making it more affordable!

I am re-posting his article below, which was originally filed on November 21, 2009 under Arts.

Circuit Gallery is a web-based project co-founded by Claire Sykes and Susana Reisman. Modelled after Jen Bekman’s highly successful 20×200 concept, it takes advantage of the internet’s wide reach and the affordability of digital reproduction to offer editions of contemporary art at wonderfully low prices.

Here’s how it works: the art sold through the gallery comes in standard sizes – like 8×10, 11×14, and 16×20 – and in limited but large editions (usually around 500). These two factors are then taken into consideration in determining the price of each piece. The smaller the size and the larger the edition, the less expensive the work is – and, of course, vice versa.

Circuit Gallery's recent exhibition at the Department. Photo credit: Derek Flack

I’ve been waiting for something like this for a while. Despite the fact that there are numerous online galleries that have popped up over the last couple of years, very few offer art of this high a quality at this low a price. As an art lover who’s yet to hit the pay dirt, I used to bemoan the fact that purchasing “real” art just wasn’t an option for me. Although there’s loads of art that can be viewed online, the majority of it is either crappy and amateuristic or, if the work of an established artist, exorbitantly priced.

And yet it’s about time that high quality virtual galleries take root. The recent arrival of Amazon’s Kindle to Canada is a timely reminder of the digital paradigm shift that’s taken place over the last half decade or so. With the rise of new technologies and the electronic dissemination of information, the materiality of our music and books has become less and less significant.

Artwork: Susana Reisman. Photo Credit: Derek Flack

For reasons that are not altogether surprising, the fine art industry, on the other hand, has been slow to react to these changes. Traditionally speaking, the artistic object acquires its value based on two related qualities: originality and rarity, or what the German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin refers to as the aura of the work.

For Benjamin, the rise of mechanical reproduction (which could be traced as far back as the printing press, but really took hold with the invention of photography) had the double effect of solidifying and threatening the aura. In cases where an original and its reproduction are different (like a painting and a print of the painting), the reproductions tend to increase the prestige and authenticity of the original. But with art forms like photography (and virtually all digital media), where no material difference exists between each edition or print, the aura of the work is either eliminated or forcibly constructed through the limitation of the edition.

Artwork: Bill Finger. Photo Credit: Derek Flack

The plurality and equality of the works produced in an edition thus has political as well as artistic importance. The aura of artwork has always been associated with a certain cultural and financial elitism, both of which are disrupted by the availability and affordability of reproductions. Being academically trained (both have graduate degrees), Sykes and Reisman know their Benjamin. So they also know that a work’s aura must be delicately managed.

As affordable as one might want to make artwork, the limitless reproduction of a work ensures that it will retain very little value and, as such, desirability. So the key is to find the right limit for each edition. And I think Circuit’s hit the nail on the head in this department. Editions of 500 may be higher than the successful 20×200 model, but this also ensures that popular work doesn’t sell out too quickly. There’s also what they call a “variable option,” in which artists can offer their work in custom sizes with lower edition numbers and commensurate pricing.

Artwork: David Grenier (left), Aki Miyoshi (right). Photo Credit: Derek Flack.

But what, one might wonder, makes Circuit a “gallery?” Isn’t it just an online art shop/store? Well, lest we forget, private galleries are also commercial enterprises. The reason we don’t often think of them primarily in this manner is that they also tend to foster appreciation of artwork even for those who have no intention or means to purchase pieces. So, Circuit’s taken steps to do this as well.

Not only do they keep up an active blog on the website featuring critical considerations of artists on their roster, they also plan on periodically coming out of the virtual world to occupy gallery spaces around the city on a temporary basis. In fact, the launch and opening reception for the gallery took place at the Department, giving those interested in the project a chance to have an in-person look at the work available via the website (and me a chance to take some photos for this post!).

Circuit has also joined forces with Alphabet City, an annual anthology that addresses issues of global concern organized around a single word (this year it’s “water”), to offer print editions of works that appear in the small-sized collection. Currently on offer via this collaboration are pieces by Eamon MacMahon, Stefan Petranek, Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley.

Although it remains to be seen if the concept of the virtual gallery will really take off in Toronto (and Canada), experiments south of the border and the quality work on offer at Circuit certainly suggests it’s a viable business and artistic model. With prices that start at $30 (for an 8×10), there’s little reason for art enthusiasts to resist starting or increasing their collections.

See the article as it originally appeared on November 21, 2009 in BlogTO.

I am re-posting a nice short post on Circuit Gallery photographer BILL FINGER and his latest show “Gravity Wins” at Punch Gallery (Seattle) by Regina Hackett from her Arts Journal Blog Another Bouncing Ball.

Bill Finger spent 16 years working as a movie-set cameraman before packing it in to become an artist. He can run, but he cannot hide. In every way, the career that he ditched informs the one he moved into.

He builds models that he photographs as full-scale environments. After Thomas Demand, Oliver Boberg, James Casebere and Ross Sawyers,
it’s a popular strategy, but Finger’s are unlike anyone else’s. They were born worn out and anonymous, as if endless actors had been interrogated inside his police station…

stared out his window …

or glanced at the extra sleeping on a mattress that had been distressed by the special effects department.

Although he tends to avoid the particular, when he engages it, he goes all the way to iconic.

The stage sets Finger filmed and later recreated to photograph and dispose of resonate with moments of his childhood. They are memories potent enough to register outside his head and generalized enough to connect with similar memories of others. The only fox holes he dug, for instance, were in his childhood, playing war while Vietnam was ablaze on the nightly news. He was both bored and transfixed by what looked like his future. The ladder he made is missing a few rungs, giving its user a reason to continue to hide in his hole.

At Punch Gallery through Nov. 28 [2009].

See the post in its original context on Another Bouncing Ball (posted November 11, 2009).

See more of Bill’s photographic work on his gallery artist page.

NEWS RELEASE

Art From The Anthologies, Alphabet City And Circuit Gallery
To Offer Limited Editions

Toronto, ON – October 27, 2009 — Toronto’s internationally acclaimed Alphabet City has found an ideal partner in Circuit Gallery. The two entities have joined forces to offer a series of very affordable limited edition artworks drawn from two decades of Alphabet City’s compelling, and always relevant, publications.

The collaboration, “Art from the Anthologies,” begins with works from Alphabet City’s newest anthology, Water (co-published with The MIT Press), with plans to offer material from previous editions in the near future. The works are exclusively available for purchase online through the Circuit Gallery website – www.circuitgallery.com/overview_ac/.

“Artists have always been central contributors to their thematic volumes,” says Claire Sykes, Circuit Gallery co-director. “We are very excited to be collaborating – both in raising funds for Alphabet City and in making available some very strong artwork.”

Artwork currently available includes special editions by Eamon Mac Mahon, Stefan Petranek, Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley.

To mark the launch of this new collaboration a special event entitled Water, Life and Baths has been organized for Sunday, November 1, starting at 5:00 p.m. at The Department, 1389 Dundas Street West, Toronto, and is part of the larger ALPHABET CITY FESTIVAL 2009: WATER (October 31 – November 6, 2009). (Visit the Alphabet City website for more details).

The evening, moderated by Ian Brown, will convene three literary contributors to Water (all of them recent mothers) – Jowita Bydlowska, Astrida Neimanus, and Christie Pearson – who will read from their essays and reflect together on the life of watery beings. Artworks from the latest anthology, Water, will be on display for the event.

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About Alphabet City

Alphabet City is a series of annual hardcover anthologies originating from Toronto, Canada. Each volume in the series addresses a one-word topic of global concern and draws on the diverse perspectives of writers and artists from many cultures and disciplines. Each book is a graphically rich and textually surprising combination of images and texts that critically and imaginatively reinvents the topic at hand.

About Circuit Gallery

Circuit Gallery specializes in high-end editions of works by emerging and established contemporary artists with an emphasis on photographic, digital and print-based works on paper. The gallery aims to make interesting, significant, quality, contemporary art more accessible by making it more affordable.

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For more information, contact:

Claire Sykes, Partner, Circuit Gallery

Tel: 647-477-2487

E-mail: claire@circuitgallery.com

We want to alert our readers to the launch of Alphabet City’s excellent new publication WATER (now available though MIT Press), and this year’s WATER FESTIVAL (see line-up below) which starts October 31 and continues through November 6, 2009.

Water—chemical matrix of life, transportation conduit, industrial feedstock, agricultural necessity—is coming under new pressures. This year Alphabet City considers the current state of this most vital substance, from the mythic to the infrastructural.”

The WATER festival includes HYDROCity–a panel, exhibition, and symposium series about the future of our cities’ relationship to water.

The festival also launches Water, Alphabet City’s 14th anthology, a hardcover, full-colour artbook co-published with The MIT Press.

Festival Events Quicklist
Click below to visit the Alphabet City website for dates, times and details.

• On Designing Water (book-making talk)
• Kevin Yates (exhibition opening)
• Psychodrama: 13 Variations (installation and festival opening party)
• Beyond the Water’s Edge (river walk and workshop)
• Water, Life and Baths (exhibition, readings and panel discussion)
• HYDROCity panel: Water, Cities, Disaster (panel discussion)
• The Building of “WaterpleinenWatersquare”: Jeroen Bodewit (lunchtime talk)
• The Ladies of the Lakes (opera performance and dinner)
• HYDROCity Exhibition (exhibition opening)
• The Wet Cabaret (performances and festival closing party)
• HYDROCity: A Symposium on Hydrology and Urbanism (symposium)

NYC Events Quicklist

• Water Colloquium and Launch (public colloquium and book launch)
• Infrastructure Slam (24-hour design charette)
• Student Exhibition (exhibition)

Visit the MIT Store
Learn more about Circuit Gallery’s collaboration with AbC: Art from the Anthologies

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About Alphabet City
Alphabet City is a series of annual hardcover anthologies originating from Toronto, Canada. Each volume in the series addresses a one-word topic of global concern and draws on the diverse perspectives of writers and artists from many cultures and disciplines. Each book is a graphically rich and textually surprising combination of images and texts that critically and imaginatively reinvents the topic at hand.