Defining Power

A review of John Zeuli's "Women of Power"
By Allison Bennett

John Zeuli’s new photography exhibit “Women of Power” attempts to harness and explain the power behind the woman in each portrait. Though his work is technically proficient, there is nothing overly compelling to draw the viewer in.
Zeuli is somewhat a formulaic photographer. You can expect his photographs to be in black and white, and to be portraits of people that are supposed to inspire and tug at the heart strings of the viewer. It works the first time or two you see images from his exhibit. But after that, the wonder of his style of photography has worn off considerably.
The women featured in “Women of Power” could also be the women featured in “Keepers of the Spirit” or “Relay for Life.” There is no specific thing in their portraits telling of what makes them powerful, other than that they’re female and most are looking directly at the camera.
Zeuli props his subjects in front of a black background, but I do not see a story there. If you’re going to strip out the background to provide some context of who your subjects are, then your portraits better be really good. And for me, they’re just not quite there. The poses sometimes seem awkward, while the rest just seem safe and bland. He uses a similar lighting set-up for most of the portraits as well, making it seem more like he just switched out subjects rather than he’s trying to tell stories.
In his press release, he describes his “compelling” portraits of “diverse” women to feature “women of extremely varied life experience, accomplishments, careers and age.” True, by looking at the portraits I can see who is young and who is old, who is black and who is white, who is handicapped and who probably has a good job with a decent income. But that does nothing to tell me why they are powerful, why they should inspire me.
On his Web site (www.johnzeuliphotography.com), Zeuli includes quotes about power from the subjects. However, he doesn’t link them up to each portrait, so while I can learn what they collectively think about power, it still doesn’t define why each woman is powerful for me. He also strips each woman of her name, which is bothersome. He notes that he includes “women [who] society considers extremely powerful,” but I have a hard time recognizing any of them without their names displayed.
John Zeuli is good at what he does, and he does have a lot of admirers. And while I’m likely to flip through his images when he sends them to the newspaper, I’m not likely to study each portrait or visit his Web site to find out the backstory for the exhibit. I’m just not that interested.

John Zeuli’s black and white portraits in “Women of Power” are on view through the end of May at the Starfish Café, 719 E. Broad St.

We will have class

We will have class this Thursday April 20.


Bring new work or cool stuff.





-Steve

Review of Don Foresta's Lecture

A Review of Don Foresta’s lecture on the new renaissance of the interactive network by Tori Purcell

Don Foresta spoke on Friday, April 14, 2006 at the biennial Art History Symposium presented by Savannah College of Art and Design. The title for this year’s symposium was, “The New Renaissance- An Interactive Paradigm.” Foresta, a professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Arts in Paris and an associate academic at the London School of Economics, opened the symposium with a lecture on what he calls the evolutionary mechanism of a global interactive network. Art and science have blended together to create a space that both defines modern society and replaces the industrial machine that used to define society. Foresta says, “It is a visual space, a communication space, an organizational space, a philosophical space, a psychological space, and the space of our imagination where reality and our interaction with it are seen and defined.” The role of art in this schema is to test the extent of a tool’s communication potential. Let’s examine the contemporary art project, "Harvey Loves Harvey."

"Harvey Loves Harvey" refers to the collaboration art works created by artists in different physical locations. This project originated with Jason Dean of Brooklyn and Matthew Nash of Boston collaborating from a distance on creative projects via a virtual communication space. They refer to themselves as “concept artists, media lovers, and pseudo-scientists,” and the web acts as their collective studio. This constant exchange of ideas through an interactive network is precisely what Foresta was talking about as the evolutionary product defining current generations. Another example to consider, this communication space has become the norm for many musical groups. Members of a band may live in various locations and use a network to rehearse, co-write songs, plan tours, or construct set lists. The communication potentials are mind-blowing.
To sum up the key notes of Don Foresta’s talk last Friday, the interactive network has evolved into a “metaphor of our civilization… [and] the geometry of our imagination.”

The Still Cinema

by Jay Gould

The lights slowly raise and the group around me stretches their stiff limbs and make their way out of the theater. We have all just spent the last few minutes witnessing a story of play, curiosity, and nature. There are a few catches you must understand. One is that the group is not leaving. They are moving a few feet over to the next theater to enjoy another story. The next catch is that they are watching photographs, not films at Jeremias Paul’s recent photographic exhibition My Invented Country.

Sorry to have tricked you, but there is no denying the cinematic feel of these photographs. The rich colors of these wide format images floating in deep, black frames gives the viewer the impression of being immersed in a dark theatre watching the anamorphic projection of a character exploring a beautiful, alien world. This world presented is our own, but so obviously not. The photograph’s color and movement cast an ethereal quality that warps both time and space as the artist’s performance is creating a fictional culture that is spiritual, mythological, and sometimes oddly familiar. Performances such as being buried in the sand or reclining in a muddy pond are playful childhood acts taken to the extreme and given aesthetic consideration. It is this careful consideration to the environment around the artist along with Paul’s technical prowess that gives this work its value. Each character fits perfectly in his stunning environment and repeatedly gives the audience a single-frame story to imagine, decipher, and enjoy.

My Invented Country, photographs by Jeremias Paul will be presented in Savannah, Georgia at the Alexander Main Gallery, 668 Indian Street, April 14 – 28, 2006. To see the work visit www.momentism.com

Tim Prentice and his 64" Loose Circle...

The form moves as if to glide across the gallery floor. In Tim Prentice’s “64” Loose Circle,” an amoeba-like sculpture spins with the gusts from those walking by and the various fans pointed in its general direction. This sculpture most resembles a combination of an Alexander Calder mobile and a biomorphic shape one would see depicted in a Joan Miró painting. This loose circle, measuring a fluctuating 64” in diameter, is hung from the industrial ceiling in the gallery, held up in close proximity to the gallery floor by a hefty wire. The entire sculpture is a cross of scientific and industrial elements, as it is namely made of stainless steel and aluminum. The wire then leads to a series of stainless steel tubes which vary in size. The majority of the structure is anchored by a thick tube at the top, followed by a cascading of smaller tubes that play the part of a marionette controlling the range of movement of a puppet, which in this case is the biomorphic circle at the bottom of the sculpture. The circle itself is made of thin, rectangular aluminum panels. All 130 of these panels are strung vertically with intricate wiring. Each is then placed in close proximity to the next, barely overlapping each other, rotating with the movement of the tubes above to create a simultaneous, fluid movement. The sculpture itself is masterfully crafted, with every wire curved and bent to precision, and perfection from one aluminum panel to the next. These formal elements allowed me, as the viewer, to absorb the artwork with no distraction of minor flaws, as well as admire the pure quality of the entire piece. The structure is also a miniature of the intended outdoor sculpture, yet evokes a strong sense of movement and space within the confines of the gallery space provided. “64” Loose Circle” is masterfully created into a fusion of fluidity in space alongside industrial elements, and showcases past influences of engineer, navigator, artist, and child from the life of Tim Prentice himself.

A Country New to Me

A review by Al Fuller

Not to say that I’m extremely picky or anything, but I have to admit that when it comes to thesis shows, I am so utterly critical it’s ridiculous. I know that it’s partially because if a show looks bad, it makes all of us graduate students look bad, and if it’s good, it means the bar has been raised that much higher. As my show goes up directly after his, I went in to Jeremias Paul’s My Invented Country with an even higher standard then normal.

Not being a performance artist, and even having a hard time understanding it in the first place, at first I wasn’t quite sure what to make of these images. They illustrate a much more surreal experience than any I have had with nature myself, and make me wonder what I have been missing all this time. Maybe it is just the fact that I was born and raised here in the States, and nature has always been considered something you had to get around, go over or through to get somewhere else. After coming out of the show, I felt like I had just been on a nature hike somewhere far away that I have never seen before. I also found myself wishing I were able to see what happened before and after the shutter clicked. I could definitely see some video work accompanying this body of work, even if it was not so directly related to the pieces as I mentioned above, but instead showing yet another experience with nature in Jeremias’ surreal style. In many of the images, Jeremias was wearing shorts, which I found to be really distracting. I wish maybe he could have had a loincloth or something a little more primeval that wouldn’t make me think of the mass-produced world I’m more familiar with. I would prefer to stay in his invented nature. The lengths Jeremias goes to for an “experience” take me places I would never dare go, such as floating in a sludge puddle or hanging by his feet from a tree!

A great escape from my reality of being trapped indoors was provided by this exhibition. I look forward to seeing what kind of work he makes next, and want to commend him for producing such a well-done show.

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