Category: Contemporary Projects

no water, Athens, Greece, 2015: Twenty-four hours with nothing to eat or drink, only smelling the jasmine

By Penelope Vlassopoulou

Penelope Vlassopoulou began her Metamorphosis series in her home city of Athens. The series evolved in multidisciplinary dialogue with diverse urban environments including Berlin, Belgrade, and Chicago. In March 2015, Metamorphosis returned to its point of origin with no water tracing a link between Greece’s historical past and the country’s current predicament.

Oral Sadism & The Vegetarian Personality (Approximately)

By Karl Haendel

Artist Karl Haendel has been creating an archive of 35mm slides since 2000, composed of found images and photographs. The approximately 10,000 slides are organized into more than 250 categories and subcategories (from the W section: Wedding Geometry, Weapons, White House, World War I), and some of these slides become the basis for his drawings. Though this archive exists in analogue form, Haendel recognized that the popular GIF format functions in a similar manner to that of the slide projector, and thus created a digital slideshow experience of these source images for Art Journal Open. To view Oral Sadism & The Vegetarian Personality (Approximately), click on the image inside this post to launch the project.

Imprinting Agnes Martin

By Karen L. Schiff

In the early 1990s I saw a conference presentation about Agnes Martin’s grid paintings, and their rigor and sensitivity was imprinted on me: I felt motivated to return to making art. When Martin (1912–2004) passed away, I started making artworks to reflect on her work and life, often through printed texts.

Outtakes: California Company Town

By Lee Anne Schmitt

I finished the film California Company Town in 2008. The film was a way of looking at the fallibility of history, to be able to depict a process of political thought against the markings it makes on landscape. Most of my work combines official and anecdotal histories.

The Hour Blew

By Amy Granat

The digital form still feels new to me, and slightly intangible when I use it. Nevertheless, I use it constantly—though its workings remain unclear. That confusion can be liberating. It creates layers and dimensions I don’t understand and cannot visualize. If I try, I see free-floating motion with no hard edges.

Excerpts from the Graphic Novel !Women Art Revolution—A Secret History

By Lynn Hershman Leeson

I was a graduate student in Berkeley, California, during the tumultuous 1960s era of the Free Speech Movement. I felt an urgency to capture that moment, so, with a borrowed camera, I shot some of the people who were coming through my living room. Even though they included well-known people such as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, and Phil Ochs, I concentrated on the stories of the yet-unknown women who were struggling to become artists.

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By Paul Chan

On the occasion of the upcoming release of the multimedia e-book version of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A field Guide (co-published by Badlands Unlimited and Creative Time Books), Paul Chan writes about some of the secrets hidden in plain sight within the maps and notes that make up the documentation of this multi-faceted work.