October 24, 2011

Kim Riley - Photography
by burningman | 08:58 AM

 

 

 


Once and future home of Kim Riley Photography. By default, there can't be any adult images here, because there are no images; I'm guessing that Ms.Riley just moved her site to a new host. However, if this sampling of thumbnails of her work from BM2001 is representative, we should see some interesting photos on this site in the near future.

 

 

 

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October 24, 2011

Bookmark / Burning Man: Deidre DeFranceaux and Jann Nunn
by burningman | 08:40 AM

 

 


About the cradle installation at BM2001 ... you have two choices, but I'm not sure that the first one is going to work, any more. A fraction of a cent per Meg, and people are still deleting articles online, as if we were stuck back in the 20th century, and needed to conserve every available kilobyte. Amazing.


. Original Location | Internet Archive

 

 

 

 

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October 24, 2011

Image in preceding post
by burningman | 08:16 AM











A thumbnail of this photo can be seen in the eighth paragraph of this post, with credit given here and in the alt tags on the thumbnail. The full sized image, seen here, is a night time picture of saucer taken near Plastic Chapel, Burning Man 2001, and is credited to Kim Riley Photography, very tentatively reviewed above.

 

 

 

 

 

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October 24, 2011

Charles H. Trapolin and the Maze
by burningman | 07:39 AM

 


Re: this site

Some things I liked, some I didn't, but I suppose you expected that ...

 


This one, I'm reviewing with the usual mixed feelings I have as I approach Burning Man sites. The title you saw on this review at its old location was the one applied to every page on Mr.Trapolin's site (Charles H. Trapolin, Fine Art and Design), which might have caused some confusion because there were (and still are) more pages on the man's site to be reviewed, but the system on my previous host forced us to give the review of a page the same title as the one the site owner, so this could not be helped.








Window into Maze Coutyard, Burning Man 2001. Thumbnail of image by Charles Trapolin. The page I'm reviewing right now is the one Mr.Trapolin devoted to the mazes he designed for Burning Man 2000 and 2001, with pieces created by other artists appearing within. I missed Burning Man 2000, not surprisingly; being partially disabled and living below the poverty line, I find Burning Man a difficult event to get to, but I did manage to get to Burning Man 2001, so I'll talk about that year's maze.












Trapolin makes an understandable, if fundamental error in shooting his piece during the day; by day, one can't help but notice that like most of Black Rock City, the maze was constructed very cheaply, of plywood, as it would have to be. Keep in mind the fact that the whole city gets torched at the end of every event; if "Black Rock City" (the temporary community built at Burning Man) wasn't built cheaply, the expense of this yearly recreational arson binge would be enough to send Microsoft into receivership.










Thumbnail of another image by the artist The question one is left with is "how does one deal with that reality"; the answer at Burning Man 2001 seemed to be "play with light and shade, and the limits of human perception"; "Black Rock City" was an imaginatively crafted illusion, made possible by the fact of its remote location, far away from the lights of any real town.












When one gets out into the middle of the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada, the nearest community (Gerlach) has maybe 150 people, if one counts outlying areas, and it is some tens of miles away, on the other side of a mountain range. About two hours away, one finds the largest city in Northern Nevada - Reno, which at 210,000 people, just barely qualifies as a city, failing to raise that familiar bubble of light on the horizon that in places like Northern Illinois, serve as an eternal reminder that the beloved metroplex is never so far away as one might imagine, even after one drives a few hours seeking an elusive night.

 




A smallish city and a town that probably should be called a village, and really little more - one finds little but the emptiness of a desert so barren as to inspire incredulity in some at the notion that people could live here at all; the evening, left to its own devices, would at times become almost impenetrably dark. Away from the encampment, one sees the Jackson range faintly traced out against a velvety black night sky in the soft blackish blue tones that remain of the moonlight, after it has worked its way through the dust which, even at night, does not have a chance to completely settle out of the air; more silhouette than landscape, the mountains reveal little more their profile, coyly granting only the vaguest hints of their more prominent features to those who would lovingly gaze upon them. The brilliant stars of one's imagination are not to be seen, as far away from most of the world as one is; their light barely ever had a chance to reach the ground. Even the light of the moon, so bright in the starlessly overlit red midnight skies over Chicago, is dimmed.





The pitch black night, like the Playa, becomes an empty canvas. During the day, when sudden dust storms haven't turned the air opaque, the sun reveals all in blinding detail and the artist must accept this. As the sun sets, however, those creating Black Rock City find that since like almost everything else, light is present only to the extent that somebody had the foresight to bring it, that this allows them to do what would be impossible in more brightly lit locations: to sculpt the light, choosing what the viewer will see and how he will see it. What by day is clearly a shabby looking sheet of plywood, by night, with the right lighting, become the wall of a convincingly solid if fittingly mysterious looking temple. Nighttime is when the visuals of Black Rock City came alive, the sunstroked day being more a time to scurry out of the merciless light in search of shade, company, quieter creative activities, and if such gods as one believed in pleased, maybe a little air conditioning or at least a mister; daytime temperatures easily topped 100.





Cultures carry over, even when a fashionable postmodernism encourages participants to pretend that they could leave such things behind, and "work during the day and play at night" is a well-ingrained pattern of behavior in much of the Western World; most of the participation seemed to take place during the day, the tired participants relaxing to enjoy the spectacle at night, as a light show played itself out against the darkened open playa. [under construction]

 

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October 24, 2011

Kate Raudenbush Experiments
by burningman | 07:19 AM








I like this site, but wish that I could see the artist's work offline for a few reasons ...









Re: The Kate Raudenbush Experiments Site Pleasant viewing - or maybe not. Yet another opportunity to see contemporary art come of age - beautiful photography of elegant nonrepresentational sculpture made by Ms.Raudenbush, much of it seen at Burning Man, along with images of a few other places she's been.

Image links to Internet Archive entry for the artist's site.As we view these images, we run into one of the regrettable truths about posting images to the Internet - nothing is really ever really browser safe. What looked crisp and detailed and more than a little breathtaking on my computer looked washed out on my father's and almost devoid of detail, so if you're looking and wondering why I'm making a fuss, that might be why. The medium doesn't always do the artist justice, when the artist's work picks up a thousand subtle shades that come of the daylight as it filters through a transparent sculpture, or the faintly dusty desert air whose light gives these pieces the context which helps define them; would the sculpture you see to your left be the same piece were it bathed in the faint green light of an Indiana forest, instead of the blindingly yet strangely soft radiance of a summer afternoon on the Playa?

The artist makes good progress on the challenge of conveying the different look and feel of her piece in what, for most viewers, will be an unfamiliar environment, only to run into the limitations imposed by inadequate standardization in what is, after all, supposed to be a communications technology - egotistically creative self-indulgence on the part of the software engineers developing the systems we use to view the Web coming at the expense of expressive freedom of the artists who, in this, they are supposed to be serving; where would painting be today if oils randomly changed colors when a painting was moved into another room or viewed from a different angle? At the very least, the art form would have been seriously and unnecessarily limited by the artist's lack of control over her medium, as digital art is often is, now.

Good reason, perhaps, to see if Ms.Raudenbush has any upcoming showings of her photography, offline, where screen settings and the quirks of individual systems will not get between us and our enjoyment of her work.





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