"[Richard Misrach] saw the border, [Guillermo Galindo] heard it, and by coming together across that line of artistic practice, they've now created these 'border cantos.' Misrach has been using the canto literary structure, borrowed from Dante and Ezra Pound, as a way of organizing his long-term photographic project, Desert cantos (1979 to present). But here the canto also moves off the page and into sound, opening up into Galindo's practice. In Italian, canto means 'song'; in Spanish, 'singing' and 'chant.' In this sense, all cantos are part eye and part ear, able to bee seen and heard at once."--Page 10.
This project presents a unique collaboration between photographer Richard Misrach and composer and performer Guillermo Galindo. Misrach has been photographing the 2,000-mile border between the US and Mexico since 2004, with increased focus since 2009--the latest installation in his ongoing series Desert Cantos, a multifaceted approach to the study of place and man's complex relationship to it. Misrach and Galindo have been working together to create pieces that both document and transform the artifacts of migration. Using water bottles, clothing, backpacks, Border Patrol drag tires, spent shotgun shells, ladders and sections of the border wall itself, most of which were collected by Misrach, Galindo fashions instruments to be performed as unique sound-generating devices. He also imagines graphic musical scores, many of which also use Misrach's photographs as points of departure. A unique melding of the artist as documentarian and interpreter, the book includes several suites of photographs drawn from a number of distinct series or Cantos, some made with a large-format camera as well as an iPhone. The book contains a compilation of two dozen sculpture-instruments, graphic scores, instrument designs and links to videos of performances by Galindo.
In "Violent Legacies the acclaimed photographer Richard Misrach has compiled three new "cantos" in his ongoing series of photographs exploring the desert in the American West. The desert has long been a metaphor in Misrach's art. In "Violent Legacies these barren lands, so often romanticized, undergo an eerie transformation at the hands of man and become an unmistakable reflection of militarism, violence, and environmental destruction. Misrach's political commitment and activism-- filtered through an ironic counterposing of form and content, as well as his exquisite use of color and composition-- have never been as powerfully articulated as in these three new cantos. In "Project W-47 (The Secret)" Misrach reveals classically inspired vistas of the Utah deadlands, tainted forever by their past incarnation as Wendover Air Base-- the secret training and planning site for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Aspects of what took place at Wendover still remain classified by the U.S. government. "The Pit" is a Goyaesque series that focuses on the mysterious death of livestock in very close proximity to a former nuclear test site in the Nevada desert. These photographs are a chilling reminder of U.S. and global nuclear contamination. "The Playboys" are Misrach's studies of "Playboy magazines that were used for target practice by persons unknown on the fringes of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. While cover girls appear to have been the principal targets, many aspects of American culture-- including icons like Andy Warhol, Ray Charles, and Madonna-- were inadvertently blasted. Susan Sontag uses these cantos as a springboard to an allegorical tale-- "The View from the Ark"-- asubtle, yet probing meditation on violence in contemporary society. A postscript interview with Richard Misrach provides background information about the sites comprising "Violent Legacies. "The West," says Misrach, "is s
Insightful and interdisciplinary, this book considers the movement of people around the world and how contemporary artists contribute to our understanding of it In this timely volume, artists and thinkers join in conversation around the topic of global migration, examining both its cultural impact and the culture of migration itself. Individual voices shed light on the societal transformations related to migration and its representation in 21st-century art, offering diverse points of entry into this massive phenomenon and its many manifestations. The featured artworks range from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, and sound art, and their makers--including Isaac Julien, Richard Mosse, Reena Saini Kallat, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Do Ho Suh, among many others--hail from around the world. Texts by experts in political science, Latin American studies, and human rights, as well as contemporary art, expand upon the political, economic, and social contexts of migration and its representation. The book also includes three conversations in which artists discuss the complexity of making work about migration. Amid worldwide tensions surrounding refugee crises and border security, this publication provides a nuanced interpretation of the current cultural moment. Intertwining themes of memory, home, activism, and more, When Home Won't Let You Stay meditates on how art both shapes and is shaped by the public discourse on migration.
What do paintings signify in an age of photographs? How do photographs modify the visual language of paintings? Richard Misrach's Pictures of Paintings showcases photographs of select museum masterpieces. Working primarily in the art museums of the American West, along with The Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Misrach photographs paintings to reexamine specific details, not so much as a guide to the artist's style or technique, but as a means of understanding a lexicon of cultural values, among them race, gender, religion, and power. By collapsing the barriers between the traditional practice of documentation and the recent strategies of appropriation art, these photographs raise important questions regarding representation itself. This publication marks the first comprehensive compilation of this significant body of work. Blind Spot Books, a division of Blind Spot Inc. (publisher of the premiere art photography magazine Blind Spot), is now partnering with powerHouse Books to produce elegantly designed, sumptuously produced works of artistic and literary significance. Founding Blind Spot editor and publisher Kim Zorn Caputo will use the same uncompromising production standards and the finest printing available for the series. Each book will be treated as a creative medium that celebrates the integrity of the best in art and literature.
In fall 2012, the hardcover edition of this book was released to critical acclaim and received several awards, including the 2013 American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for its innovative collaborative approach and design. Now available in a smaller, more afford - able paperback edition, Petrochemical America features Richard Misrachs haunting photo-graphic record of Louisianas Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff s Ecological Atlasa series of speculative drawings developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as Cancer Alley when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region. This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of decades of environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. Even more critically, the project offers an extensively researched guidebook to the ways in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. What is revealed over the course of the book, however, is that Cancer Alleyalthough complicated by its own regional histories and particularitiesmay well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole.
Shelly is forced to fight her way through life trying to fit in. From birth, she is seemingly unwanted. She is confused as to why her life is so difficult so as soon as she is able, she cuts ties and runs. She runs anywhere she can, without understanding the consequences of her actions. She doesn't care what happens, just that she can get away from the unfairness of her life. Shelly has no idea of how life works, other than she has to have a job (or two or three), she always must pay her car payment and insurance, and she is never allowed to pay credit card bills late. She is never taught to manager her money or her life, and just flies by the seat of her pants. Her good nature and naivety put her in situations she might have avoided if she didn't spend her life cutting ties and running. Shelly's always wanted to live in Florida. The beaches, the sun, and the beautiful ocean called to her, but there was no way she would be able to prepare for everything that beauty had in store for her. Florida is the ultimate test of Shelly's independence. Follow Shelly's adventures as she learns how to reinvent herself just to survive.
Since the publication of Richard Misrach's bestselling and critically acclaimed publication On the Beach, he has continued to photograph at the same location, building a body of work that has been exhibited as On the Beach 2.0--a reference to the technological and optical developments that have made the intensely detailed, exquisitely rendered depictions possible. The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings focuses less on the abstraction of water, sand and mote-sized figures, instead honing in on the gestures and expressions of bathers adrift in the ocean. Misrach has rarely ventured into portraiture; this work is his first to focus exclusively on the human figure. Each photograph features one or more individuals crisply rendered from a distance, as they seem to levitate among turquoise waves, isolated from everything save the shifting patterns of the ocean. There is ambiguity and a sense of the uncanny in the figures suspended in the water: are they approaching the shore or moving away from it? Each image is presented both as full frame and as a series of enlarged details that enable the viewer to linger on each individual's surrender of their body to the sea.
