MFA Lecture series - extra credit

Graduate Lecture Series, Fall 2013  The USC Roski School of Fine Arts is pleased to announce its Fall 2013 Graduate Lecture Series, featuring weekly, in-depth presentations by internationally recognized artists, curators, and writers in an intimate setting that fosters critical conversation. Free and open to the public.  roski.usc.edu/calendar/

August 28: Tala Madani, Artist 12-2pm Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) September 11: The Propeller Group, Art Collective 12-2pm Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) September 25: Oscar Tuazon, Artist 12-2pm Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) October 2: Lara Schnitger, Artist 12-2pm Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) October 9: Barbara T. Smith, Artist 7-9pm Wong Auditorium (HAR) October 16: K8 Hardy, Artist 7-9pm Wong Auditorium (HAR) October 23: Michael Ned Holte, Critic, Writer 7-9pm Wong Auditorium (HAR) October 30: Alexandra Grant, Artist 12-2pm USC Fisher Museum (HAR) November 6: Susan Silton, Artist 12-2pm USC Fisher Museum (HAR) November 13: Elad Lassry, Artist 12-2pm Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) November 20: Hito Steyerl, Artist, Theorist, Writer 12-2pm Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) December 4: Wu Tsang, Artist 12-2pm Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT) December 9: Merlin Carpenter, Artist 12-2pm Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT)

Graduate Lecture Series: Thomas Demand

Image: Thomas Demand, Copyshop, 1999, C-print, 72.25 x 118.25".

September 7, 2011
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Lecture Forum
Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT)
3001 S. Flower Street
Los Angeles, CA 90007

Thomas Demand is a German artist who works in Los Angeles and Berlin. He is a 2010–2011 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in L.A. Demand has shown his work in solo exhibitions at museums and gallderies around the world, including Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Centro Cultural Usina do Gasômetro, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and many more. Born in Munich, Demand studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich; the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf; and Goldsmiths College, London.

MFA Lecture: Charles Long

Last Wednesday, I got to hear Charles Long speak about some of his recent works of art. Overall, it was a really great presentation. I was most interested in hearing about what drove him to produce his work. He spoke about how he would venture down to the LA river to find inspiration. Through his slideshow of photographs that he took there, I could see that it truly is a different world down by the river-it's an interesting mix of urban influences (the cement banks of the river, trash, shopping carts) and nature (there's tons of vegetation growing down there). Mr. Long spoke about how he would take various things from the river and drag them back up to his house. There, he would put them together into unexpected forms and paint them. I've include some samples of his compositions from the river. I'd advise anyone to look up some more of his work!

Jennifer West

Experimentation with materials can lead to a whole new world of work. That's what Jennifer West discovered when she attempted to see what would happen to film when it was exposed to not just the normal set of developing chemicals. She creates films that come out in a dazzling array of colors and run at a seemingly frantic pace. The colors and scratches are all results of intentional scratches and baths in liquids. A former teacher at USC, one of her recent works involved students donning lipstick and kissing each frame of the film. The result is a neon arrangement of lip prints strobing along the screen.

West does not intend for her films to be viewed like narrative movies. Instead, she sees them more as abstract paintings that adorn the walls of a gallery. They just so happen to be painted by projector rather than brush. As she showed films during the talk, West was visibly uneasy by the audience watching her films in their whole forms and one after another. When viewed in this manner, the viewer expects a narrative or some sort of story arc. On the walls of a gallery, the paintings are free to be judged aesthetically and the method used to create them can be pondered.

Last year, West created an exhibited a piece at the Tate Modern Gallery in London. For the piece, she took over a large ramp in the middle of the museum and brought in skateboarders to ride down the ramp over film laid out on the ground. For a few hours, skateboarders took over part of the Tate Modern and took their hobby from the street to the unfamiliar gallery. While West had originally wanted to pull skaters in from the street around the gallery, safety guidelines for the gallery forced her to use professional skateboarders. It is an unfortunate compromise that many artists must make when creating art for larger institutions. West said that though it was disappointing, it did not compromise the integrity of the entire piece. After the day of skateboarding finished, she scrambled to develop the film overnight for a showing the next day. The Tate decided to show her film in a theater the next day where viewers watched the film in it's entirety, making West slightly uneasy. While she concedes that the Tate ended up influencing the piece a little more than she had hoped, the overall experience was a good experience that helped her bring her art to a large new audience. In the process, she also got to slide down the Tate Modern on a skateboard.

Yvonne Rainer

Last week, the influential Yvonne Rainer spoke at the grad building. Famous for her involvement in the creation and exploration of modern dance, Rainer has grown older and seen her roles change. In the 1960s she worked in the same realm as other modern dancers such Merce Cunningham and Steve Paxton.

Her dances focused on the involvement of everyday movements into the medium of dance. Her pieces did not glorify these movement or aggrandize them. Instead, they simply became menial parts of the performance. Rainer's talk focused on these everyday movements and the expressiveness they create. Simply standing in front of the room, she argued, can be as expressive as striking a complex pose in front of a room. At one point in the lecture, she interrupted herself to scream the word "passion". Seconds later she spoke the word in her normal voice. She proceeded to argue that both performances of the word are expressive. Loudness or force has little to do with level of expression.

First performed in 1966, Rainer's most famous work is the 3-person dance, Trio A. The dance is based around fairly mechanical actions and is taught to dancers to this day. Rainer acknowledged that the dance is always a work in progress. She can always find something to critique in the dancers performing the dance today. Performed without music, the speed at which the dance is moves can be complex. To Rainer, the dance must be slow as to emphasize the movements and poses but not too slow as to seem meditative. While some dance is meant to be a meditation, Rainer is adamant that Trio A is not one of those dances.

One of the important characteristics of dance is the temporal nature of the medium. A dance will be performed slightly different each performance even if the same person performs it. When different people perform the dance, they add small parts of their demeanor and posture to the dance. Rainer says that she never corrects the posture of her dancers and allows this small part of the dance to remain natural. Age also plays a large role in how a dance is performed. While originally Rainer performed all her own dances, she is now over 70 years old. Her body will no longer allow her to perform many of her dances. She considers the age of her dancers an interesting contemplation as she composes her dances. With older dancers, she considers the limitations of their bodies interesting problems, much like design challenges. She must work around this or emphasize it in the dance as a commentary on age.

Below is a sample performance of Trio A.

Handtmann Photography Lecture Series: Arthur Ou

I attended the Handtmann Photography Lecture by Arthur Ou on Nov. 23, 2009. He is an artist based in New York and teaches at the Parsons The New School of Design. His work has been exhibited all around the world, including Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Beijing, Berlin, Taipei and many other places. I was especially interested in learning about him as an artist because he was born in Taiwan - the place where my parents were born.

His photography implements many different media. Ou says he likes "translating from one medium to another", and this can be seen in many of his photos of dirt mounds contrasted with ink splatters. He talked about the presence of motifs in his work, and that he likes reusing certain motifs because it presents the action of viewing photos in a more specified way. He mentions how photos are very "slippery things" because a lot of external work is necessary for the photo to have meaning.

For much of his work, he said that he was inspired by many household things he saw in his home and his friend's homes. Statues and vases were some of the objects he was inspired by. Furthermore, he mentioned the decorative walls often seen in Chinese gardens or backyards - he made these part of his photos because of the repeating motif and elegant shape of the walls. Many of his earth works were made with dirt and he repeatedly rearranged it until he achieved a composition he liked.

In the Taipei Biennial, Ou had an installation where he had, in the middle of the room, a large yet simple fireplace. He used this to contextualize his pieces with something that was more "familiar and domestic". I thought this was clever because just merely showing your work is perhaps not enough anymore - the idea of contextualizing is important for viewers and can give an entirely different experience for people looking at the artwork.

For some pieces, Ou had a tendency to have double objects for subjects. He said that he intended this to be a reference to the history between Taiwan and China, which I thought was very interesting.

He concluded with his thoughts about the German word aufheben, which means "to preserve, elevate, or cancel". To him, this represents the direct process of photographing something. For example, the initial drive to take a photo could be to preserve something or an action. And then a subject can be transformed and the original experience of taking the photo is cancelled out. This word resonated with him and made him feel that photography is very much a part of the human experience.

MFA Grad Lecture: Anne Ellegood

Last week I saw Anne Ellegood, newly appointed senior curator at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.  In her talk, she discusses two projects that she's curated: The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture and Realisms, the second half of the two-part exhibition, The Cinema Effect: Reality, Illusion, and the Moving Image, both at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.

The artists involved in the Recent Sculptures exhibition were Andrea Cohen, Bjorn Dahlem, Isa Genzken, Mark Handforth, Rachel Harrison, Evan Holloway, Charles Long, Mindy Shapero, and Franz West.  What I thought was most interesting was that Ellegood got permission to let a few of the artists into the Hirshhorn permanent collection storage and pick out works that influenced or informed their own work.  They were then able to curate mini exhibitions in the smaller galleries around where their work was installed.  I thought that was great because when you're in school you get to hear your professors and visiting artists talk all the time about artists or work they like but when you're alone at a museum you usually don't have a clue how or where anyone came up with their ideas.  And this exhibition gave museum attendee's that chance for further insight.

For the second half of her talk, she read a paper she wrote for the Realisms catalog which discusses video and digital works that investigate how traditional cinema both communicates and critiques by complicating the relationship between fiction and reality.  She screened parts of Candace Breitz two-part video installation piece “Mother + Father” as well as Omer Fast's "Godville."

MFA Grad Lecture: Anoka Faruqee

Finally catching up with my blog posts!

About a month ago now, I went to the Anoka Faruqee grad lecture.  I'm usually not that interested in painting but I thought I would go listen in anyway.  Faruqee's work is very, VERY meticulous and tediously constructed.  The bulk of her painting are made up of what might be millions of asterisks.  She grids them out according to what color she wants to paint and where and then hand paints every single one.  She told a story about one time where she actually damaged her eyes from painting so often.  Every time she looked at one of her own paintings she would get a migraine.  She ended up having to hire assistants to finish her works for her until her eyes went back to normal.  And now she's supposed to do eye exercises everyday to make sure it doesn't happen again.  That just seems nuts to me.

In the beginning of her lecture, she talked about how she grew up in a house heavily decorated with elaborate Indian fabrics and that their patterns heavily influenced her work.  I wish I knew more about the significance of the asterisks though.  I know she explained it but even at the time I wasn't able to catch it.  She talked very little about why she makes the painting she makes and talked mostly about how she made them, which was slightly disappointing.  She talked at length about colors and grids and pours and copies and mixing and charts and stuff but not much else.  Finally at the end of the lecture, the grads and faculty were able to pull a little more out of her but by then it was too late and the lecture was over.

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For more info about Faruqee and examples of her work, check out her website.

Alice Konitz

Recently, I went to artist, Alice Konitz's, lecture on her artwork. Her work mainly consisted of sculptures, but there were a few paintings and collages from magazines. Her sculptures, for the most part, were geometric and oftentimes heavily influenced by architecture and landscape, topics which she seemed to be very fond of.

Something very interesting about Alice was her love for LA; she admires the architecture and the desert and even the freeways and how her work stems from these things. Growing up in the suburbs and constantly seeing the buildings and freeways of LA, I definitely don't think I appreciate the landscape and engineering as much as Alice does. For me, a freeway is just a freeway, dirty and oftentimes blanketed with cars sitting bumper to bumper; but for Alice, a freeway is an "adventure park", something that she can create a piece of art from. What I like about Alice's work is that it makes the ordinary more exciting and interesting.

I also enjoyed Alice's use of geometric shapes. She oftentimes used hexagons in her work, using them to make large interactive sculptures and imitations of stores and store fronts. She also used hexagons in designing a decal pattern for a store, which I found particularly appealing. I think the balance of the hexagonal sculptures and the hexagons themselves made me attracted to those particular pieces. I think, also, that the practicality of her work, was an alluring aspect for me, perhaps suggesting that her "art" could at times be called "design."

All in all, I did enjoy Alice's work. Though some of it, like her movie, was hard for me to understand; I think that what she accomplishes is both thought-provoking and physically appealing.

Alice Konitz

Last night I attended the Alice Konitz lecture on her art work. Her presentation consisted of a simple slide show and her personal connection to or the inspiration for a particular piece. She also shared her creative process and described what she was thinking while creating it.

One of the pieces that she showed us was a table. It was covered in this gold foil that created a reflective quality that appealed to me. It was very geometric, and looked as if it was created with three 3 inch rectangular frames. When I saw this it made me think of the "art vs. design" debacle from the first week of class. I felt that this is representative of the elements that we associate with design. It is art, but it is also a functional table that could be used in everyday life. That confuses me.

Most of the pieces she showed us were sculptures; however, there were some 2-D works that were particularly interesting, as they relate to design. She showed us few images of a window treatment that she did for a show on Hollywood Blvd. The 2-d design also depicts the struggle of "art vs. design." To me, it is design because the window treatment was to function as a eye-popping advertisement like display. At the same time, however, it is created by this woman as a depiction of an idea and/or theme.

There were many things that I liked about her work. Of course, I was attracted most to the more geometric and "design"-like works. I feel that her work is fascinating and original, multi-faceted and obscure.

Alice Konitz Artwork

Last night I attended Alice Konitz's presentation. I had no previous knowledge of the artist and therefore I held no assumptions about her work and had no specific expectations for her. Most of the works she displayed in her sideshow were sculptures (although she did a few mixed media pieces involving images from magazines and paint). Her sculptures typically assumed structural and geometric forms. Many of them resembled man made constructions that served utilitarian functions.

For example, one of the sculptures she did resembled a table, yet was distinctly a new and altered form. The piece had uneven surface so although it may have looked like a table, it could not function as one. This particular work reminded me of the question we debated at the beginning of the semester: what are the differences between art and design? I thought that her work supports the idea that differentiating art from design involves discovering its function.


I was particularly fascinated by the fact that Konitz was so inspired by all that she observed in L.A. She created thought-provoking pieces based on highways, donut shops, food stands, and other undervalued attributes of our surroundings. Perhaps she derived inspiration from these things because she is not a native of California, and thus she may have a fresh perspective on the things many of us take for granted. I am accustomed to looking at and analyzing art created as a commentary on broad social issues. I am still unsure of whether or not I appreciate Konitz's focus on the minutia of everyday life. I felt conflicted about her work: I liked that she was imploring veiwers to think about things that they probably would have never noticed or contemplated (like her monument to the point on a mountain where radio signals change), but I also wondered why she was not making a more blatant argument though her pieces.

In general, I liked the appearance of her artwork. I thought that her choice of more everyday mediums mirrored her attention to the smaller aspects of life. I also really liked the costumes she used in her short film "Owl Society," although I could not discern their function or how they specifically contributed to the film because I was also unable to hear the dialogue. I'm happy I heard Konitz speak and I hope to see more of her work in the future.

Alice Konitz: Whitney Wiese

AlICE KÖNITZ:

I attended the alice KÖNITZ lecture of her artwork. Initially, alice came to California because she was inspired by the desert landscape. she Created a peice that consisted of a trailer placed in a desert landscape. she removed everything inside and took off the roof in order to see the sky and its different light stages. Another interest of alice's was taco stands. the fact that people can watch their food being prepared was amazing to her. she then created "Taco Stand." alice KÖNITZ has an attraction to owls because of their eyes. The fact that they are very human-like with eyes on fornt of their head, unlike most birds was very interesting to her. most of alice's work was 3d. I enjoyed this lecture very much and really liked listening to her.

-alice peeking inside her trailer piece. (right)

Alice Konitz

Tonight Alice Konitz came and spoke to students at USC and I was given the opportunity to hear about her art.. She is a sculptor. Her sculptures are never completely finished and leave room for interpretation. They "deny resolution" and are monumentally based. Alice focuses on how you physically relate to the sculpture, and how it fits into the space provided. Her pieces deal with light as well.

Some of her pieces are "Stone Curtain" and "Shelf" which can shift in space and vary the height and fit

"Taco Stand" was based off of architecture of a taco stand she saw. Konitz was very drawn to the structure and the people coming in and out to get food. Alice is also very interested in owls because they are very human-like because their eyes are set in the front of their heads instead of the sides. She has done many pieces based on owls, including a film.

She has also been very inspired by architecture of the freeway. Alice has constructed and is trying to construct monuments in Glendale. Alice has also done storefront patterns, exhibited in museums, and has and will continue to be a huge force in the sculpture world

ALICE KÖNITZ

I attended the Alice Könitz powerpoint show and I got to see her work. The work is mainly structural, taking a heavy influence from modern architecture around the city. Most of Alice's work seems to be objects that reference architecture, rather than something that could be used as part of an actual edifice or construct, but she keeps a healthy balance of both by having installations of public artwork. She really wants to put something up in century city because of the urban retro design feel that it has. 

Personally, my favorite work of hers was a small piece that she did that was sort of an abstract representation of a freeway that she takes a liking to. The history behind the freeway is that it was stopped mid construction, so there is kind of a random platform that she likes to visit and look from. As part of a more functional artistic project that she would like to carryout, she wants to build an elevator that can take people up to the platform in order to look at the view from it. I think its a really interesting concept because I find it really funny how something so vast and concrete could be stopped mid construction. Although it may seem like a wasted space at first glance, Alice is someone who is attempting to make something of it.  

The small scale sculpture that she did was sort of two platforms combined together, but combined in a way that someone could not really tell what it is supposed to be solely by looking at it. Once she explained the freeway story it really took to my liking and I enjoyed the piece for its representation of something so vast through such simple miniscule platforms.  

MFA Lecture Series: A.L. Steiner

Last Wednesday I sat in on A.L. Steiner's MFA lecture.

Steiner works in the mediums of photography and video but started out as a communications major as an undergraduate and worked as a photo editor after graduating. And from the sound of it, she didn't go to graduate school, which is pretty rare for a working artist getting representation from galleries. I thought her process of making photographs was refreshing. She works mostly in 35mm and digital, which I also think it rare for photographers working right now who mostly seem to be using 4X5 and 8X10 cameras to make their work. She takes her cameras with her everywhere and photographs whatever she feels like, slowly building an archive of thousands of images.

One of the works I was most interested is called, "One Million Photos, One Euro Each," where she covered the walls of a gallery, floor to ceiling, with photographs that could be bought for one euro by anyone who came into the gallery. She's done this project in several locations all over the world.

I especially liked her work C.L.U.E., which stands for Color Location Ultimate Experience. It's a collaborative video dance piece where two women wearing different sets of the same colored clothing and dance through various environments. It reminded me a lot of being a child and playing with friends, which is probably one of Steiner's intentions for the piece as she mentioned a lot of her work is about play.

Steiner also works with the music/performance group Chick on Speed and W.A.G.E., an organization that fights for fair wages for artists as they do work for educational institutions and non-profits.

I couldn't find actual footage of C.L.U.E. but I did find this performance with parts of the video playing in the background.

MFA Lecture Series: Jennifer West

Last week I attended MFA Lecture with LA-based artist and Roski faculty member Jennifer West.

West's works consists of video works in which the most of the content is made not through exposing film in a camera, but by taking actual film and drawing on it, soaking it, scratching it, kissing it, and anything else to it that you could possibly imagine. After cleaning the film, which often gets covered in lots of disgusting and messy substances (grape jelly, laxatives, urine, Gatorade, dirt, etc.), she takes her film to a lab where it's transferred to a digital format which she then projects, usually along the edges of walls, in gallery spaces exhibiting her work.

While I was a little overwhelmed at time by the sheer number of works she screened for the lecture (in a conversation later about the lecture, a professor of mine said that they were pretty sure that West showed all of her past work), I did find myself deeply interested in what I saw. But even though I think the works are beautiful and mesmerizing, I found myself more interested in her process rather than the actual works themselves. She spends a lot of time coming up with what she wants to mark the films with, materials that often not very visible or noticeable when actually watching the work. Not to mention her process of making her films can be incredibly collaborative, often involving her family, friends and past students in her film marking festivities. If she didn't let us know what she used to make each film before she screened it, I really wouldn't have had anyway of distinguishing one from the other, besides the color and maybe some of the patterns of each piece.

I liked listening to West talk but I wish she would have spent more time talking about fewer pieces. She kind of rushed through most of her works so she would have time to talk about the last piece on her dvd. I hope to one day see her work in a more formal gallery setting, encountering her work the way she intends it to be seen. I feel that if I saw her work in a gallery space without hearing her talking I would have been more interested in the actual videos rather than the process of how the work is made.



Don't forget that A.L. Steiner is visiting tomorrow. If you're into photography, I wouldn't miss it!

MFA Lecture Series: Dexter Sinister

David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey joined together to create Dexter Sinister, which from Heraldry, literally means right hand side (dexter) and left hand side (sinister). The platform for their lecture was very simple. Reinfurt and Bailey sat at the front with two laptops and showed pictures while reading from a book they had compiled. The book was separated into individual "texts," each of which was discussed in detail. They would usually begin with a passage and then discuss the foundation of their ideas for each of the chapters.

Dexter Sinister is most notable for their magazine, Dot Dot Dot. They have a small basement book shop in the lower East Side of New York City. The main motivation for establishing a bookstore was so that they could have hands on control of distributing their magazine (Dot Dot Dot). At the time, the bookstore only contained issues of Dot Dot Dot and other publications by either Bailey or Reinfurt. Not long after the store opened, the duo realized that the revenue from their in-store sales covered the rent of the space (which was not expected). As a result, they expanded their inventory to include books that closely correlated with their work and books from artists that they may have worked with in the past.

In all of their work, whether it was the texts or the magazine, they had some sort of thread that stitched each project together. This idea was stressed throughout the lecture.

I thought one of the more interesting things that they discussed was about how words preceded graphic forms. This led into a discussion about the Moholy Paintings, which were a set of enamel paintings supposedly created from a conversation over the telephone between Moholy (the artist) and an employee at a sign factory in Berlin.

Other topics included things like Heraldic color coding, the Mickey Mouse Protection Act and Ben Franklin's publishing company. As you can see, most of the topics had some theme about typography or publishing.

The lecture was somewhat abstract. I was confused as to what they were ultimately trying to promote. It was a little bit boring, but they were both very interesting people that have been successful creating their work in a very unique way.

Roski MFA Lecture Series: Dexter Sinister

Wednesday afternoon, I attended the lecture of visiting artists David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey, collectively known as Dexter Sinister, over at the Roski Graduate School of Fine Arts. I felt compelled to go, not just because of the class extra credit that I was offered (though I must admit that it was nice incentive too) but more because I was curious to hear the duo speak about their work as a collaborative team.

For the past several months, I've been working on my first collaborative project, tentatively called Fantasy IRL, with a fellow Roski student, which investigates fantasy and science fiction fan culture and their members methods of enacting their fantasies in-real-life (IRL). I've found that people often underestimate the added pressures and responsibilities of working as a collaborative team as opposed to by one's self and I was interested in observing the ways in which Reinfurt and Bailey interact and work with each other, in this case particularly in the public sphere.

They spoke they way their work looks: direct, plain and and well-researched. Their way of speaking was regimented and almost seemed planned, but not in a stiff or unnatural way. When there was a pause in the conversation, one would fluidly pick up where the other left off with plenty of things of his own to say, almost like they had their talk rehearsed down to an art in itself, which I've found that many artists do. Though I regret not asking them any questions during the Q&A about their practice as a collaborative team versus their individual practices, I later spoke with Shannon Ebner, artist, professor and head of Roski's Photography Department, who, having collaborated with Dexter Sinister on a number of occasions herself, was able to further illuminate some of what I was further interested in knowing. From what she said, while working as Dexter Sinister, Reinfurt is more hands on with the actual designing of works and has a small design company of his own. Bailey, though still a designer, is more of the front-of-the-house kind of guy, talking and dealing with galleries, museums and whoever else they need to keep in contact with while making their work. This sort of pragmatic division of labor is something I find most helpful in my own collaborative dealings and processes and one that I hope I can further implicate in mine and my partner's practices as we continue on with our project.

Aside from the inner working of Dexter Sinister as a team, I was particularly interested in how they deal with mechanical reproduction, copyright, and dispersion of information in their work, all things that I've been dealing with myself in my own artwork lately (and things that in today's world, designers should concern themselves with). Though photography itself is a form of mmechanical reproduction, the issue has only become more exaggerated with the current digital revolution. And as I have been using more and more digital means to produce my own work, work that also often deals with aspects of the digital age and a movement toward the future and technological singularity, I found their words and interests particularly applicable. Also, having recently become an avid blogger, I've had to become more and more aware of copyright laws and ways of legally dispersing information that might otherwise be illegal and I was interested to see the way they delt those issues as well. In one of their works in particular, the piece consisted of a copy machine and a number of loose chapters of a book laid next to it. Dexter Sinister found a loop hole in the book's publisher's copyright laws that allowed them to at any one time let any person make one photo copy of one chapter from the book and keep it without technically doing anything illegal. This also meant that technically the same person over the course of many days could go into the gallery and copy a different chapter of the book each time until they collected the whole book without ever having to pay for it.

Though designers they may be, I've come to see, appreciate and respect Dexter Sinister more for their ideas and conceptual work as artists, rather than as designers (thought I must say, I do love the clean simplicity of their visual designs). Not only am I interested in now keeping up with their various publications, such as dot dot dot, but I'm excited to observe the way they will further adapt to the world in which they live and work as it continues to evolve around them, as well as keep track of more future incarnations of Dexter Sinister.