Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Hello! My name is Magali Duzant and I'll be guest posting for the week!  I am a NY based artist working in photography and video. Many thanks to everyone at Der Greif for the opportunity. As my first guest post I thought an appropriate place to start was to highlight the work of five emerging artists who question the role of photography today and whom I was honored to be included alongside in an exhibition this past February.  The show, Lift Off, was curated by Elisabeth Biondi at Fridman Gallery in NY. The exhibit brought together the work of six recent MFA graduates in New York. In putting together the show Biondi wrote, "the world of photography has changed radically in the last few decades. It has opened up in so many ways and has been freed from a relatively narrow interpretation. This creates a vast new world of possibilities as artists incorporate technology and digital imaging into their work...this diversity reflects the multidimensional practices that have transformed the contemporary world of photography." Being invited to participate in the exhibition cemented my understanding of photography as one of if not the most fluid mediums in the art world. It can be and is both two and three dimensional. Video is no longer an offshoot but an interconnected viewpoint. Photographs are both found and staged. They are continually being manipulated and reprocessed. This fluidity is what makes it truly the medium of the 21st century; in many ways what work does not start or end as a photograph? The artists, Charles Sainty, Michelle Gevint, Jesse Chun, Rehan Miskci, Jesse Wakeman, ( and myself ) investigate twenty-first century themes - analog versus digital, surveillance, cross cultural identity, the role of the archive, and the personal versus political. Jesse Chun explores notions of identity, mobility, and her transcultural experience. In Part I, she re-contextualizes various passports’ watermark images into large-scale landscapes by employing methods of appropriation, scanning, and digital manipulation. Michele Claire Gevint pursues her desire for an improved society while realizing the failure of her utopian vision. She creates digital collages by scanning and reprinting an appropriated image to recreate a poster-like new image. Rehan Miskci’s Void focuses on ethnic and cultural identity. Miskci removes the subjects from a found archive and fragments them into abstracted re-interpretations. They visualize the idea of loss and disruption, which defines the Armenian experience in Turkey. Charles Sainty explores the relationship between mental projection and physical reality. To make his video, LAX, he used footage from iconic films (The Wizard of Oz, Taxi Driver, The Matrix, etc.) to procedurally generate rough 3D models of the selected scenes and characters. Jesse Wakeman is a lens-based artist who uses photography, film, and video to explore contemporary conditions of human experiences. His work ranges from black & white silver gelatin prints to experimental narratives in film and video. My own piece for this exhibition was a staging of an on-going project in which I live stream the sun setting chronologically from time zone to zone creating a perpetual setting sun in real time projected out onto the street using surveillance cameras to make visible what we cannot see.