AIPAD 2015: MAX DE ESTEBAN

Esteban's overall photographic practice explores socio-political concepts within visual structures of serialization and repetition. At the 2015 AIPAD Photo Show, we will present Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral and Proposition Four: Heads Will Roll. 

PO7, 2011 from Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral

Series Title: Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral

Number of artworks at AIPAD: 4

Edition: 5 + 1AP in each size

Size: 20.7” x 27.6” & 39.4” x 52.5”

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Year: 2011

With this series, Max de Esteban turns his camera toward recent cutting-edge technology—utilized in the creation and communication of art—that is now considered obsolete. Through a time-consuming and meticulous process, he dis-assembles apparatus such as film projectors, 35mm film cameras, VHS tape players and record players. Piece-by-piece, the parts are painted white, the machines are then reassembled and photographed at different stages of being re-built. The photographed layers are themselves assembled into a single image, resulting in x-ray-like photographs that are reminiscent of architectural cyanotypes.

The precision inherent in the photographs bring to mind the idea of a technological taxidermy that removes nostalgia, yet performs the role of memento mori for machines that have become obsolete and may soon be forgotten.

This work can be found in several private and public collections. Most recently, the Deutsches Technik Museum in Berlin acquired 15 photographs from the series for its collection. 

Transforming the Labyrinth, 2013

from Proposition Four: Heads Will Roll

Series Title: Proposition Four: Heads Will Roll

Number of artworks at AIPAD: 1

Edition: 5 + 1AP in each size

Size: 25” x 19” image on 28” x 22” sheet & 45” x 35” image on 49” x 39” sheet

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Year: 2013

The Proposition Four: Heads Will Roll series examines the non-stop, daily flood of images that impact peoples' thoughts, memories, desires, dreams – even the very concept of reality. At a time of accelerated technological change, Max de Esteban layers and flattens multiple images into a final image, utilizing digital tools to present a cacophony of information that is at once dense with information yet visually legible. 

This series is the subject of the monograph, 'Heads Will Roll', published by Hatze Cantz in 2014, and will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Klompching Gallery in September 2015.

Max de Esteban holds graduate degrees from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and Stanford University, as well as a PhD from the Universitat Ramon Llull. He is a former Fulbright Scholar, and his photographs have been exhibited throughout Europe. He lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.

AIPAD 2015: ODETTE ENGLAND

Develop Before 07/1991 (Kodacolor Gold 200 12),  2014-2015

Series Title: Develop Before

Number of Artworks at AIPAD: 5

Edition: 3 + 1AP

Size: 20"x20" image on 24x24" sheet

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Year: 2014–2015

Home is the center-weight of Odette England's artistic practice, with memory and forgetting being the counterbalances. Her photographs are fragile, contemplative and temporal spaces. She works with expired film, vintage cameras, damaged negatives and alternative photo processes; exploring the volatility of identity, emphasizing the unstable nature of the past/present and the parent/child seesaw.

The Develop Before series continues these overall themes. Completed 2014–2015, this series of twelve photographs is newly released to the market, with their exhibition at AIPAD 2015, being their first-time showing. 

"Grandpa was a collector – matchboxes, bird’s eggs, seeds, postcards – but one of his most curious collections comprised old Kodak 126 film boxes, each neatly unfolded, held together in a stack with a thin rubber band and placed inside a worn, faded green plastic bag hidden in the back of a freezer.  On the outside of each box, where Kodak had printed 'Develop Before' together with the film’s expiry date (a practice that dates from the end of the 19th century) Grandpa had circled the date in red pen, as if to ensure that the snapshots he took would be revealed at their very best and 'freshest'.

What struck me wasn’t that the boxes themselves had expired, but that they were simultaneously the same and different, much like family snapshots.  There is homogeneity to how we make snapshots the world over, both in terms of subject matter and our behaviour (as subjects ourselves) in front of the lens.  Grandpa's boxes have their own unique marks of age – wrinkles, scars, stains, bruises – things we tend to avoid in family photography.  They were also never intended to be subjects of photography: boxes are simply trash – nothing of value, though to Grandpa, worth something.  I was compelled to photograph them, using a heavily modified Kodak Instamatic, expired photography chemicals and a scanner."—Odette England

Collections holding the work of Odette England include the New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe), George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film (Syracuse) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago).

AIPAD 2015: HELEN SEAR

Inside The View, No. 10 (2005)

Series Title: Inside The View

Number of Artworks at AIPAD: 8

Edition: 5 + 2APs

Size: 13.25"x13.24" image on 15.75"x15.75" sheet

Medium: C-Type

Year: 2005–2008

Inside The View is an exceptional collection of photographs, wherein Helen Sear addresses the notion of work, labor of the hand and time in the process of image making. Sear also contributes to the long history of montage by superimposing two images — one a portrait of a woman and the other a landscape. The image is then erased through a complex and painstaking process of digital drawing, with a lace-like network of lines based upon the patterns of sewing or hand woven lace making.

The result is a wonderful play on vision, whereby the figure and ground appear and disappear within the resulting lines of erasure. In many ways, the lines of erasure are the image; they form a veil to look at and to look through. Amongst other things, Sear is intrigued with the viewer’s habits of looking, and in this context she views the photographic medium as not fixed or entirely knowable.  

“Within the multiple layers of Sear’s art we face the complex questions of work and invention. The innovative labour of image craft is central here. She does things few others do with the medium ... It is a restless process of intellectual risk, aesthetic demand and technical experiment.”—David Campany (2006).

In making these images, Sear has been inspired by the works of Helen Chadwick and Jo Spence, as well as that of the northern romantic tradition of painting. The title of the work refers to a series of collages, A L’Interieur de la Vue, by Max Ernst.

Helen Sear’s work has been published in Arts Review, Creative Camera, Art Newspaper and Art Monthly amongst others. Collections holding her work include Ernst & Young, Victoria & Albert Museum, British Council (Rome) and the Paul Wilson Collection. She lives and works in Wales (UK).

In 2014, Helen Sear was selected by the Welsh Arts Council to represent Wales at the 56th Venice Biennale, with a solo exhibition at the Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Via Garibaldi, Venice, May 9 – November 22, 2015.