Month: January 2018

Anna Reivilä

Sculpture / Photography by Anna Reivilä

“In Japanese religious ceremonies, ropes and ties symbolise the connections among people and the divine, as a means to identify sacred space and time”, Anna Reivilä, a graduate from Aalto University, Finland, explains.

With the ‘Bond’ series, Reivilä bridges the gap between Scandinavian nature and Japanese rituals. Inspired by Nobuyoshi Araki’s images, the nature of bondage and a mix of raw violence and beauty, her photographs study the relationship between man and nature. “The Japanese word for bondage, kinbaku, literally means ‘the beauty of tight binding’. It is a delicate balance between being held together and being on the verge of breaking”, she adds.

According to her gallerist, Reivilä chooses spaces where nature’s elements, once combined, reveal natural tensions; she then creates a new form of dialogue by extending, wrapping and pulling these indigenous forms. From these existing components, she projects a new sense of volume.

“Using ropes as lines is my form of drawing. The lines create interactions; connect the elements. I’m interested how the volume of any given site can be stretched by the use of several simple lines. More, these three-dimensional drawings are physically unstable: they exist only for the moment. Photographing them gives them another dimension in time,” says Reivilä.

Nicolas Whitman

Nicolas Whitman, Photographs of Vintage Circus Posters

After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1978 Nicholas Whitman was commissioned to photograph collections at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. During his tenure he brought order and interest to the museum’s superb photographic holdings. In 1986 he moved to freelance practice.

Returning to the Berkshires in 1990 he has since provided imagery for many of the regions cultural institutions. Including the Bennington Museum, Berkshire Museum, Berkshire Theater Group/Colonial Theatre, Chesterwood, Olana, MASS MoCA, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williams College Museum of Art, and Williams College.

In concert with commissioned work Whitman continues to mine numerous veins of expressive photography. Several of which have resulted in books, gallery shows and museum exhibitions.

Alex Blas

Alex Blas, “Day Off #1″, 2006, Oil on Canvas

Alex Blas was born in 1978 in Mexico City, emigrated to the United States in 1988 and received his degree in 1999 from Santa Ana College. His work has been shown at the Lyons Weir Gallery, New York, and the George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles, as well as Manifest Equality (Los Angeles) and at Legends of La Cienega, sponsored by Elle Décor magazine. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles and curates Artwerq at the Downtown LA Artwalk monthly.

Using his personal friends and real life experiences as inspiration for his subject matter, his large-scale oil paintings capture people in private moments; solo figures behaving as they do when no one is watching. In his three series: “Housesitter“, “Day Off” and “Friends“, Blas voyeuristic perspective turns the viewer into a fly on the wall, making us witness to personal indiscretions, pleasures and self-indulgence such as selfies, watching porn, masturbating, playing video games, talking on the phone and napping.

Calendar: January 25

A Year: Day to Day Men: January 25

Honor Among Men

January 25, 1924 marks the opening date of the first Winter Olympics held at Chamonix, in the French Alps.

In 1911, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) proposed the staging of a separate winter competition for the 1912 Stockholm Games, but Sweden, wanting to protect the popularity of the Nordic Games, declined. Germany planned a Winter Olympics to precede the 1916 Berlin Summer Games, but World War I forced the cancellation of both. Soon after the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, an agreement was reached with Scandinavians to stage the IOC-sanctioned International Winter Sports Week.

On January 25, 1924, the ‘first Winter Olympics’ took off in style at Chamonix in the French Alps. Spectators were thrilled by the ski jump and bobsled as well as 12 other events involving a total of six sports. The “International Winter Sports Week,” as it was known, was a great success. It was so popular among the 16 participating nations that, in 1925, the IOC formally created the Winter Olympics, retroactively making Chamonix the first. In 1928 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) officially designated the Winter Games, staged in St. Moritz, Switzerland, as the second Winter Olympics.

At the  Chamonix games, Scandinavians dominated the speed rinks and slopes, and Norway won the unofficial team competition with 17 medals. The United States came in third, winning its only gold medal with Charles Jewtraw’s victory in the 500-meter speed-skating event. Canada won another hockey gold, scoring 110 goals and allowing just three goals in five games. Of the nearly 300 athletes, only 13 were women, and they only competed in the figure-skating events.

Calendar: January 24

Year: Day to Day Men: January 24

Ginger and Blue Tiles

On the twenty-fourth day of January in 1848, carpenter James Wilson Marshall found nuggets of gold in California’s American River near the site of the sawmill he was constructing for John Sutter. The news of this discovery brought three-hundred thousand people to California in the hope of a new life. This sudden influx of population allowed California to quickly achieve statehood through the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise was a packet of five separate Congressional bills, one of which approved California’s request for statehood, that temporarily defused tensions between the free and slave states in the United States.

A New Jersey native who came to California in 1944, James Marshall had found the gold nuggets in the tailrace, essentially a water wheel for producing energy, attached to the lumber mill he was building for Swiss immigrant John Sutter. He brought the gold to Sutter and the men privately tested the nuggets. Assured it was gold, Sutter wanted to keep the news of the discovery private as he had plans for an agricultural empire on the site. 

Having sworn all the workers at the mill to secrecy, Sutter sent one of the carpenters, former Dragoon soldier Charles Bennet. to Monterey which was acting as the functional capital of the territory. Bennet was to meet with Colonel Mason, the chief United States official, to secure mineral rights of the land upon which the mill was being built. However after stopping in the Bay Area city of Benicia, Bennet excitedly made remarks about Sutter’s gold discovery after hearing about a recent discovery of coal. In San Francisco, he made a second remark about the gold and, after Colonel Mason declined to make judgment on the mineral rights, revealed the secret a third time.

By March of 1848, the discovery of gold at the Sutter site was confirmed by newspaper publisher and merchant Samuel Brannan, who had hastily stocked his store with gold prospecting supplies and advertised the discovery throughout San Francisco. The New York Herald, a major news source on the eastern coast of the United States, reported the California gold discovery in its August 19th edition of 1848. On December 5th of the same year. President James Polk confirmed the discovery in an address to Congress and, with that, the gold rush began. As John Sutter had feared, his business plans were ruined, his workers left to pan for gold, and squatters took over his land and stole both his crops and his cattle. 

While the sudden influx of gold into the money supply reinvigorated the American economy, it had severe effects on Native Californians and sped the Native American population’s decline from disease, starvation and genocide. Whole indigenous societies were attacked and pushed off their lands by the gold seekers. Dependent on traditional hunting, gathering and agriculture, Native Americans  became victims as gravel, silt and toxic chemicals from prospecting operations killed fish and destroyed habitats. Game disappeared as settlements and mining camps were built amidst game and food gathering locations. Newly plowed farms to feed the miners took away more of land.

Systematic attacks against tribespeople living near mining districts occurred. The numbers of killings of California Native Americans by non-natives between 1846 and 1873 was estimated at between ninety-four hundred and sixteen thousand, most of which occurred in more than three hundred-seventy massacres. If Native people responded in retribution, large scale attacks would be made against entire Native villages. One such attack was the 1852 Bridge Gulch Massacre where a group of setters attacked a band of Wintu Indians; only three children survived the massacre.

California’s first governor, Peter Burnett, declared there were only two options towards the California Native population, removal or extermination. On the twenty-second of April in 1850, the California legislature passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians which allowed settlers to capture and use Native people as bonded workers, prohibited Native peoples’ testimony against settlers, and allowed the adoption of Native children by settlers, often for labor purposes. After the initial rapid economic growth had ended, laws and confiscatory taxes were imposed to drive out the remaining Native Americans, immigrants from China, Mexico, Chile and Latin America. 

Alex Ross

Alex Ross, “The Invisible Man”

Nelson Alexander “Alex” Ross is an American comic book writer and artist known for his painted interiors, covers and design work. He has done projects for both Marvel and DC Comics, such as the 1996 miniseries “Kingdom Come, which Ross co-wrote. His feature film work includes concerpt and narrative art for “Spiderman” and Spiderman 2″, the DVD package art for the film “Unbreakable”.