SPRING 2019 DUALITY 1
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ISSUE 16: DUALITY
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Thank you for supporting ISO. ISO began as an outlet for students to show their work and over time has transformed into a community collaboration to showcase established and emerging artists. While our content has changed since our founding, our mission of providing a platform for artists to exhibit their work and reach a diverse audience has not. The ISO staff decided that this year’s theme would be duality, initially a playful way to observe our eleventh anniversary. We defined duality as instances that encompass the tensions of contradiction and the inevitable repetition inherent to the human experience. We occupy the in between spaces: of generations, of our own personalities, of societal conventions; we fit into multiple places at once and yet nowhere at all. Duality is also found in replication, repetition, and reflection; images act as visual and metaphorical cues, showing clear duplicates or having undertones of similarity in form or subject. From dog shows to the visual reinterpretation of The Art of the Deal, works contained in this edition range widely in subject matter but all correspond to contradiction, repetition, and the in-between. We hope that exploration of this magazine will allow you to mediate the spaces in which you exist and through which you travel, even those spaces in between.
- Nina Dietz and Katie McGowan
ISO Magazine is a student-run publication based out of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Since 2008, our rotating staff has worked to explore contemporary themes in photography and image culture. We place the work of emerging photographers in conversation with that of established artists, as well as write critically and creatively on photography.
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Front Cover: Jackson Krule Inside Cover: Madeleine Roodberg
06 THE SINGLE SELF MARYLIN LAMANNA
MAKE BELIEVE MAURY GORTEMILLER
24 30 HEALING GARDEN PANTEA KARIMI
42 DUALITY THE GALLERY
DIVIDE BEN ZANK
12 18 ZOË BUCKMAN LET HER RAVE
THE TWINS AVA WILLIAMS
36 BEST IN SHOW JACKSON KRULE
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BEN ZANK
DIVIDE TEXT BY PAIGE LABUDA
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The body is present in these images. The body thrown into the open, isolated against its environment. It is tense, it is moving, and it is utterly still -- resting. Ripples in pink skin where muscles are taut mirror the ripples of sand, of metal. Hands engage with the ground beneath them, weight is thrown into feet, and a woman is thrown into the ocean. These are bodies out of context, taken for their physical weight by the camera, pulled from their existence, and floating somewhere unknown. Zank’s images inhabit this unfamiliar world, this limbo that is beautiful and uncertain. There is an inherent connection between the body and the ground upon which it stands: in the physicality of touch, of weight on earth, in the realm of existence, of a sense of place given by that very ground. Zank pulls the body and the viewer from their expected place into something far more unknown. 8
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THE SINGLE SELF
Marilyn Lamanna Interview by Will Stabach
Portraiture’s ability to explore and uncover truths about identity is what drives my mission as an artist, and storyteller. Identity is multifaceted, and my own personality varies depending on my environment, my mood, or the present company. “The Single Self” is a series of self-portraits that visually captures the multiplicity of an individual identity. The project plots these identities on a visual timeline. Even though I photographed each image within the span of about 3 months, they encompass years of personal adaptations. Sickness sometimes looks like a stairwell, and a daughter may look like her father, according to her mother. Sixteen years old is a fairytale in a forest, while nineteen is a queer woman with colorful bed sheets. Even though each photograph is a self-portrait, I wanted each to stand alone as its own identity, to further emphasize the fact that the definition of “self” is multi-layered, and constantly changing. But rather than interpreting the images as completely separate portraits, I see them collectively as a story. Parts of it are derived from people who influence my characteristics, such as my father, while others are formed by my own attributes and growth. Each portrait acts as both a disguise and a confession, as singular parts to a cohesive whole. What got you interested in photography? I always wanted to pursue acting in middle school, and I was always very imaginative, so once I discovered my camera, I was immediately drawn to self portraits. I could never really find models, so I was just like, I have this idea, I’ll just do it myself. What artists or media inspired you growing up? I’ve known about Cindy Sherman’s work forever; my mom had a few old photobooks in our living room. I think that makes a lot of sense for the work I started to do, as far as self portraits and taking on different personas. What artists or media inspire you now? Still Cindy Sherman. I like a few smaller photographers I’ve
found on social media who do film work. Katch Silva does a lot of weddings and portraits, and she always puts her own flair on them: really kooky effects, fuiji film. I’m starting up my own business right now, so I do a lot of weddings, but I really want to keep it creative and put my personal take on that. What is your favorite photograph? I don’t know why, but there’s this one Tyler Shields underwater portrait of a girl in a really big dress. I don’t know the title, but in high school it really inspired me to go the extra mile and put models underwater, go to the ocean, crazy stuff like that. I just thought it was so magical. What inspired this project? A lot of the Cindy Sherman inspiration came into play. I was trying to figure out the best way to do a culmination of my college work. There was a lot of pressure of it being my senior thesis, pressure to make it the “best thing” I’d ever done, so I wanted to encompass all my work. I was trying to figure out which aspect of myself I wanted to present. I came to the conclusion that there were endless variations of myself, so why not focus on that concept itself and do a series of different versions of me? Which of these was your favorite? The one based off my father. There’s a photo of him that looks exactly like this, he’s in a refinery and he’s working on something with chemicals and oil and one of the dudes was like, “Hey Jim, turn around!” I set up a tripod in this garage and had him help me out, and the fact that it was him directing me, it was like he was creating this image. It was crazy working together on that because its my image and he was the inspiration behind it, but he was also directing the photo while I posed for it. It was just so funny and I didn’t anticipate doing a photo like that. There’s a lot in my personality I get from him, so it was cool to emulate that.
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What motivates you to keep taking photos? Having the creative outlet, it just helps me get away from the world. It’s an escape. It doesn’t even have to be a thought out portrait. Just going out and taking pictures of landscapes or another model fulfills me, and when I go back and retouch the photos I get so energized. Advice for NYU freshman trying to begin a career in the arts? Don’t be afraid to not know anything. There are no dumb questions, and I feel like there’s a lot of stigma, especially coming in to NYU, that you came here for a reason and you need to bring the A-game. I found my freshman year I was really intimidated. There were things I was not good at that I felt I should have been good at: studio lighting, for example. The energy in this city is pretty cutthroat, but don’t be afraid to fake it ‘till you make it. What’s your next project? I applied to go back to the same camp I worked at last summer 14
in California, where I worked as camp photographer and art director. Even though it’s a few months away, I’ve already set aside that creative time for myself. I really want to create a more solid body of work this summer and include the beautiful landscape and nature out there. Any other thoughts on this series? This series was very eye-opening for me, and it was very cool to take a step backwards and look at my time at NYU. I’m really grateful for the whole thesis experience, and being able to do a thesis and really go deep. Doing a project like that was really therapeutic. Being able to do a creative project that was personally valuable was just great.
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Make Believe Maury Gortemiller
The images in the series “Make Believe” are in direct response to Donald Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal. While Trump’s personality and reputation certainly form a considerable presence in the work, the images are not meant to refer specifically to the President or the present political climate. Rather, the work is, at times, intended to lampoon the braggadocio and surliness of the authorial voice. In other instances, images evoke human qualities that I identify as absent or lacking in the book: a capacity for wonder, humility, and a recognition of one’s shortcomings. Each image title derives from one specific page of the book via a Dadaist ‘cut-up’ approach, in which words and phrases are decontextualized, reordered and repurposed. Ultimately, I intend the images and reconfigured text as an antidote and corrective to unbridled egotism and nationalism.
Top Left: The Advantage of Age is a Controlled Neurosis Top Right: One Night I Found Myself Stealing Wives 18
Right: I Saw Creation in the Wire Mesh of the Window
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Top Left: Good Security Eliminates Surprise Bottom Left: I Always Assume that Women Do Not Tell the Truth Above: I Was Ambitious at Night and Better With My Hands Than Most
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Top Center: I Can No Longer Distinguish Between My Dreams and Vain Illusions Bottom Left: The Explanation is Simple; I am Self- Destructive Bottom Right: A Patient Fire Will Destroy a Beautiful Apartment Right: You Can Con the American People with a Smile 22
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LET
HER Zoë Buckman
RAVE
Zoë Buckman is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions around the globe, in solo exhibitions across the United States, and through February of 2020 her sculpture “Champ” will be glowing on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. With feminist overtones, her work is particularly relevant in the #MeToo era and resonates with life as a woman at large.
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How do you balance the duality of delicate femininity and feminism in your practice? I’m fascinated by the intersection of the perceived feminine and the perceived masculine, and so most of my work explores both physically and symbolically some kind of duality. In this work, you use both neon and sculpture together to create a visual experience. Do you see multimedia continuing in the field of photography as it has in your pieces? Yes I’m super excited about the multimedia work coming out of lens based practices today! Being educated at ICP and starting your career in photography as a medium, how did your art evolve into what it is today, more of an installation based process?
An Interview with Zoë Buckman What was your inspiration in starting this project, specifically in the context of your other work “Every Curve”? With “Every Curve” I was working with text, poetry really: the lyrics of rappers Biggie and Tupac, and though Let Her Rave doesn’t use text specifically in it’s materiality, it is very much inspired by a Keats poem I studied at school, “Ode on Melancholy.” I found the writer’s approach to female emotion complex and problematic, so I was using the text as a way of exploring patriarchal constructs that keep women in a particular place.
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My evolution into more sculptural or installationbased work was not something I intended, but something that happened quite organically. After I left school I became a mother, and so my studio practice had to adjust to that change in circumstance. I found textiles and sewing something I could do between feeds, or something I take with me when traveling. It just made more sense for me and grew to be a practice I felt more comfortable with than photography. In the #MeToo era, where women’s stories are coming to light and starting to be listened to, do you find that the work you created in “Let Her Rave” has gained further depth or traction with the quickly adapting political climate since the project’s inception in 2015? In other words, do you find this work only becoming more relevant as stories hidden for years are uncovered? Great question, I do think the current political climate is providing an awakening for many in this country and is therefore shedding light on the work that I was always making.
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THE TWINS
Ava Williams
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It is so clear for me to see the beginning. I can see it like a timeline, where exactly I started calling it “The Twins” and why. I started it to explore the meaning of being two instead of one. To look into the mind of someone who has never had a singular identity. Someone who has two names, two faces, two personalities. I started this project in an unknowing attempt to figure out who I was, and since the beginning it has always generated more questions than answers. This project is about duality in its rawest form. What it means to see double, what it feels like to grow up with your identity tied down by the overlying fact that there are “two of you”. This project is founded on one of the most basic elements of design: repetition. “The Twins” explains what it feels like to grow up knowing you will never be one in a million and how that affects your identity. I have gone about my life documenting what it means to be a twin without realizing it. “The Twins” is piecing it all together. This project is mainly for people of a single embryo. They will never know the feeling of twinhood. They will never know the love we have. In the end, my work attempts to replicate the feelings I have while being with my sister. It attempts to pull the audience into the world we have lived in since conception. Be in our shoes, move around for a little while, and feel what we feel.
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HEALING GARDEN
a virtual reality project
PANTEA KARIMI 36
“Healing Garden” is a virtual reality project that I envisioned in 2017 after the medicinal botanical gardens of the Alhambra Palace in Andalusia, Spain. Andalusia was the birthplace of “The Herbal,” which is one of the most remarkable manuscripts of medicinal botany in the middle ages. The book was composed by the 12th c. Andalusian physician and scholar al-Ghafiqi and was copied and read by many healers and physicians throughout the following centuries. 37
Wearing VR headset, participants “enter” the “Healing Garden,” which is a courtyard with white arches, and ten plant beds around a water fountain on a floor that is covered with Moorish tiles. They use their own hands to pick a series of medicinal plants and arrange them in the plant beds. Thus, they create a virtual garden as a metaphor for reconnecting with nature for healing. The plants are modeled after my screen-printed images on paper, which were inspired by al-Ghafiqi’s illustrations in “The Herbal.” Water and fountains were integral parts of medieval Islamic gardens and palaces of Andalusia. The sound of water fountains and the moving reflections of buildings, trees and flowers on its rippling surface contributed to a unique, calming experience for the resident. Similarly, in my VR “Healing Garden,” participants have the opportunity to listen to the sound of a water fountain. The participant can then “walk” on the glowing Moorish tiles under the sun and pass through the Moorish arcades and enjoy her/his hand-crafted garden from a short distance.
Pantea Karimi is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. After attending the Art University in Iran for graphic design, Hastings College of Arts and Technology in England for printmaking and glassworks, and San Jose University for printmaking and painting, Karimi finds herself creating work at the intersection of these various mediums. Informed by archives and ancient scientific manuscripts, her portfolio as a whole speaks to science, identity, and the Iranian culture.
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BEST
IN SHOW Jackson Krule Text by Katie McGowan
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Best in Show: An award bestowed upon canines in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show starting in 1907 and continuing up to today. In his ongoing series of the same title, Jackson Krule examines highly trained show dogs with his camera, pointing focus specifically at handler and pooch. Krule’s artful use of intense flash enhances the images’ vivacity and brings a paparazzo sense to the collection; with animal names like “Banana Joe V Tani Kazari,” how could he not treat these creatures like stars? Almost more interesting than the dogs themselves, the handlers present as pageant moms by teasing poodle hair with spray and stuffing treats into whiskery snouts. Krule plays this balance of handler to dog as if they are codependent; of course, the dog needs its handler for food and shelter, but it also seems that these strained and eccentric individuals need the dogs as companions, livelihoods, and identities.
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THE
GALLERY
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Isabelle Beauchamp Madison Becerra Roxanne Dierking Nina Dietz Chloe Dugourd Natasha Fenga Mohammed Amir Hamja Derek Koffi-Ziter Paige Labuda Spandita Malik Meghan Marshall Cora Rafe Tejan Rahim Clara Reed Madeleine Roodberg Colby Tarsitano Junlin Zhu
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“Self Inverted” is a series of portraits of gay, Chinese individuals shown in negative form representing, and respecting, the participants’ wishes to not come out “completely” to the public. Through color inversion presentation, participants become less recognizable and “protected” from the cursory view of passersby. The negative images simultaneously provide participants a safe space to mediate between a positioning of visibility and concealment.
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Previous: Natashsa Fenga Left: Junlin Zhu Above: Isabelle Beauchamp
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I was reading about drag How it’s such a drag to indulge my unrealistic fantasies How the real performance isn’t the spectacle but the sadness underneath My sadness is a spectacle to be consumed by vicious viewers My sadness is not tight or contained it is not small enough to be a subtext it’s as large as the drag itself I’m giving you daddy issues realness I’m giving you shattered self confidence realness I’m giving you building emotional walls and never trusting any man realness I’m giving you never had someone to teach me how to shave realness I’m giving you never had his father come to his high school plays realness I’m giving you spent one Christmas where my father couldn’t make it home realness I’m giving you messes around with older men realness I’m giving you not wanting to be called boy but definitely wanting to call him sir realness I’m giving you only writing one parent as an emergency contact realness I’m giving you having your father ask you about what you are writing about and scanning for any answer that isn’t “uhhh, you” realness I’m giving you feeling selfish for wanting time with him on a holiday realness I’m giving you feeling abandoned by him and chained to him at the same time realness I’m giving you wishing he had run away completely so this wouldn’t be an issue realness I’m giving you wanting a fucking apology realness I’m giving you no fucking understanding realness I don’t understand you Isaac Roberto Lopez Above: Derek Koffi-Ziter 52
Right: Chloe Dugourd
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Below: Roxanne Dierking Right: Madison Rose
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Left: Cora Rafe Above: Spandita Malik 57
baby’s breath had my baby’s arms per sweet request. i sleep breathing her in summer. sweat in broderie rain-dress. fog over window glass careful under her skin— holy reverie. lying here is not love though blind. maybe like the blood damp in my hair dark and drying. humor me she presses on— i give her my ribs. ink blot baby inside me carving rot with her coy teeth— son of a tongue slicing bedside window. (her body— —the penumbra) baby’s breath falling like heavy snow. slipping into an empty— precious vase. my darling girl pouring embrace into next day— light eating moth-lace. i wait here as she lies bloody elsewhere— -ELLEN LI
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Above: Meghan Marshall
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Right: Mohammad Amir Hamja
AN IDENTITY FOR FREEDOM I met these four young Rohingya students, who live under fake identities as Bangladeshi to study in Coxbazar. They go back and forth almost every day to the camp through false pretenses to have basic rights. Like the deceptive beauty of this sea, one end comes with lots of joy and happiness, while the other with the crisis of humans.
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Left: Kush Dhungana Above: Nina Dietz
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Above: Colby Tarsitano
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Above and Left: Clara Reed
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A FAMILIAR PLACE: A TALE OF TWO HOUSES Home is not a solid - or at least it never has been for me. A house with steel beams and a concrete foundation and fiberglass in the walls is a solid - but this does not make it home. Every Friday afternoon, we would switch houses - me with a big suitcase in a minivan off to a different parent’s home for the week. My mother stayed in the same place until this summer - that one was home when we were there. My father switched often - for women, for money, for remodels. Too many houses and none were really home. Now my brothers and I live in dorms or in basements - new cities, somehow becoming home. There are always beds and dressers and watercups and windows, always sunlight and family. And now there is construction and change and a new house with a new bed and a new dresser, and an old house half new - stuck.
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Left: Paige Labuda Below: Madeleine Roodberg
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Above: Makeda Flood
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Above and Left: Tejan Rahim
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EDITORS: Nina Dietz Katie McGowan HEAD OF DESIGN: Alyssa Dickson Clara Reed DESIGN: Taylor Bissey Chloe Dugourd Paige Elyse Labuda Emilio Miguel Torres Sophie Yewell Raymond Warren Zrike PHOTO EDITORS: Isabelle Beauchamp Owen Gavis Eric Hart Jr. Kavya Krishna Alina Patrick Kendall Ross Will Stabach FACULTY ADVISORY: Mark Jenkison Editha Mesina SPECIAL THANKS: Tom Beaver Edgar Castillo Tom Drysdale Allyson Green, Dean Niki Kekos Patricia McKelvin Lorie Novak Caleb Savage Caroline Wolfe Papocchia Todd Pettiford Morgan Sloan Deb Willis, Chair of NYU Tisch, DPI
GALLERY CONTRIBUTORS: (in order of appearance) Natasha Fenga Junlin Zhu Isabelle Beauchamp Derek Koffi-Ziter Chloe Dugourd Roxanne Dierking Madison Rose Cora Rafe Spandita Malik Meghan Marshall Mohammad Amir Hamja Nina Dietz Colby Tarsitano Clara Reed Paige Labuda Madeleine Roodberg Makeda Flood Tejan Rahim FEATURED ARTISTS: (in order of appearance) Ben Zank, benzank.com @benzank Marilyn Lamanna, marilynlamanna.co @marilynlamanna Maury Gortemiller, maurygortemiller.com @elmaurygee Zoë Buckman, zoebuckman.com @zoebuckman Ava Williams, avawilliamsphoto.com @adventureava Pantea Karimi, panteakarimi.com @karimipantea Jackson Krule, jacksonkrule.com @jacksonkrule FEATURED WRITERS: (in order of appearance) Isaac Roberto Lopez Ellen Li Kush Dhungana GENEROUS SUPPORT FROM: Tisch Profunds: The Office of the Dean and the Tisch Undergraduate Student Council Tisch Undergraduate Student Council Tisch Office of Student Affairs The Department of Photography and Imaging Printed at GRAFIKA Edition of 500
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Back Cover: Jackson Krule Inside Back Cover: Madeline Roodberg
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