Imaginarium - QCP Emerging Curators Program

IMAGINARIUM curated by Belinda Kochanowska David La Roche Katerina Belkina Caleb Weintraub Catherine Nelson Sonia Payes Laura Seeds

C CP

IMAGINARIUM curated by Belinda Kochanowska

The Emerging Curators Program is a proud initiative of the Queensland Centre for Photography (QCP) in response to government funding cuts, which resulted in the loss of our physical exhibition space. As sad as this is, every cloud has a silver lining and technology offers us a platform to continue promoting high quality photo media art. Through the Emerging Curators Program, emerging curators now have a space to curate exhibitions to an international audience. Each online publication will present a curated exhibition of two established international artists, two established Australian artists and two emerging Australian artists.

To celebrate the first QCP Emerging Curators Program online exhibition, “Imaginarium” brings forth photo media work by artists who have used digital technology and post production techniques to create images which create imaginary worlds and explore inner realms. This showcase contemplates the potential that technology offers us to fully realise our imaginative and creative potential. “Imaginarium” celebrates the new vocabulary technology offers the visual language of an artist, and new ways of exhibiting and promoting art to the public.

Katerina Belkina Fly! 2010

Belinda Kochanowska is an emerging photo media artist based in Brisbane, Australia. Under the mentorship of the Queensland Centre for Photography, Kochanowska’s practice frequently explores issues of memory, identity and physicality. She has exhibited in various group and solo exhibitions in Australia. Kochanowska also works as the Executive Officer for the Queensland Centre for Photography.

www.belindakochanowska.com

DAVID LA ROCHE Australia

David La Roche as a “digital native” shares the unique experience with his generation in having not experienced a world without the Internet and digital technology. La Roche embraces our technological condition in his work by reimagining 2D photographs with 3D scanning and computed generated models and then returning the 3 Dimensional result to the 2 Dimensional plane as a rendered image. Through this digital journey, anomalies and artefacts result. Photographic truth is questioned, as is the changing role of images in our society. As La Roche states: “This work aims not to raise alarm, but to quietly question the changing role of images, and the infinitely malleable modes of representation brought about by the digital.”

It is this “infinitely malleable mode of representation” which also provides a conduit for infinite imaginative output, which undoubtedly will be explored and brought to life by generations of future photo media artists to come. As such, digital native artists such as La Roche provide an exciting insight in the future of the photographic image and the vast imaginative potential of digital technologies.

Next spread: David La Roche Cables (detail) 2014.

David La Roche is an emerging artist whose origin in commercial photography is evident in the aesthetic and technical choices within his work. La Roche graduated from the Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Photography (Honours) in 2014. His work has been shown across various exhibitions and art journals. La Roche will be exhibiting his work at photo l.a and Photo Contemporary in Los Angeles in 2015.

David La Roche Self Portrait 2014.

www.davidlarochephoto.com

KATERINA BELKINA Russia / Germany “Katerina Belkina is an artist who views man as a creature who looks for the boundaries of the connection with the universe by using soul and reason. As the confrontation with the impossibility thereof is great, he creates his own universe.”

Marike van der Knaap, Art Historian Katerina Belkina’s work presents us with hyper real imagery which transports the self image of the artist, who models in her own work, into a lonely metropolis which is symbolic of the psychological and physical disconnection the modern world imposes on its human inhabitants. Drawing from the tradition of Russian Iconography, her face forward portraits are at once discomforting and otherworldly.

Belkina is not truly alone in her image because she is sharing the experience with us in her gaze, just like an icon, her gaze is otherworldly – we are not quite connected with her, we observe her, and she observes us. But in doing so, there is an understanding we share her experience – lost in a spiritual dystopia that has been shaped by our modern materialistic world.

“I see the city like something as independent, living and non living at the same time… like artificial intelligence it attracts, fascinates…

Sometimes we feel the same emptiness inside and we want to fill it, but [instead] we fill the empty spaces outside… we begin to understand our accomplishments are an illusion and material goods imaginary.”

Katerina Belkina, 2014 This tension and lonely void enhances the feeling of a world in which we struggle to connect meaning with materialistic wealth. Belkina masterfully harnesses digital photography and post production techniques to create these crystal clear, almost alien environments.

She arranges several photographic elements into an image, which is then manipulated through Photoshop and sometimes enhanced with charcoal, paint and pencil.

Katerina Belkina Enter 2011.

Katerina Belkina was born in Samara, Russia and studied at the School of Arts, Samara from 1985 – 2000, the Design Department of Advertisement, Academy of Arts Petrov – Vodkin, Sasara from 1989 to 1993 and the Photo School of Michael Murosin between 2000 – 2002. Exhibitions of her work followed in Moscow and Paris. Katerina Belkina was nominated for the prestigious Kandinsky Prize (comparable to the British Turner prize) in Moscow in 2007. Belkina was awarded first place in the Moscow international Foto Awards for Fine Art this year. Other accolades include first placing for the 2012 and 2008 IPA International Photography Awards (Los Angeles), 2010 Px3 Photo Competition (Paris). Since 2005. Belkina has exhibited in group and solo shows in: Russia, Netherlands, USA, Germany, Canada, Belgium, Italy, France, Korea, Monaco, Austria, Hungary. Katerina Belkina is represented by Galerie Lilja Zakirova (Netherlands), Absolute Art Gallery (Belgium), Duncan Miller Gallery (USA), FOTOLOFT GALLERY (Moscow). Katerina Belkina is based in Berlin, Germany.

www.belkina.ru

Katerina Belkina Weighing Up 2010.

Katerina Belkina Red Moscow 2011.

CALEB WEINTRAUB USA Caleb Weintraub is the current Head of Painting at Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana. His background in painting has led to the creation of digital works through 3D software, initially to build models to inform his painting and sculptures. From these beginnings, Weintraub has masterfully embraced the digital medium to create imaginative worlds, which draw heavily from art history and literature.

Weintraub has fully embraced the possibilities digital technologies offer an artist with enormous success. Weintraub best describes his work as follows: “It is no secret that the future of the way we inhabit space and the way we perceive space is evolving. The rapid development of technology: the advent of devices such as Google Glass, the Oculus Rift, the growing popularity of immersive video game experiences in which people assume proxy lives –genetic tinkering in laboratories– it is all leading to the possibility, maybe the inevitability, of our living in a world that is quite different from the one we know— a new reality.

My work is a re-imagining that draws from art history and literature, pop culture, and the news. These are vestiges of a world we might recognize, a world half remembered or misremembered and reincarnated in a fanciful way. Incongruous plants and animals exist side by side. Climates are theoretical. Children reign. Bits and pieces from the past, from politics, and from religion

are stitched together. It is a patchwork of places and persons, rituals and amusements, where clichés are turned on their heads... art historical clichés, orientalist clichés, emotional clichés. I am dreaming up a world that is the result of our civilization - saturated with information — exhilarating, disturbing, and opaque.

If paintings can be thought of as portals, these are windows into a hypothetical place, a hybrid reality, part past, part future. As digital images on a screen as well as physical objects, painting/prints that hang on walls, and have unique surfaces, these works have dual existences. In that way they are analogous to our current and precarious position as people of matter, beings existing in a physical space but simultaneously perched on the brink of something else— something spectral.

The palettes, the textures, and the imagery imply a world that is utterly fluid, totally adaptable— Where this may be one person’s conjured space, another’s might look entirely different. We are to believe that the trees here could change at any minute— a new pattern may be imported, a character swapped— a sky stolen.

My work is not quite a warning. And not quite a celebration. It is a wondering.”

Caleb Weintraub earned a BFA from Boston University and an MFA from The University of Pennsylvania.

He has had solo shows in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. His paintings and sculptures have appeared in art fairs in the US and abroad in such places as Miami, London, and Zurich. Group shows include exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Hyde Park Art Center, and Scion Art Space in Los Angeles. Weintraub has been an artist-in-residence at Redux Art Center in South Carolina and The Santa Fe Art Institute. His work was included in the book, “Signs of the Apocalypse/ Rapture”, distributed by University of Chicago Press.

calebweintraub.com

Caleb Weintraub All That Glitters 2014.

Caleb Weintraub Eye for an eye 2014.

Caleb Weintraub Plain Sight 2014.

CATHERINE NELSON Belgium / Australia

Catherine Nelson describes herself as a painter with a camera.

Nature photography, visual poetry and digital techniques combine to produce five tantalising dreamlike forests in her new series, Expedition. Nelson’s images are each constructed over a period of 2 months, piece by piece, from a palette of images taken from various locations in Australia. The resulting collage challenges the immediacy of the photographic image. This is photography at its imaginative best, relying on memory to reconstruct habitats, just as one would when privately exploring ones imagination.

In doing so, memory and it’s interplay with imagination, particularly that of a child, is questioned and we are challenged to consider how memory can embellish and distort, in ways which are nostalgic and magical, such as happy childhood memories tend to do.

The Expedition series is based on a boy’s experience of his environment. Drawing on memories of growing up in Australia, Nelson’s work blurs the line separating realism and imagination.

“Living in West Europe, on each return to Australia, I am always struck by the difference in climate and landscape and my familiarity with it. I felt drawn to creating a body of work that would be a response to its distinctive beauty and my wonderment when confronted with it. It is deeply nostalgic work.”

Catherine Nelson, 2014

Catherine Nelson began her art education as a painter in 1992 in London, at the Chelsea College of Art

Catherine Nelson Lost 2013.

Foundation. In 1993 she returned to Sydney, graduating from the College of Fine Arts in 1996 with majors in painting, drawing and video. She then moved quickly into computer animation and gradually into visual effects for film, which at that time was a young, burgeoning industry. Since 2000 she has worked on such films as

Next spread: Catherine Nelson Pond 2013.

Moulin Rouge, Harry Potter, Australia and 300, working and living around the world in cities such as London, Rome, Milan, Brussels, Reykjavik, Bratislava as well as her home town, Sydney. Photography has always been a very playful means for her to express her creativity. She has been a keen photographer throughout her travels.

In 2008 she returned to the studio to dedicate her time fully to her own art practice. Since the creation of the Future Memories series in 2010, her work has been exhibited in Paris, Beijing, Seoul, Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York and throughout Australia. In 2010 she won the Royal Bank of Scotland Client Choice Award, as well as being exhibited in the Blake Director’s Cut Exhibition. In 2011 she was included in both the Bowness Photography Prize Finalist Exhibition and The Royal Bank of Scotland Emerging Artist Award Finalist Exhibition.

In 2013 she won the AX3 Award for Photographer of the Year, as well as being selected again for the Blake Director’s Cut Exhibition. Nelson is represented by Galerie Paris-Beijing in Paris, Brussels and Bejing, Michael Reid Gallery in Sydney, Gallerysmith in Melbourne, and Jennifer Kostuik Gallery in Vancouver.

www.catherinenelson.net

Catherine Nelson Gully 2013.

SONIA PAYES Australia Sonia Payes is an acclaimed international new media artist, photographer and more recently ventured into sculpture. Over her many years of practice, Payes’ photography has incorporated a broad spectrum of techniques and subjects, showing she is equally at ease with choice and chance. She gained attention with her early portraiture, with her images that both captured and defined her subjects. Her photographic essays of 60 significant artists have been published in the 400-page book: ‘UNTITLED: Portraits of Australian Artists’ (2007).

and muse who materialises from the ether of veils and fog to become a four-faced goddess ready to lead a new breed of humanity into an unsure future. Re Generation is the point of transition that moves the personal and specific into the universal. Once this conceptual leap was made the floodgates opened and Payes vision for the future of humanity was similarly morphed into video works, three-dimensional sculptures and manipulated photographic prints.”

More recently, Payes’ work has embraced the surreal and futuristic wonderings. Payes work in Re Generation is a fascinating example of the exciting territory a visual artist can discover and navigate with digital technologies. Curator and Winthrop Professor, Ted Snell, explains:

Payes combines deeply personal subject matter with digital technologies, video, animation and three-dimensional sculptures to imagine worlds and future destinations. The work Corn and Quarries, of which a still is presented in this exhibition, has been described by Robert Nelson as depicting “…terrifying terrain, where the head-grass becomes a forest of freakish fodder, a GM crop bio engineered with human DNA, an organic field colonised by geometry.”

“…Payes embraces technology and the opportunities it presents to extend her work and its emotional potential and to stretch it quite literally into the third dimension.

Central to the work is that image of the artist’s daughter

Sonia Payes ReGeneration 2013.

A Master Photographer with the Australian Institute of Photography, she studied at the Australian College of Photography, Arts and Communication and at The Melbourne School of Art and Photography. She has exhibited in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions in 2014 include Photo LA with the Queensland Centre for Photography; Wild Cards curated by Bill Henson for the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, and Re Generation curated

by Prof Ted Snell and presented in association with the Queensland Festival of Photography. Payes recently won the prestigious McClelland Achievement Prize (MAP) and a survey exhibition in 2016. Her works are held in numerous public, corporate and private collections throughout Australia and overseas. Sonia Payes is represented by Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne, Australia.

www.soniapayes.com

Sonia Payes Corn and Quarries 2013.

LAURA SEEDS Australia

Laura Seeds’ series “Head Spaces” invites us into the metaphysical landscapes of the human psyche. Her experimental printing techniques and digital interventions marry the technical possibilities of the digital age with the physical intervention of the artist’s hand. Stripping portraits down to greyscale images in Photoshop, Seeds prints a portrait and then prints over it again with the colour original. A simple process discovered by mistake, Seeds has successfully exploited a chance discovery into portraits that prompt its audience to speculate on the subjects internal world. The portrait becomes a deeper representation and reflection of the subject she has photographed, only to be discovered after her process has revealed another point of view of the straight portrait.

Laura Seeds Emily 2014.

Laura Seeds holds a Bachelor or Photography majoring in Creative Advertising and Art Practices. Seeds work has been published in Triple J Magazine and Time Off. Seeds has exhibited in the 2high Festival 2013 and internationally with the Photocopy Club in Brighton and Johannesburg. Seeds’ personal work is often exploratory and experimental portraiture that strives to delve into more psychological areas such as anxiety, identity and sexuality.

lauraseeds.com

Laura Seeds Ariel (detail) 2014.

C CP

Queensland Centre for Photography

Emerging Curators Program

PO Box 5848, West End Q 4101, Australia admin@qcp.org.au +61 4 09 349 952

IMAGINARIUM Curator: Belinda Kochanowska December 2014 - February 2015

www.qcp.org.au www.lucidamagazine.com www.qcpinternational.com

Cover image: Katerina Belkina Morning Message (detail) 2010.

Director: Camilla Birkeland Executive Officer: Belinda Kochanowska

Š copyright 2014: QCP and the artists

The QCP Emerging Curators Program showcases the work of international and Australian photo-media artists in an online exhibition catalogue. The program aims to foster connections between the national and international art communities and the QCP, presenting work produced by innovative photo media artists to curators, academics, students, the viewing public and Australian artists.

QCP IS PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY

Brisbane Digital Images