Artists to Watch -- Kerry Skarbakka

Kerry Skarbakka

Kerry Skarbakka's dramatically gestured imagery, is quite the contemporary take on the art of posing.  In his series, The Struggle to Right Oneself, Skarbakka's photographs of himself performing back bowing maneuvers are both a physical and aesthetic accomplishment, placing the edgy and rugged muscular movements found in, perhaps, vert-ramp skateboarding into a context of Escheresquely defined gravity, where subjects are broadly stepping across vertical walls, up balconies, off of verandas and bridges, or simply through windows.  These might seem the stills of a very masochistic stuntman on the set, but they are in point of fact feats of photography and convey strong ideas.  

Against the backdrop of visually beautiful, if not ordinary scenes, are impossible, yet casual gymnastics performed by everyman type characters -- resonating Skarbakka's inherent theme that everyday life is a death-defying act. Referencing  the crucifixion and 70's action sitcom stunts in turn, the characters seem self sacrificial for no apparent reason.  When falling from a building, Skarbakka's subject's gestures do not imply intention or defeat, as in a suicide attempt.  They instead exude a composure of certainty and tense comfort, like cats aware that they will land on their feet.  The cathartic resolution then is not shown but implied by the finely captured gestures of the actor/artist.  Death is defied ultimately, even if the risk of life never really had to be there in the first place, as in the apartment bound robe clad chef in Kitchen.   Further reading then implies that the edge traversed so closely is not physical in nature but mental, what we see is not what the characters are doing -- it is how they are feeling.  In creating the incredibly kinetic stills, Skarbakka is perhaps risking his own life and limb to convey, ultimately through metaphor of gesture, what it feels like to dread the ordinary moments in our day to day affairs, and to recognize that that struggle alone makes all of us fall guys.  For further viewing, visit http://www.skarbakka.com/portfolios/struggle.htm. 

Artists to Watch -- Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown

If ever a painter showcased the melted flesh of humanity's imperfection, Glenn Brown might be him.  If ever a hidden vault of portraits of the corrupt souls of famous paintings' subjects existed in some cluttered closet, Glenn Brown might have painted them.  If he had been available to paint Hurd Hatfield's portrait he surely would have jumped at the opportunity, but does this define Brown's work or even begin to characterize its effect?

Looking at the broad range of his images one could not say for sure.  As if skinned and captured, many of Brown's portraits are grippingly objectionable, but so tastefully and masterfully rendered that they exhibit naught but the highest aesthetic sense behind them.  Initially appearing to be mixed and crossed tube-squeezed markings of oil, expression unabashedly emerges from the faces in portrait.  In each, Brown has cut out a figure in the carpet from seemingly chaotic strokes.  The impressions are undeniable and unlike any other artist's work, and thus call for a new reading of facial interpretation -- that of the subtlest recognition of what peers at us -- whether it has eyes and all those other features or simply gaping holes where they might have been.  Through the unrecognizable sometimes the universal is more clearly shown

Artists to Watch -- John Stezaker

John Stezaker

A natural visual wit, John Stezaker isn't merely collaging two photographs of disparate persons – he is unveiling to the viewer a preexisting and undiscovered presence through the careful manipulation of the most human of human impressions, the face.  The notion of identity is intensely distorted in Stezaker’s ingeniously partitioned imagery.  If a face is the stamp of the soul, then what happens when one’s most revealing features are wedged into another’s?  A chaos of identity ensues and the familiar becomes immediately alien.

 

Thus, we find looking at us – in terribly uncomfortable grins and oddly flirtatious eyes – the unmixed yin and yang of otherwise typically glamorous visages.  Stezaker excavates from the vintage headshots of Hollywood actors and actresses a grotesque retardation without altering a single feature.  Behind this apparent effortlessness lies the unique vision of the artist, whose innate sense of cropping, composition and collage ushers in a highly aesthetic series of images amazingly shocking for how straightforward their assemblage is.     

 

For further viewing, visit: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/john_stezaker.htm

Artists to Watch -- John Sanchez

John Sanchez

Throughout the gradually all-consuming encroachment of the Industrial Revolution and its unaesthetic progeny, art has slowly shied away from the sentimental representation of the cities and everyday scenes in which we exist.  Darkening over time from the bright heyday of the Impressionists’ take on Paris and the French countryside, to Hopper’s epochal modern era Nighthawks, the perception of our manmade environments seems to have taken – according to the art of the twentieth century – a final turn towards utter disenchantment. 

Enter John Sanchez and his softly focused streetscapes of dewy asphalt and diffused lights.  In them, we see a resurrection of lost sweetness from the retired flesh of the dismal.  The late night vistas capture what many dreamy denizens who have spent countless hours behind the wheel of a car waiting, perhaps, for a light to turn green, have felt on certain nostalgic nights – the cathartic romance of a certain resignation to one’s trapped circumstance.  In doing so, Sanchez returns us to the perspective that our world is, to this day, charmed.

For more viewing visit: http://dorschgallery.com/artist/5