Isadore & Dunn - Markings

For the last few months I’ve been working with my wife and partner Sarah, to establish a gallery Isadore&Dunn here in Brooklyn. Online (for now), our goal is to promote work from smart and evocative emerging artists, to help them gain an audience, and to build and grow a community.
Today we opened our first show. After two months of sifting through a ton of incredible submissions, it is up. It’s a small step, but I am proud of the work we’ve done and excited to see how this unfolds our futures, engaging with and supporting the art community.

Our first show got a surprisingly robust volley of submissions. Many great works from a range of artists. Photography, drawing, painting, sculpture… and all engaging takes on the theme of Markings.

Walk Like You – Helena Almeida

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Helen Almeida is a Portuguese artist and photographer who was active creating surreal photography and collage from the 1967 on into the 80's.

Her work plays with the line between the art and the viewer, breaking the forth wall, acknowledging the medium. Playing with expectations. It also makes the artist herself, the subject of the work. Another boundary to play against.

From Wikipedia:

There is no difference between the work and artist's body. In her work, a woman's image is always present, but the image is transformed in a painting or drawing. Almeida avoided creating self-portraits. Rather, "My work is my body, my body is my work." "I am the canvas."[5] Her work has been described as "halfway between a performance (capturing an instant), and body art (the body itself as the absolute protagonist).[6]

More:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Almeida

http://www.artnet.com/artists/helena-almeida/

Walk Like You – Marilyn Minter

Last year I had the opportunity to see PRETTY/DIRTY at the Brooklyn Museum I had gone to the museum for something else entirely, but wandered into this show and it floored me. These large scale images eight feet, ten feet across. Paintings on Aluminum panel, photoreal based on amazingly lush and layered photographs. Video of high heeled feet smashing glass ornaments, water, paint and pearls.

There’s a lot to go into the sex positive feminism of these works, or the combining of dirty rough grit with beauty, and what beauty actually is. What our relationships are to our own sexuality the artifice of makeup and dress. I honestly should have to read more interviews and more from the artist directly but for now suffice it to say that these works are technically impressive and undeniably powerful.

Walk Like You - Alex Prager

Alex Prager is a photographer and filmmaker who trades in beauty, nostalgia and surrealism.

There's a great deal of storytelling happening in these photos. Beyond just one surreal moment, or some reference to the past, she is setting up some scenes with many things happening at once. A car crash, a dead lover. Almost like a renaissance painting or comic book spread. Everything happening at once. A much bigger story implied by the specifics of this captured moment.

There's a lot of ambiguity here, but there's also implied depth.

Coming from animation or film I think this is a very interesting way to think about storytelling. Can you put enough details in the image to imply a bigger story? Can you tease them? Draw them in with a few threads but not weave the whole thing together? I think this is a powerful idea for film or photography alike.

Walk Like You: Guy Bourdin

'Bourdin's photographs are often richly sensual but also rely heavily on provocation and ability to shock. Additionally integrating erotic, surreal, sinister components, Bourdin configured a whole new visual vocabulary with which to associate the goods of haute-couture. The narratives were strange and mysterious, often plainly exhibiting violence and graphic sexuality. Evident through astute reading of his compositional and thematic presentation, Bourdin profited from the influence of a diverse collection of contemporaries: first and foremost, his mentor Man Ray, but also the photographer Edward Weston, surrealist painters Magritte and Balthus, and Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel.'

–Wikipedia

Okay why do I like this? They are clever, they are sexy, they are deliberate and directed. They are weird. There are stories happening here, or maybe not. Maybe we just have 'art'. It becomes sort of open ended. And theres also some darkness implied, but in each instance its sort of light and whimsical.

Legs? A body? is this a murder? Oh but her shoes are beautiful.

I don't know what to say, but this work occupies a very unique space, and I really enjoy it.

Wild Nothing – Album Art Video

Wild Nothing. To Know You / TV Queen

Wild Nothing did an amazing job taking the photography from Life of Pause and creating a video actually living inside the space depicted on the album art. This one is buoyed also by the fact that I love the record and these songs particularly.

Directed by Shawn Brackbill.

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Walk Like You: Leiter

Saul Leiter as one of the original on the street, lifestyle, candid New York photographers has maybe one of the best eyes ever. Every composition, shooting through things, refletions, shapes color, silhouettes, stolen moments. they are all lush and evocative and wonderful. I have many self portraits shot reflected on glass that are a personal homage to his work. And many other things I've shot owe to his composition, or use of foreground middle and background to internally frame the subjects.