Tonight!!! William Greiner opening at Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Loungers
Noac, 1995, Digital C-Type Print, Signed & Numbered Verso

I am exhausted, spent and still unfinished with my final projects for the School year but I have to go to this for a bit tonight. I'm looking forward to seeing the final images in printed form. So far, I have only viewed Greiner's work on his website and his blog.

FALLEN PARADISE — William Greiner
May 1 — June 27

OPENING RECEPTION: May 1, 6pm — 8pm

This is the underbelly of pre-Katrina New Orleans. Greiner presents an image of a city that was already devastated, by neglect and abandonment, long before natural disaster struck. His imaging of New Orleans' urban vernacular is perceptively pictured through a carefully constructed use of color, form and content.

William Greiner's modus operandi is the American Color Tradition — the snapshot that isn't. Here, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. The seemingly objective actuality of the city, its banality, its ordinary everyday impression, is transformed into a vista of flush saturated palettes of color. Born, raised and (until Katrina) living and working in the city, New Orleans has always been an importnt source of inspiration for Greiner's work.

Here, a decade of looking and picturing his immediate environment, is brought together and displayed for the first time. Fallen Paradise is a celebration of apparent incidental imagery that is, of course, abound in formal devices — frame, vantage point, shape and line. Although there exists an autobiographical subtext, Greiner is most successful in compelling us to also look, not just at his city, but at the photograph itself. Whilst the importance of his subject does not disappear, these images function as photographic artifact — at once, they are observation and cultural object.

William Geiner lives and works in Baton Roughe, Louisiana.

KLOMPCHING GALLERY

111 Front Street, Suite 206
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Thinking about Art/Photography blogs

Alec Soth, Bonnie (with a photograph of an angel), Port Gibson, Mississippi 2000

Alec Soth’s departure to blogging has left a deafening silence in the Internet for me. From September 3rd, 2006 through September 30th, 2007, Alec provided a haven for not only reading about photography but a virtual hub to openly discuss and debate photography away from the Flickr and forum hounds. However, as I think about the mark he made in the community the silence has made me think about the roll of blogging in the photographic and art communities. These questions keep circling through my head:

• What and how do blogs function in the long term?
• What happens to his blog now that it is idly sitting on his server?
• What is it now but an archive of artist’s thoughts over the course of a year? How refined is it? Would Alec change anything he wrote?
• What does Alec think of his yearlong experiment? Is this it or will he ever return and blog/write again?
• What would a blog from Jeff Wall (1980 or today) read like? Longer more theoretical posts? Would that work? Does Jeff Wall Google himself?
• Is there a place for an October like blog? would the Art and Photography communities care?
• Do long form and/or more theoretical essays have a place in the blog format?
• How does blogging about photography affect your art work and your standing with in the art world? which follows What did Alec Soth get out of making his blog?

All this was sparked by a recient post from Christian Patterson who is feeling burnt out on the whole blog thing. We’ll see what happens with his blog as the months roll on it doesn’t seem like he has thrown in the towel yet.

As for me, I feel like I never really put enough effort into this. Therefore, this next year I hope to be more vigilant with this blog thing, give it a real show, run it through its paces, and then evaluate it. Maybe a medium of journals and magazines can better discuss photography but maybe there is a place for this as well—despite some recent dwindling numbers?

New York Gallery ratings

Interesting new blog How's My Dealing? is a place for Artists to share their positive/negative experiences with critics, curators, and galleries. There aren't too many comments so far and some of the comments a bit on the whiny chip on my shoulder side but this experiment could be quite interesting and telling if the right people find it and start posting constructive comments. With enough support it could turn into a Epinions for the art world.