SUMMARY: During the pandemic lockdown, the speaker relocated to Montana, where life was more normal, to work on two projects: a memoir and drone photography. Fascinated by boundaries, they explored aerial views that reveal distinct cultural and geographical divisions. Their past 30-year experience involved using an 8×10 view camera, requiring precise, single-shot decision-making due to economic reasons and a love for the process. The drone, however, offered a novel, unpredictable perspective, marking a shift from traditional methods. Inspired by timeless art from past centuries, the speaker sought to avoid artistic repetition and aimed for enduring relevance in their work.

“It's like playing a sport. There are rules.”

We meet Stephen Shore, one of the most outstanding photographers of our time, who took a close look at the USA from above.

“For about 30 years, from the early 70s to the early 2000s, my primary camera was an 8×10 inch view camera, which is like a big 19th-century camera on a tripod. The physical nature of the camera, the size, all lead to very conscious decision-making. With the drone is completely different. I have no idea. The drone could be half a mile away from me. And I move it to the right; I move it forward 10 feet. I have absolutely no idea what will come into the picture, and it's very exciting. I am on this voyage of discovery.”

“The perspective has been in my mind since the late 70s. And a critic who was looking at the pictures said, it's like a God's Eye View. And I think it means that there's a view that is more encompassing than what we could see on the ground at eye level. But not so far up that it becomes just topographic. But it is close enough for it to be human almost.”

Stephen Shore was born in New York in 1947. His photographs are attentive to ordinary scenes of daily experience, yet through color–and composition–Shore transforms the mundane into subjects of thoughtful meditation. A restaurant meal on a road trip, a billboard off a highway, and a dusty side street in a Texas town are all seemingly banal images, but upon reflection, they subtly imply meaning. Color photography attracted Shore for its ability to record the range and intensity of hues seen in life.

In 1971, at age twenty-three, he became the first living photographer to have a one-person show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His 1982 book, Uncommon Places, became a bible for young photographers seeking to work in color because, along with that of William Eggleston, his work exemplified the fact that the medium could be considered art.

Stephen Shore's work has been exhibited and collected at and by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Library of Congress, Washington DC, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has received numerous awards, which you can find listed here: https://www.303gallery.com/artists/stephen-shore/biography. Since 1982, he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College in New York's Hudson Valley. Under the title Vehicular & Vernacular, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris opened a vast retrospective of Shore's work in May 2024.

Stephen Shore was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at 303 Gallery in New York on the occasion of his show presenting new drone photographs of the American landscape.

Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Edited by: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, and C.L. Davids Fond og Samling.

#photographer #photography

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SUMMARY: Art runs in my family, with my great-grandfather and grandfather as hobbyists and my uncle formally trained. Growing up surrounded by abstract paintings sparked my curiosity. As an artist, I work in a dialogical manner, merging text, motif, and context. I'm restless, exploring various forms like painting, theory, and curating. I collect art, driven by emotion and a desire for complex juxtapositions. I value the flow of information and artistic exchange. Art bridges private and public spaces, as societal views on surveillance evolve. Ultimately, I cherish memories over material accumulation, seeing them as fundamental to storytelling and collective history.

We met a man of seemingly endless energy – the Danish artist Claus Carstensen, who resists being labeled or put into categories.

“As an artist, I work dialogically. The dialogue of art means that text and motif and everything behind, next to, before, and after the motif matter as much to me in my work as the motif and the text.”

“The great thing about art and poetry is its openness. It's something uncontrollable. It's like an open work of art with boundless gifts. It has a generosity not found in regulations, traffic signs, and treaties. But it's always there in paintings and poetry. In art and poetry.”

Claus Carstensen (b. 1957) is a Danish artist, poet, writer, curator, and former professor at The School of Visual Arts at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, where he taught painting from 1993 until 2002. He has had a long row of solo shows, including What's Left (Is Republican Paint) at ARoS – The Art Museum of Aarhus (2015, catalog), Ether Body at The National Gallery of Denmark (2019), and The Day the 70s Died at Randers Art Museum (2021, catalog in two volumes). He has participated at The Biennale of Sydney (1992), 22. Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (1994), and The Venice Biennale (1997).

Carstensen has executed a wide range of public commissions, e.g., the University of Copenhagen, the Danish Parliament, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, and the maximum-security prison Storstroem Faengsel. His latest curatorial projects were the transhistorical group exhibition Becoming Animal at Den Frie, Copenhagen (2018, catalog published by Hatje Cantz Verlag) and RES PUBLICA at Museum Sønderjylland i Tønder (2024, catalog published by Hatje Cantz Verlag).

He has published 15 collections of poetry and six essay collections and edited several anthologies.

Camera: Simon Weyhe
Edited by: Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, and C.L. Davids Fond og Samling.

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SUMMARY: Thao Nguyen Phan, a Vietnamese visual artist, explores history, trauma, and human connection through her art, which blends poetry and beauty in traumatic contexts to offer optimism and alternative perspectives. Influenced by her Buddhist upbringing, she emphasizes equality and respect in her work, focusing on mundane moments that hold historical significance. Trained in lacquer painting, Phan now works with various materials and is inspired by fiction, history, and oral traditions. Her projects, such as those addressing the 1945 Vietnamese famine, employ moving images to convey time circularly, embracing the transformative nature of art to foster understanding and compassion.

Thao Nguyen Phan looks to the past to understand the present. Intertwining myth and reality, fact and folklore, she revives the untold stories of Vietnam's turbulent past.

“I'm interested in how history and reality are written and perceived,” she states as she sits down to unveil some of the layers of her practice.

In her delicate watercolor paintings, silk works, and video installations, Phan invites audiences to reconsider how concepts like history and reality are created. By turning to forgotten oral histories and changing the perspective from which we perceive historical events, Phan seeks to challenge how conventional history is written. “Even something extremely mundane, like the life of an animal or the spirit of a tree, could have the same weight and importance as a major historical event,” she explains.

Phan's artistic approach is rooted in her upbringing in a Buddhist family, which also permeates her relationship with time. She notes, “The way I perceive time in the Asian context is more circular. Like tides going up and down.” One way in which Phan challenges Western notions of linear time is through her moving image works:

“For example, in the video piece Becoming Alluvium, I try to manifest my understanding of time through a series of reincarnations. Reincarnations in a literal way, in which the characters in the film transform and reincarnate into different lives. So basically, if I add another life, the story can be expanded to an infinite point.”

Thao Nguyen Phan (b. 1987) lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Originally trained in lacquer painting, Phan's works span multiple disciplines, including artist moving images, which she studied under American video artist Joan Jonas as a 2016-2017 Rolex Protégée. In 2019, Phan was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award, and in 2018 she was granted the Han Nefkens Foundation-LOOP Barcelona Video Art Production Award, in collaboration with Fundació Joan Miró. Phan has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Tate St Ives, Cornwall; and The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams.

Thao Nguyen Phan was interviewed by Nanna Rebekka in Phan's solo exhibition Reincarnations of Shadows at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Thao Nguyen Phan was interviewed by Nanna Rebekka in her exhibition Reincarnations of Shadows, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Producer and editor: Nanna Rebekka
Cinematographer: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2023

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, C.L. Davids Fond og Samling, and Fritz Hansen.

#Art #ArtistInterview

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