Lets talk about recycled art for a moment I have always appreciated recycled and found object art work.  The idea of making something wonderful out of discarded things, has always appealed to me.  In painting I would create works using found papers and collage, in photography my found things are the broken and derelict things made by man.

Vik Muniz takes this idea to a whole new level.  Creating portraits of the trash pickers in Brazil from the business that sustains them.  Truthfully these work speak on some many levels.  Like all found art it brings attention to what is discarded in our culture, we see the mounds of things that are thrown away daily that could be reused, or recycled into something new, his works are truly reused and the fact that they are impermanent and can be swept away speaks to this as well.  The movie does not make this clear but I imagine that after all the collected materials were used for the portraits they were then recycled.  Just as importantly this works brings our attention to another important note, the poverty of the people.  We see the people who are struggling to live lives, worried about what others will say about there job but doing all they can to earn a living for themselves and their families.  Muniz does not just leave these as images of these people, we not talking some documentary, these people helped him create the art.  I really am impressed by Muniz in that he continued to help the people he featured succeed, in their lives.  His work in effect helped to reuse the people that he featured, i mean this in a sense that they were given new life after the work, they began to feel good about their lives and many of their stations improved.  This is truly a social awareness work that really caused some powerful change.

Waste Land Webiste

I have seen Roni Horns work for a while now although i have mostly been familiar with her portrait work.  I am really interested in her work with water, and this is something I have begun to explore this year.

Although her work with water seems to be based on scale to encompass the viewer I have wanted mine to be based on sheer quantity of images and I am more focused on the Waves breaking but seeing her work has inspired me to continue my own work on the subject me a place to continue this body of work.

I also like the idea of water and the portrait being symbolic of the landscape in  You are the Weather.  Focusing on the same model we begin to lose the personal when seen over and over again, yet some how still engages into the particular landscape as well.

I Found Carrie Mae Weems’ work with re enacting history extremely intriguing.  Taking sections of american history and reenacting them based on historical accounts but showing the stage they are set in.

In many ways it was as much the models and their learning of the history that made the work as intriguing as it is.  The photographs and films are not a so much as a historical reenactment.  These are not people dressing as civil war shoulders and reenacting battles to a historically accurate level.  They are more an interpretation of history through the 20/20 vision of hind sight.

In these works she looks on the past and recreates it into a new telling of history, she tells historical events through a view that has gained from those events of the passed.

Misrachs works in Dead west are a pointed view of a place I am very familiar with and have photographed throughout the years.  Not in the same places, with the same thoughts but these desolate areas creat amazing images.  He looked at the areas owned or formally owned by the US Military Machine, areas that have been completely destroyed and formed a vacant field of used bomb parts and dust.  A visual history of the American Military Dollar generator.  Some of the images with so many bombs being dropped up to a daily routine, all of which is just money well spent.

The Work with Hurricane Katrina was a fascinating narrative that he credits to the people of New Orleans.  However, I think he is wrong in saying that the photographer was left out.  In many ways it reminds me of the “Cut up,” writing of the beats, where they would cut up other writing add some of the own and then re assemble it into a new work of literature.  It required the skilled hand to process raw material into the story.  So while the folks of New Orleans provided the raw narrative it became a story through the photographer.

Ai WeiWei is actually an artists I have know about for a while, I find fearless defiance of The Chinese regime.  This film offered up a new perspective of him and in reality in many ways expanded his almost superhuman devotion to truth and justice.  Even after being detained by the government WeiWei continues on his quest to expose the truth in China.

I actually remember hearing about the Sunflower Seeds  work when it was put on display in London in 2010.  I remember thinking what an interesting idea.  Though he intended the work to represent the people and the ideas of the people of China, i always felt that the piece was far beyond just China.  Millions of tiny porcelain hand painted sunflower seeds, each one if you just glanced looks like the others, but if you picked it up and looked closely all are very different.  We as people so often get lost in a world of day to day, lost in a crowd in a culture that has stopped caring for us as individuals, we wait for a person to stop a pick one of us to recognize what we are on our own.

The story of two young boys and their discovery of themselves and their history.  Outwardly the film seems to delve into the life and struggles of Victor dealing with a father that he felt abandoned him and his mother.  We learn during the film that his father left because he caused the fire and could not deal with the grief of what he had caused in Thomas’s life.  All though the story takes us through Victors healing and dealing with his own interpersonal issues with his father, I feel that the more had to deal with Thomas.  Thomas was our story teller continuing on the oral history of the native people.

We met Thomas a nerdy kind of teen that hung around telling the stories of the native people.  Yet no one wanted to here these stories.  Yet he told them, he also collected new stories from personal experience and from those around him.  He was a historian of his people, old ideas and thoughts and contributing new ones.  Thomas traveled with Victor not only because of his personal connecting to Arnold (Victors father) but because it was a tale of his people to be collected.

Thomas fills an important role in the of many First Nations peoples, but also in many societies is that of historian or a story teller.  Though a young man you could almost consider him a elder to the tribe because he had taken time to hear and memorize the tales told by the elders, to experience life as a young man but also be aware and record that life.