Barbara Kasten on her work Studio Construct 17 in The Edge of Vision Interview Series by Aperture Foundation.

While many might consider Barbara Kasten, whose portfolio was featured in Aperture 136, one of the foremost artists pushing the limits of  the photography, she herself considers her work pushing the limits of painting, drawing, and sculpture more through a particular use of photography.

Kasten was one of the artist’s covered in Lyle Rexer’s 2009 volume The Edge of Vision, a history of abstraction in photography that traces the roots of what might be a contemporary revival of the mode to early ‘modernist’ photographers like Aaron Siskind and László Maholy-Nagy.  However, as she explains in an interview with The Photography Post, she prefers to distance herself from terms like ‘abstract’ or ‘modernist.’ “What I do,” she says, “is neither a continuation nor a departure from their work but a conceptual event of my own.”

Most non-representational art is an abstraction of some originally recognizable form. Kasten considers her work, on the other hand, “as a process that transforms itself into something else.  Beginning with a simple, transparent, non-representational form, I create the image as I work through the possibilities of sculptural and lighting combinations to a new point of perception.”

She photographs assemblages that are built with mirrors, plexiglass, paper, and highly specific lighting situations, not to last, but for the sole purpose of the photograph. She distances her work from the discourse of engaging with the ‘real,’ and levels instead a strict focus on the sheer phenomenon of light.

Her latest exhibition, Constructs, Abrasions, Melons and Cucumbers with sculptor Justin Beal, opening Thursday, June 21, 2012 at Bortolami Gallery in New York (on view through August 3, 2012), is an attempt to explore the ways the artist tends to “mis”-lead the audience’s first reading of the work.

Find more about Kasten’s “approach to photography and what it means to ‘think like a painter’,” in another interview with Anthony Pearson of Frieze Magazine.

Constructs, Abrasions, Melons and Cucumbers
Opening reception:
Thursday June 21, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Exhibition on view:
Through August 3, 2012

Bartolami Gallery
520 West 20 St
New York, NY
(212) 727-2050

On view as part of the Pingyao International Photography Festival earlier this year. The Edge of Vision, curated by Lyle Rexer, presented a group of contemporary photographers who base their practice in some form of abstraction. Click and scroll the images for a virtual experience of the installation in China.

Special thanks to photographer Nils Duval and Matthieu Torrano from China Time Machine Image Centre, who created this VR. CTMIC was instrumental in printing this and several other exhibitions at the festival.

The exhibition, specially expanded for Pingyao, was divided into several sections: “The Aesthetics of Perception,” “The Politics of the Image,” and “The Poetics of Light, Space and Time.” Taken together they force us to ask, what, after all, is a photograph, and where does its meaning lie? In the picture itself? In the world or its phenomena? In us? These questions are as vital and open today as they were 170 years ago, when no one knew exactly what a photograph should look like or what it might disclose.

Artists included in this presentation are Bill Armstrong, Carel Balth, Ellen Carey, Richard Caldicott, Roland Fischer, Manuel Geerinck, Shirine Gill, Barbara Kasten, Seth Lambert, Charles Lindsay, Roger Newton, Nicki Stager, and Penelope Umbrico.

View new videos from the weekly series of artist’s interviews with Barbara Kasten and Carel Balth included in the exhibition now on view at Aperture Gallery, The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography.

In the first video-clip, Barbara Kasten presents her work Studio Construct 17 as based on physical constructions that play with light and are created only for the purpose of being photographed. By this approach, the photograph itself becomes the object and is removed from being representative or documentary. Kasten expands that while subject matter is inherent to photography, her images are unidentifiable and exist as records of light that explore spatial and formal ambiguity. This distance results in a more indirect connection between the viewer and the work.

In the second video-clip, artist Carel Balth explains the process behind his works Moving IV and Madrid V, and how his appropriation of images through a digital format functions as a new medium. Originally recorded as digital video taken by Balth, he carefully selected screen-grabs that are later printed on canvas called Piezographs. He explains that this approach creates a new vantage that confronts reality though light, space, time, and movement into a culmination of images. Balth likes the idea that people may not completely understand his work at first, and recommends The Edge of Vision by curator Lyle Rexer for further insight to his aesthetic.

Click here to view The Edge of Vision limited-edition portfolio.

Click here to view related microsite including previously posted videos with Lyle Rexer part 1 & part 2, Bill Armstrong, Seth Lambert, Charles Lindsay, Jack Sal, Penelope Umbrico, Silvio Wolf.

View new videos from the weekly series of artist’s interviews with Ellen Carey and Manuel Geerinck included in the exhibition now on view at Aperture Gallery, The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography.

In the first video clip, Ellen Carey presents her works in the exhibition: the large-scale Pulls with Lifts and Drops of film pulled through the rollers of a Polaroid large-format camera and her color photogram, PushPins, where the artist used pushpins to perforate the photographic paper in the darkroom. Carey explains how abstraction in photography challenges the viewer to rethink the medium, and go beyond the narrative side to explore new arrays of light and color compositions as well as new processes using meaningful materials that reference the history of photography. She also highlights the physicality of her work often exhibited through large-scale installations.

Ellen Carey from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

In the second video clip, Belgian artist Manuel Geerinck, who started his career as a painter, speaks about his unique process combining his drawings that he then photographs in motion. Inspired by minimalism and the early days of photography, Geerinck explains how his work is at the crossroads of photography and painting as well as abstraction and figurative, always “at the edge.” He also speaks about his exploration of colors through the photographic medium.

Manuel Geerinck from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

Stay tuned next Thursday for video clips of Barbara Kasten and Carel Balth.

Click here to view The Edge of Vision limited-edition portfolio including Manuel Geerinck.

Click here to view related microsite including previously posted videos with Lyle Rexer part 1 & part 2, Bill Armstrong, Seth Lambert, Charles Lindsay, Jack Sal, Penelope Umbrico, Silvio Wolf.