In her first book, Arbeit, Laura Bielau found monumental images of tiny things in her studio workspace. The notion of art and labor were at the fundament of the documents she produced. Everything from an empty Amazon envelope to a rubber band was magnified and challenged for their quotidian usage. Enlarged and brought into […]
The photographs in this series were taken between 2020-2022 in Germany. Taken in seemingly forgotten spaces that bear the traces of past human intervention. The places are in a state of transformation, which is slowly taking place. Sometimes, it is a seeming recapture of nature or a blurred state of abandonment. In photographically precisely […]
Editor’s Note: I wrote the original press release for this book. Pointing this out before you read the review for transparency is fair and necessary, as it will inevitably show some bias. In place of a review for this concern, I have decided to extend the format with what appears as inanity but […]
I’m going to start this review in a slightly off way by suggesting that the subject matter, no matter how expertly handled in the beautifully produced self-published set of books proposed by Regina Anzenberger is not my cup of tea. This will be a failed review as I cannot find the words to speak […]
Laura Bielau’s Arbeit 2016-2019 (Spector Books, 2021) is a stripped-back and minimal series of investigations that regards the environmental working effects and detritus of art labor in 2021. Though the aims are not overtly class-oriented or political, they function as a personal case study between the artist and the alien consumer objects that become […]
“It has learned that outward and visceral signs of its existence only lead to its questioning of intent early on; its oft-espoused will thus deposed to the memory of collective trauma…” Ideology is not always easy to see. We read it through the symbolic order of insignia and perhaps we are able to cull […]
“Struggle is often written in the foundation of our city’s (un)natural architecture” Struggle is often written in the foundation of our city’s (un)natural architecture. In our rural areas, it is marked by temporary institutions-the grass, trees, fields and clearings bear the organization of bomb craters and sweeps of forest shoulder a mane […]
“In the case of the schism between our home life and the outside world, it takes a taxing event to traction our movements in order to think through the slowness of change beyond the window sill” Frame by frame, the casualties of observance are often manacled to an enveloping banality, a nothingness that […]
“The fridge was loud, but outside it was quiet, much quieter.” There is a literal wall of language separating the two halves of Michael Schmidt’s landmark photobook Waffenruhe (published in 1987 and reprinted in 2018), a visually sprawling text that spans seventeen pages at the center of the book. Despite the text’s […]
“This is before the Internet and I was living in an isolated place, so access to ‘culture’ was quite limited but I fortunately did have the photography magazines my parents were buying as well as the radio shows I would try to tune into from the countryside to copy the music on tapes…” BF: […]
“We are on occasion reminded on occasion of a great plague pit, its underground presence rewarded with a blue plaque to signify its existence as both a terrible debacle in our local history and yet it tellingly reminds us of the foreboding possibility for futures yet unspoken” Trauma is a strange attractor. Just as […]
“Maybe just to plant a stake in the ground, I’d also say that topics are not necessary. Which doesn’t at all mean that one can’t have one; just that one needn’t”. This conversation took place over a year of emailing and should be read as informal. The intention was to talk about Tim’s […]