Friday, June 5, 2009

11 Megachurches

This is a recently completed series of images to be exhibited for the fall semester @ Asbury College in conjunction with:

Bringing Creation to Praise:

The Arts and Faith



A two-day conference organized by Asbury College

Plenary speaker: Jeremy Begbie, Ph.D., Duke Divinity School; formerly University of Cambridge and University of St. Andrews

Thursday and Friday November 12 and 13, 2009


This conference was organized to deal with issues of relationship between art and religion: primarily as it regards to environmental concerns.


panelists

Mathew Sleeth, M.D., author, Serve God, Save the Planet

Cameron Anderson, M.F.A.,Executive Director, Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA)

Patrick Adams, M.F.A. , exhibit and Artist’s Talk, “Heaven and Earth”

Campus Exhibits organized by the Asbury College Art Department


including artists:

Keith Barker

Rondall Reynoso

Laura O’Neal

Chris Segre-Lewis

Travis Shaffer

Sarah Jane Gray








Branded Nation: The Marketing of the Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld



I just finished reading this great book by James B. Twitchell, a professor at U of F.

For anyone interested in the branding/marking of the culture industries (art, religion, education...) this is a very interesting book. Which supports my theories on the impact of fashion (lowercase "f"), trend, and social status on these "truth seeking institutions".

It's dry, but fascinating.

This book was published in 2004, and it is interesting to see the things Twitchell is talking about becoming more common and explicit now.

Friday, February 6, 2009

26 ---fill in the blank---


jeff brouws - twentysix abandoned gasoline stations (after ed ruscha)



jeff brouws


eric tabuci - twentysix abandoned gasoline stations (after ed ruscha)



Tuesday, February 3, 2009

I Touched it...




Recently while making a routine trip to the UK Fine Arts Library I decided to check info-cat (the uk online catalog) again to see if UK housed a copy of one of my current inspirations... and to my surprise they did.  Lucky for me as a Graduate Student/ Instructor i have access to the closed stacks.  I can't believe they plastered this thing with stickers.  It makes me want to punch them.



Here is the title page... for those of you unfamiliar with Ed Ruscha's books, if this is a first edition, which i doubt, it has a value of a few K,  although some Kentucky douche thought it appropriate to place an ellipsis after the title on this page, and the library plastered it with their logo and stickers so it's likely not worth anything.  Of course that would make Ruscha proud as he made so many as a means of keeping the books from becoming a commodity.


Just a view of the inside of the book, it consists of 31 offset press prints of images he commissioned to be photographed by an LA commercial photographer from a helicopter.  I am currently in the process of finishing my adaptation of this book which has a flexible title (currently 204 parking lots) it is a stack of 6 reproductions using screen captures from google maps of the same parking lots.

A Website... Finally ( www.travisshaffer.com )


fourty-one walmart supercenters # 31
8" x 8" silver gelatin print


After a visiting some friends in Lvl (louisville, ky) I have found a simple and clean means of managing my website that actually has resulted in it having content.....

My designer friend Ricky (www.dressedinvalue.com) led me to quite an awesome site builder of sorts... and set it up for me as i am web/code illiterate.

On it you can find my recent and not so recent Artwork and CV.

An-My Lê (Robert C. May Lecture Series)


An-My Lê
M-246 Semi Automatic Weapon, Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal, Iraq, 2007
archival pigment prints
Edition of 5
40 x 56 1/2
inches

At the University of Kentucky we are privileged with the funds to bring four contemporary photographers in each semester to present a lecture on their work and hang a small show in the University Museum.

An-My Lê was the first of the two spring semester lectures...
She recieved her MFA From Yale in the 90's and has shown everywere including the coveted MOMA!

As an artist, and not a critic... i'll spare you my opinion of the quality of her work and just say that the obvious Hiroshi Sugimoto reference was an interesting one to me, and conceptually this work and his seascapes are so very different. Check her work out via the g-OO-gle.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

post-postmodernism an abbridged introduction

Post-postmodernism applies to a vast number of categories of thought including but not limited to developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism....

Alt/TITLES

NEO-MYSTICISM

TRANS-IRONIC

POST-IRONIC

NEO-SUBLIME/UTOPIAN

RE-KANTIAN

POST-SARCASM

MY PERSONAL FAVE IS TRENDSCENDENTALISM

AND OR SIMELTANIOUS PRE[POST}CONFUSION

a common positive theme of existing attempts to define post-postmodernism is that faith, trust, dialogue, performance or sincerity can work to transcend postmodern irony. The following definitions, which vary widely in depth, focus and scope, are listed in the chronological order of their appearance.

In 1995, the landscape architect and urban planner Tom Turner issued a book-length call for a post-postmodern turn in urban planning.[12] Turner criticizes the postmodern credo of “anything goes” and suggests that “the built environment professions are witnessing the gradual dawn of a post-Postmodernism that seeks to temper reason with faith.”

In his 1999 book on Russian postmodernism the Russian-American Slavist Mikhail Epstein[15] Epstein believes that postmodernist aesthetics will eventually become entirely conventional and provide the foundation for a new, non-ironic kind of poetry, which he describes using the prefix "trans": suggested that postmodernism “is […] part of a much larger historical formation,” which he calls “postmodernity.”

The term post-millennialism was introduced in 2000 by the American cultural theorist Eric Gans[3] to describe the epoch after postmodernism in ethical and socio-political terms. Gans associates postmodernism closely with “victimary thinking,” which he defines as being based on a non-negotiable ethical opposition between perpetrators and victims arising out of the experience of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In Gans’s view, the ethics of postmodernism is derived from identifying with the peripheral victim and disdaining the utopian center occupied by the perpetrator. Postmodernism in this sense is marked by a victimary politics that is productive in its opposition to modernist utopianism and totalitarianism but unproductive in its resentment of capitalism and liberal democracy, which he sees as the long-term agents of global reconciliation.

A systematic attempt to define post-postmodernism in aesthetic terms has been undertaken by the German-American Slavist Raoul Eshelman in his book Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora, Colorado: Davies Group 2008, ISBN 978-1-888570-41-0).[18][7] attempts to show that works in the new epoch are constructed in such a way as to bring about a unified, aesthetically mediated experience of transcendence. Performatism does this by creating closed works of art that force viewers to identify with simple, opaque characters or situations and to experience beauty, love, belief and transcendence under particular, artificial conditions.

In popular culture, the movement that is loosely called “New Sincerity” displays salient features of post-postmodernism in its opposition to postmodern irony and in its attempt to promote good feeling. One of its most notable proponents is the radio talk-show host Jesse Thorn, who issued a brief “Manifesto for the New Sincerity” on his blog in 2006.[8] He states we should “think of [the New Sincerity] as irony and sincerity combined like Voltron, to form a new movement of astonishing power.”

In 2006 the British scholar Alan Kirby formulated an entirely pessimistic socio-cultural assessment of post-postmodernism that he calls “pseudo-modernism.”[19] Kirby associates pseudo-modernism with the triteness and shallowness resulting from the instantaneous, direct, and superficial participation in culture made possible by the internet, mobile phones, interactive television and similar means:






this information is courtesy of the most RELIABLE ACADEMIC ? source of information to be found, wikipedia.com