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Tavers Adler: One Session at Rincon

I became aware of California surfer Travers Adler through his brother, Will, a photographer I worked with. Travers inspired Derek Hynd to wax poetic in this month’s Surfer’s Journal and, watching this video, it’s easy to understand why. Not only is he incredibly gifted, but his surfing is incredibly fun to watch, as evidenced in Morgan Maassen’s film, One Session at Rincon.

**Incidentally, see more of Morgan Maassen’ surf films here. In my opinion, he’s one of the most creative surf film makers out there at the moment.

Feb 11, 2013 | Categories: Surfing | Comments Off on Tavers Adler: One Session at Rincon

Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers

Anyone living in a city for more than a few weeks knows that solving the perfect apartment setup is an ongoing quest rather than an attainable solution. The Museum of the City of New York ((MCNY) has collaborated with the Citizens Housing & Planning Council for their latest exhibit, Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers. The exhibit offers innovative design solutions to better accomodate New York’s changing demographics-including the rise in single people, and features a furnished micro-studio apartment in just 325 square feet. The exhibition also presents winning designs from the Bloomberg administration’s recently launched pilot competition to test new housing models, as well as examples set by other cities in the United States and around the world, including Seattle, Providence, Montreal, San Diego, and Tokyo.

January 23 through September 15

Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103 Street
New York, New York, 10029
212-534-1672

The Museum is open 7 days a week: 10:00AM-5:00PM.

Feb 08, 2013 | Categories: New York City | Comments Off on Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers

Gravity and Grace

Don’t miss the first solo exhibition in a New York museum by the globally renowned contemporary artist El Anatsui. This show features over 30 works in metal and wood that transform appropriated objects into site-specific sculptures. Anatsui converts found materials into a new type of media that lies between sculpture and painting, combining aesthetic traditions from his birth country, Ghana; his home in Nsukka, Nigeria; and the global history of abstraction. His pieces may at first seem to be tapestries fashioned from fabric but take a closer look, they are made from discarded milk tins and liquor bottle caps.

Included in the exhibition are twelve recent monumental wall and floor sculptures, widely considered to represent the apex of Anatsui’s career. The metal wall works, created with bottle caps from a distillery in Nsukka, are pieced together to form colorful, textured hangings that take on radically new shapes with each installation. Anatsui is captivated by his materials’ history of use, reflecting his own nomadic background. Gravity and Grace responds to a long history of innovations in abstract art and performance, building upon cross-cultural exchange among Africa, Europe, and the Americas and presenting works in a wholly new, African medium.

Brooklyn Museum, February 8–August 4, 2013

Feb 07, 2013 | Categories: Creative Culture, New York City | Comments Off on Gravity and Grace

Documentaries in the Wake of Sandy

The cinematographer Jen Schneider shooting Union Beach, N.J., for “Shored Up." (Photo: Ben Kalina)

From the NYT:

But while the footage that Mr. O’Keefe and others collected during Sandy and its aftermath will probably be making its way into movies for years, festival directors from Austin to Toronto, from TriBeCa to San Francisco are already getting completed Sandy films, less than three months after the fact. Advances like digital filmmaking have made speedy responses more common. Less than a year after the Japanese tsunami of 2011 several documentaries and fiction films made their debuts at the Berlin Film Festival and elsewhere. And as with that disaster there were a handful of documentarylike television programs on Hurricane Sandy within weeks.

Feb 06, 2013 | Categories: Creative Culture, New York City | Comments Off on Documentaries in the Wake of Sandy

The Ecstatic Music Festival

Already underway, The Ecstatic Music Festival at the Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Center once again unites a wide array of performers from the classical and independent music worlds, resulting in some truly one-of-a-kind opportunities to witness musicians doing what they do best outside of their usual confines. While the overall slant of the program leans toward the classical end of the music spectrum, this year’s line-up presents some very interesting collaborations worth a listen.

For example, on February 27th, minimalist composer and visual artist Arnold Dreyblatt utilizes the emotional power of psychedelic folk players Megafaun to fill out his grand and transcendental sound in a collaborative work that has been years in the making. The performance here will essentially be a preview of a recorded work between the composer and the group, which will be released in the near future.

Earlier, on the 23rd, a personal highlight of mine would be the meeting of Laurel Halo and Julia Holter, two musicians who have recently created some of their best work to date, using simple instrumentation and layers of their voice, processed in seemingly complex and interwoven ways. The two will also be joined by Daniel Whol and his TRANSIT ensemble, which itself aims to break the barriers between composers and contemporary music, much like the festival does.

These are but two examples of the diverse programming. Other highlights include the impossible-to-pin Deerhoof bringing their energetic unique style of frenetic rock and pop into contact with a classically-trained ensemble, and the turntable-based talent of DJ /rupture entering the mix with the avant-garde collective Zs. While these may be the more known of the bunch among the avant garde and the indie rock circles, the entire program is up to this caliber and well worth at least one night out to hear some music you truly cannot find anywhere else in the world.

Feb 05, 2013 | Categories: Random | Comments Off on The Ecstatic Music Festival

Building the Perfect Serpent

Romuald Hazoumè, one of Africa’s leading visual artists, will be installing Rainbow Serpent, a 12 -foot arc constructed of recycled jerry cans, at the Newark Museum on Thursday, Feb. 21 from 10 am-3 pm. The sculpture is part of the upcoming African Cosmos: Stellar Arts exhibition, which opens at the Museum on Feb. 27.

Feb 04, 2013 | Categories: Creative Culture, Sustainability | Comments Off on Building the Perfect Serpent

Garrett McNamara Surfs World Record 100 Ft Wave

Garrett McNamara, January 28th , Portugal

Guinness World Records are looking into whether Garrett McNamara has broken his previous world record for the highest wave surfed. On Monday, January 28th, McNamara caught a wave off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal, where photographer Tó Mané took an incredible shot of the giant swell. McNamara’s previous record was also set at Nazaré, recorded at 78 feet.

Check out more photos of McNamara from The Guardian.

Feb 01, 2013 | Categories: Surfing | Comments Off on Garrett McNamara Surfs World Record 100 Ft Wave

Michael Gaillard (Harmony Artist-In-Residence)

Here are some images from the rodeo/fiesta in the town of Nosara, a few kilometers inland from Playa Guiones where the hotel is located. This is a five-night event, and the entire local population, children and adults alike, Ticos (locals), ex-pats, and tourists, all look forward to the event with great anticipation. I decided to return to my photographic roots for this endeavor, working from a more instinctual place and allowing myself to respond more spontaneously to the environment than I can with my other devices.

Below are thumbnails. Please click on the thumbnail. The image will enlarge to full size. When you scroll over either side of the image, you can see an arrow appear. Click on the arrow to proceed to the next image in the slide show.

The images below do not represent a complete portrait of this event, nor even close to a portrait of the community that populates it. That being said, I am not averse to attempting such an endeavor in the future. I believe there to be significant symbolic weight embedded in this subject matter, but with it comes complications that always accompany a photographer witnessing a foreign culture. For me to endeavor to fully realize this project, if it were to become a project, I would need to become much more fluent in the language and the culture, otherwise I would always remain on the wrong side of the fence.

In addition to my excursions to the rodeo, my days have consisted primarily of photography with my 8×10 field camera. The results of this work will not be ready until after I’ve processed and scanned the film. Stay tuned for updates in the coming weeks.