Mathew Pokoik - news

Summer ‘08

We are thrilled to announce our first Mt Tremper Arts Summer Festival. For seven weeks from July 19 through the Labor Day weekend, we will be hosting weekly performances, a photography exhibition, artist residencies, artist talks, and classes. The following is a tentative performance schedule subject to change:

July 19: Grand opening benefit party.

Featuring the opening reception for the photography exhibition SIGNS, followed by the fantastic klezmer/punk band Golem.

July 26: TBD

Aug. 2: Jonah Bokaer

Aug. 9: TBD

Aug 16: Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre

Aug. 23: Hilary Easton + Company

Aug 30 and 31: Mt Tremper Arts Labor Day Weekend Festival, detail TBD

Mt Tremper Arts Studio from the garden. ©Mathew Pokoik

Winter and Spring ‘08

We are currently in process of obtaining all our permits from county and state agencies to officially open our doors as a Performing Arts Center. We expect to receive the go ahead by January. It has been a lengthy and complex process, with permits to convert to a commercial space needed by the Town of Shandaken Planning Board, Ulster County Planning Board, Ulster County Department of Health, Ulster County Highway Department, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, and the Army Corps of Engineers (wow, that’s a long list!). In the spring we will be doing construction to bring the property up to code, including fire and handicap accessibility for the studio building, septic system expansion, and road / parking improvements to the landscape.

We also will soon have fiscal sponsorship by a 501(c) corporation so that we may begin accepting tax deductible contributions and grants to help pay for the above work and our upcoming summer festival.

Hillary Easton, A Letter to Pratella (an excerpt from Noise + Speed)

from Domesticated ©Amy Stein

Next Sunday will be the closing of The Interactive Landscape. This is a great time to visit the Catskills if your located in the city. The leaves are approaching peak color, the air is cool and smells like fall, and its your last chance to see this fantastic show!

Over the weekend one of the exhibiting photographers Amy Stein, came up from the city for a visit. We had a relaxing dinner on the porch, and spoke about photography. Then went over to the annual Center for Photography at Woodstock’s benefit auction, where Amy outbid me on a fabulous Alessandra Sanguinetti print from her series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. All in all a photographically jam-packed evening in the backwaters of Ulster County.

You can see Amy’s point-of-view on her blog here.

©Roger Ballen

I just found this excellent interview with photographer Robert Ballen in the recent issue of See Saw magazine. I find his work to be mysteriously dark and sublime, it touches upon an internal reality, while examining the external world. For those of you who were at the Q&A of the Interactive Landscape, you might be interested in the following quote from the interview:

Chas Bowie: “Your photographs tend to always have an element of spontaneity to them, as still as they might appear.”

Roger Ballen: “There has to be. That’s such an interesting thing that I’ve discovered in photography. A lot of artists today use photography, and they create these sort of installations or conceptual photographs. But you remember almost none of those photographs. They just sort of sit there and you have to figure out the guy’s theory to get into the work. The reason the images don’t get inside you is because the artists don’t understand anything about photography. You can’t just set things up and photograph them and expect the picture to “zap.” It is very important that the mind feels that there is a moment of truth or a moment of authenticity. It’s really crucial, because if the artist’s hand is seen as too strong, the pictures seem either dead or contrived. The mind doesn’t believe it. The mind has to see that photograph as commenting on some aspect of truth, whatever truth means.

The other night we were speaking/debating about the “authentic” or the “real” in photography. It seems to me that Ballen is saying this is an internal judgment. Its not about “reality” in so far as this is judged to be of the external world, but of an internal correspondence with our own experiences and self-knowledge. We believe what corresponds to our own experiences and internal truths, whether the photographs are staged, manipulated, or “straight”. If we feel betrayed could it be because the hand of the artist has forced a particular point-of-view a bit to strongly - has drifted to far away from actual experience? Has made an image that is “staged” in that it no longer corresponds to the world we know through experience?

©Roger Ballen

Here’s a few pics from the performances and party this last Sunday night.  If anyone has any more please e-mail them to me.

Jill Sigman Flotsam (An improvisation)

Freefall A Short Piece About Love (Excerpt)

Kelly Peck an The Dance Group Unfolding

Hillary Easton A Letter to Pratella (an excerpt from Noise + Speed)

Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group And How Should I Begin (Excerpt)

Jean Taylor Wild Hair

Q&A for the Interactive Landscape

Questions from the Q&A

By the fire making smores

Here are two clips from the Q&A discussion this past Sunday night from the opening of The Interactive Landscape. From left to right is myself, Ian Baguskas, Mathew Porter, and Christian Patterson.

In my eyes the conversation did degenerate a bit into questions of photography as art or reality. I was surprised by how much people look at photographs with an implicit trust that a photograph is “real”, even in the present digital age. Images are constructs of our own invention, photographs are deeply subjective, even so-called “straight photographs”. What I felt from the audience was almost a sense of betrayal - a “what do you mean photographs are not real!”. It reminds me a bit of the Science vrs. Religion debate, that certain ideas are so deeply ingrained in us, that even in the light of evidence people cannot allow for their world view to be upset. I suppose this discussion also reinforced for me, how a stronger education in visual thinking is needed in our culture. Are we capable of seeing beyond the surface of photographs so as to have an authentic experience of images?

Update: Susan De George reflects on the Q&A here

The Interactive Landscape will be open at Mt Tremper Arts from 9/2/07 - 10/14/07 in the Catskill Mountains of NY.

Curated by Mathew Pokoik and Featuring the work of Ian Baguskas, Aaron Diskin, Emmet Gowin, John Daido Loori, Daido Moriyama, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Matthew Porter, Susana Raab, Stephen Shore, Amy Stein, and Mark Wyse.

A photographic web preview can be found here.

Curators Statement for The Interactive Landscape

Landscape has always been tied to our deepest desires as a culture. It is the place where our sustenance comes from and the place we return to for respite. It has become a place where wonder can still be found, a place we actively seek to escape from modern day realities, a place of return, a place endowed with a secular sacredness, a modern day pilgrimage site.

In Stephen Shore’s Yosemite we are presented with what appears to be a family contained within an almost sexual and certainly sensual landscape. The way the tip of the beach meets the water is like a gentle caress of skin touching skin, or the shape of a breast. The entire landscape conjures up the female goddess of fertility and nature that has been banished within our Judeo/Christian framework. And within this landscape we have the act of photographing, what appears to be a brother photographing his sibling entering the water. Worlds within worlds – photographs within photographs, it asks the question: what is the act of photography?

©Stephen Shore Yosemite

Imagine the Interactive Landscape as a journey through mythological time. Beginning with the Garden of Eden and onward to temptation and the fall. Could it be that all landscape-based art is a conversation with our original mythos of nature? A conversation with the Garden - with paradise - with temptation and death? Aaron Diskin’s mysteriously dark and beautiful untitled photograph speaks to my eye of Eve in the garden with temptation, or the medieval maiden, sexuality and death. It is one of those rare photographs that is exactly what it is yet also touches upon the mythological, the otherworldly.

In John Daido Loori’s photographs of Mt. Tremper and Morning Light, rather than dealing with Eden we might say he takes up the Buddhist perspective of the non-dual; his photographs are of simply mountains, clouds, snow, trees, light. We are presented with the conundrum that the Fall never happened – it is an invention of our mind. His photographs present an experience of landscape that is not apart from us, not of the other – these photographs are direct / present / accessible. They are the gateway we pass through as we enter the physical space that contains this photographic exhibition.

©Mark Wyse Fishing Hole

Respite / recreation / a oneness with nature is a theme within Mark Wyse’s two images, Fishing Hole and an untitled image from his Surfer’s series. In Fishing Hole we have a scene like Shore’s; we find mountains, water, people, the classic themes of landscape, yet the culvert in the foreground hints at a larger perspective that shades the possible meanings of his photograph with additional layers of complexity and subtly. Ian Baguskas’s Maiden of the Mist IV also presents us with a landscape of extraordinary beauty, the waterfalls, the rainbow, and this seemingly dwarfed ship precariously close to the falls. It hints at an underlining tension and the raw power of nature contained within this tourist based landscape.

©Ian Baguskas Maiden in the Mist IV

At some point in our history, the landscape became an abstract and separate entity, a place to photograph, to visit as a tourist, to photograph in an attempt at claiming it. Or a place to re-create, such as an in-door ski resort in Dubai or a photographic backdrop that allows us to capture the illusion of great expanse in a take-home snapshot, as in Susana Raab’s, C2 Marketing Event, McSoccerfestival. We encounter this again in Christian Patterson’s girl with cellular phone, who sitting within a natural landscape is engaged with capturing its appearance within her digital phone/camera. It asks the question: can photographs separate us from this very landscape we seek for respite?

©Mathew Pokoik Dubai, Indoor Ski Resort

In other instances we seek to protect ourselves from that landscape, to create homes and structures, yet nature has its ways of creeping in. Amy Stein’s photographic re-creations of animal and human encounters, hint at the fierce wildness that we are unable to suppress or control. Or Daido Moriyama’s Stray Dog from the streets of Misawa or the flight of Birds through the old city of Dubai, even in an Urban setting Nature lives and breaths and finds a way to survive, to interact with us.

©Amy Stein Trash Eaters

This show speaks of our modern day conundrum, what is our interaction with landscape? With nature? With our world? We stand on this ground surrounded by the undeniable force and ineffable quality of nature. Yet this ground is the cliff’s edge, and we have -like Matthew Porter’s Car Crash - launched ourselves over the precipice.

©Matthew Porter Crash

The Mt Tremper Arts Party is this Sunday night, which will include the opening reception of the Interactive Landscape along with a dance and physical theater performance and DJ. It looks like we’ll have as many as 30 presenting artists across the mediums, I’m quite happy at how it has shaped up. I’ll be posting more related materials as they become available, curators statement, video from the Q&A, and party snap-shots. Hope to see you this weekend!

Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group ©Mathew Pokoik

Over the past weekend Mt Tremper Arts hosted Jonah Bokaer and dance company for a short residency and work-in-progress showing of The Invention of Minus One. It was quite a treat to have them here, apart from the fact that they are all current or past members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and some of the best technical modern dancers in the world today, they were a pleasure to talk to. Jonah is making challenging and fascinating work, both my conversations with the company and Jonah’s work will be bumping around my head for some time to come.

Holley Farmer and Rashaun Mitchell in work-in-progress The Invention of Minus One at the MTA studio ©Mathew Pokoik

Additionally Jonah’s work is close to my heart for a number of reasons:

-His work explores themes of modern media in a variety of ways, media of media and signs of signs, dancers photographing dancers with instant polaroid cameras and dancing with cameras on tripods - creating layers of the human, the digital, and media based imagery/movement. Anyone familiar with my work The Global City will understand my affinity for this type of movement based art. What I find interesting about Jonah’s work is his movement vocabulary clearly shows a strong influence of Cunningham, yet he is able to push the medium forward through the introduction of stronger subject matter than the old master would use.

-It is clear that he is looking and thinking about a variety of artistic mediums and having a dialogue with past and current artistic work. Duchamp is a clear influence as can be seen in past work such as NUDEDESENDANCE or Octave, of course Duchamp’s legacy was taken up in movement based art by Cunningham, and it’s logical Jonah would continue that legacy.

-He runs an arts center Chez Bushwick, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and is a strong advocate and activist for the arts by supporting new experimental work, artist curated events, arts community dialogue, and Chez Bushwick provides the lowest priced rehearsal space available in NYC!

A Group Photography show curated by Mathew Pokoik as part of the Mt Tremper Arts Party
Open 9/2-10/14 by appointment, see the MTA website for info.

Black Canyon, looking below near Camp 8, Colorado River, Arizona, 1871 ©Timothy O’Sullivan

Maiden of the Mist ©Ian Baguskas

Fishing Hole ©Mark Wyse

Yosemite ©Stephen Shore

Stockholm, WI, August 2005 (Girl with cellular phone ©Christian Patterson

C2 Marketing Event, McSoccerfestival, Poolesville, MD, 2006 ©Susana Raab

Dubai ©Mathew Pokoik

Golf Course Under Construction ©Emmet Gowin

Surfer ©Mark Wyse

Dubai ©Mathew Pokoik

©Amy Stein

©Amy Stein

Stray Dog ©Daido Moriyama

Crash ©Matthew Porter

Work by John Daido Loori coming soon.

Aaron Diskin prefers that his work not be posted on the internet.

Check back soon for a curators statement and a video from the Q&A!

A part of the 3rd annual Mt Tremper Arts Festival

The Interactive Landscape - A group photography show curated by Mathew Pokoik.

Featuring, Ian Baguskas, Aaron Diskin, Emmet Gowin, John Daido Loori, Daido Moriyama, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Matthew Porter, Susana Raab, Stephen Shore, Amy Stein, and Mark Wyse.

Opening party and Q&A at 8:30pm

Dance Performance at 7:00pm.

More information can be found on the Mt Tremper Arts web site, and will be coming to this blog soon.

Dubai, 2007, Mathew Pokoik