Mathew Pokoik - news

Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) now has on-line the Windows on the Work, with an interview, based on my photographic work Streetwork. Since 2001, this and another portfolio of my photographs, have been touring school’s around the greater NY Metropolitan area. They’re the center of study in an Aesthetic Education unit taught by an LCI Teaching Artist. It has been fantastic to have now thousands of students ranging from pre-K to post-grad study my work in this setting. Now they have available, The Windows on the Work, a collection of related articles, study aid, and contextual information resource for students and teachers studying these portfolio’s. Sadly, much of the information is password protected, only for teachers and students working with LCI.

What you can see is this interview with me by friend / artist / and fellow LCI teaching artist, Tenesh Weber. I’m quite happy with the way it turned out, I hope you enjoy it. To check out the Windows on the Work go to LCI’s website, click on Repertory Resources, in the left hand column, Then click Visual Arts: Street Work, in the center column and surf away. Sorry that is takes a bit of work to find, LCI’s quirky yet chalk-full of interesting-info website doesn’t allow for easy bookmarking. Below is one of the photos from the Streetwork portfolio. If you would like to see both portfolio’s (minus one forever lost image) click here, and type “lci”.

NYC, Canal St. 1999, ©Mathew Pokoik

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)

Upcoming additions to The Global City will be taking place February 9-29 as we travel to India (details of exactly where in India are still being worked out). Houston, Texas from March 13-21 where I’ll also be attending Fotofest. Then from April 20-28 onwards to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil with my wife’s dance company AVMG.  I’ll be photographing while they’ll be performing at the Centro Coreografico do Rio. As always, if anyone has any friends, or suggestions about where to go, see, eat, or drink please let me know. You can e-mail me at: info(at)mathewpokoik.com

Dubai, The Global City/Media and the Street, 2007, ©Mathew Pokoik

Today I received in the mail a copy of Vision, a behemoth of a Beijing based fashion magazine, distributed  throughout Asia, weighing in at just under 400 glossy pages. This month they did a feature on my photography of Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group, my wife’s modern dance company. Flipping through this tomb I find curious how utterly western the magazine, articles, images, and advertisements are. To see the uncropped images click here.

I’ve just added a new experimental portfolio to my website - The Old World - it might be a new album or chapter in my ongoing collection of images exploring global urban centers. The Global City explores media nodule points within new environments of urban architecture. The Old World explores themes of history / ancient regimes / religious centers / parks / and colonial empires through their traces in the modern world. Traces that are often in today’s cities - epicenter’s of the global tourist’s travels.

Jerusalem, Old City, Muslim Quarter, Israel, 2007 ©Mathew Pokoik

I’ve not yet had time to list place information that goes along with each photograph - they’ll be coming soon. This is a changing and morphing project - I don’t think of the web site + my work + process as a fixed and stagnant being. It might be that this beginning of a new chapter in the larger work could eventually split into additional subsets and albums. Who knows? So please let me know what you think? And stay tuned for future changes.

Jerusalem, Old City, Muslim Quarter, Herod’s Gate, Israel, 2007 ©Mathew Pokoik

AVMG from And How Should I Begin ©Mathew Pokoik

Tomorrow, Sunday Sept. 9 at 2 pm, my wife’s dance company, Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group, will be performing an except from her evening length piece And How Should I Begin, as part of the DanceNow|NYC Festival. If you haven’t yet seen this piece or want to see it again please come and also check out the many presenting artists. More info can be found at the DanceNow website here, this is a great festival and an excellent way to sample what’s happening across the board in the NYC modern dance community.

The show will be at: Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th St. bet. 7th and 8th Ave. Tickets are $20 advance or $25 at the door.

I’ll be in Mexico City from Sept. 12-19 to continue work on The Global City. I’m quite excited, apart from the fact that I haven’t made any new work since May after a summer learning more about zoning laws than I ever thought I’d need to know - I’m feeling the photo itch. This will be the first Latin American City to be included in the project.

If anyone has any suggestions for places to photograph related to media saturation / consumer frenzy / sci-fi type public spaces I’d love to hear about them. Also places to eat, drink, and be merry - or even better - your long lost friend currently living in the city to meet up with this lone traveler. Leave a comment or e-mail me: info (at) mathewpokoik.com

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