Isabelle Wenzel's Stand Up Sculptures

Isabelle Wenzel is another artist who (like Melinda Gibson in the previous post) participated in Brad Feuerhelm's call out for investigations into his archive.

Wenzel also investigates the female body and how it is represented in fashion and how dress, posture and function are used to distort and depersonalise in traditional female jobs and roles.

She used to be an acrobat/contortionist so all the pictures here are also self-portraits; and they are a check-list of various fashion tropes (starting with Guy Bourdin) which gives them a life and makes them both funny and subversive. They're performance, still life, sculpture, political commentary and stand-up all in one. And they look fantastic.

Add to that the low-tech way that she makes her pictures, using a self-release button on a Canon G12 (that might have changed by now). She sticks it on a tripod and then dashes into place to get the shot in the 10 seconds available. And if she doesn't get it she does it again... and again... and again...

More on that here.

And here's a video of her posing and if you go here (Just after 5 minutes in), there's a video of her actually making pictures - "Everything I did before was stupid. And this is also kind of stupid... but there is something interesting." Tremendous!

Still Lives, Allotments and Galaxies

The BJP has a Still Life special this month featuring, from top down, the work of Nadege Meriau, Klaus Pichler, Nicolai Howalt and Deborah Bay (and interviews by myself and Lauren Heinz examining their work).

All the artists photograph something we take for granted and then recontextualise it  - Meriau, Howalt and Bay all have projects that transform things into something resembling galaxies; dust, vegetables and bullet holes become Supernova in their hands.

Pichler and Meriau have both worked with allotments and now work with food, Howalt's Car Crash Studies look like close up of birthday party wrapping paper and Deborah Bay's project is called Big Bang and she's from Houston so there has to be a Sheldon Cooper connection in there somewhere.

The Big Bang project reminded me very much of Claus Stolz's sunburn pictures too -one of which is below. Which brings us full circle to the night sky and the stars. Somehow Still Lives are a bit more about movement, living and the fundamentals of human life.  And it all started with a Big Bang!