About Me

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MICHAEL SCHREIER Michael Schreier is a professional artist and photographer who has dedicated his considerable professional career to the celebration of both the public and private hero. Recent work includes Storyteller, Waiting for Words at the Ottawa Art Gallery, curator Emily Falvey, 2009, and the curating of the exhibition Dave Heath, A Heritage of Meaning, 2013 at the Ottawa Art Gallery. Selected works are represented in both public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the National Archives Photography Collection, the Agnes-Etherington Art Centre, the Canadian Portrait Gallery, Visual Studies Workshop, (Rochester, New York), Light Works Workshop, Syracuse New York, Carleton University Art Gallery, and the University of Ottawa Library Special Collections.

Thursday 2 July 2020

Post # 23

(Click on image for detailed viewing)


The Poetics of Voice

"with appreciation to Lawrence Lipking," 

                                                                             
                                                                   The life of the Poet:
                                                    Beginning and ending Poetic Careers


" If the lives of the Poet/Artist tend to be peripheral to 
the insides of work, 
the life of the artist is often the life of the work: 
then to become the life of the beholder.?"





The artist [beholder] embracing the work might recognize its autonomy?

Lawrence Lipking underscores the value that an artist's life might encourage vision and a poet's voice: suggesting this might also offer a rationalization, a clarity not to be mistaken for truth. A photograph's truth rests in its metadata, its formal and material rendering. With this one becomes reliant on objectivity, and as is currently suggested the presence of "fake" and the challenged rendering: bringing into question one's facility/sensitivity for both evidence and metaphor. 




                                                                               The "insides of a work"?

Photography's analogue negative on film or paper emulsion begins as a latent image: an image registered in the emulsion to be developed, its characteristic to be determined by silver content and directly related, sensitivity to light. Note: the actual visual quality of the image is determined by exposure control taking into account the amount of light available and the desired rendering, whether of maximum depth of field or limited through aperture/shutter speed adjustment. The development of the image determines appearance, grain structure and the subsequent aesthetic content of the image.The critical difference between this and the digital image is that the film becomes the sensor and the latent image results in a translation of 1's and 0's.

However, the true beginning of metadata, whether analogue or digital resides in intent. The artist's  initial impulses, experiences and  insight might be shaped to both the present and to the value of history and continuity. This is true to photography as to any of the creative arts. It is in the presence of the "other" that voice is initiated. 
                         
                                    So how is it that a work reveals its true self, the portrait of the self?




One looking carefully at the above images might discern mutual elements of containment, layering and of transparency: all of which lead to an understanding for passage. The time line, day>month>year>hour>minute>second offers an initial containment, confirming a moment observed.



Part 1: The Heroics of the Banal



The Jacob M. Lowy Collection is Canada's national treasure of old and rare Hebraic and Judaica. Its intellectual scope spans religious, scientific, historical and philological thought emanating from presses in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. It now comprises approximately 3000 volumes printed between the 15th and 20th centuries.

Friends of Library Archives Canada


                             The above three works introduce the still life as a staging for thought.
                     
     

All this might lead one to pay attention to the privacy of knowledge and the value for empathy. It is true that to give value to another, one must first value the self, not a self portrait but a portrait of the self.


Chiaroscuro, the rendering of light to dark offers not only a quality of texture but an experience of passage in which contiguity prevails.
Light to dark plays a drama between what is revealed, disclosed and what must remain privileged, in the interim of a conversation, there is a pause, as Lyotard suggests, a Differend, a moment of quiet reassurance within the presence of doubt.








Monday 27 April 2020

Post#22

One may notice that some images may have appeared in previous posts, an intentional gesture as an image may inform within numerous perspectives: effectively, the strength of art history and for the author/beholder an offering of extended reading.

(Cursor on single image for detailed viewing)



Ledger, A Study in Esoterics
Stations #1: Travels through the Veil of Orpheus

(Thoughts considered during Covid 19 Pandemic)

Consider waking one morning without any sense of voice , language, structure, that all you have known is swallowed in a cloud of silenced unknowing. I have only genuinely realized this once in my life, remembering very little of its immediate texture. I have however by cause always enjoyed not just the meaning of language and words, but its, their texture, tone as in music, perhaps an appreciation for implied passage, a realization, an awareness of intuitive knowing. I can only imagine now from many years distance the void, that [silence] would encourage.

                                         An “I”s, eye’s perception without coherency yet a quiet urgency to construct.





The term ledger stems from the English dialect forms liggen or leggen, meaning "to lie or lay" (Dutch: liggen or leggen, German: liegen or legen); in sense it is adapted from the Dutch substantive legger, properly "a book laying or remaining regularly in one place". Originally, a ledger was a large volume of scripture or service book kept in one place in church and openly accessible. According to Charles Wriothesley's Chronicle (1538), "The curates should provide a booke of the bible in Englishe, of the largest volume, to be a ledger in the same church for the parishioners to read on."

Wikipedia



                                                                                          Avicenna, "The Book of Healing"
                                         
                                                                                  (In for repair, Library Archives, Canada, 2018}
                                                                                            




How a simple string of ceramic beads, represented in the original image, used to weigh  the pages down without causing damage, might proffer added insight, perhaps an understanding as to the true function of the "Book of Healing".


The Book of Healing (Arabic: کتاب الشفاء Kitāb al-Šhifāʾ, Latin: Sufficientia) is a scientific and philosophical encyclopedia written by Abu Ali ibn Sīna (Avicenna) from medieval Persia, near Bukhara in Maverounnahr. Also called The Cure it is intended to "cure" or "heal" ignorance of the soul. Despite its title, it is not concerned with medicine; Avicenna's earlier The Canon of Medicine in 5 volumes had been medical.
This book is Ibn Sina's major work on science and philosophy. He probably began to compose the al-Shifa in 1014, completed it around 1020,[1] and published it in 1027.[2][3]

The book is divided into four parts: logicnatural sciences, mathematics (a quadrivium of arithmetic, geometryastronomy, and music), and metaphysics.[3] It was influenced by ancient Greek philosophers, such as AristotleHellenistic thinkers such as Ptolemy, earlier Persian and Muslim scientists and philosophers such as Al-Kindi (Alkindus), Al-Farabi (Alfarabi) and Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī.

Wikipedia:





The common thread, a silent interior connecting these thoughts/ images might provide an empathy for continuity, passage, and, with an added  reference to metaphysics, abstract concepts concerned with knowing and being. It may also suggest the principles of contiguity, critical in our contemporary digital realm.

Esoteric thought is understood to be of a specialized or limited community, but can also be associated with or as an agent for introspective musing. It is directly associated with allegory and storytelling.




The anonymous Ledger submitted to Library Archives, Canada, 2017, for repair is in the traditional definition of a ledger, a regional catalog, registering transactions for reference and historical record. This catalog experienced serious damage, the result of aging and other circumstances. It however, also becomes a muse offering evidence not as fact but as a trace, vulnerable to conviction, certainty and loss..



                                                                                ( Drawings by Hilde Schreier)



With profound subtlety Joy Kogawa introduces the reader in "Obasan's" chapter 15, to a clarity of thought and experience garnered by anyone having experienced exile: that anonymous space wherein any previous archive becomes vulnerable and doubt reigns supreme. 


" I am SOMETIMES NOT CERTAIN WHETHER IT IS A CLUTTERED ATTIC in which I sit, a waiting room, a tunnel, a train. There is no beginning and no end to the forest, or the dust storm, no edge from which to know where the clearing begins. Here, in this familiar density, beneath this cloak, within this carapace, is the longing within the darkness."

Joy Kogawa, from "Obasan"
Exile, A Literary Quarterly
Volume 8 1 & 2







                                                                                            "terminus ad quem,"
                                                                           the point at which something ends or finishes


                                                                     Leaving Vienna Austria for Canada, circa; 1953

                                                                                    (from emigrant > immigrant)
                                                                                       
                                                                     See Camera Obscura Post #1, January 21, 2016


( Note:

In the reading of the above image, 13..12..17, 11..38..33,  (the numbers indicate metadata time line of the photograph as day/month/year/ hour/minute/second), one becomes aware that the photograph "Am Schiff" was taken 64 years earlier, and yet as author of this work I am aware of the influence of time, one moment informing the other. Initially, I as a young boy would, as a senior artist 64 years later offer this layout within my body of work.)



      ( Cursor on image for referenced detail )
Details of a topographic map offering location, villages depth soundings of the St. Laurence river.



Index for Reading

  • To understand space in between
  • To question means to break, it means to set up on the inside and on the outside.
  • Does one first of all have to find oneself in a state of rupture?
  • Transition between textures.
  • Nuance resonated/resonance nuanced.
  • Ledger is about a loss of presence and its recognition: an oxymoron
  • To illustrate the experience of seeing and thinking.
  • The serendipity of an idea connected to work, in George Steiner's Bluebeard's Castle,an understanding that history informs the value of continuity and that trace is both of the tragic and the sublime.
  • A surface underscored by depth, the hidden and the implied, from the past, the present never attained, and future always speculative, where present is never present.

Movement within a still image always occurs at the edge of any of its elements. This is true for painting,printmaking, drawing and the reading of a book. It is the beholder's responsibility to connect, assisted by visual clues, gesture, color, perspective, associations that might occur between elements providing passage throughout the still work. Depending on associations that are made the visual passage may be between foreground, middle ground and distance, depth of field, movement vertical horizontal or left to right. Where texture and luminosity might imply the presence of a subsurface, the difference between glass ,air, and water. Then, the two associates, abstraction and objectivity may complete a profound rendering of containment.



Consider the reference to containment in the above image, whether the converging lines leading us to an anonymous conversation, the content of which is not revealed, the reading of a paper as one passes by and the presence of a chair inviting the beholder to rest for a moment, speculating for us what might be contained outside the frame. Body language and gesture might offer some insight, yet a rational narrative is not available. What is privileged remains.  If one is to view one of the elements listed above, what happens to our awareness of the presence of the other's insignificance? So it is through formal framing that hierarchy is established. Cursor on the image of the ledger and one becomes aware the depth of the surface of the paper as all marks as in a painting are effectively similarly registered. In concert, and  with the introduction of a glaze, the painter is able to separate and suggest the depth of an underlying space. It becomes clear that every element nurtured in an image embraces a portal offering a deeper and more profound reflection, identity.


"A brief glance... the speaker embraces voice: entr"acte.

She is encircled by silences, unanswered, incomplete and never pure. 
As the storyteller, she anticipates thought's final concert. 

And yet, 

she appears reluctant within this proscenium of solemnity 
as she reflects on a prospective ending 
to this conversation, 

although certainly her musings might confirm a shared experience. 

Offering both a celebration and its rejection, from the analytical to the sublime, 
from the privatized to the social and then to return,
 she understands that the remnant's of an actor's memory might garner 
further disturbances in reading. 

Nervous and wearied by silence's exacting pulse she begins.

Vienna, City of Thoughts
2010, Michael Schreier 




( Camera Obscura Post #20)




...from the heart's Eolian wind-song:
With ice blue tears, cloistered by the sounds of another's epoch,
 the most isolated individuals recognize that they must share  the same virtual  position, 
as they enter the act of the mind...
and then in the beginning and as the curtain rises, 
silence offers a portal to thought. 

Yet, and even then, it may occupy that nuanced moment resonant between reverie and word...




Tears for an Empty Desert
Michael Schreier, 2009




...tsror...


       (Hebrew, means pebble)