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Mossless Issue 1 is available IN STORES:Printed Matter, NY, ChelseaOHWOW Book Club, NY, West...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:29:00 -0500

Mossless Issue 1 is available

IN STORES:
Printed Matter, NY, Chelsea
OHWOW Book Club, NY, West Village
Ed Varie, NY, East Village
Carte Blanche, SF
Family, LA

ONLINE
Mossless - free shipping within the US
Fourteen-Nineteen (UK)
Self Publish Be Happy (UK)

ON VIEW
Millenium Magazines, MoMA (Feb 20 - May 14)
MoMA Library

photo credit: Derek Kalisher

Nathanael Turner is 23 and has eyes that change...

Mon, 09 May 2011 12:12:44 -0400

Nathanael Turner is 23 and has eyes that change colors.

MOSSLESS: What interests you the most about people?
NATHANAEL TURNER: I am often attracted to people by their physical appearances, but then, after that initial crush has worn off, by what makes them different from myself. I just finished the first week of a five week trip through Scandinavia. I am staying with strangers the entire time, which gives me a lot of opportunities to meet interesting people and make lots of portraits. I have been staying with a French guy who moved to Helsinki about 3 years ago. We are completely different people, but after spending a week living together in his one room flat, hanging out naked in saunas and getting drunk together, I think we have formed a comfort level that has made it possible to make intimate portraits together that reflect something of his personality, being, ect. It is these kinds of personal experience that I love most about traveling and making photographs.

ML: What keeps you shooting?
NT: Sometimes it takes giving yourself five weeks away from work and friends to really concentrate on making new work. I am always shooting, but not always happy with the outcome. The worst thing I can do for myself is to get completely comfortable with my surrounds, where I am living, or where I am working. When that happens I tend to get lazy about making new photographs. I’m really excited about the rest of this year. I don’t have an apartment anywhere, I hardly own anything and I don’t have a job that ties me to a single place. It’s the feeling I get from this kind of freedom that keeps me going.

ML: What’s the most heinous thing you’ve ever seen?
NT: Hmm, The word heinous makes me think of something that is intentionally grotesque. I spent three weeks in Uganda when I was a freshman in college. I saw some pretty disturbing things while I was there, but heinous? Well, just this week I watched an extremely intoxicated young man try and pick up a girl at this bar in Helsinki. There was a punk show going on so he was yelling in her ear. I’m not sure if she could hear anything. While he was yelling at her, his beer slipped out of his hand and shattered on the edge of the table. Beer and glass flew all over the girl. She looked like she wanted to cry. He just brushed off some of the glass that was on her lap and continued to yell at her. I’m not sure why she didn’t punch him in the balls. After another 10 minutes of drunk blabbering he left her and came to sit by me. As he very slowly sat his drunk ass next to me, I gently pushed him as far down the bench as I could. I thought he might try and break his next beer on my lap.

ML: Since this is something you’re very capable of: how do you think a photographer can project real sincerity into their work?
NT: I’m glad you see some sincerity somewhere in my work. I want my photographs to reflect at least a hint of what I remember a person or a place being like. I’m not sure that reaching this works the same way for everyone. I try to not be too hasty about making a photograph of someone, but sometimes this comes back to bite in the end though. I think it has a lot to do with building some level of trust. This is where it takes time. For example, I knew Larson for two years before I made a photograph of him that I felt was “real”. But, its not like I wasn’t trying those first two years. All of a sudden, something happened, and we began to trust each other. It doesn’t always take that long, but for me, its not worth it if I don’t have a certain level of intimacy with the people I work with. Its hard to fake genuine effort and respect.

Grégoire Grange is 37 years old and lives and works in Bordeaux,...

Fri, 06 May 2011 12:42:00 -0400

Grégoire Grange is 37 years old and lives and works in Bordeaux, France.

MOSSLESS: Tell me about how you grew up.
GRÉGOIRE GRANGE: I grew up with my twin in a middle class French family. My father was a photographer and my mother an industrial drawer. I had my first camera round 5 or 7 years old. A Fex Indo imperia 127 and always shot pictures ever since. The second camera I had was Canon Ae1 Program, and I still shoot my pictures with this type of camera.

ML: You’re often very far from what you take pictures of. Why is this?
GG: Well these are generally persons or things that stop my walk and draw my attention for any reason. I then shoot that spot. I like the picturesque aspect given to those kind of framing, that make things quiet and still.

ML: What’s your favourite kind of film?
GG: I would say the French Nouvelle Vague, Godard and Truffaut but also Jacques Tati.

ML: What’s the best thing that happened to you this month?
GG: Taking a 15 day vacation in New York.

Caroll Taveras is ageless and is a native New Yorker.MOSSLESS: A...

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:05:05 -0400

Caroll Taveras is ageless and is a native New Yorker.

MOSSLESS: A few years back you ran a temporary old-school portrait studio. What started the idea?
CAROLL TAVERAS: It was an idea that had been brewing in my head for years. Inspired by the portraits of Peruvian photographer Martin Chambi, who had a portrait studio in Cuzco from 1920 through the 1940s. In January 2009 I was offered a storefront in downtown Brooklyn by Art Assets, which I had about 2 weeks to set up. This dream of mine to have a store front ‘photo studio’ was now suppose to come together within a couple of weeks. It was pretty crazy, but also amazing being able to pull it off that quickly.

ML: How has it grown since then?
CT: It’s actually been a slow process since then. It had originally been scheduled to travel to Berlin after Brooklyn but the funding fell through since it was right in the middle of the whole financial bust. Last month I set up the studio at our gallery in Chelsea for a little over a week. That was great, but different from the studio in Brooklyn. I have a few surprises in store for this summer so stay tune to it coming around again.

ML: What are your favorite type of people to photograph?
CT: I love photographing teenagers. There’s something really beautiful in the way they carry themselves. A sort of sensual awkwardness and curiosity.

ML: You founded F.L.O.A.T. Gallery together with Meagan Ziegler-Haynes. What is a pop-up gallery and what’s the best thing about running one?
CT: Well, we don’t really like the term pop-up gallery. We never really saw ourselves that way. When we initially opened F.L.O.A.T in Brooklyn about 7 months ago we were originally going to be in the space 6 months to a year. It was a donated space, but the property was sold so we began looking for another location. It wasn’t our intention of having a ‘floating’ gallery. It just happened, really.

MOSSLESS: How long does it take to make these?CORINNE VIONNET: I...

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 11:48:30 -0400

MOSSLESS: How long does it take to make these?
CORINNE VIONNET: I have worked on the series “Photo Opportunities” since 2005. It took me around one week to create each image. I didn’t work in a systematic way but instead used the photos as a pallet to achieve an impressionistic image.

ML: How do you feel about these tourist traps? Are you embracing them or is this a critique?
CV: It’s not a critique, but rather a question. I’m unable really to translate my emotions and feeling in words, I share and reveal them through my images. Images have always been important to me. They surround me and nourish me.

Using collected vernacular photographs of famous sites, “Photo Opportunities” tries to conjure up questions about our collective memory. Through this personal interpretation, it also shows my own visual culture.

ML: What do you think of Idris Khan’s work? How is your work different?
CV: Of course, when talking about the technique of superimposing images these two works could be compared, but then so can many other works using the same kind of technique, such as Mike Mike’s work with Face of Tomorrow. Each of these works speaks about very different subjects and expresses something different.

Also, the technique (camera, software, etc) is only a tool that enables me to translate and share some thoughts on a subject, questions that I have, or part of a landscape I’ve seen or emotion I had.

ML: I also love your Museum On Hold work. I always wanted to see what was behind these curtains and makeshift walls when I was at museums. Actually, I still do. Did you too when you were younger? Do you still feel that way after shooting this project?
CV: Before I started this work I had many opportunities to see these “in between exhibition” moments. I was curious to see “behind the curtains”; everything changes fast. A person removes the letters pasted on the middle of a wall, another is already painting the beginning of it.

But there is a special moment when the art works are away from their supports or when a room is empty. It made me wonder about the legitimation of art through museums, but also the importance of the building itself, as today the museums are visited for their architecture as well as their artwork.

Avery McCarthy is 24, received his BFA in photography from The...

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:51:47 -0400

Avery McCarthy is 24, received his BFA in photography from The School of Visual Arts in 2008 and makes work about the ways that people explain the world around them.

MOSSLESS: I’m interested in your series Theory of Everything. How did you take these pictures?
AVERY McCARTHY: The Theory of Everything is a unique project. It was created just as I was leaving school, and I had spent the vast majority of my time there working with analog darkroom processes. Until that year I had been a complete purist, rejecting the digital method entirely. Recently, I had given in and printed my color film digitally and it became clear at that point that digital was not only able to compete with analog work in terms of quality, but also had become the absolute standard for all things photographic. Many of the criticisms leveled at digital work became fuel for this and later projects: “Taking thousands of pictures is very different than taking one very slowly.”, “There are so many options, it overwhelms and the work just ends up colorful and pretty.”, and mostly, “There is no life or character to digital prints.”

One day I began looking through my archive of images that I capture off of Google, I pulled out some of the more symbolic ones that looked like they could have been sculptures. I had been reading a book called “The Elegant Universe” by Brain Greene about string theory, and so the idea of large and small objects being equivalent was floating around my head at the time. The whole portfolio came together in one moment, with one idea, which was that I could work this project in reverse: I could make traditional silver gelatin prints from these digitally appropriated images. The approach borrowed from the best of both worlds, a limitless and incredibly malleable source of content, and a printing process that imbued the works with the nostalgia and gravity of traditionally created photographs.

I set about isolating the images, creating digital negatives on transparency paper, and then printing them. It was the last project I produced in the darkroom, and kind of ended up marking the transition to working digitally for me.

ML: What can you tell me about the picture Dark Matter in that series and why did you portray it like you did?
AM: Each image in The Theory of Everything is presented as an equally sized object in a black void, except for Dark Matter. In my reading and research that led to the project, dark matter seemed to be particularly interesting because no one can see it, we don’t know what it’s made of, it is only evidenced by it’s gravitational effects, and yet it makes up about 80% of our universe. That’s an overwhelming number. When I began researching what it looked like, or how it was distributed, I started finding images that looked like spiderwebs made of electricity. I thought they were incredibly beautiful to say the least, so I capped them. When I was going through my images to pull potential works for The Theory of Everything, those images stood out as a potentially profound statement to add into the mix. Here was this concept, proven and visualized through purely mathematic means, that makes up almost everything in existence. That just blew my mind. It deserved to be in there, and the idea of having it be the only piece that stretched edge to edge seemed appropriate.

ML: Your series X=? feels quite personal. How does this work tie in to your personal beliefs?
AM: X=? is quite personal, it is my answer to the question “How do people explain, understand, and control the world around them?”
I have been thinking for a long time about what I have to say as an artist, because I constantly feel that I dont have enough information on any subject to make an informed artistic statement. The more I look around, the more I’ve come to feel that no one has enough information—people piece together conclusions, link together observations, and trust systems that are already in place in order to assist with the extraordinarily difficult task of navigating through the thing we all call life.

The ‘What Is?’ Project is a series of interviews I conducted that ask people for their answers to life’s biggest questions. What is love? What is happiness? What is your goal? What is time? I have spend hours and hours interviewing and reviewing answers to these questions in an attempt to create some sort of index of opinion on them. During that process, I began pulling photographs that explored my answers to these questions as a sort of personal answer to these largest of questions of life. It seemed a natural progression: observe the biggest, smallest, most epic things in existence; ask people to explain their feelings on the biggest, smallest, most epic questions; then explore the implications of those findings in photographs.

What I ended up with was a group of images that were shot over the course of the past year and a half that are about exploration and the search for understanding. Religion, science, art, math, philosophy, and business are all manifestations of the same desire: to explore, understand, and control the world around us. This body of work observes the beauty in all of those equally valid approaches.

ML: How did you get so interested in the universe at large?
AM: I used to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation every day growing up, and it made a huge impact on how I perceive the world, and how I conduct myself in it. The show presents a future in which humanity has come together and used our intelligence and resources to eliminate poverty and now seeks to better our understanding of the universe. The characters use technology as a means to understand and explore, but what is truly important is personal integrity. This gave me a sense of purpose and a respect for the power approaching life as an explorer. As I got older, I became more interested in science and art as ways to explain what I saw around me, this lead more or less directly to the work that I am producing today.

Megan Carney is 23 years old and lives in a place where it...

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 12:25:03 -0400

Megan Carney is 23 years old and lives in a place where it hasn’t rained in 7 months.

MOSSLESS: Tell me something about the memories represented in your body of work called Relatives.
MEGAN CARNEY: The memories set the stage and context for what is being physically represented. These are memories that are significant to me in their insignificance, in that they relate primarily to something that only I could deem valuable given their peculiarity. For example, there is an image of two towers of Kleenex boxes, (the photographs are currently untitled so bear with me). On these boxes is a Post-it note with a written tally. This scene, briefly put, represents the strange excitement I felt as a child when placed with the obligation to provide my class with tissues for the school year. These types of somewhat intangible memories are interesting to me in the form of photographs because they can be objectified through both the photographic medium and my personal and aesthetic imprint. The images then serve as a physical interpretation of something that is not inherently physical. This is an ongoing project and I’m still digging around a bit to give a concrete expression to the process I find myself involved in.

ML: How are you tackling the ever-increasing difficulties of trying to live as a photographer?
MC: Right now I’m just figuring out what it is that I want to do with photography. Since graduating from college my main focus has been my work and I couldn’t say that I’ve been thinking too much about the difficulties of trying to live as a photographer. Those difficulties seem inevitable and I will have to get back to you once I encounter them.

ML: What are some great things about the photography world in Texas?
MC: There is a lot of great photography coming out of Texas right now and I’ve been fortunate enough to have professors who are at the forefront of it, and also a community of encouraging friends who are creating interesting work. After I graduated I moved to a small town in West Texas to focus on my work and I look forward to entering the broader photography world in Texas in the future. I love this state and I couldn’t really imagine working anywhere else right now.

ML: Do you have any interesting upcoming projects?
MC: Yes! In addition to working on Relatives, I am currently shooting for a series titled Is This You? This series is similar to Relatives aesthetically and conceptually, however, it is more outwardly focused. The images are humorous and the subjects are primarily people - both areas that I am fairly new to in this format. These photographs will slowly find their way onto my website.

Bryan Krueger is 22 years old and notices eerie parallels...

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:18:00 -0400

Bryan Krueger is 22 years old and notices eerie parallels between himself and Michael Scott from The Office.

MOSSLESS: How was your experience with your mentor, Kathy Ryan?
BRYAN KRUEGER: It’s really funny to think about how one transitions from thinking about an idea as an object into experiencing it and, in turn, making it part of their reality. When I first digested the fact that I had been given the opportunity to work with Kathy Ryan I wasn’t sure how I could assimilate that into normality. I let that get to my head. When I visited the New York Times building for the first time, it felt like I was in some surreal 80’s movie montage where some college student couldn’t quite find their bearings in the fancy corporate building – I went to the wrong front desk, I dropped my portfolio, I couldn’t figure out the elevators (hint: the buttons are on the outside). But once I got to the right floor Ms. Ryan welcomed me warmly and gave some of the most direct critique I’ve had – all with a personable and encouraging touch. Her approach reminds me a lot of Penelope Umbrico’s, who teaches at SVA. I can credit my thesis advisor, Barbara Pollack, with breaking me out of my comfort zone and forcing me into work that meant more to me than ever before, while I credit Kathy with focusing my divergent rampages (caused by excitement) within that first 20-minute meeting. I was pleased to find her consistent enthusiasm and support throughout the subsequent meetings we held.

ML: Can you tell me something about your work and how you exhibited it? (click here to see how Bryan exhibited his work)
BK: Gladly – I guess I can start by saying that the work tends to tiptoe on the line between illusion and disillusion. The subjects of the photographs I’ve been making are either directly mitigated through digital interventions or are repeated through drawing. In either case, I am interested in harkening in the viewer the act of looking at this flat thing that has the immense power to embower the viewer in a displacing illusion. I like the idea of enacting the viewer’s gaze in the completion of a composition that has missing parts. I became really interested in this idea of projecting personal counterparts onto a photograph during my time working at a photo lab in San Francisco. Mounting slides and trimming prints increasingly made me feel disillusioned from the actual content of imagery by the sheer amount I was ingesting that I began placing myself, the people I know and the places I’ve been into the pictures. Suddenly, someone’s 2-month African safari turned into a Krueger family reunion in Phoenix, Arizona. I like to think about photographs as having this flexibility and believe they do by themselves – as demonstrated above and, of course, in those found in mass culture – but I am interested in pushing this a step further in my own practice in order to highlight that flexibility.

For the Mentor show, I approached the presentation of the photographs just as I approached the making of the photographs themselves. Given the way I want to engage the viewer’s attention while looking at the images, it seemed almost antithetical to fix the prints in frames – the frame seems so final in relation to this work. Despite the several layers of mediation the photographs themselves present, the frame would impose a finality that, in my mind, would be reductive to my efforts in making the viewer a part of the photograph’s reading. By pinning them as loose prints to the sheet of wood that mimics a wall, I hoped to freely expose the prints to each other (since they vibe off one another) as well as to the viewer.

The leaning of the wood wasn’t so much an afterthought as it was introduced by the fact that I bought wood that might have been a little too heavy to adhere to the wall with only four nails. I do feel, however, that my over confidence serendipitously added a nice layer to the presentation. The leaning wood fully breaks away from the wall – a break that, in my mind, echoes the way in which the images break the passive gaze onto the images themselves. This idea of breaking the gaze is pushed further by the fact that the prints are well below the conventional “viewing height”. In a show with so much to look at, I like the idea of the prints being on the verge of escaping view yet retaining their own private presence.

The small grey prints, which hang just above the sheet of wood, represent the early stages of the trajectory into the color photographs pinned to the wood. What separates them is the way in which they were made (via Risograph printer) and the fact they are purely about stripping away information, whereas the color prints are about building up information and subverting it – both methods, however, are meant to engage the viewer similarly.

ML: What has your most memorable moment been at SVA?
BK: Having my first meeting with Stephen Frailey and noticing the color of his office walls compliment his eyes very nicely.

ML: What are you going to be doing this summer and onwards?
BK: That’s the question, isn’t it! It’s probably that question alone that fosters productivity after graduation due to the neurosis it instills…or not. In all seriousness, I’m planning on staying here in New York for as long as I have productive things to do. I somehow weaseled my way into working with a former teacher of mine from SVA – which has proven to be a dream set-up. If I don’t bug her too much, I’ll hopefully help her out well into the summer, perhaps onwards. Other than that I’ll be working on things in the fall with LMAKprojects, a great gallery located in the Lower East Side. Eventually I’m looking to go back to Graduate school – but have not thought about those specifics too deeply yet…

In any case, you can find me soaking up the California sun for the month of August. I’ll be there for a party that my parents are having – in a strange way it is associated with my graduating but has more to do with mini burritos and margaritas.

Signe Pierce is 22 years old and is currently invading your...

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:22:45 -0400

Signe Pierce is 22 years old and is currently invading your reality.

MOSSLESS: How was your experience with your mentor was Janet Borden?
SIGNE PIERCE: Janet has been great to bounce ideas off of. She provided a lot of insight into the thought process behind the Surreal Housewives. I think some of my subject matter was a bit foreign to her (i.e., trashy pop culture and reality television… can’t say I blame her), however she was able to help me refine some of my ideas and helped me get closer towards what it really was that I was trying to accomplish with my work. Her critiques of my images and ideas prompted me to dig into myself. She had me asking questions and verbalizing ideas I had been having a hard time putting into words. She pushed me to make sure I was digging as deep as I possibly could. I still have some things I need to figure out… I think every artist always has their questions, but I really enjoyed my conversations and time with her.

ML: Can you tell me something about your work and how you chose to frame it?
SP: The pieces in the Mentor Show, Glitz Pageant and Surreal Housewives are from a series I’ve been working on called Role Modelz. I’ve been musing the current onslaught of girly girl nastiness and decadence in pop culture, and how we’re viewing it within the context of “reality” TV. The whole “reality” aspect is what really fucks with me intrinsically. I guess I just get angry about what gets perpetuated and sold as being “real”, when everything seems like artifIce. I worry about the effect it has on a younger, more impressionable person. I’m very interested in the ways that the “self-as-a-subject”, “anyone can be a star” culture is going to play out, and what it’s doing to social standards. I guess by using myself in my work, and specifically by playing multiple characters I feel like I’m sort of creating a paradigm of the disturbing standards being set. I like to take things to the extreme in my images as far as pop and color and “glitz” is concerned because I tend to feel like everything that surrounds this odd culture of femininity has this sort of lazy sparkle to it that loses its luster with every hair extension that gets sold. I think that’s what drives me the most lately is that sex appeal, beauty, femininity, body parts, whatever, is what’s being sold to me, to us. You’re selling me make up but the girl in the ad has digital skin… you’re talking about “reality” but everything I see is fake. I wanna be like “I DON’T CARE GO AWAY!!” because I know it’s all just artificial noise, but it’s so damn loud, so I guess I have to talk back.

All of that went into how I wanted to frame them. Specifically with Glitz Pageant, I knew I wanted her (Dannica-Lynn, superstar pageant princess) to be BIG and in your face. I liked the idea of her looking out across the room, demanding you to stare into her vapid gaze, or “dead eyes” as I refer to them. As far as my decision to bedazzle her frame (her frame is covered with various rhinestones and gems), it just made sense for the glitzy obsession and never-ending extravagant spectacle to be interfering with the piece in a physical way. Everything about the culture is ostentatious so of COURSE Dannica-Lynn wouldn’t be seen without gems on her frame— she’d practically be naked! The Surreal Housewives didn’t get gems because there was already so much happening inside of the picture, plus all of their dresses were bedazzled to perfection by me and my friends (thx guys!), so they were dressed with a simple purple frame. I wanted it to be loud, slightly annoying, and in your face so that you could get lost inside the freakish, sugary, bitch glitz environment. I’m going to stop now cuz I just said bitch glitz, which renders that answer over.

ML: What was your most memorable moment at SVA?
SP: I had Jessica Craig-Martin as my junior year critique teacher and she is someone I’ll always cherish getting to know. She took me as an assistant on a fashion shoot for Black Book magazine at a strip club in Manhattan. Hanging out in the strippers’ dressing room was an experience I’ll never forget. Lots of make up, tooth brushes, sparkly panties, Gandhi quotes, gaudy jewelry, wigs, suspicious looking furniture, and high-ass-heels. One of my jobs was to run out and buy emergency chicken wings and crucifixes as props. Jessica was great because she listened to my input and was receptive to my ideas. She’s also just really, really funny. When we would talk about our work and the ugly overconsumption of culture and material things and the sort of nausea it leaves one with she summed the mantra up perfectly with a sarcastic, “Give me bloated excess; give me diamonds!”. I consider that to be a sort of philosophy of my characters for this series.

ML: What are you going to be doing in your upcoming years?
SP: I’m definitely focusing on the humorous aspect that my work tends to have. I feel like there’s nothing that speaks to me louder than good humor, and I like the idea of using it as a device to deliver information and headier ideas. I’ve been exploring performance in my work for the past couple of years by playing these characters in my images and I’m starting to grow restless with the still photograph. I think the natural progression for me is taking the characters out of their silent still images and into actual reality. I’ve spent so much time over-obsessing and dissecting the nature of “reality” and what it is to be real, and I think in order to really get what I want out of this I need to have my girls (and boys!) go into the real world. I want to give them a voice and have them interact with real people and see what effect it can have. I am inspired to test the limits of subject matter, comfort levels, genre and humor. That’s what’s motivating me currently. I’ll be doing something involving this at the Mentor Show, which you can watch here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/itz-bryssa-betch

(these questions were all asked just before the opening night. Hit ustream the link just above to see the performance Signe put on— I just had to ask an extra question about it)

ML: Can we talk about your performance at the show? I was the first person you ran into [in the video you can see me in the elevator] and even though I knew it was you I couldn’t recognize you, I wasn’t sure what to do.
SP: The performance was something I had been toying with for a while. I knew I wanted to place my characters in an interactive setting, and having one debut at the mentor show just seemed like a challenge that made sense. I knew that for this series the main representative would have to be a fame-hungry reality star, and thus, Bryssa was born. Bryssa was basically a combination of every reality TV product I’ve ever observed— blonde, tan, extremely obnoxious. However what sets her apart is that she films herself via her “reality stick”. Basically I just attached my phone to a pink plastic pole and live streamed it to the internet to her show, “Itz Bryssa, Betch” so that everything she was doing could be viewed in real time. She was walking around filming herself and making a spectacle of everything she was doing, which was essentially nothing. She was there to represent Signe because “Sig couldn’t be there” and she just wanted to come out and support the arts for a night (the fact that she was featured in Surreal Housewives had NOTHING to do with it…)

After a while she started to feel nauseous from all of the attention that was being payed to her and was downing slimey cocktails. This led to her getting sick and puking all over Signe’s exhibit area. By the end of it she had slipped in her own puke, lost her shoes, broken her cocktail glass, and somehow managed to cover the flowers Janet Borden gave her in slime. She put the flowers below Dannica-Lynn’s picture as “a symbol of something.” (her words, not mine). I’m looking forward to editing the footage we filmed and turning it into a show. This is just the beginning for Bryssa, she has so many exciting adventures to embark on with her Reality Stick (Bryssa Goes Clubbin’, Bryssa Goes To the Manhattan Mall on a Saturday, etc). As far as reactions are concerned, you weren’t alone in not knowing what to do. I think a lot of people didn’t know what to do with Bryssa other than to gawk, which was exactly the point. She is there for you to consume and to be afraid of. You should be afraid!

Derek Kalisher is 21 years old and is Romke’s...

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 18:25:00 -0400

Derek Kalisher is 21 years old and is Romke’s boss.

MOSSLESS: Your mentor was Liz Deschenes. How was your experience with her?
DEREK KALISHER: What we talked about was fruitful, but it was somewhat brief. We only met once but we did exchange e-mails, throughout which we discussed the role of science and art. This came to a head when she sent me a section of Robert Irwin’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. Sadly after that she had to make a trip to Germany, and we lost touch. We only started talking again recently.

ML: Can you tell me something about the work you exhibited?
DK: I have a big fascination with life and death. I’m sure we all do work around that concept. So, what I hoped to do with the work was photograph the in-between state, where the plant and animal both meet just as basic organic substance, with aspects of its former life, but clearly dead.

ML: What was your most memorable moment at SVA?
DK: I was asked to take part in SVA’s summer residency program. I got to do it for free by assisting the coordinator as well as showing all the other students how to use all the equipment and being on call in case any of them had a problems. So, I thought it would be a good idea to set up shop in the radio station since I worked there during the year and had the keys for it. I’d hang there after class and if anyone needed any help I’d be at their service. So the weeks go on and things are going great, I had turned a section of the station into my own private studio; I was also in the early stages of working on the project being exhibited now. This was all until the elevator in our building breaks down and everyone needs to use the freight elevator, including the president of the school who’s office happens to be on the same floor as my “studio”. The timing couldn’t have been worse, that day I had chosen to shoot a dried fish I had picked up in Chinatown a day or two prior, and the odor had crept into the hall near the elevator. I was just about to start shooting when I got a call to go help one of the other students on a different floor. While I was gone the president smelled something odd and investigated, to find the radio a wreck with all the stuff I was shooting, plus my friend Bobby hanging out there on the computer. I get a call saying I have 5 minutes to grab my stuff before the cleaning guy gets there and chucks most of the stuff in the radio. I scramble up stairs hiding all my equipment, photos, paper, and all my other things in the back room so they don’t get tossed. Only to have my key taken away soon after locking most of my things in the room. Luckily after pleading with the guard I get my stuff back but I’m banned from the radio for the rest of the summer. The best part is when I come back the following semester I get promoted to being the station’s manager.

ML: What are you going to be doing this summer and onwards?
DK: The summer I’m not sure. I hope to travel. I’ve never really left New York for more then a week or two, and never out of the States. Beyond that I will most likely be looking for work, applying for this and that and inevitably a grad school.

Marissa Plant is 21 and wishes she could be best friends with...

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:04:00 -0400

Marissa Plant is 21 and wishes she could be best friends with Seth Green.

MOSSLESS: Your mentor was Susan Bright. How was your experience with her?
MARISSA PLANT: Susan Bright is an amazing person and I was really glad I had her as my mentor. She gave me great ideas to further my project and helped me narrow down which photographs to use in the show. She even helped me edit my artist statement and expand my ideas. She gave me a lot to think about such as how the public will view my photographs and how to title my images.

ML: Can you tell me something about how you exhibited your work?
MP: I had a really hard time trying to figure out which photographs to use in the show. I had first planned to use sixteen pictures but after seeing them up on the wall, I realized how overwhelming it was to have that many. Less was definitely more in this case. I had Susan Bright as well as two other teachers at SVA look at my work to help me narrow down the selection and come up with an order. The end result was nine images. I also played around with which color frames to use. At first I waned to use black, but with many suggestions to see what white looked liked, it ended up looking much better.

ML: What was your most memorable moment at SVA?
MP: My most memorable moment at SVA actually wasn’t really at SVA. I took part of the SVA Shanghai summer residency program this past June. It was three weeks of learning about the culture, arts and food. I was able to go to many different museums as well as do some exploring on my own. One of my favorite teachers at SVA, Abby Robinson, taught the class there and really made the experience come to life. I had such a wonderful time photographing the city and meeting a lot of new amazing people.

ML: Where do you see yourself in five years?
MP: This happens to be one question I’m really hating as of late, unfortunately that’s what you get for being senior! I really want to do something in films, particularly cinematography or shooting photographs on movie sets. I’ve always been a huge fan of the cinema and I really want to have job associated with movies.

Tony Wilde is 23 years old and still loves pop...

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:39:00 -0400

Tony Wilde is 23 years old and still loves pop punk.

MOSSLESS: Your mentor was Daniel Power. How was your experience with him?
TONY WILDE: My experience with Daniel was great. I was really glad Stephen Frailey didn’t pair me up with a photographer….I’ve gotten so sick of talking about photographs with other photographers. But yeah what can I say Daniel is really smart and knows what he is talking about, his feedback about my work was really interesting…it was something new and refreshing that I wasn’t getting at my critiques at SVA. He really brought some new ideas to the table about what Im doing with this work and where it can actually go.

ML: Can you tell me something about this huge portrait you have up in the Mentor show?
TW: The photograph that is hanging in the mentor show is part of an ongoing series for over a year now, yet with no title. It involves history, in the way that I am making the model sit as he or she would have had to sit for a photograph back in the 19th century. A reverse of technology if you will? taking a state of the art camera and treating it as if it was a box camera with a pinhole lens. Im still trying to figure it all out.

ML: What has your most memorable moment been at SVA?
TW: That would be May 12th 2011 when I graduate.

ML: What are you going to be doing this summer and onwards?
TW: Hopefully getting a job at BOX Studios as a master printer for Pascal Dangin, moving into a loft, driving my VW, Surfing a lot, and working on new work, and enjoying life.

Samantha Murasko is 21 years old and is burnt out on city...

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:04:15 -0400

Samantha Murasko is 21 years old and is burnt out on city life.

MOSSLESS: Your mentor was Mitch Epstein. How was your experience with him?
SAMANTHA MURASKO: It was pretty exciting. His work has been an influence on mine for years now and it was unbelievable luck that I got paired with him. We met and he looked over my prints and edited them down which was helpful. I can edit my own work for hours and not end up happy with it so it was interesting to see which images he chose. We talked about I wanted to say with this work and where it needs to go in the future. I left feeling resolved in a weird way which is what I guess is the whole point of the program.

ML: Can you tell me something about how you exhibited your work?
SM: I decided to present all vertical images in two rows of four prints each, eight prints in total. I don’t print very large so I thought it was was a good opportunity to show a small group from the work I’ve been making.

ML: What has your most memorable moment been at SVA?
SM: Most memorable? I’m not exactly sure, but I’ll never forget the moment I met Bobby Doherty. He was my first friend I made at college and we met in the dorm. He asked me if I wanted some of his life savers.

ML: What are you going to be doing this summer and onwards now that you’re done?
SM: I hate this question. Traveling is the only thing I’ve really thought seriously about lately if that’s any clue to what’s ahead, haha. Job hunting and sipping on Arnold Palmers? I think that’s a good answer.