Mateo Gómez García

Mateo Gómez García was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1988. In 2007 he moved to Buenos Aires to study cinema and photography but after 5 months he decided to dedicate himself only to photography. He met there his mentors Juan Travnik, Ataulfo Perez Aznar and Alberto Goldstein. In 2009 he returned to Colombia where he has dedicated himself to develop documentary projects around the Colombian culture from a perspective removed from the stereotype of violence and drugs, focusing in cultural and psicological aspects native to the colombian culture. His work has been feature in Little Brown Mushroom and Vice Mexico among others. He has also exhibited his work in Foto Fever Festival and Arles Open Salon.

Artist Statement: A Place to Live 

“Small and modest things disappear, as well as small and modest images” 

Wim Wenders, The Urban Landscape

There is an ideal place to live. However, there's a conflict between ideal and reality. The city assumes the ideal position by offering work, cultural and intellectual diversity, but at the same time the reality is costlier, impersonal, routinary, controlled and accelerated. That is the reason many prefer to live in the suburbs and outskirts of the city in order to have the benefits of both the tranquility of the country and the opportunities of the city.

Bogota proves to be in unstable territory as the city grows rapidly. In 1930, the population stood at 300,000 people while today, it extends to 8 million inhabitants. The periphery of the city is always a place with development potential. It is always expanding and the continuous appropriation of space is inevitable. One's behaviour changes with landscape and the city imposes a domestic stereotype of a better life that can only be defined as controlled; the contradictory hope of progress. For 11 years, I have lived in La Calera, one of 18 districts on Bogota's savannah.

La Calera acts as a familial weekend destination to visit the countryside, eat the famous fritanga (a tray with blood sausage, potatoes, chorizos, steak and more) or to visit a mirador (view point) to look at Colombia's chaotic capital. Things have changed with the passing of time. New residential projects, country clubs and shopping malls have invaded this beautiful rural environment causing a social and environmental disequilibrium. Water is becoming scarce and what one once saw as beautiful valleys are now residential projects.

After seeing these drastic changes in such a short time I felt the need to produce a photographic record not only of La Calera but of some other neighboring districts which are suffering the same fate, if not worse. Part of my interest in this project is to propose an illusion of progress and development, the happy family and an unpromising future from an ironic and pesimistic point of view.

Christine Rogers

Christine Rogers is an artist from Nashville, Tennessee. She received her BA in Anthropology from Oberlin College in 2004 and her MFA in Studio Art from Tufts University in 2008. She has exhibited widely across the United States and was in a two-person show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile in the fall of 2012. She was a Visiting Lecturer of Photography at Wellesley College outside of Boston, Massachusetts from 2008-2011 and has lectured on her work across at various institutions such as Vanderbilt University, Watkins College and Cooper Union in New York. From 2012-2103 Christine was a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Scholar completing research for her project, "Photographing Imagined Landscapes: The Switzerland of India" and her first solo show in India was in the spring of 2013 at 1 Shanthi Road Gallery in Bangalore, Karnataka. She has since shown again in 2014 in Mumbai in group shows at Clark House Initiative and Project 88. Her work has been written about in Time Out Bengaluru, The Bangalore Mirror, The Hindu, New Landscape Photography, Hyperallergic, Dazed Digital, The Tennessean and the Nashville Scene. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Watkins College in Nashville, TN.

Artist Statement: The Switzerland of India

I went to India in October of 2012 as a Fulbright scholar to photograph the northern hill stations of India, from Darjeeling to Dalhousie all of which lay claim to the landscape of The Switzerland of India.

As a photographer and video artist, I am interested in the cultural and pictorial significance of a tourist visiting one place for the vista while imagining another far away landscape. What has happened in many of the northern hill stations of India is fascinating. Because of the rise of the Indian middle class, explosion of the domestic tourist industry, and the lore and lure of Bollywood filmmaking’s connection to the Swiss landscape, this region has been re-imagined as a surrogate landscape first for contested regions of Northern India and now for Switzerland. These multiple Switzerlands, along with the cultural confluence of India and Switzerland, is creating a fascinating pictorial and conceptual space, where an imitation of an imitation has been constructed.

This notion of constructing a photograph to reinforce desires is still present in the conceptual vocabulary of contemporary photographers, but, in practice, this construction exists not simply to reinforce desires but also to highlight the nature of desire itself. As cultural desires and physical landscapes begin to overlap, a unique cultural and pictorial problem arises. More and more, tourists might engage the landscape by witnessing a physical place (the hill stations of Northern India) but viewing a conceptual space (Switzerland).

After my solo six-month long honeymoon chasing every place that uses the sobriquet, The Switzerland of India, my work evolved into being about the spaces between reality and fantasy and the idea of a landscape; what draws you to a place initially and what happens when you reach that place. I became more interested in how the idea of a landscape is constructed and then how the mountains themselves were constructed through tunnels, roadwork and bridge building. The mountains became a backdrop to all of these other stories: stories of honeymooners, weddings, vernacular photography, hotel owners, taxi drivers, landslides, Bollywood cinema, travel, magic, snow and fires at the daybreak of the Indian middle class tourist industry.

Jason Demarte

Jason DeMarte is an emerging artist teaching as a tenure track faculty in photography at Eastern Michigan University. He received his B.F.A. in Photography from Colorado State University and a M.F.A in Photography from the University of Oregon. DeMarte's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums, both nationally and internationally. He is currently represented by Rule Gallery in Denver Colorado, and Wessel Snyman Creative in Cape Town, South Africa. DeMarte is part of the Photographers Showcase at Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe. His work has appeared in journals, textbooks and publications including Photography Now, Photo Review, the Wynwood Arts Magazine, A Short Course in Digital Photography, Fraction Magazine, the Black Warrior Review, and the Oxford American. Jason's Utopic work recently closed a solo exhibition at Rule Gallery in Denver, and Wessel Snyman Creative in Cape Town South Africa. His Utopic work was also featured in a group exhibition titled the Museum of Un-natural History at Clamp Art in NYC. Jason was awarded the Gary B. Fritz image maker award this year at the national Society of Photographic Education conference in Atlanta Georgia.

View more of Jason's work here 
 

Ashley Kauschinger: The aesthetic in your series, Nature Preserve is very specific. How did you find this visual language and how has it evolved? 

Jason Demarte: Nature Preserve is an offshoot of earlier work where I was interested in creating a dialog about consumption using images from natural history displays and other elements of fabrication. The work in this collection has taken on a more direct entanglement of the two ideas where the animals themselves appear to be infected or sometimes replaced with products, which speaks about their inherent worth as seen through the eyes of the American consumer. I originally became interested in photographing in natural history museums after re-visiting the Denver Natural history museum – the natural history museum of my youth. It was 2005, I had just moved back to the US after spending three years teaching in Dubai and wanted to shift the focus and look of my work. I had this idea to make ‘false’ landscape images from inside the museum; something about the irony of being an indoor landscape photographer interested me a lot. During a family visit to Denver I experimented with this idea and made some images in the museum. While I was happy with some of the results, what really made an impression was watching how people were interacting with the displays. Families shuffled from one diorama to the next admiring the wonders of the natural world. It was a perfect little slice of nature for people to easily digest and move on to the next. This behavior seemed strikingly similar to window shopping, and looking at the dioramas, I was reminded of perfectly composed and lit images I had made assisting as a product photographer. From there, the connection between consumerism and simulated nature was obvious and I found myself continually fascinated with the similarities and the symbolism of connecting the two. I started by using diptych imagery to compare to the two, and over the years the two images have merged, becoming more integrated and more dynamic showing how the two ideas are inextricably connected. 

AK: What ideas about American culture does your work explore? 

JD: My work investigates the charade of American consumer idealism versus the actuality of what is delivered. I use the history of this country, particularly Westward expansion and ideas surrounding the glory of Manifest Destiny, as strong visual representations of a fantasy promised. The romanticizing of adventure and nature is a strong cultural narrative in this country. This romantic fantasy compared to the ‘real’ experience of Westward expansion, was very different, just as the promise in advertising of how purchasing particular products will enhance your life versus the reality of how your life will change when you own those products are very different. The same idea holds true with politics: ideal versus reality. This model, as old as our country, permeates current consumer ideological trends. The hunger of American culture for something bigger, better, faster, easier, through whatever means necessary is still present today, and it drives consumption, from food to politics to international attitudes and policy. To illustrate these ideas, I frequently return to the idea that the manipulation of food, and the imitation of nature as strong metaphors for fabrication of truth. 

AK: Your images speak about fabricated elements of our lives, and question what is real. Does this connect to ideas you have about photography as a medium?

JD: Absolutely, the fabricated subjects I use subvert the truth the same way a photograph can. It gives me great pleasure to think about compounding that subversion by photographing it, removing another level of authenticity through reproduction, then presenting it through a medium that lends itself to believability. I am interested in using this conundrum to question everything from politics to products. Though the work has become more painterly it is important to me that every element originates from a photograph because of that inherent believability. There is just something about a photograph and how it traces life, that no mater how much the image is manipulated it still holds our attention in a different way than say a sculpture or a painting. 

AK: How do you promote your work, and balance this with creating work and being an educator?

 
JD: That's really an ongoing process that I am still figuring out. During the semester I set aside one day a week to work in the studio but I always find it difficult to make work in such a fragmented schedule, so I tend to make the bulk of my work during the summers when I can better focus my attention in one place. Promotion on the other hand is a 24/7 job and I regularly push out applications to exhibitions, grants, and competitions, I also spend a lot of time writing proposals, sending work to blogs like Light Leaked and online magazines. I’m a big fan of portfolio reviews and conferences like SPE which I attend regularly. It’s really a great way to meet other photographers and make connections in the art world. It’s a constant juggle but its worth it when you love what you do.