Damián Siqueiros, Photographer

HELP US RAISE FUNDS FOR OUR SHORT-FILM

Damian — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:30:47 +0000

What inspired the project

A few years a go I discovered that I had Fibromyalgia, which means that 90 % of the time I feel like I have flu. Some days is like a truck ran over me and some others is like the day before you get well. There was a point in my life where I could do only 20 % of what I use to do; now I’m on my way to doing 70. What saved me? Perseverance, love, but over all it was Art that inspired me to get better.

Dance, Dance, or we are Lost is a metaphor to say keep on going! Concentrate on the things you love to do to overcome your illness and your obstacles. This is the giftmy team and I want to give to the world: an inspiration for the ones who are passing trough the same situation but also to raise awareness about this chronic illness that is suspected to affect between 2 % and 5 % of the population (primarily women).

Dance Dance or we are Lost will be a 9 minute dance short film representing different stages of how one can overcome or make peace with the illness: The first symptoms, the battle and the frustration and finally finding your self and finding balance.

Three beautiful dancers will interpret trough contemporary dance characters related to the illness: the main character: the survivor. The other two represent the main symptoms of the illness. We’ll describe the complex relationship that is formed between the 3 during the different stages. The film will have a beautiful baroque aesthetic.

Meet the team

The artists involved have long and successful careers. For myself I can say that in the last years of my career I’ve won several grants and prizes such as the Public’s choice Scotia Bank Prize 2010 in Montreal’s Art Souterrain. I’ve exhibited my images in museum and galleries in Mexico, Spain, Paris, New York (The Gabarron Foundation), Washington D.C. (Art Museum of the Americas), and Canada. I’ve also done the last 2 campaigns for the Grands Ballets Canadiens and worked with amazing choreographers such as Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Margie Gillis.

www.damiansiqueiros.com

For this project I’m working with a group of very talented artist: the dancers, Roxanne Duchesne-Roy, Merryn Krytzinger and Susan Paulson, that work presently for the company Cas Public and they do independent work trough their initiative “The Broke Lab”. The 3 of them are beautiful spirited dancers with great technique and generous personality.

Dancers like these are a dream to any visual creator. There’s no limit to what you can do using their bodies to express any sort of complex emotion without having to go trough verbal language, it goes directly to the heart.

I’m also working with talented videographer Jeff Blanchet and costume designer Yvan Castonguay, who works presently for the Cirque du Soleil.

We have the talent but we need the means

For this project it was important to keep the basic elements, the talent of the people involved, as the main tool to succeed. Nonetheless there are some basic elements that we can go without to produce our film.

Your contribution would go to pay for the filming equipment: camera and the lighting. It will also help to pay for the materials for the costumes and some of the handwork involved. Since the artists are collaborating for free we decide to put our budget into the best materials we could afford.

If there’s any extra money from the raised funds it will be divided proportionally to support the individual projects of the artists involved. You are not just funding a film but you are actually giving jobs to artists!

On the other hand if we don’t raise the funds we’ll have to adjust our expectations but we’ll still do the film. We are a 100% committed and passionate about Art and our project. We would like you to be as excited.

What your support will actually do.

Your contributions to “Dance, Dance” will make a big difference on how the film looks at the end. Most of the collaborators are giving their time to the project because they believe in it, but we still have to pay for equipment, space to practice, materials, etc. Ultimately YOU ARE HELPING SPREAD HOPE and knowledge.

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the World”. Here’s the opportunity to do something concrete that will have almost immediate results but long term benefits!

Other Ways You Can Help

If you are going trough a tough time don’t worry there’s always some way to help. Just by sharing and talking about our project is a great help, maybe one of your friends or their friends want to invest in the project. An easy way to do this is by using the INDIEGOGO sharing tools. We’ll be very grateful if you share.

You have an amazing talent, you have access to film related material or you have personal experience that you would like to share with us? Well, go ahead. We can always use some extra help and inspiration.

Go here to GIVE

Ariadne. Los lazos rotos.

Damian — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:19:40 +0000

What drew my attention to a character like Ariadne is the fact that she has such a passive role in the ending of her story, even though she seems to be a defiant and smart woman at the start.

If you are not familiar or don’t remember her myth you are about too. Ariadne was the princess and the keeper of the labyrinth of Crete, the one that held captive the chimeric figure of the Minotaur, a beast with the body of a human and the head of a bull. Ariadne helps Theseus to kill the Minotaur and to find his way safely out of the labyrinth, by giving him a sword and a ball of thread, all in the promise of wedding her.

For Ariadne, Theseus was love at first sight. A love so strong, that she defied her father, the king, for it. Women where suppose to do things like that at that time. The story tells that they eloped, but then Theseus leaves her on the island of Naxos while she sleeps.

Much has been said about what happened next and in general it doesn’t end well for Ariadne. For Theseus, well he’s a hero, who remembers how he treats women. If Ariadne had been a man she would have been a hero too. Theseus would owe his life to her and probably an eternal friendship would have been forged. But Ariadne didn’t have that luxury, the luxury of being regarded as a person or as an equal.

I wanted to hear her voice and give her the opportunity to tell her own story, to express the mixed feelings that being betrayed by the one you love makes humans feel: despair, sadness, anger; so then after she could give space to relief and to her new life. Because a man that betrays a wo-man couldn’t deserve her. A man like that is no hero.

Ariadne is described as utterly pure, but I want to understand her complexity and the complexity of human relationships as well. That is the story behind ‘Ariadne. Los lazos rotos (the broken ties)’. Ariadne and her thread will grace eternally our skies.

MORE IMAGES

Dancer: Roxanne Duchesne-Roy

Should Art be difficult?

Damian — Fri, 04 May 2012 01:09:44 +0000

by Christelle Proulx

Last 9th of December, in the British journal The Guardian, an article presented a declaration by artist Anselm Kiefer proclaiming: ‘Art is difficult, it’s not entertainment.’[1] This statement is striking and it begs us to reflect on art and its reception, more so in the case of contemporary art that has the reputation of being inaccessible to the general public.

Anselm Kiefer is without doubt a great artist. I could even say that he is one of the artists that inspired me to pursue a graduate degree in Art History after his solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal. In 2006, “Heaven and Earth” was an exhibition very rich in interpretations. I even remember having found the explanations on the guide a little bit farfetched. The fact that one of his pieces belongs to the Musée du Louvre collection is certainly one of the main marks of legitimation of his work in the world of art. It is likely that this is also a factor in why his categorical affirmation is tricky, since it comes from such an influential artist.

I had the impression of having stumbled into the old elitist beliefs of American art critic Clement Greenberg written in his classic essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”,[2] where he positions entertainment on the same side as Kitsch, poverty and lack of education; in opposition to real art, the art of the Avant-Garde, difficult and made for rich educated people.[3]

Art cannot place itself in opposition to entertainment. There’s an overlap between the two, and to attempt to trace which part belongs to which is often very difficult. I really don’t believe in that kind of firm oppositions; I prefer to see art as a concept in the form of “constellations”, with contradictions that coexist and overlap, that complement and defy each other. Yet, if art must be “difficult” it is probably with the purpose of making it really effective on its contribution to new ideas about itself and about life. Though if it is only a few people that have access to those ideas because the artworks are too hermetic, it exists only as intellectual amusement that demands time, but has no more impact on life because it doesn’t reach the public.

The works of art should help the public to understand what it intends to communicate to them. Without making it easy, it must give clues of the thoughts it proposes. It also makes sense to me that art has to be “difficult” because its importance dwells in its capacity of making us reflect. Art must ask the viewer to be active in his interpretation rather than passive.

Artistic value is not intrinsic to the work, it is produced trough a complex system that comprises people that have visions and values that are very different: historians, critics, artists, museums, art collectors, art enthusiasts, etc. There is not one Art, but rather there are the arts. I firmly believe that art should contain a part of complexity, although it could be less without loosing its status; without becoming “anti-art” as Kiefer argues. The easy formulas that are visually captivating without opening the door to much more; may this be gratuitous provocation or empty esthetics, are nevertheless part of art. Art, no offense to the purists, is not and cannot be “pure.”

If art was easy, reflection about it would not have any reason to be. So yes, in that sense it should require a certain effort. Is it the work itself that should be difficult? I don’t think so. Should artistic practice? Maybe yes. I think it entails thorough research work. Art interpretation in general and of the works of art specifically? Seems this is rather it. It should demand an effort from the public to reflect on the meaning of the work.

If art, any art, is to hermetic that it takes years of reflection to derive some meaning, there would be only a bunch of art historians for which art would be meaningful. This is rather limited as an option. Art, in my view, should be multilayered. The artistic value seems to lie in the variety and depth of possible interpretations, which is called polysemy. Art that is accessible, and art that is hermetic have their place, but I’m all for the most accessibility possible, without falling into simplicity devoid from all critical sense. To make accessible the critical side of art seems a worthy goal.

[1] Written by Alex Needham and accessible through this link : http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/dec/08/anselm-kiefer-art-white-cube

[2] Published in 1939 in the Partisan Review.

[3] A bit like Kiefer states in the article, Greenberg opposed “real” art to commodity. If it is true that the market can pervert the conception of art, just as when Kiefer argues that « buying art is not understanding art ». This issue demands more reflection than I cannot address here now, but it is important to keep this in mind.

Margie Gillis and the transformative power of Art / Dance

Ophelia, my love

Damian — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:15:16 +0000

I remember well when my fascination for the Pre-Raphaelite painting began. In 1997 I visited my brother in Mexico City, in his room he had a reproduction of Hylas and the Nymphs by painter J.W. Waterhouse. From that moment the art of this period has been a constant reference in my work, in the construction of the characters and even in the way I design the make-up.

The character of Ophelia is recurrent and essential in the narrative of Victorian painting that usually drew from English literature, the Arthurian mythology and the Greek mythology as well. Ophelia is originally a character from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Perhaps the most known representation of her is the one by J. E. Millais, depicting her already dead in a river with her hands in the air.

Ophelia, as many of a big array of female in the context of History and Literature she is condemned to be a victim of her own fragility, her beauty and her innocence. As it is well known, Ophelia commits suicide drowning, after loosing her mind after learning that her lover Hamlet murdered her father, and that as a part of his plot is faking madness and rejecting her.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Victorian art is that it concentrated the negative paradigms that limit the construction of new female identities; even in contemporary society to some extent. In the case of Ophelia, imagined in the cusp of her adolescence represents the transition between a virgin girl and a crazed woman. A transition that in the Victorian Era seemed natural, when women where corrupted by the awakening of sexual desire.

For Victorian Society, metaphorically speaking, death was a fair punishment for this kind of perversion, and it could also be a fair sacrifice to prevent the loss of innocence and purity. The morals principals of the time supported by science (confirmed by Darwinian theory), considered women to be almost asexual beings, completely disinterested in carnal pleasures. These ideas are directly correlated with the high rates of prostitution in XIX century England and with the creation of Hysteria as diagnose for female sexual frustration (as it was not natural for woman to feel such desires).

The images created by the Victorian artist contain some of the most interesting symbolism of the time. Flowers could represent sexual awakening, red represented passion, danger and death and water was regarded as a transformative and feminine element. The woman depicted in their work seemed free from social repression but it often seemed to appear trough the narrative of the painting.

Ophelia is without doubt one of my favourite characters for its abysmal dichotomy between the beauty of her depictions and the darkness of the moral principles and oppression to women it personified.

Images:

1) Water lily (Ophelia). Model Liliana Alarcon. 2005.

2) If I die, let it be of love. Model I. Franco. 2005

3-4) Ophelia. The paradox oh her own reflection. Model: Merryn Kritzinger. 2010.

For more images click HERE.

Annie Leibovitz AT WORK

Damian — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 03:53:36 +0000

Annie Leibovitz is without a doubt an artist that has shaped the way we see the world trough images. Her portfolio is filled with iconic images that are engraved in our minds and in History.

At Work is a book where she tells her story and writes anecdotes about the way that she constructed some of her images, including some of the technical features.

“While it is true that the art of photography relies on knowing how to use the camera to the best of its ability, it’s also true that not knowing what you’re doing is only a temporary and not necessarily crippling condition. You learn as you work and you can certainly ask for advice.” Annie Leibovitz–

Note: This image was made on the eve of Lennon’s death.

http://www.amazon.ca/Annie-Leibovitz-at-Work/dp/0375505105

Photographer Guillaume Simoneau exhibits at la Place des Arts

Damian — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:40:15 +0000

(starting this 29 of March at la Place des Arts, 1600 St-Urbain)

Guillaume seems to control natural light at his will; and in this sense he shed light on the subjects that interest him. Might it be an awkward object or a compelling character we are able to discover its humanity.

One of the things I love about Guillaume’s images is that most of the action seems to happen in the characters heads, we see them thinking and feeling, they seem to be wrapped in their world while they unravel inside.

With a great array of topics is his treatment of social issues and his sensibility that are the most touching and memorable.

This is what Guillaume has to say about his work and this new exhibition:

On his style:

I would describe my styles as Post-documentary with an incline for substance.

On the exhibition:

For the ARTV studio exhibition I’m presenting work taken with a large format camera, half way between my commercial and my personal work.

On his passion for photography:

Photography arrived to my life trough a life-changing accident while I was in college (CEGEP). I was running late for my class and I collided with a girl that was going the opposite way. She was going out of the dark room with her material and I ended up soaked in developing chemicals. We ended up having a short conversation on photography and my life changed.

What makes me be passionate about photography is its narrative power, linear or not, of a group of images; using photography as a mean of communication, for dialogue and argumentation.

http://www.7578.com/guillaume/

Photographer Jocelyn Michel exhibit at la Place des Arts

Photographer Jocelyn Michel exhibit at la Place des Arts

Damian — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:32:07 +0000

(Starting this 29 of March at la Pace des Arts, 1600 St- Urbain)

Jocelyn Michel is a photographer that has a piercing eye; a spear like way of looking that bares the souls of his subjects. When I look at his images all trace of pretentiousness is gone and only the essence of the depicted is left.

Even his elaborate staged images have this sense of finding a deeper truth and with it beauty and simplicity.

All the elements of the image seam to work in perfect harmony, so it is hard to see anything stand out right away. But a closer look will show flawless lighting skills, amazing model direction and an ever curios mind about photography.

This is what Jocelyn has to say about his work and this new exhibition:

On his style:

I’ve always loved to create the image with madness, sarcasm, and dark humor along with 3 sticks of dynamite.

On the exhibition:

I’ll be presenting mises en scènes from my “Admission” project, which was set in motion in 2005 with the generous participation of 50+ Quebec on-screen actors & actresses.

On his passion for photography:

I love the process of letting my imagination run completely free & uninhibited and then letting the left side of my brain make order of it to create something both as absurd as tangible

http://www.7578.com/jocelyn/

Photographer Guillaume Simoneau exhibits at la Place des Arts

Discover the amazing Kevin Beverley, Circus artist.

Damian — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:22:35 +0000

Kevin Berverley is a circus artist with a dancer’s heart. An up-and-coming performer who’s biggest talent is making you forget about the difficult and precise technique required for his trapeze number with incredible soulful performances.

I would invite you to take a look at his new site including some awesome footage of his performance!

Start watching here.

Report of Apple manufacturing poor working conditions is a hoax.

Damian — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:30:09 +0000

Listen to Mike Daisey’s retraction on the radio show This American Life. Host Ira Glass re-interviews Daisey and fact-checks the report that made a lot of people change their perspective on Apple’s social responsibility. Listen to the show here. Related posts: Square Victoria Exhibit “Making-of” video of the 2011-2012 Grands Ballets photo campaign The Journey [...] Related posts:

The credits of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Damian — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:00:40 +0000

I would like to share with you the work of Onur Sentruk, who did the credits for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He has an amazing aesthetic worth while discovering.

Onur Sentruk: “July 2011 Blur studio invited me to design opening titles for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
I started illustrating Tim Miller written, David Fincher approved vignettes. Later on moved to typography, opening logo reveal. Collaborative process took almost three months to complete”

Discover his work here.