artists’ rights: copyright issue to know about

Recording available for artists’ rights phone call with John T. Unger

Wall Space-Prospectus for New Directions 2010

This call for entries privileges two points of view: looking down from a high vantage point, and looking out to a vanishing horizon. Art historian, Albert Boime, described the former as a “Magisterial Gaze” that gave early Americans, through painting and printmaking, a view at one with God, hence, Manifest Destiny. The latter may simply be the romance of the road, or curiosity about what lies just out of sight – an American impulse from early pioneers to Jack Kerouac.

Numerous painters and photographers have employed these vantage points, subsequently, they run the risk of cliché. When done well, however, each reveals the unexpected, as in Szarkowski’s photograph, Country Elevator (see wall space blog to view picture). The optimist in me delights at the disorienting perspective of looking down whereby familiar objects become abstract and dizzyingly beautiful, to looking out, with that forward motion promising adventure or escape.

The title Down & Out might conjure images of ne’er-do-wells (risky, if the public decides not to inquire further). What I hope the photographs provide, however, is pleasure in the variety of ways ‘down’ and ‘out’ can be imaged, and what emotional liberation such points-of-view can have on our often confined and overly responsible psyches.

Submit online via Wallspace ap, or mail in CD, fee $35USD–for details:

http://www.wallspaceseattle.com/newDirections/index.php