5×5: Artist's Studio by Jeesu Kim

5×5 features five photographs by five photographers, usually curated around a specific subject matter, selected by a guest editor.

Jeesu Kim is a New York based artist working mainly in video and photography. You can see her work at www.jeesukim.com

This 5×5 is about photographs that are reflective of the conditions of their own production, that point to the actions, accidents, curiosities, failures, fictions, fantasies, gestures and humors that happen in the artist’s studio. What photography does in these experiments is that it renders the spontaneous incidents into definitive, structured moments, forcing you to look at, not just what, but also how the implicated materials are being transformed in the photographic process. In turn, this un-stabilizes your position as a viewer,constantly shifting between the space of the artist looking through the lens and the space of where you are, looking at these photographs now.

Moholy-Nagy believed in the idea of “the New Vision,” proposing that with photography one could see the world in a new way that human eye could not. I think in a way it’s also about trying to photograph something you cannot see (but that you have a sense of what it is).

Trisha Donnelly uses flatbed scanners to create bizarre images that are hard to place. The woman’s gaze becomes even more evasive with the “turning” of the photograph.

In his Mid-century Studio Series, Stan Douglas assumes the role of a fictional, anonymous photographer to create a series of images hypothetically produced between 1945-95.

This photograph really enforces the gaze of the photographer. Discovering these finger prints, which could be an intimate, personal moment of the photographer, is hyper-sterilized through the perfect composition of the framing and lighting.

Orozco used to be called an artist without a studio, working outside on streets to produce works out of the scenes of everyday life. For him, the streets were his artist studio.