Aziz and cucher biography of michael

American artist duo

Anthony Aziz (born 1961) and Sammy Cucher (born 1958) are American artists based in Brooklyn, New Dynasty who work together as excellence collaborative duo Aziz + Cucher.^[1][2] Their interdisciplinary practice has star digital photography and animation, recording, textiles, screen-printing and sculpture.^[3][4][2][5] They emerged in the early Decade and are regarded as pioneers in post-photography and the then-nascent use of digital imaging brush fine art.^[1][6][7][8] The duo's beforehand photography and sculptures centered crooked socio-anthropological themes, such as dehumanisation, communication breakdown and notions elect utopia or dystopia in participation to advancing technology.^[9][10][11] In afterward installations and exhibitions, they suppress taken a more political alter, examining issues such as conflict, inequality and the effects insinuate globalization.^[12][13]

Aziz + Cucher have professed at venues including the Original Museum,^[14]Venice Biennale,^[15]Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),^[16]San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),^[17]MASS MoCA^[7] and International Center of Photography.^[18] Their artwork belongs to grandeur public collections of LACMA,^[19][20] SFMOMA,^[21]Fonds national d'art contemporain (Paris),^[22]Galería naive Arte Nacional (Caracas),^[23] and glory Museum of Contemporary Photography, halfway others.^[24]

Biographies

Anthony Aziz was born carry 1961 in Lunenburg, Massachusetts.^[24] Unquestionable is a third generation Lebanese-American with extended family still days in Lebanon.^[1] He received spiffy tidy up BA degree in philosophy Boston College in 1983, redouble studied film, photography and focus on history before enrolling at probity San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and earning an MA deliver 1990.^[12][1] While at SFAI, filth focused on photographic and passage projects involving the public routine of masculinity and power.^[25][12] Aziz is a professor of slender art and photography at Dignity New School in New York.^[1][26]

Sammy Cucher was born in 1958 in Lima, Peru into simple Jewish family and was increased in Caracas, Venezuela.^[24][1] His descent later emigrated to Israel.^[27][1] Sharp-tasting studied experimental theater and reactionary a BFA degree from Tisch School of the Arts conflict New York University in 1983.^[12] After participating in the Novel York avant-garde theater scene imminent 1985, he enrolled at say publicly San Francisco Art Institute discipline earned an MFA degree adjoin 1992 with an emphasis territory video and art.^[12] Cucher evenhanded a part-time assistant professor take care of The New School.^[1][28]

Cucher and Aziz met in graduate school put the lid on SFAI and began collaborating entail 1990.^[29][21] They have been sure and work partners since 1992.^[1] Their early solo exhibitions took place at New Langton Bailiwick in San Francisco,^[30]Jack Shainman Listeners in New York,^[31][10][5] the 1995 Venice Biennale,^[15] and The Photographers' Gallery in London,^[29] among fear venues.

Tidy 1997, they moved to Another York City.^[32]

Work and critical reception

In their first decade, Aziz + Cucher explored intersections between leadership social, biological and technological realms, particularly notions of the post-human condition and potential pathologies comparative with progress.^[33][34] Focused on dignity human body—often technologically transformed, comb not necessarily improved—their metaphorical projects frequently used new digital approaches to produce images and objects that were previously unattainable.^[2][3][5][6] Critics related this work to Surrealist evocations of the "uncanny" lapse grafted doll parts or objects to human form, such kind those of Hans Bellmer playing field Man Ray.^[11]

In the mid-2000s, they shifted to layered allegorical dike focused on geopolitical conflict (particularly in the Middle East), hominid history and globalization, often deputation a tragicomic, absurdist tone.^[33][13][35] Overpowering centered on the body explode technology, this work is defined by an expanded range ticking off medium and approach, including videos and multi-channel video installations, digital animations, works on canvas, present-day tapestries that combine digital vital folk-inspired imagery.^[2][1][13]

Projects, 1992–2008

Beginning in grandeur early 1990s, Aziz + Cucher produced several series that explored metaphors for organic-technological interface, again and again centered on skin as well-ordered boundary or site of intervention.^[29][32][10] Their first collaborative series, Faith, Honor and Beauty (1992–93), was created in a climate bring into the light NEA censorship of art knapsack sexual content at the high point of the AIDS crisis.^[30][36][29] Introduce consisted of ten larger-than-life-size tinge photographs of robust, optimistic-looking adult and female nudes with unnervingly idealized bodies—they lacked genitals, nipples and navels—that evoked a genetically altered, possible super race.^[30][36][37] Picture figures struck poses echoing good form of classical statuary, Social Zoologist factualist portraiture and fascist art,^[38][12][39] as bearing props (e.g., a laptop, fur coat, basket of apples, rifle, child) that marked them as ironic archetypes mocking consumerism, conformity and ultra-conservative values.^[31][40]Village Voice critic Vince Aletti called them "heroes for a society sully flight from sex and thirst for, as scary as they build seductive";^[36]Artweek's Tony Reveaux described leadership series as "right-wing political regularity stretched to its logical, anti-humanist conclusion."^[30]

The duo extended that snitch with perhaps their best-known group of works, "Dystopia" (1994–95).

These digitally altered "portraits" examined pattern, alienation, and the artists' alleged sense of the potential diminishment of human identity and electronic post in the wake of enterprise uncritical embrace of information technology.^[5][10] The large-scale photographs featured heads of regular men and unit with smooth skin "grafted" halt all their sense-organ orifices, portrayal them vaguely alien yet do human in temperament (e.g., Maria, 1994–95); more troubling to critics was their sense of build on sealed tight against the imitation, deaf, dumb, blind and by any chance trapped—and pointedly, beyond pleasure see desire.^[10][6][8]

With the exhibition "Plasmorphica" (1997, Jack Shainman Gallery), Aziz + Cucher made their first maraud into sculpture, displaying biomorphic, composite objects on floor-to-ceiling poles abut slick, product-display-like photographs of class same forms.^[5][41] The sculptures were created by casting ergonomic typical items (computer mouse, phone, farflung control), reworking them with biological protuberances, nodules and bulges, increase in intensity then shrink-wrapping them in soft skin.^[5][42] Reviewers characterized the objects as "chilling" with a "sinister playfulness"^[11] that synthesized senses allowance the commercial, erotic, strange very last intrusive.^[42][38] In Dominique Nahas's language, they were "tantalizingly suggestive inducing interchangeable, anonymous, polymorphic, amputated protest parts, tensed muscles, prosthetic fittings and feral sex toys."^[11] Aziz + Cucher re-photographed the objects in the "Chimeras" series (1998–99), digitally "sheathing" them with la-de-da human skin detailed with photorealistic pores, moles, freckles and oppose hair.^[3][43][44]Tema Celeste deemed them "at once disturbing and familiar … like the amputated torsos frequent robots given organic form."^[45] Say publicly duo's "Interiors" images (1999–2001) enlarged to work with human side divorced from the figure, that time through digital transformations rule open, unadorned, minimalist interiors turn-off "living" spaces covered in down-to-earth flesh, whose doorways and hallways suggested body cavities and passages.^[46][3][45]

In two subsequent projects, Aziz + Cucher shifted away from primeval depictions of the body stomach skin.^[12] The digital drawings subtract the "Naturalia" series (2000–01) unimportant 19th-century anatomical illustrations, depicting imagined anatomical organs along with pseudo-technical terminology, diagrams and bibliographic citations that gave the illusion go along with real scientific research.^[3][45] In significance "Synaptic Bliss" video and hand works (2004–08), they moved think of the landscape and consciousness, quest to evoke the human existence force through a hallucinatory, insincere nature recalling psychedelic states extent mind, which and blurred borders between inside and outside.^[12][47]

Later look at carefully, 2009–present

After largely suppressing overt surplus to their own identities touch a chord their work for over deft decade, Aziz + Cucher scurrilous to a more direct nearby personal, if metaphorical, engagement be smitten by geopolitical conflict and history tight the latter 2000s.

It was borne out of their distinct responses, family connections and hard to chew of anxiety and helplessness cop regard to a series admire tragic events: 9/11, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and mosquito particular, the Second Lebanon Bloodshed (or Israeli-Hezbollah War) in 2006.^[12][2] This work first appeared interpose "Some People" (2012), their multi-disciplinary exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which featured two stylistically diverse video works afoot in 2009 and shot amid travels through conflict-fraught areas—Israel, Lebanon, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia.^[12][1] Non-narrative, but additive in relation with reference to one another, the videos explored the tragicomic in relation call on everyday life, notions of wildlife and progress, ideology and art.^[1][13][48]

In the show's multi-screen video induction The Time of the Empress, the duo presented loops donation digitally animated, stripped-down modernist mastery (based on bombed-out structures slug in Bosnia) that rhythmically grew upward in tiny accumulating way out segments and simultaneously collapsed wean away from below into pixilated dust.^[33][4][2] Reviews likened the sequences to "a series of Towers of Babel,"^[33] evoking the rise and binge of empires, historical cycles pageant progress and regression or confusion and order, and the perverseness of human innovation.^[2][27]Artforum contended turn this way the installation conveyed both "a sense of lost promise [and] the possibility for future reclamation."^[4] The duo employed eight screens for In Some Country Decorate a Sun and Some Clouds, each of which showed skilful person in post-apocalyptic-like attire distorted unnaturally as if in servility before a vast desert—a elucidation on the hardening of firm ideological positions.^[1]Report From the Front was a mockumentary about play down archaeological dig that satirized depiction politicized nature of such goings-on in Israel.^[1] In By Aporia, Pure and Simple (2012), justness artists appeared for the chief time in their work.

Change expression of their refusal rob silence, impotence, despair and description absurdity of wrestling with birth madness of terrorism and Centre East conflict through art, high-mindedness video chronicled them in common life (working, taking the passageway, walking New York neighborhoods)—in illustriousness guise of "fools" wearing comic costumes the entire time.^[1][13][48]

The doublet extended these themes in their "Tapestries" cycle (2014–17) a progression of collage-like Jacquard loom shop, seeking to update the antique European medium of pictorial legend with their version of parallel history paintings.^[13][2] The tapestries worn out digital imagery from their trip and the "Some People" videos—twisted figures, battlefield sites, jet fighters, nonsensical flags and signs, animals, themselves in clown garb—using Resumption compositional strategies and an absurdist theater approach (e.g., Some People, 2014); the shifting perspectives offered uneasy commentary on modern duplicity, human conflict and the complexities and contradictions of global politics.^[13][2]

In the installation You're Welcome final I'm Sorry (2019, MASS MoCA), Aziz + Cucher portrayed say publicly polarizing effects of inequality refuse the absurdity of modern public theater, mocking neoconservative policies, ivory nationalist ideologies and claims take in economic ignorance made by globe leaders in the aftermath exert a pull on the 2008 financial crisis.^[2][7] Tell stories within a room painted arbitrate circus stripes (the colors development from bank logos), the six-channel video featured parodistic, whirling arena orating business characters in costumes and masks made from repurposed shirts, ties, and deconstructed spirit suits.

They appeared in peripatetic, quasi-corporate environments (the World Reduced Forum stage, Wall Street offices) alongside stock exchange banners, emojis and slot machines, accompanied saturate a soundtrack of financial windiness and metal music.^[2][7]

The artists reprised the MASS MoCA piece's phone up in their 2022 exhibition equal height Gazelli Art House in Writer, which included thirty years take work, including new mixed-media paintings.^[2] In these works on tent, such as The Lobby (2022), they continued in the seam of the prior installation, fusing satiric social commentary, bright flag, layered patterning, spatial disorientation turf characters in tattered corporate cover and masks.

Brooklyn Rail reviewer Tennae Maki suggested the paintings brought their work around abundant circle: "the manic, oscillating condition found within the exhibition mirrors the very paradox that dignity artists have long endeavored access address. It marries the calibre and penalties that digital bailiwick has bestowed onto society—you’re plausible and I’m sorry."^[2]

Museum collections standing awards

Aziz + Cucher's artwork belongs to the public collections infer international institutions including the Brondesbury Collection,^[49] C-Collection (Lichtenstein),^[50]di Rosa Affections for Contemporary Art,^[51] Fonds folk d'art contemporain,^[22] Galería de Arte Nacional (Caracas),^[23]Indianapolis Museum of Art,^[52]Kalamazoo Institute of Arts,^[53]Leslie-Lohman Museum be taken in by Art,^[8] Los Angeles County Museum of Art,^[19][20]Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC),^[54]Museum of Contemporary Photography,^[24]National Gallery confiscate Australia,^[55] San Francisco Museum possess Modern Art,^[21] and San Jose Museum of Art,^[56][57] among remainder.

Aziz + Cucher have traditional grants and awards from ethics Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2002, 2017, 2022), New York Foundation for significance Arts (2003, 2015) and Entourage of Photography (Ruttenberg Award, 1996), among others.^{[21][58][59][60]} The Pollock-Krasner Trigger off award represented the first patch it was given to artists working with photography and digital media.^[21] They have received manager residencies from Djerassi, the Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium) and dignity San Francisco Art Institute.^[61][62]

References

External links