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German-born photographer Bastienne Schmidt (born 1961, now resident in the U.S.) challenges the popular idyll of household as private utopia with her Home Stills series. Posing in the role of lone housewife, and staging her works exclusively in Long Island, the artist recapitulates disconcertingly familiar scenarios excerpted from daytime TV. Following Highway 27 across Long Island from Patchogue to Easthampton, Schmidt recreates her interiors--from cheap motel rooms to upscale mansions--as imaginary rooms of her own, performing a dystopian twist on Virginia Woolf's eponymous idea of a feminist haven. Recalling the work of Cindy Sherman, Schmidt draws on such diverse visual influences as the films of Wim Wenders and the paintings and prints of Hokusai, Sigmar Polke, Jan Vermeer and Edward Hopper, to portray the alienated social contracts of a world of suburban fragmentation and loneliness.
In Topography of Quiet, the internationally acclaimed German-born, New York-based photographer Bastienne Schmidt (born 1961) uses painting, drawing and photography to explore the patterns and typologies of nature. Her color and black-and-white photographs of ocean tides and patterns in sand and water are juxtaposed with other landscape scenes in which some small gesture of human activity or intervention is apparent--a hose floating on water, a pyramid in silhouette, tire marks, agricultural demarcations, white lines on a soccer field. These photographs, taken in locations around the world, are further augmented with delicate, complex paintings and drawings that underscore the subtlety of Schmidt's eye. As the book's title indicates, an expansive serenity permeates these works, which gently pursue and embrace the co-existence of the natural and the man-made.
In her latest series Typology of Women, the multiple award-winning photographer and artist Bastienne Schmidt shows a series of hand painted cut-outs that represent silhouettes of different types of women. The term "typology" has been consciously chosen, as it refers to the study or the systematic classification of types that share certain characteristics. The comparison of forms and the study thereof is based on well-known artistic working principles. Bastienne Schmidt's silhouettes in luminous orange also show a feminist and ironic twist to the reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. The multi media artist refers to the outline drawings of ancient Greek ceramics, as well as to Japanese woodcuts, to airytales and to American pop culture.
Transforming the Culture of Dying assesses the establishment of the Project on Death in America and evaluates its the contributions to the development of the palliative care field and end of life care in American society.
Coral and Concrete, Greg Dvorak’s cross-cultural history of Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, explores intersections of environment, identity, empire, and memory in the largest inhabited coral atoll on earth. Approaching the multiple “atollscapes” of Kwajalein’s past and present as Marshallese ancestral land, Japanese colonial outpost, Pacific War battlefield, American weapons-testing base, and an enduring home for many, Dvorak delves into personal narratives and collective mythologies from contradictory vantage points. He navigates the tensions between “little stories” of ordinary human actors and “big stories” of global politics—drawing upon the “little” metaphor of ...
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A look at the prisioners who are unfairly imprisioned, written by a journalist.
Bastienne Schmidt's photographs are images of both life and death. Mercilessly direct, these pictures from Latin America - the fruits of intensive work over the past few years - bring to an existential fact of our lives, a truth we in western societies are only too happy to hide behind a facade of casual diversions and consumable "beauty"; the immediate presence of death. It takes courage to look at these pictures, for in the faces of these people from another culture we are confronted, violently and with an authenticity we cannot ignore, with the very destiny we refuse to accept. Moreover, Bastienne Schmidt shows us the naked truth that underlies not only our inability to look our own death in the face, but also our tendency to disregard the violent deaths of others, failing to recognize the value of "mere" life as we do, so long as they die far enough away from our own doorsteps.
Haydn is enjoying renewed appreciation: this book explores fresh approaches to his music and the cultural forces affecting it.
#1 international bestselling author Cathy Kelly’s writing is “warm, lyrical, and fascinating” (Marian Keyes) and “rich with the emerald allure of the Irish landscape” (Publishers Weekly). In The House on Willow Street, four women discover that home isn’t where you come from, but where you are meant to be. . . . Every picture-perfect village tells a story. . . . The Irish seaside town of Avalon is a tourist’s dream of quaint shops and welcoming cafés. Avalon House, perched at the end of Willow Street, was in Tess Power’s family for generations. Now Tess ekes out a living from her antiques shop while the crumbling mansion awaits a new owner. Her marriage and business may be fl...