Offering

Projected onto a panoramic screen using three projectors, the film presents a cyclical journey that begins with an intimate depiction of a matador being dressed for a bullfight by his armour bearer. This ritualistic procedure takes place in a small, sparsely furnished room and is meticulously executed, almost choreographed. The film moves on to slowly navigate through the architectural spaces of a solitary Corrida and then to the physical encounter between man and beast. Finally, the film returns to the small room of the opening sequence and shows the matador undressing at the end of the fight. The film aims to depict, with meticulous attention to detail, an intense and private encounter between culture and the sublime, between a matador and a bull, between life and mortality. It is intended to produce an effect that is psychologically penetrating, and that reveals the carnal affection and sensual affinities between man and beast. I aim to avoid taking a moral stand, but to converse with a long painterly tradition of religious iconography. Through contemporary and historical juxtapositions – the film includes depictions of Old Master paintings - I seek to create a timeless space, a space that cannot be anchored, a space that hangs between past and present, between art history and contemporary practice. Offering forms part of my ongoing series of moving portraits. These include Evaders (2009) and Will You Dance For Me (2011). All three films aim to depict the existential experience of single individuals who occupy a space that is both performative and biographical

Mars and Rhea Silvia

Sin resume

Floating World

Central to my work is an examination of the evolving nature of the camera. Traditionally a device that recorded what was in front of it, it has now become something that creates our world rather than documents it. Since the digital revolution the speed of information transmission has compressed both time and space. We can now immediately see images of events as they are happening on the other side of the world, and the technology that makes this possible is now available to millions more people than ever before. This has profound implications for how we see and experience what is outside of us. Nothing remains fixed for long; everything is in flux. Where does reality occur? In November 2015 I visited Japan and photographed the Zen gardens located in and around Kyoto. Created to reflect the essence of nature, not its actual appearance, and as aids to meditation, these gardens are self-contained worlds within the wider world. They are both real and metaphysical places, where time stands still. For me they not only represent an alternative to our image saturated ‘world in flux’, but they are also symbolic of a physical and spiritual displacement that resonates with his personal history. They are places that hover between a utopian ideal and an everyday reality. Within Kyoto’s Zen gardens I chose particular places to photograph where natural forms are reflected in water. During the post-production process, in an attempt to perfectly integrate the reflection with the reflected objects - what he calls the virtual with the material - Gersht inverted his photographs and fused them to create new spaces that hover between material and virtual realities. The resulting photographic prints are fundamentally dependent on something that exists in the physical world, but because of the melting together of tangible reality and its reflection, they are not literal depictions of it. We are presented with the absence of the object of representation. The photograph becomes the thing that exists, an image of the folding of space and time. In Buddhism there is a parable concerning the wind on the water. When a gentle wind disturbs the still surface of the water in a pool the reflections on it are broken into shimmering patterns. The world seen reflected on the surface becomes a fractured image. The viewer becomes lost in the complexities of the reflection and it is only when the wind drops and the pool becomes still again that it is possible to discern what lies beneath the surface of the water. By interleaving space and time in his Floating World photographs Gersht exaggerates the disturbed appearance of reality’s surface, just as the wind does the surface of the water, and invites us to think about what is beyond, behind, and within it

On Reflection

The mirrors in On Reflection reflect what appear to be still-life paintings by Jan Brueghel, but the images are illusions—not only because they are mediated by mirrors, but also because each reflection is not of a painting but of a replica, featuring artificial flowers meticulously crafted by hand. The three replicas that I created, each based on a different Breughel bouquet, are comments on the nature of the original paintings, in which Brueghel chose not to depict wild flowers but blossoms that were the result of a sophisticated horticultural intervention by man. The depiction of the simultaneous perfection of so many species that bloom in different seasons and in far flung geographically locations—a fantasy of a desirable, but never attainable reality—is an assertion of the power of art and craft, alongside the power of science and technology, to remake the world of objects. In contrast to the laborious and meticulous processes that led to the creation of the replicas of the bouquets in Brueghel’s paintings, the compositions that were captured by the film camera at the instant of the mirrors shattered were rapid and unpredictable. The use of the two cameras allowed me to record simultaneously two contrasting views of the same event. One focused close up on the glass surface of the mirror, the other—from at a distance of three meters—on the reflection in the mirror of the vase of flowers. Because of the different focusing points and the limited depth of field, each camera captured an alternative reality, questioning the relationship between photography and a single objective truth. In the film I combined the two point of views, integrating the virtual images of the reflections with the physical presence of sharp the shutting glass. The final photographic prints simultaneously embrace rigorous and painstaking craft and the mechanical instantaneousness of the digital camera. In them, I raises the question of whether the camera records, or creates, reality

Haptic Aesthetics and Bodily Properties of Ori Gersht’s Digital Art: A Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Study.

Experimental aesthetics has shed light on the involvement of pre-motor areas in the perception of abstract art. However, the contribution of texture perception to aesthetic experience is still understudied. We hypothesized that digital screen-based art, despite its immateriality, might suggest potential sensorimotor stimulation. Original born-digital works of art were selected and manipulated by the artist himself. Five behavioral parameters: Beauty, Liking, Touch, Proximity, and Movement, were investigated under four experimental conditions: Resolution (high/low), and Magnitude (Entire image/detail). These were expected to modulate the quantity of material and textural information afforded by the image. While the Detail condition afforded less content-related information, our results show that it augmented the image’s haptic appeal. High Resolution improved the haptic and aesthetic properties of the images. Furthermore, aesthetic ratings positively correlated with sensorimotor ratings. Our results demonstrate a strict relation between the aesthetic and sensorimotor/haptic qualities of the images, empirically establishing a relationship between beholders’ bodily involvement and their aesthetic judgment of visual works of art. In addition, we found that beholders’ oculomotor behavior is selectively modulated by the perceptual manipulations being performed. The eye-tracking results indicate that the observation of the Entire, original images is the only condition in which the latency of the first fixation is shorter when participants gaze to the left side of the images. These results thus demonstrate the existence of a left-side bias during the observation of digital works of art, in particular, while participants are observing their original version

Last Men Standing: Chlamydatus Portraits and Public Life in Late Antique Corinth

Notable among the marble sculptures excavated at Corinth are seven portraits of men wearing the long chlamys of Late Antique imperial office. This unusual costume, contemporary portrait heads, and inscribed statue bases all help confirm that new public statuary was created and erected at Corinth during the 4th and 5th centuries. These chlamydatus portraits, published together here for the first time, are likely to represent the Governor of Achaia in his capital city, in the company of local benefactors. Among the last works of the ancient sculptural tradition, they form a valuable source of information on public life in Late Antique Corinth

Roman Marble Sculptures from the Sanctuary of Pan at Caesarea Philippi/Panias (Israel). By Elise A. Friedland

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The Roman Marble Sculptures from the Sanctuary of Pan at Caesarea Philippi/Panias (Israel). By Elise A. Friedland. American Schools of Oriental Research Archaeological Reports, vol. 17. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2012. Pp. xiii + 186, illus. $89.95. [Distributed by ISD, Bristol, Conn.]&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; </jats:p