New Catalogue

Photography

admin — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:14:00 +0000

Luke asked his students to create two images that were nearly identical in composition but had some kind of optical differentiation. These photographs are by Camille Aumoite who is a visiting Graduate student in architecture at the University of Illinois. We thought her approach by using a flash in the second photograph was a simple and direct way to handle the project. As fundamental as optical relationships are in photography we find it necessary for our own work to remind ourselves of this fact.

Old Roads

admin — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:50:29 +0000

These pictures were taken outside our studio in Chicago, just west of the Loop. Lately, we have been thinking of documenting the city outward from our studio. This project is called Old Roads. The title seems to refer first to the Victorian cobbled streets of Chicago before asphalt was laid over them but in many ways the title also refers to the crumbling new streets with their potholes. Some of the photographs were taken on Fulton Market, which is home to the meatpacking district and a Belgian Beer pub we like to frequent. Of these, one of our favorites is where someone added cement to cover cracks in between the building and the road. The cement and cobblestone look sculptural and remind us of Joseph Beuys’ Fat Chair, 1964.

New Catalogue Artist Books

admin — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:29:30 +0000

With our new website, we have added a store for artist books, bound with our assistant and professional bookmaker, Julia Stotz. For the most part we are printing them out in an editon of 10, measuring 8 x 10 1/2 inches. They are saddle stitched and printed in our studio in Chicago with either 9 or 13 images. Jonathan and I think it will be a great way to handle special projects with some of our collaborators who will be working with us in our summer studio.

Thank You

admin — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 03:15:18 +0000

This journal entry is dedicated to all the people that helped us create this new website. First thank you is to Neil Donnelly who designed it. His many hours listening to our concerns will never be forgotten nor will the education he provided. We met Neil several years ago when he lived in Chicago. He has since received his MFA from Yale in Graphic Design and worked with the Storefront for Art and Architecture on their new book and most recently at the New Museum where he is the Artistic Director for the New City Reader which is part of the exhibition The Last Newspaper. Our next thanks go to our assistants and constant collaborators Julia Stotz, Samuel Copeland, Ha-Tien Nguyen, JP Ramirez and Brent Wagner. Without all of their efforts New Catalogue would be a lonely studio and not the same.

Nine Mustaches

admin — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:29:42 +0000

We were talking with some Freshman students at the University of Illinois recently about ideas and how to come up with them. We suggested that when you are searching for ideas that it can be useful to look at everyday words and see if they cause a reaction that then could be rendered in photographic terms. Luke randomly thought of mustaches and googled the word on his mobile device during the lecture. He read the wikipedia entry and shared with the students the origins, history and details of notable mustaches. In many cases the most celebrated mustaches were often fake or artificially enhanced. Groucho Marx, Adolf Hitler, Frieda Kahlo and Marcel Duchamp were just a few of the names we discussed. In response we asked the students to make a mustache over the weekend out of any material and we would photograph them. We loved them all. Our favorite is by Breanne. It is made of prairie grass that was growing near her home. She is 18 and her stoic veneer impressed us greatly.

Nine Spaces Eighteen Hands

admin — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 18:33:27 +0000

This project is part of the work that we have been doing at the University of Illinois. The class is a five-week seminar where the Freshman Foundation students get to work with three different professors in variety of projects. The class format is a stream of conscious syllabus that includes Rilke Poems, Michael Hanecke Films, Fred Sandbeck Sculptures, Alain Robbe-Grillet and lively conversation. We have one rule; we attempt to do everything in one class period from concept to execution. In general we asked the students if they would collaborate with us on a New Catalogue Book Series that related to the content of the class. (See Nine Mustaches and Students Read Rilke). We spend around 20 to 30 minutes at the end of the class photographing the idea. For this project we wanted to reference Fred Sandbeck’s yarn pieces and give them a document where depth of field was emphasized. We walked out the doors on a cool Autumn day and asked each student to make a space with their hands and just stare at it. We were surprised how many of them made very little spaces! On a side note Ashley’s giant ball was such an inspiration and it now hangs in our studio as a visual guide to the task ahead.

Tiger Afternoon

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 22:16:32 +0000

Tiger Afternoon was originally the name of a cardboard café created by the two young daughters of an artist friend of New Catalogue’s. The café, made from a discarded appliance box, did not last long so we adopted the title for this project. We thought that Tiger Afternoon applied well to the moment in youth when one’s social and sexual independence was being defined. Our assistant Kristie had been photographing her girlfriend Elizabeth for school projects. We asked Elizabeth if she would participate. We hired her for six weeks and she became the anchor for the project. A lot of the images were improvised on the spot. We later realized that we were directly influenced by our mutual obsessions with the films of John Hughes and Jean-Luc Godard.

Big Ten Co-Eds

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:18:42 +0000

We had been watching a documentary on the activism in the 1960′s relating to poverty, labor relations and the Vietnam War. The Berkeley students that participated in the Sheraton Palace Hotel Demonstration in 1964 caught our attention because they did not look like our mental picture of an activist or protestor in the 1960′s. We started to realize that our impressions of this time were starting to become general as opposed to specific. Many were dressed in ties, jackets, and preppy skirts and sweaters. Compared to the élan of the black panthers or later protest attire of anti-war radicals they looked part of the establishment. Since We both work on college campuses, we started to look at activists and realized, like the past there is no one discernible look, so we created a bit of a mash-up of the 1964 Preppy Activist, militant anti war activist and college recruiting poster. In the future we want to make a similar project with some of our male students.

Various Fires

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:01:29 +0000

Various Fires is the first New Catalogue Project. In fact at the time we had not even decided to call our collaboration anything. We just wrote a short list of things we would like to photograph. We were driving back to California when on break from graduate school and decided to work together on some pictures. In reference to Ed Ruscha we decided to only photograph fires. Later we created some conceptual fires and as one can see, set things on fire like cinder blocks which seem like the least flammable substance on earth. Ed Ruscha’s book series were extremely influential when we first encountered them at Humboldt State University. You could check them out of the library. Recently, due to the rarity of the first editions, we have noticed that most libraries now keep them in the rare book section. Various Fires is an ongoing project.

Sergio Vieira De Mello

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 20:54:46 +0000

Sergio Vieira De Mello was the Secretary-General’s Special Representative in Iraq who was killed in a car bomb explosion at the Canal Hotel in 2003 in Baghdad along with 20 members of the UN mission. His long career in diplomacy and his tragic loss provoked the New Catalogue Studio to think about how we could make a memorial for a peacemaker. We decided to create a series of graphic totems that detailed his life, career, birth and death. Instead of making a static work that simply looked at the past we merged his life with a corporate sponsorship of a fictional motorcycle rally from Paris to Darfur. In essence we gave Sergio one last mission, to help mediate the intractable problems of Darfur. “Oh Shit” is one of the decals that adorns the Enduro Bike and is centrally located on the large decal sheet. According to some accounts he uttered these words when the bomb went off outside the Canal Hotel and the building started to collapse. It has become the working title of the project, not only referencing one man’s last words, but also a comment to the darker aspects of the human condition.