Elayne Estrada_ Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham

Her images are very sharp and a good amount of them look to be of porcelain texture. She was best known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes. Cunningham was an American photographer and continued shooting up until her death at 93. Her work is characterized as a visual precision, not scientific, but presents lines and textures of her subjects, which are articulated by natural light from their own gestures.

 

Elayne Estrada

http://www.imogencunningham.com/

Elayne Estrada_ Ruth Bernhard

Ruth Bernhard

 

Ruth Bernhard was known as a Berlin-born American photographer who focused her work around the live she loved, the beauty she knew, and the happiness she experienced. All her photos are made like that. Before Ansel Adams death, Bernhard was inducted into the National Women’s Caucus for Art and Adams hailed her as “the greatest photographer of the nude.” Her work migrates from still life figures to complex nudes. Loving the black and whites of her images, I have selected the images that interest me the most. 

Elayne Estrada

http://www.artnet.com/artists/ruth-bernhard/ 

Elayne Estrada_ Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramovic

 

Described as “the grandma of performance art” Marina Abramovic has been an active artist for over three decades. Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body and the possibilities of the mind.

In Imponderabilia two performers, both completely nude, stand in a doorway. The public must squeeze between them in order to pass, and in doing so choose which one of them to face. This performance was reenacted at MOMA in 2010 in The Artist Is Present.

Throughout her performances, Abramavic has “explored passive aggression, constructing the actions around her rather spectacular body.”  She notes that Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful. During the early years of performance art female artists used their own bodies to challenge the institution of art and the notion of beauty. Marina has said in an interview that during the 1970s,  “the commodification of art and artist by critiquing conventions of and demands for female beauty in art and contemporary culture.”

 Elayne Estrada

http://marinafilm.com/about-marina-abramovic

Elayne Estrada_ Vanessa Beecroft

Vanessa Beecroft

Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist who lives in Los Angeles. All of her work addresses conceptual concerns as well as aesthetic concerns. She is a performance artist and her work is often large scale and most of the time involves female nude models. Critics have characterized as art, fashion, brilliant, terrible, evocative, provocative, disturbing, sexist, and empowering.  During performances her models are unified through details like hair color, or identical shoes, stand motionless, unapproachable as­­ viewers watch them. 

 

Elayne Estrada

http://www.vanessabeecroft.com/ 

 

Elayne Estrada_ Carolee Schneeman

Carolee Schneeman

Her work is characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relationship to social bodies. She has been coined as “a mad pantheist,” because of her relationship and re­spect for nature.

Up To And Including Her Limits – is a direct result of Pollock’s physicalized painting process.  The artist suspended herself in what is called a tree surgeon harness on a three-quarter-inch manila rope. She has access in manually raising or lowering her body in order to sustain through a period of drawing.  While holding crayons which is hitting the surrounding walls. While accumulating a web of colors the says, “My entire body becomes the agency of visual traces, vestige of the body's energy in motion.”

Elayne Estrada

http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/