“Closed” ©Tim Best

I revisited this image from a performance I did onsite at a Washington Mutual Branch that was about to be torn down. I was invited by Tom Feulmer and Christina Rees for their on site exhibition “Modern Ruin” in Feb 2010.

Backyard Fence 34x22

This image will be appearing in the “Home” exhibition at the Center for Fine Art Photography opening on March 2nd 2012.

This project takes cinematic, mythologic and biblical references and ties them together in a narrative format that follows a five part structure including prologue, beginning, middle, end and epilogue. There is one photograph per part of the structure so there will be five images in the end.  The imagery I staged and captured in these photographs are signs and symbols of contemporary money culture.

The series is in progress.

stuff installation at Modern Ruin 2 in Ft Worth 11/5

stuff installation at Modern Ruin 2 in Ft Worth 11/5

Modern Ruin: Quick and Dirty
3309 West 4th Street
11/5 8 – 11 p.m.
B.Y.O.B.

The show is up at 500x!  Opening reception 11/5 from 7-10.

FREE BEER HERE!!

On Stage: 11/5 to 11/27 at 500x Dallas

For Immediate Release:

“On Stage”

Tim Best and Tom Leininger bring together two diverging points of performance for a two-person show in the Upstairs Gallery at 500X in Dallas from November 5 through 27.  Opening reception will be Saturday, November 5th from 7-10pm.

Tim Best, a Dallas based artist, stages dramatic emotive scenes. His work presented is from his “making a scene” project that includes photography, video and a book release. The setting is blackness as if it were the mind void of thought. Then a spotlight illuminates a figure doing nothing but expressing emotion, that uniquely human behavior that inspires both constructive and destructive action. The drama is about to unfold but instead of live performance, Tim Best captures this with a still camera. He used a list of 49 emotions found on Wikipedia to call out emotions that the actor spontaneously improvised under the spotlight. Total focus is on the facial expression, the physical gestures and the wardrobe flying through space in crisp detail. Drama itself and the process of creating drama is the subject of Best’s work.

Emotion drives Best’s work. “In my experience, it is the root of all drama. In this body of work I direct actors and models through a sequence of emotions. Rather than assume the role of observer in a dispassionate way, I choose to actively set up these performances in the studio. The resulting photographs are surreal, subconscious reconstructions and rearrangements of ‘reality’ that come out of the experience of improvising the emotions. The chiaroscuro of the spotlight illuminating the figure in the darkness implies a tension between real life and the imaginary.”

Tom Leininger is a Denton based photographer whose work is rooted in reality and based on private moments individuals are able to carve out for themselves at public events. The color photographs are found rather staged. They are part of his ongoing series “Sidelines”. The events at which the images were first made may have been staged, but the images are not about the events, rather those on the side who are watching.

“The event brings people together, which becomes the fodder for me to explore,” Leininger says about the work. “I am not interested in the place or the event, but rather how all of these different events add up to one big staged show in which the script is written after the event.”

Tim Best and Tom Leininger can be contacted for more information. Best can be reached at 214-531-3857. Leininger’s phone number is 940-230-0110.

Tim Best: http://timcbest.com
Tom Leininger: http://tomleininger.net

anger from 'making a scene'

Check out my new book on Lulu from my ‘making a scene’ project:

“Business Man” is one of my very first projects from back in 2005. In fact this group of images was due to show in October after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans (where I was living at the time). So the prints evacuated with me and I was able to get them framed in Florida and shipped to Boston in time for the show.

The guy in the images are me however I don’t consider these self portraits. They are images from a dream sequence I had so I consider them an unconscious expression of something. Not sure exactly what but I think my inclination is to get dressed up when I am performing. Or at least I think I’m supposed to!

When I think of spiritual ecstasy I think of feeling horror and euphoria at the same time. Two opposites occurring simultaneously. Something else that occurs simultaneously in these photos, as do all photos, is the real and unreal. At once the “real” is recorded whether in a studio or in the environment, and the “unreal” image that never existed before the photograph was taken. In that spirit these characters are ‘out of context’ illuminated only by a spotlight signifying a performance for the camera. They are strange but undeniable.

Guardrail Damage Ahead exhibited at 500x in spring of 2009. This was my first show at the gallery as a member. The idea for these images came from 2 sources. The first being the movie “American Psycho” where an upscale trust fund baby couldn’t fulfill his adolescent appetites so he went on a killing spree. The second source was my studio. I was doing a lot of sculpture at the time and working with power tools. I decided to use them in these pictures not only because of the reference to the movie but they actually helped ‘make’ the images.