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Jeffrey Milstein | Versailles from Above

Jeffrey Milstein, aerial photograph of Versailles

Jeffrey Milstein, Versailles 01, archival inkjet print

Known for his impressive shots of Los Angeles and New York City, Jeffrey Milstein recently set his sights on France, shooting the country's historic chateaux from a helicopter.

The sweeping vista of the Palace of Versailles pictured above is one of the artist's favourite images from the shoot. With a background in architecture and graphic design, Milstein has always been fascinated with the elaborate and highly-ordered design of the French landmark.

Equipped with his Hasselblad and an incredibly sharp lens, Milstein approached Versailles at sunset - the "golden hour." He had the pilot fly as close as permissible (one must obtain a special permit to fly directly over Versailles), making steep turns to allow him to lean out of the helicopter’s open sides and capture the perfect view. Characteristic of the acclaimed artist's aerial work to date, this meticulously composed and highly-detailed image shows the iconic palace from an unusual perspective, including not only the gardens and the chateau in the composition, but the town that surrounds them. Viewers can spot the King's Vegetable Garden that supplies the palace kitchens, the Saint-Louis Cathedral and the orderly grids of homes and buildings.

We are thrilled to be exhibiting this piece at the impressive size of 55.5 X 74 inches in Milstein's upcoming solo exhibition Jeffrey Milstein: Aerials. The show runs March 9-23. The opening reception will be held at 350 Dundas Street West on Saturday, March 9, 2-4pm.

Click here to read more about the show

CLICK HERE TO VIEW COLLECTION ONLINE

Jeffrey Milstein with helicopter, Francine 2019

Photographer Jeffrey Milstein poses in front of the helicopter used for his recent shoot in France.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW COLLECTION ONLINE

Janna Watson Profiled in Creators Vancouver

Creators Vancouver's Elizabeth Newton profiled Janna Watson in anticipation of her upcoming February 9th show at Bau-Xi Vancouver, Suspended In Time. Janna shares some of her proudest career achievements to-date, creative lessons from her grandfather and even advice to other artists who wish to make it in the art world.

EXCERPT

Some proud career moments:

I used to work at the Soho Metropolitan Hotel doing room service. Through this job, I made connections and had my first solo show in the lobby. Soon after the hotel commissioned me to do a piece for each floor! Hands down this experience gave me all of the confidence that I needed to make a career in painting.

Other creators who inspire you:

My grandfather Arthur Bonnett was my mentor and taught me how to use watercolour. He gave me painting lessons and would send me to the back field of his farm to draw the essence of a tree. He once told me “It’s OK, but it needs to be wilder.” His critiques were honest and he always pushed me to exude more. I am also inspired by Cy Twombly for his raw and elegant child like mark-making techniques, as well as Joan Mitchell’s sense of colour and strokes.

Curious to hear more from Janna including her advice to other artists? Read the full Q&A on Creators here

VIEW THE JANNA WATSON COLLECTION HERE

Katrin Korfmann and Jens Pfeifer at the Teyler’s Museum

Korfmann and Pfeifer at the Teylers Museum, NL

Teylers, Haarlem, a large-scale photograph by Katrin Korfmann and Jens Pfeifer, is currently on view at the Teyler’s Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands.

The image depicts an imagined birdseye view of a room in the Teylers Museum. Using over 500 photographs of the museum captured from an aerial perspective, the artists digitally stitched them together to create a cohesive composition.

Korfmann, a fine art photographer, and Pfeifer, a sculptor, created this piece as part of their recent series, Back Stages. This photographic series examines many aspects of the world of fine artwork and culturally important objects, highlighting manufacturing processes and handling.

Back Stages will be exhibited at Bau-Xi Toronto this May for the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival.

Click here for full details about the exhibition

Click here to read a Q&A with the artists about this piece

Katrin Korfmann and Jens Pfeifer, Teylers, Haarlem, archival inkjet print. 47 X 68 in. Edition of 5.

VIEW MORE WORK BY KATRIN KORFMANN

Canadian Photographer Barbara Cole featured in the Jerusalem Post

Impersonation, from Duplicity

Canadian fine art photographer Barbara Cole is internationally recognized for her innovative process and timeless aesthetic. Cole was recently written about by Barry Davis in an article for the Jerusalem Post, which takes us through her beginnings as a young photographer working in a friend's parent's pool, to her recent experiments with shooting in the ocean. The article celebrates Cole's ability to employ the highly technical and precise medium of digital photography to create beautiful, ethereal imagery with a uniquely painterly aesthetic. She is continuously inspired by the underwater realm, and always fully embraces the unexpected in her practice, resulting in a career of unique and compelling photographic series.

[Cole photographs] in conditions that make the end product anything but certain. That, for her, is what it’s all about… “That’s the thing that’s so magical...Every show is different, and every time I shoot I don’t know how the water is going to be, or how the people are, or what the lack of gravity is going to do. Sometimes you don’t even need to know that.”

CLICK HERE TO SEE BARBARA COLE'S COLLECTION

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN THE JERUSALEM POST

Kew at Night, from Falling Through Time

Hoax, from Underworld

Embellishment, from White NOise

Pattern Recognition | Jeffrey Milstein and the 'magic' of the view from above

In June 2018, The Scottish National Gallery acquired Jeffrey Milstein's 49 Commercial Jets for their permanent collection, and selected it to feature in their exhibition, Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

In the final days of the exhibition, James Crawford, writer and presenter of the BBC One series Scotland from the Sky, draws inspiration from this piece, and from Milstein's body of work, to discuss the 'magic' of viewing the world from an aerial perspective.

Read below:

"At first glance, you see a flower, shedding its petals in the wind. Another photograph shows a massive line of shelves, displaying row after row of brightly coloured book spines. Next is a close-up view of the veins of a leaf, spreading outwards in a delicate, repeating pattern.

Jeffrey Milstein, *Newark Airport Terminal 11 A*, © Jeffrey Milstein

Jeffrey Milstein, *Container Port 43, Industry L.A. Aerials*, © Jeffrey Milstein

Look again. Look closer. And very quickly you see something else.

The flower is no flower. It’s an airport terminal. Newark airport to be exact. Pictured at dusk, as a warm orange glow spills out from the circular terminal building onto the wide aprons of runway. And the petals, drifting off? They are aircraft, arriving at and leaving their stands: connecting and disconnecting from the air bridges that will carry passengers to and from the terminal.

What about the second picture, those colourful bookshelves? They are nothing of the kind. Peer in and you can see that it’s a view of a container port. All those brightly coloured books are in fact shipping containers, being sorted and stacked by huge machines.

Jeffrey Milstein, *Seal Beach Naval Weapons Storage*, © Jeffrey Milstein

And the veins of the leaf? A weapons storage facility for the US Navy – a complex of turf-covered, concrete bunkers linked together by now overgrown roads and railway tracks.

These images are the work of the American photographer Jeffrey Milstein – the product of his enduring passion for the view from above. At the age of fifteen, Milstein, who grew up in California, began taking flying lessons. On the day of his seventeenth birthday, he earned his pilot’s licence. He did not, however, pursue a career as a pilot. Instead, he chose to study architecture at Berkley, and later went on to start a graphic design company. You can see all of these influences coming together in his work.

Milstein takes his aerial photographs from the cockpit of light aircraft or small, agile helicopters, always flying at sunset, when the low light makes shadows longer and suffuses everything with a golden glow. Almost all of his images look straight down at the landscape – what’s known as ‘vertical’ aerial photography, a technique that requires the aircraft to bank steeply and fly round a target in tight circles, allowing the camera to point straight down. In a plane, this means opening the window and pointing the lens out. In a helicopter, it means removing the whole door prior to the flight… It’s not for the faint-hearted.

From this vantage point, Milstein brings his architect’s training, and his graphic designer’s eye, to bear on the world below. His preoccupation is with pattern and colour, transforming even the most banal sites – a car park, a freeway intersection, a housing estate – into works of abstract beauty. Often, Milstein stays in the air after the sun has dropped below the horizon, capturing cities – in particular Los Angeles and New York – as their electric lights flicker on to meet the dusk. In these images, even broader ideas and possibilities emerge. Photographs of New York’s Time Square and Broadway redraw the map of the city with pathways of bright, neon energy. It’s like you’re looking down on New York’s central nervous system, glowing with flashes of synaptic light.

Jeffrey Milstein, *NYC 55 Times Square*, © Jeffrey Milstein

Jeffrey Milstein, *NYC 69 Times Square Broadway and 7th Ave*, © Jeffrey Milstein

What Milstein clearly understands is the unique power of the view from above. For me – and I suspect, for Milstein – there is no better medium for understanding the impact of humanity on the landscape. The way we have both overcome and overwritten the natural world – yet at the same time, almost bizarrely replicated it. From the sky, Milstein turns row after row of LA backyards, trees, houses and car parks into a remarkable unfolding structure, like living cells growing under a microscope. London’s Waterloo Station at night becomes a beautiful, iridescent sea shell, or the beginnings of a DNA double helix.

Jeffrey Milstein, *LA 07 Park La Brea*, © Jeffrey Milstein

Jeffrey Milstein, *Waterloo Station (Night)*, © Jeffrey Milstein

In this sense, the view from above is compelling, seductive even – and often revelatory. Milstein is far from the first architect to be inspired by aircraft and the possibilities they offer. Over a century ago, in 1909, a young art student in Paris watched the world’s very first flight over a city – when a primitive aircraft circled the Eiffel Tower. That young man is best known today as the cultish father figure of modern architecture, Le Corbusier. From that moment on, Le Corbusier became obsessed with aircraft, saw them as the perfect symbol of a technological future. Yet, when he finally took the skies over a city himself in the 1930s, he was shocked by what he saw below: ‘immense sites encrusted with row after row of houses without hearts, furrowed with their canyons of soulless streets’. His ultimate verdict? ‘Cities with their misery must be torn down. They must be largely destroyed and fresh cities built’.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Le Corbusier’s message was embraced across the world: not least in Scotland by a new generation of post-war planners and architects. Using vertical aerial photography taken of every inch of the Scottish landscape – 300,000 photographs produced by the RAF between 1944 and 1950 –the redesign of an entire country began. This took in everything from deciding which valleys and glens to flood for dams and hydro-schemes, and plotting courses for new, high speed motorways, to the wholesale remodelling of our largest cities. For a time, in 1947, all of central Glasgow was marked for demolition – including buildings like Central Station, the City Chambers and the Glasgow School of Art. Robert Bruce, the city’s Chief Engineer, had proposed a new central district of skyscrapers, roads and high rises, aiming, as he put it, to create ‘a healthy and beautiful’ Glasgow. This plan was ultimately shelved – but only because of the vast costs involved.

Glasgow, 1947, taken as part of 1944-50 RAF aerial survey. 20 years later, the M8 motorway would be carved right through the heart of this part of the city. © Historic Environment Scotland

This modernist movement in architecture emerged alongside new technologies like aircraft and the motorcar, and many of its ideas were informed by what were then daringly exciting, technologically advanced modes of travel. Milstein himself talks of how a favourite pastime in his youth was to wait at the end of the runway at Los Angeles airport: ‘I loved having the aircraft fly so low overhead that I could almost reach up and touch them’. Years later he took his camera back there, pointing it not straight down this time, but straight up, capturing the undersides of aircraft as they flew at some 200mph directly overhead. In his work ’49 jets’ – a composite of 49 of these ‘portraits’ – the aircraft are presented almost like a taxonomy, a beautiful range of colourful wings and fuselages, like an arrangement of butterfly species. It is, as Milstein says, a testament to ‘the magic inherent in flying’. For a large part of the twentieth century, roads and runways acted as potent – ‘magical’ even – symbols of movement and freedom. And as such, were seen as essential elements of any modern city.

Jeffrey Milstein 49 Jets 2007 © Jeffrey Milstein

Today, our sensibilities have changed once again. Now cities aspire to become ‘car free’, new airports are sited on the periphery, removing the noise and pollution from the heart of densely populated areas, to be replaced by green spaces and urban parks. If you keep looking down on our cities over the next fifty to a hundred years, we may see the retreat of the road and the car, the advance of greenery and leisure spaces – the pattern shifting.

This, of course, is what the view from above does better than anything else. It shows that our world never stops changing, not even for a second. It shows that our cities are hard-wired for change – always growing, shifting, suffering or thriving. Always regenerating and rewriting themselves. And one thing is for certain. The landscapes that Milstein – and, thanks to his photography, we – look down on today, will not be the landscapes of tomorrow.

James Crawford is the writer and presenter of the BBC One series ‘Scotland from the Sky’ and the author of the book of the same name that accompanies the series. He has previously written a number of books on aerial photography, including ‘Above Scotland’, ‘Scotland’s Landscapes’ and ‘Aerofilms: A History of Britain from Above’. A second series of ‘Scotland from the Sky’ will be broadcast in Spring 2019"

James Crawford (writer and broadcaster), January 9, 2019

Michael Wolf retrospective moves to the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany

Michael Wolf: Life in Cities, installed at the Deichtorhallen

On November 17th, the touring retrospective Michael Wolf: Life in Cities, opened in its second location, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany. The exhibition is installed in the museum's House of Photography, and will run until March 3rd, 2019.

The retrospective features 12 series from Michael Wolf's body of work, ranging from his early career as a documentary photographer to his more recent fine art photography projects. The centerpiece of the show is The Real Toy Story (2004-2018), a massive wall installation composed of more than 30,000 cheap plastic toys that are 'made in China,' which provide the framework for portraits of Chinese toy factory workers. This is the largest installation of this piece to date.

Click here to watch how The Real Toy Story was installed.

Michael Wolf's The Real Toy Story, installed at the Deichtorhallen

The retrospective will also feature some of Wolf's best known and most widely collected works, including his acclaimed series Architecture of Density. In this series, Wolf captures Hong Kong's enormous and famously dense architectural landscape, and transforms it into colorful abstractions and geometric shapes. One of his earliest projects, this series included in many museum, corporate and private collections.

Michael Wolf: Life in Cities is a production of The Hague Museum of Photography, and is curated by Wim van Sinderen. The exhibition, accompanied by a monograph of Wolf's work, debuted in the summer of 2017 at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France.

Michael Wolf's Architecture of Density series, being installed at the Deichtorhallen

Michael Wolf's Paris Rooftops series, installed at the Deichtorhallen

Michael Wolf: Life in Cities advertisements, featuring Tokyo Compression series

VIEW MICHEAL WOLF's ENTIRE COLLECTION HERE

Joshua Jensen-Nagle | New ski scenes

Matterhorn View For You

Joshua Jensen-Nagle recently added 4 incredible new pieces to WINTER, his ongoing series of mountain and ski imagery. Shot in Switzerland this past winter, these shots capture the scenic ski villages of Zermatt and Wengen in the Swiss Alps.

An avid skier and snowboarder, Joshua Jensen-Nagle explores the slopes on his snowboard with his camera equipment on his back, allowing him to shoot idyllic ski scenes and impressive mountain vistas as he experiences them.

During this particular trip to Switzerland, the artist also experimented with shooting the mountains aerially. He hired a helicopter to fly him over the runs, allowing him to capture Chalet Days, a spectacular aerial-perspective image of a ski resort in Zermatt.

These dreamlike images impart a sense of nostalgia, perfectly capturing the crisp air and clear skies of a day on the slopes.

Contact us at 416-977-0400 or photo@bau-xi.com for more details.

Chalet Days

Days Like This

The Mountains and Me

VIEW THE ENTIRE COLLECTION HERE

Robert Marchessault featured in Toronto Star Homes

Ontario-based painter Robert Marchessault is featured in The Toronto Star Homes, in an article by Carola Vyhnak about custom fine art commissions.

The article profiles the Oklahoma home of Greg and Lisa Reagon Love, who commissioned works by Marchessault to accent the architecture of their home.

Click here to read the full Toronto Star Homes article

VIEW WORK BY ROBERT MARCHESSAULT

Photographer Barbara Cole featured on CNN Style

Click here to read the full CNN STYLE article

Barbara Cole's pool, where her photoshoots take place

Toronto-based artist Barbara Cole is featured on CNN Style in a compelling article by Ana Rosado. Titled "From Nirvana to 'weightless worlds," the article begins with a brief history of the evolution of the practice of underwater photography and highlights Cole as a major contributor to the practice. She is described as an artist who "ingeniously [uses] water as an artistic tool to transform reality" and "[takes] advantage of the submarine environment to create a dream-like alternate dimension."

My goal since I began to exhibit in 1984 was to push the medium -- to paint with a camera, resisting the realism that is normally expected of photography.

Alla Prima
From Figure Painting, Cole's most recent underwater series, photographed in 2017

Emulsion
From Figure Painting, Cole's most recent underwater series, photographed in 2017

Click here to read the full CNN STYLE article

VIEW WORK BY BARBARA COLE

MICHELLE NGUYEN FEATURED IN MONTECRISTO MAGAZINE

Michelle Nguyen sat down with Violette Leigh of Montecristo Magazine to discuss her painting practice. Shedding light on the significance of literature in creating her compositions, Nguyen notes the viewer's experience in relating to the different figures populating her canvas is of particular interest:

'The painter gets to know the viewer by who they identify with,” she explains. By tagging oneself in a painting or identifying with a particular character (maybe the elegantly dressed woman sprouting a demon arm in Cassadaga or the woman devoured by butterflies in Gorgoneion), the spectator is given an indirect opportunity to share vulnerable thoughts. Nguyen believes society has an increasing need for empathy, and she tries to create it with her stylized communities of humans, demi-humans, and non-humans. “I love how when people are looking at these humanoids,” she says, “we’re always trying to relate to them in that way and anthropomorphize, personify, and empathize with them.” This act makes relatable what may have first been perceived as foreign.

Click link to read the full Montecristo feature

VIEW WORK BY MICHELLE NGUYEN

SYLVIA TAIT AWARDED 2018 DISTINGUISHED ARTIST AWARD BY FANS SOCIETY

Sylvia Tait will receive the 2018 Distinguished Artist Award by the FANS Society at the Tribute to the Arts Event on Friday, November 2, 2018. The artist will share this special recognition with author Claudia Casper.

The Fund for the Arts on the North Shore is a registered charity managed by the North Shore Community Foundation. The Fund receives donations, bequests and other funds from arts supporters in the local community, which all go toward the building of the Fund’s capital account. As the only public art event of its kind on the North Shore, the FANS Tribute to the Arts presents a unique opportunity for the community to participate in the recognition of outstanding artistic achievement by North Shore artists.

Click to read more about FANS

VIEW WORK BY SYLVIA TAIT

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