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Sticky PostingsPortfolio
Tomas Svab's professional and art photography portfolio section is a collection of only portfolio work. Go to the Portfolio SectionSunday, May 31. 2009洛西ケーブルテレビ インタビュー
この春に、洛西ケーブルテレビのニュースワイド京都「都見聞録／京都に住む外国人の方に京都の魅力語っていただく」コーナーにて取材を受けました。 その時のテレビ番組の模様がこちら。。。 取材ならびに番組編集をされたのは、松下隆さん。彼はフリーディレクターとして、映画・舞台映像・番組などの演出、制作などをされています。 Electric Graphics Saturday, September 13. 2008Galleries West
Galleries West (Canada) Fall/Winter 2008
You can find the Fall/Winter 2008 PDF here "Win, Place, Show; The Ever-Growing World of Art Competitions, What Does it Mean to Make the Shortlist?" by Heather Ramsay. The article looks into what these competitions mean to artists and how it affects their lives. Ramsay mentions my 2005 national award in the 1st Art Invitational Student Art Competition. She goes on to explain Eric Metcalfe's position on becoming an artist. Ramsay wrote, "Art schools across Canada are graduating thousands every year and at a recent ceremony in Alberta [Metcalfe] told the grads to look around. 'Only three of you will become artists,' he said. 'That’s how tough it is.' " I've been asked "Why would you want to be an artist. The pay isn't good and you work too hard for what you get back. Why not just give up?" But I just want to continue, there is no reason, in fact reasons are practical things and this is not a practical decision. Financially making art can be a waste of time, but that's why we depend on the kind of people who can help fund making art. Kyoto Journal #70
Kyoto Journal is an English language publication coming out of Kyoto. To mark its 70th issue Kyoto Journal has looked locally at its birthplace; Kyoto. I showed the founding editor John Einarsen some of my previous work documenting city streets in Vancouver and he thought something like this might work in issue 70.
 The final eight page image before text was added. I was new to Kyoto at the time (this was last November) so I started to look for locations right away. I had little idea of what Kyoto was like beyond the tourist spots I've seen before. Kyoto is the city of temples; there is no mention of being the city of convenience stores or renovated cafés. I went out many times to either look or to photograph. Each week I told John "I'm almost finished, I just have to shoot one more building and stitch it in." Well, that week kept repeating. By April I had to attach a tripod holder to my scooter so I could get around. I went from hypothermia in the winter to heat-stroke in the summer but I was still shooting.  An early mock-up of the cover image for KJ. A few weeks before the magazine went to press John was still calm and patient with me. I kept promising to finish but John said, "I have a few more places I want to show you." He took me on a tour of some spots that don't have tour bus parking like Kurodani Temple (黒谷寺). By this point I was using a bicycle to get around more slowly and I found even more hidden locations. Well, sometime in July I finished the image. It includes images from November to July with over 70 layers of buildings and people. It isn't "straight" documentary where each snapshot would have be considered a separate image, it's edited like a film into a one coherent strip about 2 meters long. It wraps around from the back cover to the front and the first few pages in. Friday, September 12. 2008PeaceWorks ZAIM
ZAIM, Yokohama, Japan
 ZAIM, the old zaimusho or tax office in Yokohama. I remember seeing a sculpture of a voluptuous Korean woman with a potato in her hand called "Abundant Potatoes." It was at the Mori Art Center for a show called "Happiness" and the piece was made by the artist Kim Chul-Eok from the DPRK at the height of a famine1,2. The topic was quite nebulous but it allowed visitors to see interpretations of happiness by different artists (some paid for by the government to speak on their behalf). The last piece was Yoko Ono's "Mend," which is a set of broken cups the visitors can glue, tape or tie back together. There are small joys and big joys and we cannot judge someone else's happiness or desires as false at face value. So in this way an exhibition about peace will not stick to one person's definition of peace, and if it did then all the images would be bountiful harvests. A good show would venture into the questions raised by the critics of "peace", whether intellectually or more holistically. The difficulty of pinning it down verbally makes is a prime subject for visual art, too.  "Before the Law" 「法の前」(Tomas Svab) photo by Stewart Wachs Maybe the show was a bit disjointed because it wasn't curated. Instead it was a project by artists. That's why ZAIM was perfect, the place looked like an artist's studio. It was like a giant collaboration between all kinds of creative people using photography as a medium. The danger of curating a show about peace is it could easily become someone's soapbox. And this surely wasn't - since everybody has a piece they think is off topic. In my mind this means it was successful. ART COURT Gallery
２００８年7月29日ー8月8日
ART COURT GALLERY I had the opportunity to show more photographs from The Metamorphosis of Spaces at Art Court this summer. Art Court is the largest privately run contemporary art gallery in Kansai. Usually I'm shooting installation shots for Art Court, that's why I knew the angle of this installation image even before I framed the artwork. Monday, June 30. 2008The Metamorphosis of Spaces: Takashima City
２００８年６月４日ー６月３０日
 "Bleak" from "Metamorphosis of Spaces."  Inside Gallery Kai. ＜日本語訳＞ このシリーズにある作品の全ては滋賀県高島市周辺で撮影されたものである。 そもそもこのシリーズを始めたきっかけには二つの考えがあった。ひとつには義理の家族が住む場所で、欧米人として全く新しい日本の生活を発見し始めていた時であり、写真に撮ることによって、自分自身色々なことを学ぶことができると思ったからである。二つめとしてこの市が近年６町村が合併したということ。おそらくここにある平穏な生活シーンに変化が見られるかもしれないと感じたことである。 Continue reading "The Metamorphosis of Spaces: Takashima City" Saturday, February 23. 2008Diagrams at PRINZ, Kyoto
The Geopolitical Eveningwear series at PRINZ from January to February, 2008. The series has thirteen photographs in it right now but it will be added to as time goes on. Most of these images haven't been exhibited before. You can see all the images in detail in this posting's tags.
 Geopolitical Eveningwear series. Sunday, February 10. 2008Riot at Fraser Regional Correctional Centre
 Fraser Regional Correctional Centre in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada Today the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) reported that there was an "uprising" of about 30 prisoners at the Fraser Regional Correctional Centre involving about 30 prisoners. According to the CBC article the prison is designed for about 420 prisoners, but there have been complaints about overcrowding. They didn't mention how many prisoners were in the jail at the time of the uprising. A spokesman for the prison claims the disturbance was stopped without any serious injuries. I wanted to photograph the exterior of the building in 2005 and I was barely allowed to speak to anyone. I had to call out in an empty room until finally I heard a voice come from behind a thick mirrored glass partition telling me there is no way I could ever take photos of the building's exterior even from the parking  Pulled Over from Brothers series; we had a good time being pulled over by this RCMP officer turned actor. With a huge studio camera and a flash in the car, we had to ask if we could take his photo, so he is actually acting... in this shot. Not wanting to take any chances with the RCMP, I decided it was safer for me just to take a photo of the sign as part of my fences series. Although another time, I did have a great photo opportunity with the police; one of an RCMP officer with an interest in art and television, that made it into the exhibited series "Brothers." This time I didn't want to push my luck, since I've seen first hand what is only recently being documented in the media about accidental injuries inflicted onto unarmed people by the RCMP. Thursday, November 8. 2007Playroom. at MOMAK
On November 1st I photographed the installation of a work called Playroom. by ICHIHARA Hiroko and YANAI Shin-ichi. The photographed is published on the MOMAK (The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto) website in the news section.
The room the work was installed in completely changed once the elementary school students and high school students arrived. The piece was transformed from a static collection of objects into something spontaneous and carefree. These are not always the kind of reactions we want to have in an art gallery — or so it used to be, a group of people quietly contemplating a Rodin sculpture without more than a whisper. Children are not so distant from art. They enjoy jumping right into it. Playroom. is the kind of piece where you can see this transition because it was built for children and teens to interact with. Tuesday, November 6. 2007Making Books by Hand
 The Geopolitical Eveningwear book.  Inside the book.  The two books showing the stitching in the coptic style binding.  Inside the Brothers book. 1st Art Catalogue
Finally the 1st Art catalogue has arrived from BMO. It shows the artwork of the winning artists between 2003 and 2007 from all across Canada. I'm happy to see that there are more winning photographs from Emily Carr Institute. The original project I submitted that was chosen as the national winner in 2005 is described in this entry. You can see more detailed images here as well.
 Vancouver Art Gallery
 I worked for the Vancouver Art Gallery Photo-imaging department from 2003 to 2007. I started out making scans of the artwork documented on film. Later I began to photograph artwork and installations digitally. I also photographed some events for the gallery when the event was big enough to be photographed. Here is a selection of the kind of work I did for the Vancouver Art Gallery and other freelance work in the art community.Saturday, October 27. 2007Destination: Kyoto City
 Our Balcony, Facing South, Kyoto City.  Shelter, Uzumasa, Kyoto City.
Uzumasa is near Eiga Mura or Movie Town in Kyoto city. The neighbourhood can't be compared to Vancouver at all. While Vancouver was built in clear steps our neighbourhood in Kyoto is layer on layer of construction. The houses are packed together but not in even rows. The streets become suddenly narrow and house-fronts face different directions. But in Kyoto the tiny Jizo shrines keep their sacred spaces like bubbles from the past as trains, scooters and houses surround them. If Vancouver is well known for its modernist architecture, being predominantly built in the 1950s and 60s, Kyoto is more like a well packed suitcase holding the contents of over a thousand years in a modern city. Saturday, October 13. 2007The End of the Road
 At the landslide construction area. I decided to take a look at the progress of the landslide repair just past Kutsuki village (Takashima City) that seems to be under construction since at least last July. Kutsuki is in the mountains between Lake Biwa and Kyoto City. In fact, three cities and two prefectures meet up in one part at the edge of Kutsuki: Takashima City, Kyoto City and Otsu City. I think the landslide is just across the boundary in Otsu City. There are few ways to get to Kyoto from Kutsuki but there are also other roads that meander, growing mossier and mossier until they suddenly end as tiny one lane roads marked with crumbled cliff-faces and warning signs. It was one of these roads that I drove on on a rainy autumn day.  One of the roads coming from Kutsuki and ending somewhere north of Kyoto city.
 The mossy road that ended suddenly. The other part of the name "Disappearing Views of Takashima-City" I don't like is that these views aren't going to disappear as much as change. But that's nothing new or spectacular. What is really happening is that the younger generation is moving to the city to find more profitable work and live in greater convenience creating a vacuum in the rural areas. So in the end I need to start photographing the journey between the quiet towns and villages between Lake Biwa and Kyoto city. Now I just need to come up with a new name. "City Self, Country Self" is already taken by Rodney Graham.
(Page 1 of 2, totaling 30 entries)
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