Happy New Year!!!

For the sake of a new year...

Happy Holidays!

It's been a busy year....I'm generally not a fan of the "once a year catch up letter"...it's in the same ball park as Larry David's "stop and chat". So I'm not going to write one. Against my principles.

Here's a card instead. I hope everyone is well, and best of wishes for this new year and all that it brings!

Take a looksee...

Hello everyone!

My assistant has been hard at work and the big reveal of my website is now ready! To view it, you can go to www.brettkallusky.com. I have photographs dating from 1999 to 2008 (the span of almost a whole decade…) on the website. I am very proud of this work and hope you all enjoy. *

Regards,

Brett Kallusky

*dictated, but not read by Brett Kallusky

Keeping with Halloween

Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come out at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins, how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them and then, and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?"

"Good God, Professor!" I said, starting up. "Do you mean to tell me
that Lucy was bitten by such a bat, and that such a thing is here in
London in the nineteenth century?"

From Bram Stoker's Dracula

Not as gruesome as you might think....

This is a photograph made at St. Roch in New Orleans this past spring while teaching a Photo Essay class down there....

About the saint himself: A french nobleman who gave up his wealth at a young age to look after the sick, specifically those affected by the plague. The story goes that he himself came down with the plague, went to the forest to die, and met a dog. Apparently the dog brought him food, and nursed him back to health.

Upon recovery he returned to his home town of Montpellier and was promptly arrested for spying. He was jailed and died in prison five years later.

He is known as the patron saint of invalids, and dogs...

The Monster

I remember a photograph made by Dan Estabrook of his studio in the late 90's. It was the most frightening shot of a view camera I had ever seen. Dan explained to me the feeling of immobility in the face of trying to create in his studio. At the time I was incredulous at the fact...I thought if you have your own studio, everything must be great. Today I get it.

I made a similar photograph at Cranbrook in 2003...it has poignancy for me today as i strive to create new work. Everything you may want, or may be afraid of lie under that dark cloth, in that space that has been carved for light.

Seven Years and a day ago...view from my apt. rooftop in Brooklyn

Google Search: Disingenuous

Disingenuous

adj.

1. Not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating: “an ambitious, disingenuous, philistine, and hypocritical operator, who … exemplified … the most disagreeable traits of his time” (David Cannadine).
2. Pretending to be unaware or unsophisticated; faux-naïf.
3. Usage Problem. Unaware or uninformed; naive.

Recent, Upcoming and Current Events

Last Saturday I took part in the MCP Portfolio Review along with gallerist and photographer Kathleen Day Coen. This was a great opportunity to see the work of several photographers with different bodies of work and give feedback. I would encourage anyone looking for some outside perspective to what they are doing to give this a try. Two peoples work who I was not familiar with but enjoyed....Michael McGraw and Aaron Bommarito.

Today I am a visiting artist at Bethel University and will be sharing my experiences from Cranbrook and the Fulbright with undergraduate students in the photography program under the charge of Lex Thompson.

Friday...Colleen Mullins will have a lecture and opening at 9th Street Gallery in lowertown St. Paul. The lecture is at 6pm with the opening to follow. In addition there are all sorts of photography shows going on right now in the Twin Cities...

Paul Shambroom at the Weisman Museum, August Sander at Weinstein Gallery, The Populated Landscape at Flanders Contemporary Art, JoAnne Verburg and Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscape at the Walker Art Center.

Also...don't forget to see Mica Lee Anders work in the group show Soul on Ice at the Soap Factory!

More Cuts

Fontana at work

Photographed by Ugo Mulas

Lucio Fontana and Francis Bacon walk into Mussolini's Kitchen...

Upcoming Event

Colleen Mullins will be exhibiting her work from a project entitled Elysium, a collection of images documenting and describing the landscape of New Orleans that has been overlooked in the tragedy of Post-Katrina recovery. Her images not only evoke a sense of the event that forever altered the landscape, but also pose the questions of where priorities and responsibilities lay in the stewardship of a distinctly unique urban forest. She will be speaking about her project on February 29th at 6pm at the 9th Street Entry Gallery in St. Paul, with a reception to follow.

Through the Looking Glass

Clean Slate

Neruda

My Aunt and Uncle just returned from Chile, where they visited Pablo Neruda's nautical themed home in Valparaiso. They said it was quite the experience, reflecting aspects of a ship in every room. My uncle told me that in fact Neruda was not a sailor, and was in fact deathly afraid of the water. I find this compelling based upon the imagery in so many of his poems is based on waves, water, and cyclical gravitation...oh the irony of fear and desire.

At any rate, a poem on a Sunday.

Love by Pablo Neruda

What's wrong with you, with us,
what's happening to us?
Ah our love is a harsh cord
that binds us wounding us
and if we want
to leave our wound,
to separate,
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us
to drain our blood and burn together.

What's wrong with you? I look at you
and I find nothing in you but two eyes
like all eyes, a mouth
lost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful,
a body just like those that have slipped
beneath my body without leaving any memory.

And how empty you went through the world
like a wheat-colored jar
without air, without sound, without substance!
I vainly sought in you
depth for my arms
that dig, without cease, beneath the earth:
beneath your skin, beneath your eyes,
nothing,
beneath your double breast scarcely
raised
a current of crystalline order
that does not know why it flows singing.
Why, why, why,
my love, why?

Tangled

Portfolio Review at MCP

Information on how to have me look at your work if you happen to be in the Twin Cities on Saturday February 23rd from 1:00-3:00pm at the Minnesota Center for Photography.

Upcoming Photo Shows-MPLS/Philly

Ryan Widger is showing SOLO at the Kelly Webber Gallery in April...

check this promo video out for more information on Mr. Widger and his work.

http://dskessler.com/studioscopic/

James Henkel is exhibting at Gallery CO opening this weekend in Minneapolis...

http://www.galleryco.net/current/

Fuzzy Cage...

Don't need a weatherman...

Disabled Love

Somedays you eat the bar, and others, well...

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another:
that is perhaps the most difficult of all out tasks, the ultimate, the last test and
proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young
people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to
learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about
their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning
time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and
far into life, is solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with
another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished,
still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become
world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim
upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in
this sense, as the task of working at themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day
and night"), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and
surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and
gather for along, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which
human lives as yet scarcely suffice.

Whoever looks seriously at it finds that neither for death, which is difficult,
nor for difficult love has any explanation, any solution, any hint of way yet
been discerned; and for these two problems that we carry wrapped up and
hand on without opening, it will not be possible to discover any general rule
resting in agreement. But in the same measure in which we begin as individuals
to put life to the test, we shall, being individuals, meet these great things at
closer range. The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our
development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them.
But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and
apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play,
behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their
existence - then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible
to those who come long after us; that would be much.

Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letters to a Young Poet

Home Sweet Home

Writings on a wall....

...out of water (with some inside).

From MNCP's Website: Steve Benson

Steven Benson

Second Tuesday Lecture + Steven Benson:
The Cost of Power in China: The Three Gorges Dam and the Yangtze River Valley

January 8, 2008 - 7:00 PM

Photographer Steven Benson will discuss his much acclaimed photo essay documenting 400 miles of the Yangtze River valley before the reservoir behind the Three Gorges dam filled in 2003 flooding 13 cities, 140 towns, 1,352 villages and forcing two million people to leave their ancestral homes. He will address, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the construction of the world's largest dam and the effect it has had on the valley's people and their way of life. A book of this work was published in 2006 by Black Opal Press with essays by A.D. Coleman and Dai Qing and a limited number of copies will be available for signing.

Bio
Steven Benson received a Masters Degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has received numerous fellowships and grants, including three Creative Artist Grants (Michigan Council for the Arts) and an NEA/ArtsMidwest Fellowship. Benson is in many private and public collections, including Museum of Fine Art (Houston), Detroit Institute of Arts, Bibliotheque Nationale (France), Centre Georges Pompidou, Museet for Fotokunst (Denmark). His recent exhibitions are FotoFest Biennial, Argentinean Biennial of Documentary Photography (2004), International Festival of Photography (Poland), Internationale Fototage Biennial (Germany, 2005), International Photography Gathering (Syria), Daegu Photo Biennale (South Korea), Lianzhou International Festival of Photography (China), Odense Foto Triennale (Denmark, 2006), retrospective FlatFile Galleries (Chicago, 2007), FotoFest 2008 Biennial. His book, The Cost of Power in China: The Three Gorges Dam and the Yangtze River Valley, with essays by A.D. Coleman and Dai Qing - interview by Jens Friis - was published by Black Opal Press in 2006.

web links:
www.stevenbenson.com

Moody

Dumped...Sorry Mother, Left

Silent Treatment

Goodbye

Fold