Tag: contemporary art

Grants to join us in Los Angeles for the 2016 IIC Congress – Only two weeks left to apply!

IIC 2016 Los Angeles Congress-logo_0A range of grants is now available to assist practising conservation professionals and students to attend the IIC 2016 Los Angeles Congress.  The Congress is on the intriguing and challenging topic of Saving the Now: Crossing Boundaries to Conserve Contemporary Works and will take place from the 12th to 16th September 2016.  Please note that the deadline for application for all these grants is 31st May 2016.

  • The Getty Foundation

Thanks to the generosity of the Getty Foundation we are able to offer a limited number of grants to enable practising conservators to attend the Congress. These grants are not available to students nor to recipients of other IIC-managed grants related to attendance at the IIC 2016 Congress.
Application is open to individuals from any country not part of Western Europe, North America, Australasia or Japan, currently in employment in either a public or a private capacity. For this Congress, applications are particularly welcomed from south and central America and the Caribbean.

  •  The Brommelle Memorial fund: help for Student Members of IIC

Applicants for these IIC grants are required to be enrolled in a full-time course of conservation training leading to a recognised academic qualification. Students may apply for this funding at any time during their course of study, including their final year or internship.
These grants are not available recipients of other IIC-managed grants related to attendance at the IIC 2016 Congress. As the fund can offer only limited support, it is not expected that these grants will cover the whole costs of attending the Congress and recipients should obtain additional funding from elsewhere.

  •  Tru Vue

Thanks to the generosity of Tru Vue, we are able to offer several grants each of US$1,000 to assist practising conservators to attend the Congress.
These grants are not available to students nor to recipients of other IIC-managed grants related to attendance at the IIC 2016 Congress. Application is open to individuals from any part of the world currently in employment in heritage conservation in either a public or a private capacity.

  • The Gabo Trust

As with previous IIC Congresses, we are delighted to have the participation of the Gabo Trust in the 2016 Los Angeles Congress. The theme of the 2016 Congress Saving the Now: Crossing Boundaries to Conserve Contemporary Works is particularly relevant to the work of the Gabo Trust.
 Applications and further details
Instructions for applicants and more information can be found on the IIC Congress pages at https://www.iiconservation.org/congress/2016losangeles/grants.
 
–Graham Voce

42nd Annual Meeting – Photographic Materials, May 30, "Preservation of Deborah Luster's One Big Self" by Theresa Andrews

Luster is a Louisiana based artist who began her own career in photography in 1988 after the death of her mother. Both her mother and grandmother were photographers. One Big Self is an artwork comprising 287 4″ x 5″ silver gelatin developed out photographs on aluminum plates, stored in a steel cabinet with three drawers, and a lamp on top of the cabinet to facilitate viewing. The photographs are portraits of Louisiana prison inmates taken between 1998 and 2002. On the back of each metal plate is a personal description of the person in each photograph. The artwork is intended to be interactive, allowing the viewer to handle the photographs and read the inscriptions, seeing the subjects as real people. The metal plates are covered in paint, followed by the gelatin emulsion layer used to print the photographic image which is selenium toned. Creating these plates is very labor intensive, and Luster only manages to produce three to four plates per day. She inscribes the personal information about the inmates on the plates with a dremel tool.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) was faced with the challenging task of displaying One Big Self in the way the artist intended – as an interactive work – after it was acquired in 2003. The security and physical preservation of the photographs were the two biggest threats to the work. The piece ended up being displayed alone in a room with one museum guard on duty at all times, which seemed appropriate in the context of the artwork’s subject matter. It was decided that only 200 plates would be displayed at any time, and twenty portraits were randomly selected to never be displayed. The plates that have been on display have indeed seen changes. Some plates have been caught in the drawers and become bent, edges of the emulsion on some plates have been abraded, and some of the plates have yellowed. Although the artist is dismayed at learning about the yellowing, the cost and time of replacing each plate as it becomes too worn to be viewed makes reprinting each portrait an inefficient solution. Out of the total 287 plates, excepting the 20 that will never be displayed, only 200 are on display at any given time, so 67 plates can still be swapped with any plates that become too damaged for exhibition.
 
Summary by Greta Glaser, Owner of Photographs Conservation of DC