I actually found out about Michalek because of his project Portraits in Dramatic Time, which is a series of videos of individuals and some groups doing different activities. There was one featuring the fabulous Alan Rickman, and it is just fantastic. Super super slow-mo video of Alan Rickman making iced tea, and then flipping a table. It is so slow that you can see every minute detail in his facial expressions, every change, every motion of the body, down to the millisecond. I have never seen anything else like it before. Someting that probably took all of 15 seconds to take place stretched out to 8 and a half minutes.
In New York, I did a bit of work with video and I actually find that I am not so apprehensive about video as I was before. I've been thinking about incorporating some sort of video or multimedia piece into my project this year, and I chose to do a post on David because he is one of my favorite video artists right now, and these videos almost exist as still portraits as well as cinema, they are multi-faceted. Not just existing as one thing or the other.
Portraits in Dramatic Time: Alan Rickman
Portraits in Dramatic Time (Alan Rickman) from Moving Portrait on Vimeo.
Bio: “David Michalek is an artist who takes the concept and techniques of portraiture as the starting points for the creation of his works, on both a large and small-scale, in a range of mediums. While earning a B.A. in English Literature from U.C.L.A., Michalek worked as an assistant to noted photographer Herb Ritts. Beginning in the mid-1990s, he began his professional photographic career working as a portrait artist for publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Interview, and Vogue. Concurrently, Michalek began to delve into performance, installation, and multi-disciplinary projects. Since giving up commercial photography in 1998, his work has been shown nationally and internationally with recent public art and solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Sadler's Wells, Trafalgar Square, Opera Bastille, Venice Biennale, Yale University, The Kitchen, and Lincoln Center.” -from the artist’s website: http://www.davidmichalek.net/about.php
"Paul Ekman, who has studied emotions for decades and whose book, Emotions Revealed summarizes this work, says that until he saw these segments, he thought he had seen everything about facial expression of emotion. But, watching this extremely slow motion display is like looking into a microsope for the first time: seeing a world that has always been there, that surrounds us, that we can now observe. Paul saw sequential recruiting of facial muscles into a brief moment of fury, or profound mourning (Chowdry) or the blossoming joy as a toddler is past into the arms of his mother (an actress dancing) and spies her father (strumming the mandolin)."
"International Psychoanalysis » Blog Archive » David Michalek: Portraits in Dramatic Time." International Psychoanalysis. 20 July 2011. Web. 02 Oct. 2011. <http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/2011/07/20/david-michalek-portraits-in-dramatic- time/>.
Catton, Pia. "'Portraits in Dramatic Time' by David Michalek at the Lincoln Center Festival - WSJ.com." Business News & Financial News - The Wall Street Journal - Wsj.com. Web. 02 Oct. 2011. <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304584004576419990759204596.html>.
Slow Dancing by David Michalek: Nejla Y. Yatkin from Moving Portrait on Vimeo.
Slow Dancing: Introduction
Slow Dancing by David Michalek from Moving Portrait on Vimeo.
Kafka Fragments: Performance
http://davidmichalek.net/kafkafragments/performance.php
Review: “Projecting ‘Portraits’
David Michalek thinks outside the box (and the walls) at Lincoln Center”
http://www.nypress.com/article-22617-projecting-lsportraitsrs.html
Artist’s Website: http://davidmichalek.net/
Gallery Representation: http://www.opus3artists.com/about/
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