A.kaminski

Murmurations 2016

 Murmurations 2016, Lead, Steel, Ash, and Performance

Origami cranes constructed of lead hanging in a soaring ten foot open steel structure invite viewers to step outside of the gallery and into a new space to contemplate what flies above and what lies beneath their feet. Three inches of grey ash cover the floor of the built environment. Evocative of crematorial ash, nuclear fallout ash, or the forest floor after a wild fire, viewers exploration of the two materials, lead origami cranes and ash, what they should be made of versus what they are made of and their inherent oppositional materiality makes performers out of participants.  As bodies enter the space, their juxtaposition to the environment and their destruction of patterns raked in the ash hints at personal responsibility after destruction. The artist’s presence within the work, embodied in a Zen garden rake, delegates responsibility for re-raking the ash into pattern. This work captures the fascination with repetition, war, and labor embodied in much of Kaminski’s work, evoking through its title the constant balance we seek between order and chaos.

code

Post-humanism and technology have complacency and determination in the erasure of the human. Is this a negative? Inspired by the binary code making up photographs from predator and killer drones as well as the binary code making up images of women in pornography, this series seeks to merge the themes of women under erasure as well as technology’s capacity to swiftly erase people and their potential.

The Untitled Ones.

Anonymity isn't always a choice or a privilege. It can and often is forced through corporate and governmental alienation and intimidation. Photographed in collaboration with advocacy organization, Nebraska Appleseed working to defend and organize contingent undocumented meatpacking workers in Lincoln and Omaha, this project sought to raise awareness for the realities of the meatpacking industry and illuminate the abuse and deliberate silencing  of undocumented workers in the industry.

Shot in Nebraska over four days collecting stories of undocumented meatpackers, the life-size photographs were exhibited with a collection of workers' stories about anonymity, intimidation, the failure of regulatory bodies like OSHA, high rates of injury, and the deliberate silencing through threatening deportation. 

Empty 2008

The market crash of 2008 brought homes previously sold for over a million dollars to the point of foreclosure. the cracks revealed then continue to widen.  These photographs, taken from a moving bicycle on a toy plastic Holga Medium Format Camera in 2008, elicit that wealth can be fleeting and rooted in non-reality. Not only is the camera itself a toy, but the homes themselves seem more like ghostly dollhouses than dwellings. 

Ascending to Post-Humanism "Ghost Studies" 2009 - 2016

Shot over seven years, only now is my fascination with contorting the body and creating ghostly images beginning to make sense. My obsession with becoming obsolete, disappearing, and maintaining an emergent ontology guides this collection of photographs of both models and self-portraits. Each photograph began with space. I was inspired by a large kiln that I sat in before and after firing a vessel intended for ashes, the urn. I visited Auschwitz, I saw my family name over and over. I thought of the life size kiln.  I sat in the basement of my home, laid on the cement floor imagining the world below, the core of the earth, the core of myself. I dressed a friend in white, recreating a childhood memory, the Catholic school and the theatre had the same floors. I imagined and read stories of prison, of solitary confinement, of Guantanamo. I became and unbecame someone who believed in something. 

Kosmopolitis Guerilla Magazine

The Kosmopolitis Guerilla magazine project was designed to expose the detrimental impact of cosmetics and personal care products on the environment of the human body and the environment at large. These harmful products are often marketed through beauty magazines. Taking inspiration from major magazines, namely Cosmopolitan, myself and a small group artists aimed to create a captivating and informative mimicry of the industry that we were critiquing. Through a format of collaging scientific facts, DIY recipes, and beauty-bending images, the reader was drawn in through appealing content while shifting her perspective by deconstructing the very façade that compelled her.

The sly mechanics of mimicry inspired the strategy of corporate sabotage through a format of reflective dissent. The magazine that looked and felt like a magazine insert was then inserted guerilla style into cosmopolitan magazines at local drug stores so that the reader could access this creation and its content at her own convenience.