Scott Bowe

We Are the Champions

“…a model of his high school football stadium constructed from memory. By recasting a usually colorful and crowded environment in stark, empty white, he renders it at once familiar and alien.” 

-Rockland Center for the Arts

Stefan Banz

From his project, The Muhammad Ali’s

Stefan Banz travelled for three years throughout Europe asking subjects to portray their favorite Muhammad Ali pose

Roderick Buchanan

Work in Progress
1995
The men in ‘Work in Progress’ are wearing either Inter Milan or AC Milan football team shirts. The type of portrait is familiar from football publicity photographs, where the players stare ahead with their arms held behind their backs. However, instead of being Italian sportsmen, the players are from amateur five-a-side Glasgow teams. Their separation into two sets alludes to the need of individuals to lend themselves a separate identity, while at the same time maintaining common bonds of knowledge and agreed opinion. The implied rivalry echoes the competition between the two Glasgow football teams, Rangers and Celtic.

Nicholas Arbatsky

Terrain Park featuring Backside 180 at Heavenly & Switch Boardslide at Salt Lake Winter Olympiad
2005
Mixed media
45’ x 24’ x 15’, (2) 8’ x 12’ images

This sculpture takes the form of a snowboard terrain park reinterpreting the traditional sequence of ramps that offer snowboarders the ability to induce flight. The installation includes a billboard structure with abstract images from a snowboarding event.

From the Socrates Sculpture Park Exhibition: SPORT

Tim Laun

All About Tim Laun’s Brett Favre Cyclorama

Brett Favre’s record of endurance is legendary. As quarterback of the Green Bay Packers he has started every game from 1991 to the present, an unprecedented accomplishment in football history. The concept of the Favre Era Cyclorama calls attention to a profound shared experience that has emerged parallel to his continuous game streak. Technology has made it possible for a community of poeple in Wisconsin, and throughout the world, to participate in Favre’s ongoing career by experiencing the games not only in stadiums, but also on the radio, over the internet, and particularly through local and satellite television. This is an experience unique to our time, an ongoing event captured in minute detail and beamed around the world.

The Favre Era Cyclorama is composed of a 360-degree bank of television screens, one television for each game of his career. The configuration of televisions, stacked 16-feet high, creates a large circular space, which surrounds the viewer. The audience ascends a ramp or staircase and enters the Cyclorama through a passageway in the floor. The installation of over 200 televisions may be experienced in silence, or with audio content for each of the games, which is available through a wireless headset and keypad. The video content is the complete original broadcast of every game in Favre’s career—one game per screen. Because it includes every second of every game, rather than simply highlights or only the best games, the Favre Cyclorama is a time capsule of popular culture and sports history from 1991 to the present. Through the inclusion of commercials the video content reflects the passage of time, evidenced by changing fads and fashions while Favre’s participation in the sport is constant.

Television editing, commentary, and advertising, all create—and constantly reaffirm—a mythology about the sports hero by framing their careers in terms of winning moments, celebrity status, scandals, and lucrative contracts and endorsements. The Favre Era Cyclorama on one hand embraces the spectacle of sports, and on the other offers something different: a catalogue of every moment—winning, losing, thrilling, mundane, embarrassing or legendary. In the Cyclorama, each game holds equal weight and serves as a building block, both literally and visually, in Brett Favre’s career and a televsion spectacle many fans have experienced. 

Info on Don Majkowski (Above Wall pieces about him)

Majkowski was drafted by the Green Bay Packers in the 10th round in 1987. As a rookie, Majkowski split time with Randy Wright. He also shared quarterback duties with Wright during the 1988 season.

Nicknamed The Majik Man, Majkowski broke out during the 1989 Green Bay Packers season. He was given the starting job and Randy Wright was released. Majkowski had one of the finest seasons in Packers history. He completed 353 passes in 599 attempts. His 4,318 passing yards led the NFL. He also threw for 27 touchdowns. Notably, the Packers won their first game against the hated rival Chicago Bears since 1984. The key was a touchdown play first nullified by an illegal forward pass by Majkowski; then upheld by instant replay as a legal pass. The season ended with 10 wins and 6 losses; Majkowski capped the season with his being selected to the Pro Bowl.

Majkowski’s success was cut short when, in the 10th game of the Packers’ 1990 season, Majkowski was injured when he was upended and tackled on his shoulder by Freddie Joe Nunn. Nunn drew a personal foul on the play. At first thought to be a bruise, Majkowski’s injury turned out to be more serious, a torn rotator cuff. The Packers finished the season using backups Anthony Dilweg and Blair Kiel. During the course of the 1991 season, Majkowski was benched and replaced by Mike Tomczakas starter, but resumed starting duties at the beginning of the 1992 season. On a play on September 20, 1992 against the Cincinnati Bengals, Majkowski tore a ligament in his ankle. He was replaced after the play by Brett Favre, who completed the game, and started in every subsequent Packers game through the 2007 season.

Fans Steal Brett Favre’s Ball!

Rancourt/Yatsuk Strike Again

Catherine Opie

“The Surfers are large-scale colour photographs of seascapes taken along the Malibu coastline and portraits of surfers standing on the shore just after emerging from the water.

The Surfers were created after Opie returned from a one year residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where she created the Icehouse series. Both the Icehouses and the Surfers are part of Opie’s ongoing series focusing on American cities and landscapes. The Surfers were photographed in the morning when the light fog in the air faintly obscures the horizon line, causing the water’s edge to seamlessly fade into the sky. Like the Icehouses, the Surfers document a community defined by a landscape.”

Tom Kotik

Interview with Tom Kotik

Wardell Milan

“…His series of collages titled “Battle Royale” consists of cuts and rearrangements made to black-and-white photographs of boxers like Jimmy Slade, Floyd Patterson, Ike Williams and Sugar Ray Robinson. The family and sports photos and his explorations of black male sexuality echo the work of artists like Lyle Ashton Harris and Glenn Ligon — who wrote the essay introducing Mr. Milan’s work in the show’s catalog — as well as Paul Pfeiffer’s videos in which sports figures are isolated from their surroundings.

Mr. Milan’s photographed collages include a wealth of images and a pile-up of references, everything from the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. to Rogier van der Weyden’s “Deposition.” But his graphite and charcoal drawings, which recall classical nude battle scenes and are titled after the Tennessee Williams short story “Desire and the Black Masseur,” are comparably one-dimensional.”

From the New York Times

Sweet Blogspot

Brian Finke

Check His Home Site