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Another Arizona artist who I first discovered at Eye Lounge gallery during a split show with my photo teacher, and later saw his work again at the Phoenix Art Museum. He is a painter, and of his work that I've seen that I find most striking are of seven very life like bust portraits that are about 3 by 5 feet in size. He uses texture like you wouldn't believe, the paint literally comes inches of the canvas. They're so intricately detailed that you can make out pores on the subjects skin, they look like photographs from a distance. I'm not familiar with the rest of his work, but from what I have seen, he seems like an artist worth getting to know.
Swat Team- The Musical
I went to Jason Hanasik's lunch lecture some weeks back, and was really interested in what he had to say about photographing your own family and presenting that as art. He said he struggled with what was appropriate and considerate of him to publish from photographs of his parents and his sister. Much like myself, he wonders if his family is aware of the way people may interpret his work by the way the subjects of the photograph are presented. He frequently works with presenting male subjects that challenge the standards for what is considered "normal" masculine representation. Which is why I was very interested in the image above, which features his father in a rather passive position, while his mother appears much more aggressive and assertive. In regards to my own work, he had mentioned a photograph that his father asked him to no longer show, and since then has never shown it, so I imagine I will continue to use the work of my own family until they ask me not too.
Brought To Light: Photography and the Invisible 1840-1900 is an exhibit of early scientific photography by both professional and amateur scientists. The curator, Corey Keller wrote of the photographs, “If they appear remarkably modern to us, it is in large part because science and photography have determined our idea of what modernity looks like.” And they did look aesthetically quite modern to me, but more interesting was the point that this early link between photography and science contributed to breaking down our civilization’s belief that seeing and knowing are the same. The show is broken down into several categories. “Spirit Photography” represents that period of time when multiple exposures gave Occultists wonderful “proof” of their work, and exposes (sorry ft pun) the disintegrating connection between truth and photography (still a tenuous connection we often make). The collection “Microscopes” when seen in the museum context certainly gave me a strong aesthetic impression- I was reminded of Abstract Expressionism, as if the photographers were capturing their psychologies in compositions of single-celled organisms. GE's early demo pictures of alternating current (above) in "Electricity" are almost breathtakingly beautiful (except that I am a little jaded by ugly fractals). Another collection with a strong artistic bent is the “X-Rays,” where images of subjects skeletons seem to purposefully focus on identity through the presence of jewelry and clothes. “Motion Studies” (Muybridge) and “Telescopes” had less of an overall aesthetic impression on me, but were strong reminders of how our seeing has changed because of these very images. This show is on through Jan 4, 2009. www.sfmoma.org
Cyanide was Dustin Fosnot’s debut solo exhibit and although a few pieces were on display, the piece Cyanide caught my attention and kept it so that I can hardly remember the others. On the floor were three blue mattresses, each with the outline of the artist’s body created by a cyanotype process. Initially I associated the blue of the mattresses, which was uneven and dotted like a starry sky, and the outlines of a person lying on them with the excitement and awe of childhood nights spent outside staring up at the sky, but after learning about Fosnot’s personal history and the process with which he made the piece, I had an altogether different impression. Fosnot spent several years homeless in the Bay Area and the first mattress was found on the streets where he had slept (all the mattresses were old and used). Creating a cyanotype with these mattresses meant lying on a cyanide coating and, knowing this, the outlines and materials shifted to associations with the outlines of dead bodies in crime scenes and the precariousness of life in the streets. I was then able to switch back and forth between these two impressions leaving me with feelings of both wonder and fear.
Todd Hido is another Bay Area photographer and this exhibit, A Road Divided, focused on landscapes. All the photographs appeared to be taken on the road and from inside a car. The weather is rainy or snowy in all of them and there is usually a mostly natural lanscape broken by the line of the road or telephone poles. But what made these images stand out is the painterly and cinematic quality of them created by blurred sections due to rain on glass (presumably the windshield). They are haunting and beautiful while feeling very contemporary. They appear to be manipulated, but, intriguingly, I could not tell what the manipulation might be, what was ‘natural’ and what created. You can see this collection on his site www.toddhido.com.
There were several artists showing at the Mark Wolfe Gallery, but by far I was most moved by two pieces by Sarah Hirneisen, a local sculptor. The first, Naming Conventions, was an immaculate white case filled with rows of glass shelves on which sat small glass vials of Iraqi oil and carefully etched onto each of these was the name of an Iraqi citizen killed in the Iraq war. I found the juxtapositions of sterility with the messiness of oil, politics, death, and war, and the fragility of etched glass a powerful metaphor for the American-Iraqi relationship. The second piece, Inventory, was a spare metal house-shaped frame with glass squares filled with the contents of vacuum cleaners of various homes. On the back of each square, the contents within were meticulously cataloged. For me, the piece again dealt with juxtaposition, this time the work of the artist against domestic housework, pointing to how much meaning and value are changed by context. I also highly recommend her website www.sarahhirneisen.com!
The Haines Gallery had an exhibit of David Nash’s work, a British artist who does mainly large wooden sculptures fastidiously carved with a chainsaw. I don’t connect with these sculptures, however, Nash’s work Wooden Boulder, reminiscent of Andy Goldsworthy’s series of Time pieces but with more of a sense of humor, gave me great pleasure. Nash carved the ‘boulder’ out of a very old oak tree which had been felled, then followed its journey with (almost) no intervention down a stream to the ocean over the next 25 years. Nash documented the journey with video, photos, and whimsical line drawings. This piece made me think about our intent in our creative work and how this intent might infuse our pieces. In the case of the boulder, I felt as if the witnessing and documenting of its intermittent journey might be animating it, transforming the journey into a performance more than a circumstance. I smiled a lot.
B&W works from the 1960s. Winogrand was one of the most influential photographers of his time (whose work I had never encountered before this exhibition). His work reminded me of Diane Arbus’ (who was also on exhibition here) because of the focus on people in their contexts, but with much more focus on the context- the era and the places where he was shooting. Two photos in particular struck me: He Had It: John F. Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960, and Los Angeles 1969. In the first image (above), we are seeing JFK from behind and, through the wonder of the video age, from the front; we are seeing the photographers aiming their cameras from behind a metal enclosure and the image they are capturing. We are also seeing this moment of leadership and hope as if amplified by the light reflecting off Kennedy’s face and raised hand. In Los Angeles in 1960, 3 women with black bouffants are wandering down Hollywood boulevard. They are looking down and to their right and we can wonder if they are noticing the Hollywood stars on the pavement or perhaps glancing at their own reflections in a large window. More probably they are seeing the figure of a disabled man drooping in his wheelchair as a little boy sitting at the nearby bustop is staring at him. But alongside all these interconnections, I am largely drawn to the geometric patterns of the shadows cast before the women, lining up in perfect symmetry with the stars on the pavement and I wonder if the man in the wheelchair sees them too. These images, as with Tama Hochbaum’s work, capture various aspects and the complexity of their subjects, also creating multiple frames within the image, but this time through the magic of a single shot. To see the second image go here: http://www.fraenkelgallery.com/index.php#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=4&a=1&p=0&at=0
