June 29 - August 26, 2006
It's Not a Photo
It's not a photo is an exhibition of abstract photography
and electronic media. If this sounds like a contradiction,
the confusion is intentional. Photography has long passed
its status a document of "truth" - the very basic "the camera
does not lie." Photography "lies" most of the time; given
the ubiquity of photo shop that even the most amateur photographer
can use to the conventions within art practice of creating
sets that are then photographed as "real" or the "real" shot
to look as if it were fake, artifice and manipulation reign.
The group of artists selected for It's not a photo have abandoned
representation to focus on the media itself. Like abstract
painting, it has become increasingly self- referential, using
the freedom of its apparent lack of subject to investigate
the tools of its own making - light, paper, chemicals, digital
process, j-pegs and the like.
The resulting work is often mysterious, evocative and replete
with a sense of haunting beauty.
Artists selected for the exhibition include:
Dimitrios Antonitsis
Jeremy Blake
Marco Breuer
Willa Davis
Bjørn Melhus
David Samuel Stern
Wolfgang Tillmanns
James Welling
(click artist's name for more info)
Dimitrios Antonitsis
top^
Jeremy Blake
“The way this work developed for me is comparable
to a musician that grows up playing acoustic instruments,
and then at a certain age starts playing electric guitar.
I started with painting and then found out it could be electric,
and that it could be more like the rock n' roll I grew up
listening to. I think every generation needs to move the story
of how art is made along a little bit, and the computer allowed
me to mix things in new ways without losing the personal nuance
and immediacy that I value in traditional mediums.”
-JB
Jeremy Blake's seductive surfaces, whether in his time based
DVD paintings or C-prints, unfold into hallucinatory transformations
of shape and color, and slip seamlessly between the representational
and the abstract, and in the DVDs between non-narrative and
narrative passages. To realize these works, Blake typically
combines numerous media—his own drawings, photos, film
footage, etc.—in the computer frame by frame, and then
animates and alters his images digitally in a way which combines
the sensibility of a painter with the techniques of a filmmaker.
Blake's work is loaded with recent art historical references.
James Rosenquist, Morris Louis and Ed Ruscha are just a few
which the artist frequently cites in combination with an ongoing
examination of contemporary America's popular myths: the dream
home, the heroic gunfighter, the Hollywood success story,
etc. In doing so, Blake manages to innovate visually while
critically surveying the landscape in which a contemporary
artist works; one which is determined by the visual lexicon
and discarded utopian ideals of high modernism on the one
hand, and fantasies promoted in popular culture on the other.
As a graduate student at Cal Arts in the mid 1990's, Blake
had an emotional and artistic predisposition to abstraction,
but felt that abstraction was reaching a dead end in his own
painting. ". . .but at that time I was also encouraged
by the work and the thinking of people like David Reed, and
so I started looking for a way for abstraction to migrate
and remain powerful without trying to force it to be exactly
like it was at the height of the NY School." Advances
in digital media provided him the tools for a new kind of
work, which Blake called 'time based painting'. These are
gorgeous, intricately layered artworks, which move slowly
and hauntingly on a plasma screen and follow the semi narrative
logic of a dream. They are the realization of Blake's early
ambition to engage painterly abstraction in a new dialogue
with representational imagery and film.
top^
Marco Breuer
“For most of my work I attempt to strip photography
down to its bare essentials to create photographic images
that have the directness and the intimacy of pencil drawings.”
-MB
Marco Breuer’s work constitutes a systematic investigation
of the conditions of the photographic medium. For the works
in the exhibition, Breuer emphasizes the physical act of making,
rather than taking a photograph. Eliminating the camera, he
subjects paper (photographic or other) to a range of erosive
treatments such as sanding, folding, and scratching. While
some of the images might be considered drawings, they are
intrinsically dependent on the principal properties of photography.
The series titled Pan/Tilt (referring to cinematic terms
for a camera sweeping horizontally or vertically over a scene)
is a negotiation of the illusionistic space of photography
versus the concrete space of the physical mark. Using photographic
color paper and a razorblade, Breuer physically removes layer
after layer, forcing color out of the material.
For Notes, Queries, Breuer utilized the early photographic
processes of gum bichromate and cyanotype, pointing towards
a moment in photography’s history when the medium was
exploratory and fluid – a site for inquiry not yet dictated
by conventions or expectations. On a ground of white paper,
Breuer builds up layers of emulsion, in between physical acts,
to create complex, richly-textured images of their own construction
and destruction. Instead of pictures that illustrate something
outside of themselves, we are confronted with surfaces that
speak of their own coming-into-being. Emulsion and support
are not mere vehicles for the image; they, in fact, are the
image.
As with all of Breuer’s works, much of the fascination
lies in the tension between the destructive forces he employs
and the subtle and delicate images they produce. In the end,
no amount of technical information can ultimately explain
their haunting quality.
top^
Willa Davis
“As a photographer who has spent many years in
the darkrooms of the past, I openly embrace the freedom of
the digital darkroom in which I now work. The process I use
in creating these images is not automatic. I cut and place
the hundreds of pieces that it takes to create the mandala
with my digital scissors and personal inspiration.”
-WD
Willa Davis’s “kaleidoscope-like” abstract
images are from an ongoing body of work entitled The Gaia
Mandalas. Davis turned her attention from a documentary focus
to these abstracted digital compositions following a feeling
that there was more to nature, and the nature of things, than
our normal way of seeing and representation could fathom.
Abstraction and the incorporation of the mandala form became
for Davis a transformational tool leading her through what
she terms a “labyrinth” of discovery about nature
and the nature of the world we think we see.
top^
Bjørn Melhus
top^
David Samuel Stern
"My work is concerned with making images that present
visual relationships and concepts that center on what it means
to see, what it means to represent, and the tangling up of
these meanings. The camera and the eye work in rather similar
ways. So, I may say that photography makes representation
and vision into
synonyms." -DSS
David Stern’s photographic practice constitutes a
controlled blend of photographic explaining and seeing. The
blurred abstractions formed in the series exhibited here,
Lensless Aperture, resulted from a lensless Copan Schneider
4x5 aperture placed on his west-facing windowsill and set
at f/32. With a Nikon camera, he then photographed the light
(image) that bent through the aperture, at a distance of several
meters. In the process, the focus of the Nikon’s
lens was shifted from background, to middleground, to foreground.
Stern’s investigation here was to relate basic camera
optics to that of the eye. The eye, the camera, and the projector
all involve a sequence of light traveling through a lens to
form an image in a dark room. But while the practice may be
empirical, in this summoning of visual analogues, Stern moves
from explanatory information about the world to engage in
an abstraction of visual generalities, or, as he terms it,
to record the poetry that cushions the edges of this strained
synonymy of vision and representation.
top^
Wolfgang Tillmanns
top^
James Welling
“If anything can be said of the essential nature
of photography in this new decade, it is that photographs
are elusive constructs cobbled together from often unrecognized
sources and influences to form a new hybrid.”
-JW
James Welling’s photographic practice has long been
involved with questioning the very nature and function of
the medium. While his early work sought to investigate whether
modernist photography could be fused with conceptual practice,
his consistent investigation of photographic abstraction has
liberated photography, much as modernism did for painting,
into a realm of an autonomous language of light, illusion,
opaqueness, negative and solid, void and presence.
Welling chooses a different format and process for each
body of work, investigating both the image and the process
that describes the image. The Degrades for example, are camera
– less exposures of sheets of photographic paper held
under an enlarger, which acted as a light source. During each
exposure, Welling slowly moved a piece of cardboard to make
shadows producing minute, imperceptible transitions of light
that produce the gradual range of color. The bands of color
at once show the process of exposure to light and a system
of generating the gradations and breakdown of color that constitute
the territory of image making.
While such a description tells much about the conditions
of making, it tells little of the shadow that transforms the
process into these lusciously sensuous objects that breathe
in light.
top^
|
