Rineke Dijkstra. Montemor, Portugal, May 1, 1994; courtesy the artist; © Rineke Dijkstra.

Currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the mid-career retrospective of work by the photographer Rineke Dijkstra lays out the argument she has built for more than twenty years for the intimacy and dignity of portraiture as a genre. Beginning with the portraits that first brought Dijkstra’s work to international awareness, of bathing suit–clad teenagers at the beach, and culminating with a series of images of children and teenagers posing in a park, viewers encounter subjects who are alternately self-conscious, exhilarated, stoic, or wary but always cognizant of projecting an identity for the camera.

Looking at these photographs, one notices the extent to which the close cropping of an image, a non-descript background, or the figure’s selected pose or attire inform our impressions of who these individuals are and how much of themselves they hold in reserve. While their faces are expressive, their smiles are rare; they are not trying to project idealistic personas. What comes to the foreground instead are the representations of specific moments and particular affiliations in their lives that resonate universally. Whether Dijkstra’s subjects are teenage ravers, school children, refugees, soldiers, new mothers, or bullfighters, the specific details of their individual narratives are stripped away and replaced by a viewer’s empathy and recognition for what they are experiencing.

On February 17, I had the opportunity to walk through the exhibition with the artist and discuss how these ideas of individuality and universality resonated with one photograph or another, often with the work between us a silent participant in the conversation.  The photographs’ subjects are where we have been or will be: standing at the cusp between one life phase and another or fully immersed in the attributes and behaviors of a larger group, institution, or subculture.  And whether grounded or in flux, the question “Who am I?” persists from one photograph to the next.

Rineke Dijkstra. Nicky, The Krazyhouse, Liverpool, England, 2009; courtesy the artist; © Rineke Dijkstra.

The one variation of this question emanates from the three-channel video installation, I See A Woman Crying (2009), commissioned by Tate Liverpool, in which a group of schoolchildren speculate about the 1937 Picasso painting,Weeping Woman. The portrait never appears in the video; the camera remains focused on the children as they puzzle over who the woman is and why she is crying. As viewers of this video, we sit impassively as they spin narratives of murdered ghosts and shunned wedding guests, but all the while, they are gazing outward at us. Dijsktra has turned the tables on her audience; we are positioned as the subject of the students’ observations. They express fears of death, loneliness, betrayal, and unhappiness that are intrinsic reflections of our own.

________

Patricia Maloney: There’s the photograph of a schoolboy and also those photos of the Israeli soldiers, in uniform and out, in which it seems you’re trying to find the essence of who they are, within their institutional identities as schoolchildren or as soliders. How do they negotiate for their own selves within this collective identity?

Rineke Dijkstra: Within a group or a specific situation—for instance, in Israel everybody has to commit to a collective identity [with conscription]—there is always the individual who is also longing for something else. You always try to keep your own personality. You can never afford to lose that; that’s how people distinguish themselves from each other.

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Nina Katchadourian, "Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #18-19," 2011. C-print. Edition of 8. Diptych: 7.157 x 6 inches each.

The thing about traveling on an airplane is that we take for granted how phenomenally absurd it is. There we sit, unfazed, hurdling through space at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal tube, surrounded by complete strangers whom in all likelihood we will never see again. There is also the unspoken airplane etiquette that we all hope the stranger sitting next to us will follow: please don’t talk, don’t move, don’t get up…basically please do everything you can to appear as though you don’t exist. With these restrictions, an airplane in flight is a very difficult place to do anything more than sleep, read, stare out the window or watch movies with only the most watered-down content. Unless you are Nina Katchadourian.

For Seat Assignment, her fifth solo show at Catherine Clark Gallery, Katchadourian culled from a body of work made on more than seventy flights over the past two years. Now, artists reading this might be terrified by having their workspace confined to the miniscule square-footage of an airline seat and the plane’s lavatory. For Katchadourian, it is a pragmatic opportunity to bring her “studio” with her. Using only her camera phone and the materials at hand, she creates everything from improvised classical Flemish self-portraits to miniature composed landscapes and worlds.

Nina Katchadourian. Excerpt from the Extreme Sports series, 2010. From the Seat Assignment series.

As its title suggests, the series Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style uses objects such as inflatable neck pillows, napkins, bits of plastic and whatever else Katchadourian has on hand to make self-portraits in the style of classical Flemish paintings. Window Seat Suprematism references the fundamental geometric forms of the early 20th-century Russian movement. The images in the series, taken of the planes’ wings through the window, create compelling minimalist, geometric compositions that even Malevich could approve of.

Nina Katchadourian, "Meteor," from the Disasters series, 2010. From the Seat Assignment series.

In-flight magazines supply some of the most fruitful material. One work from Landscapes uses black sweater lint to turn a snow-covered mountain into a smoldering volcano. In Disasters, pretzel crumbs become a devastating landslide off mountain road. Black lint makes another appearance, with the addition of other various detritus, in Birds of New Zealand, adorning the heads and bodies of exotic birds and giving them an even more elaborate flare. The strangest thing about these images is how believable the compositions are. While it may be obvious that the pretzels on the road are indeed pretzels and not rocks, or that a bird does not have a cashew shaped appendage on its head in real life, the objects give a genuine moment of pause, plus the feeling that while absurd, it could be real.

Nina Katchadourian, "Wigeon" from the Birds of New Zealand series, 2011. From the Seat Assignment series.

Katchadourian views a situation that most of us find claustrophobic, boring and tedious as a challenge to highlight both the fantastic and mundane aspects of air travel. The sense of humor and improvisational genius that make up Seat Assignment exemplify an artist setting certain parameters for herself and successfully working within them to create work that is both complex and light hearted.

Seat Assignment will be on view at Catherine Clark Gallery until May 26, 2012.

Alice Shaw. "Gum Print," 2012; archival pigment print, 20.5 x 28.5 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.

The profusion of works and materials in Alice Shaw’s Landscape Update at Gallery 16 leaves viewers with the impression of a frenzy. The twenty-six works on view are made from an exhaustive array of media: paintings of oil and dye on linen; sculptures of cast bronze and concrete; photographs, including pigment, Van Dyke brown, and gelatin silver prints; and drawings or hybrid works of charcoal, ink, and gold leaf. Though the artist’s goal of exploring the landscape through various methods and materials is admirable, the effect is less comprehensive than it is schizophrenic. There are moments when Shaw’s depictions of a natural world sullied by human presence do shine, but overall the exhibition could have been improved by the notion that less is more.

Despite the show being weakened by the surfeit of approaches, there are many works that are intriguing and funny. Gum Print (2012) is a close-up, black-and-white photograph of a tree trunk that nearly blocks the view of the wild valley and pine-studded ridge beyond. The proximity of the trunk provides rich details of the rugged bark, showing bits of moss and an old bent nail stuck amongst its crevices; the image is so crisply captured that a viewer can almost feel the rough textures. However, the print is contaminated by a wad of actual chewing gum stuck nonchalantly to the center of the trunk: a rose-pink blot of detritus that undercuts the serenity of the scene. The wad is in a rounded, larval shape that could be an organic part of this natural scene if it weren’t for its man-made color. From an oblique angle, a viewer can see threads of sticky pink residue that stretch from the print to the inner surface of the framing glass—the same way that trodden gum stretches from the urban pavement to one’s shoe. For Shaw, no pristine vista will remain untouched by human carelessness.

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Lukasz Jastrubczak, The End, 2009. Documentation of a performance, photo: Małgorzata Mazur

Bean Gilsdorf: Let’s talk about your sense of cinema and some of the motifs that you’ve pulled from films. How do you find your material, and what attracts you to it?

Lukasz Jastrubczak: Most of my inspiration is connected directly to a specific idea in the movies. I try to take an idea from cinema and use it in a very minimal way, as simply as possible. I use materials like cardboard or fabric, because the works are props, as though I am taking the scenography from movies and putting it into reality. For example, The End was made with cardboard and helium balloons. I wanted to put the fictional sign into reality as simply as possible and recreate the final motion of the words on a movie screen. And Paramount Mountain [installed as part of the exhibition Mirage] is just the beginning of a movie, the logo. At least, that’s the inspiration but then I also connect it with the tradition of abstract geometry, the shape of a triangle and the color blue. It creates the idea of a distant mountain in aerial perspective.

BG: And you are also inspired by various artistic movements and ideas, right?

LJ: This work is all connected to suprematism and cubism in some way. Inspiration for Cubist Composition with a Jug didn’t come from the movies directly, but the idea works with Paramount Mountain. The concept is that in the gallery space you have a distant mountain, a blue triangle shape, and it’s the furthest 3D object for the viewer. But behind the mountain there is this fourth dimension, what the cubists were looking for, and there’s a sculpture of a jug there. So formally and physically there are four jugs, but the title suggests that there is only one jug. It’s one sculpture in different points of view, dealing with different kinds of dimensions, which is analytical cubism. The cubist composition becomes a four dimensional object.

BG: And this is connected to Władysław Strzeminski’s theory of vision. Will you explain that?

LJ: In 1946, Strzeminski wrote “The Theory of Vision,” which is about the perception of perspective. The idea is that until the beginning of the 20th century, perspective was mainly linear and it made an illusion on a flat painting. Strzeminski claimed that Cezanne was the first artist for whom linear perspective was not the truth. Cezanne developed the perception of reality to the maximum, and after that step everything was abstract geometry or something else. Cezanne’s work is about looking from different points of view, so you are not fixed to one point of view where all lines converge in the distance, you look from different points. For example, in a landscape you know that behind the tree there is something else, there is knowledge of other, non-visible objects in the space. Cezanne just takes all of that knowledge and makes a painting.

Lukasz Jastrubczak, Cubist Composition with a Jug, 2011. Sculpture (cardboard, spray, wood, glue), 55 x 23 x 20 inches

BG: Do you think that’s connected to your attraction to cinema? Because in a movie you can see things from different viewpoints. Unless someone uses one long shot, a scene is generally made up of shots from multiple perspectives.

LJ: Yeah, that’s the thing, that’s why Strzeminski’s theory interested me, because of the way that nowadays we see by the movies and by film language.

BG: So much of this work, Paramount Mountain, The End, is centered specifically on American cinema, and now you’re going to do this American road trip, which is a really iconic experience.  Why the United States? What is it about being here?

LJ: My consciousness of the world and the way I perceive things is very influenced by American cinema and culture. I am interested in the way we perceive the world while being influenced by pop culture and movies. Based on these two things, it can seem like the average movie viewer knows everything about the USA: what it looks like, what to expect. This is the perfect combination of fiction and reality.

Lukasz Jastrubczak, Flags on the desert, 2011. Documentation of a performance, photo: Małgorzata Mazur

BG: So what will you do in the desert?

LJ: I’m working on a book project with Sebastian Cichocki, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, who is interested in conceptual art and land art. Our idea is to create a book as an exhibition. He is sending me some texts about land art and conceptual art in America, and I will react to each. I will go for twenty days, driving from San Francisco to the southwest of America, reacting to these texts in visual form: photographs, small actions and performances. At the same time I will be realizing other works, mainly a film without a script. It’s a performatively-made movie. The idea is that we are filming the trip and the performances and installations that I will put in America. In the desert, I’m planning to install some small wire sculptures and make some performances with the fabric of the mountain.

BG: So you film this performance or some kind of action in the desert. Is the resulting movie documentation/reality or is that film a new fiction?

LJ: That’s a good question. When you document an art performance, it is supposed to be a reality. But I’m also interested in the fiction, so somehow I want to create this interesting fragile threshold between those two worlds. Like special effects in the movie, sometimes you don’t know if it’s real or not.

Lukasz Jastrubczak, The End, 2009. Documentation of a performance, photo: Małgorzata Mazur

BG: You’re so influenced by American culture and images. Do you think of yourself as a global artist, or as a Polish artist reacting to American culture? Or do you think about this at all?

LJ: I think of myself as a Polish artist influenced by American culture. But I think this Polish background is very important, because to travel in America is more exciting for me as a Polish artist, maybe, than if I were an American artist.

Mark Bradford, Potable Water, 2005; billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, and additional mixed media; 130 x 196 inches; collection of Hunter Gray; © Mark Bradford; photo: Bruce M. White

In the scholarship regarding his work, much has been made of the condition and location of Bradford’s studio practice. He grew up (and still lives) in South Central Los Angeles, a mainly black neighborhood mythologized for its urban decay. Bradford worked at his mother’s hair salon before attending art school, learning skills that he would adapt to his practice: hard work, repetitive actions and tactile processes. He gleans his materials from the posters, billboard papers, and hair salon permanent-wave end papers that are still part of his environment. And while all this information surely contributes to an important analysis of his work based in socio-economics, race and culture, it ignores the physicality and lushness of the actual surfaces and the connection of Bradford’s work to textiles.

Mark Bradford, Value 47, 2009–10. Billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, carbon paper, nylon string, and additional mixed media on canvas; 48 x 60 inches; courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; © Mark Bradford; photo: Fredrik Nilsen

Up close, the dense materiality of each piece intrigues with a kind of sumptuous dissolution; there is tension between order and chaos, rigid geometries and decay. Layers and layers of papers and paint built up over time manifest the tactile nature of his working process, while the sanding between layers wears away the visible to the point of ruin. Each surface affirms Bradford’s physical presence, because these are techniques that can only be achieved by putting sinew and muscle in service of production. Though he calls them paintings, Bradford’s work more precisely exists in the productive space between painting, collage, and textiles. Many of the smaller and mid-scale collages are built on stretched canvases, allusions to the image-framing and containment of the traditional painting. However, several larger works are created on unstretched canvas that adds a layer of dimensionality to the form. For example, the surface of You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You) undulates like fabric—it’s not really flat at all—and the edges are ragged and crusted with cracked paint. Though I include a photograph of the work below, the camera fails to capture the tangible thicknesses at the edges of torn papers, the white areas sanded smooth, the divots and pockmarks in the grids, or the directional marks of a brush dragged through thick gel medium. These surfaces create the haptic character of the work.

Mark Bradford, You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You), 2009. Billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, carbon paper, acrylic paint, rice paper, and additional mixed media; courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; © Mark Bradford; photo: Fredrik Nilsen

Moreover, Bradford’s methodology and compositions echo weavings and piecework. As with textiles, the surfaces of Bradford’s work are created by obsessive repetition, much like a weaving is created by passing the shuttle back and forth on the loom. Bradford carefully slices billboard papers and posters into fine strips and layers them densely. From a distance, these arrangements of horizontal and vertical strips resemble the over-and-under patterning of a woven cloth. Likewise, the use of permanent-wave end papers in repetitive sequences across the surface calls to mind the geometries of quilts and other fabric constructions. Combining the visual motifs of textile forms with the visual tactility of the haptic creates a connection to textiles that other analyses have overlooked.

Mark Bradford, Grey Gardens, 2010. Acrylic gel medium, carbon paper, newsprint, acrylic paint, caulking, and additional mixed media; 60 x 72 inches; courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; © Mark Bradford; photo: Fredrik Nilsen

Since not much has been made of the work’s connection to cloth, I was eager to ask Bradford about this perceived reference to textiles. During our conversation in one quiet gallery of the museum, the artist confirmed this relationship, stating that his mother and grandmother were seamstresses. Bradford remembers his mother’s lessons of choosing fabric. “I grew up touching,” he told me. “I would find a fabric that looked good and [my mother] would tell me, no, it’s not good fabric, just feel it.” In the museum the eye acts as a surrogate for the fingers, passing over each ripple, raw edge, or smoothly sanded surface. The haptic nature of Bradford’s work combined with the compositional reference to textiles creates an altogether visceral experience of looking at weavings that are not cloth.

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Note: the exhibition Mark Bradford continues across the street from SFMOMA at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The work pictured here is on view at SFMOMA February 18 through June 17, 2012. The exhibition at YBCA runs from February 18 through May 27, 2012.

Show card for "Hybrid Narrative" at Mac Arthur B Arthur, in Oakland, CA, 2012.

Sight, acknowledgment, and shared experience all figure prominently in Hybrid Narrative: Video Mediations of Self and the Imagined Self, currently at Mac Arthur B Arthur in Oakland, CA. Artists Liz Rosenfeld, Chris E. Vargas, Sofia Cordova and Shana Moulton make themselves “seen” though video, film transfer, installation and performance.

Liz Rosenfeld, Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited), 2005.

Rosenfeld’s Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited), a 16mm film transfer to video, brings us to another time both via its material, and the performers themselves . A near-direct reenactment of filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics (1974), Rosenfeld’s work is non-narrative and lyrical. A small group paints their faces, necks and arms, and bind themselves with tape in what appears to be abandoned urban and industrial spaces. The short film is an analgesic; these desirable and compellingly filthy bodies lull and please, but also unabashedly idealize. Untitled recalls the ‘70s not just in its aesthetic but also in its evocation of community – Hammer’s original film sought to make visible the 1970s lesbian-feminist art coalescence. Rosenfeld’s work is decidedly queer and pictures a similar community present at the margins of the larger contemporary art market.

Chris Vargas, Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before?, 2010. Video still.

Chris Vargas uses his body comically in Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? (2010). The artist visits several photo-worthy locales, each with particular artistic or pop-culture significance: the LDS headquarters in Salt Lake City, the Las Vegas strip, the salt flats of Utah, a windmill noted as “Americana,” and – most notably – Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976). In each location, he asks the uninhabited space “have you ever seen a transsexual before?” – pulling up his shirt and exposing his chest. Vargas grows increasingly frustrated with the lack of response, dramatically flopping on a hotel bed or scurrying out of frame. Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? takes an unanticipated turn via the artist’s frequently used low-fi green screen technology, transporting Vargas to other, faraway locales as he searches out and finds a Painted Bunting, a bird native to the American Southeast. The brightly colored bird is, in this writer’s humble opinion, pretty gay.  They are also easily misread as exotic or distant by the untested eye, although they remain ubiquitous throughout much of North America – perhaps an interesting parallel for one’s sexual or gender orientation.

Whispering Pines 10 – Trailer from Shana Moulton on Vimeo.

Time and place are also critical to the show’s other two works, Sofia Cordova’s installation and video, Fiebre Fanta [Fanta Fever] (2011), and Shana Mouton’s series Whispering Pines (2004- 2011). Cordova’s installation includes black-and-white prints (including what might be a picture of the artist as a toddler), a video projection with stuttering images, an electric palm tree, and the sound of storms, running water, and club music. The jumble of media brings to mind how identity traverses time and place: the artist, as a baby, particularly butch in a white A-shirt, and then again, recognizable as her “self” in the ostensible present.  Moulton also splices time and fantasy with the early ‘90s splatter paint, faux marble madness that is Whispering Pines. The TBN-worthy soundtrack and ample use of clip art both critique and revel in technology, not to mention self-help literature from the recent past and notions of beauty.

Image: Scott Thorpe (left) and Brett MacFadden at the wrapping party for THE THING Quarterly, Issue 15: MacFadden and Thorpe.

A central tenet to emerge from Conceptual art in the 1960s was the perception of language as an object: a visual form of signification that requires us to negotiate its materiality in order to locate its meaning. In this process of negotiation, language was no different than any other artistic medium. The tactile quality of a page and typographical arrangement of text were recognized to be as active in creating meaning as the words printed on them. If reading was a set of physical gestures that unfolds linearly—left to right, top to bottom, from one page to the next—the interruption or reordering of any of these gestures led to a reconsideration and new consciousness of the act. In other words, language was set in motion, built, excavated, or incanted instead of written, and to read these texts was to experience them spatially.¹ The inheritance we’ve received from these investigations into language as object is an inherent understanding of the performative nature of reading and, concurrently, of a reader’s role as co-conspirator in creating meaning.

As art historian Gwen Allen notes in the introduction to her book Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art, beginning in the 1960s, art magazines went beyond their documentary purpose to become alternative sites that presented works of art. They placed the materiality of art and the materiality of language into congruous relationships and transformed those relationships into performative experiences. For example, 0 to 9, a mimeographed poetry magazine published by poet and performance artist Vito Acconci and poet Bernadette Mayer between 1967 and 1969, aspired to explore language as a visual, phonetic, and kinetic form and featured contributions from both poets and conceptual artists. The magazine’s issues featured pages densely covered in text or left nearly blank, typesetting that suggested motion across the page, and even, for the cover of Issue 5, a sheet of paper crumpled and then flattened again. Preceding his transition from poet to performer, Acconci made experiments with typography and layout, motivated by what he described as a restlessness with the page that compelled him into a state of action. (“I couldn’t be on the page any more. Language took me out onto the street. I was moving on the page, now I wanted to move on the sidewalk, on the street. I was more thinking of the street as a field of activity rather than the page.”²)

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Whitney Lynn, Death Parties (2011) Plastic, glass, alcohol, chrome-laminated birch shelf, 21 x 36 x 6 in.

Bean Gilsdorf: How did this new body of work begin?

Whitney Lynn: It started with Southern Exposure in 2009, they had a show called “Bellwether” and they were asking artists to predict or envision the future. I was looking at the way in which do-it-yourself and sustainability movements overlap with survivalism. I started picking up these images about how to trap your own food, skin your own squirrels, eat your own rats, and those sorts of things. Then when I was doing a later project I was also thinking about containment, and I started thinking about trapping systems. I was not quite sure what I was going to do with all of it, and then there was the realization, oh, there’s a project here.

BG: Do you think of your work as post-apocalyptic? Has anyone ever framed your work that way?

WL: Maybe a little, with the survivalist stuff. I think there’s something kind of sinister about a lot of the pieces, but I think they’re funny.

BG: What are the general trends of your interests?

WL: The earlier works that were dealing with military were very autobiographical, and I was navigating my own personal history. Then things shifted, and I was thinking about how these intersections of politics or military are really interconnected into all kinds of aspects of life. That changed my focus, to see where those messy intersections or boundaries existed. For this particular show I was thinking about metaphors of traps and their relationship to sculpture.

Whitney Lynn, Prepared Position with Disturbance Ventilation and Luminous Signal (2010) Mixed media (furniture, cement, tv, fan) 7 x 8 x 4 feet

BG: Do you feel like that’s freeing, to get away from making autobiographical work?

WL: Well, it’s always connected. For me, it’s impossible to get away from some sort of personal thread. It’s extending from a different kind of autobiography. These traps are placed in a setting where there’s the possibility of a different kind of question: what’s the prey and what’s the bait, the lure? Part of the work is about futility—nothing’s ever going to be trapped with these. And that’s where I see some of the humor, too. It relates back to some of my earlier work…I made a bug-out location that would never actually survive anything. It was made for one person and had food supplies, but they were capers, so it was this empty gesture of preparation. And there were all these weapons that would never actually hurt you. It was all pretty pathetic. It was part of the question, “How can you prepare for the ultimate disaster when you don’t know what that is?”

Whitney Lynn, BOL (Bug-Out-Location) (2009) Mixed media installation with performance elements

BG: What’s next for you?

WL: One project that I’ve been doing on the side and that will probably come to the fore is street performance. I think that’s really a place of intersections and boundaries. My interest is in that area where street performance is performance art. I’ve been really obsessed with the Bush Man in Fisherman’s Wharf for along time, so I shot a video with him recently. I’m sure there will be a development that leads me back to the traps project.

BG: I can see the borders and boundaries that you’re flirting with in your work…some are more literal and explicit, like with the sculptures, and some are more subtle, just the feeling is there, but on the whole it creates a thread through the work.

WL: There’s something exciting about allowing that thread through the work, but to let it play itself out naturally. There can be these connections, but they don’t have to be calculated. For years I was like, “I make work that’s about intersections with military and political cultures,” and it was almost like I had written an artist statement and I didn’t want to write it again, and I’d better make things that fit into that. There was pressure to define myself, to say okay so I this is what I do, but I got tired of making fifteen different kinds of bunkers, that’s not all I think about. I was eliminating possibilities because I was stuck in the idea that my work needed to be concise.

Whitney Lynn, Trap no. 001 (2011) Acrylic, polished tree branch, 21 x 17 x 16 in.

BG: When you’re making the work, you’re so close to it. What feels like an enormous left-hand turn to you is, in reality, a slight detour to others. But you wonder how you’ll explain your decisions to the world.

WL: Right, yeah, and I think there’s something important about separating the making from the talking about it. I feel sometimes I have to justify what I’m doing before I even finish making and that can be disruptive. I try not to worry in advance how to articulate the work…it’s a matter of knowing that there’s a difference between the process and its final articulation.

BG: Sometimes you can frame the work loosely by saying that, for example, it’s about control: attempting to control the situation of a disaster, or the actions of another person or animal, or even the definition of an action on the street, where you decide if it’s performance art or not. And then in each new iteration of your work, you decide how it fits in—or not—to that broad category.

WL: I think a lot of the work is this attempt at control that is usurped, the rug gets pulled, in the face of all these systems, these attempts to corral, contain, or understand something. Where I find it interesting is where that’s not possible.

Whitney Lynn, Silver Equivalent (2011) Clay bricks, silver-plated steel nail, 7 x 14.5 x 23 in.

BG: Why did you title the show Sculptures Involontaires?

WL: The legend goes that Brassaï was hanging out with Dali at a café, and Dali pulled a rolled-up ticket stub out of his pocket. A conversation ensued about how you could photograph anything and it becomes sculpture: ticket stubs, and chewing gum, and debris…photographed, they look like landscapes or unknown objects. Through the photograph anything can become unfamiliar and strange. I love that idea. I was looking at traps and seeing how traps are sculptures just by themselves. I started buying traps—someone tracking my Amazon purchases would be really scared of me!—I was getting them and seeing how they function, admiring the beautiful ingenuity of them, all this creative thought that is put into something so sinister. So there’s this involuntary way in which they are already sculptures. My work here functions as traps and as sculptures. I’m loosely pulling from that idea of context, that by changing the context you can re-look at the form.

In a recent BBC documentary on J Dilla, the deceased beatmaker’s family and fellow industry folk recount the seminal producer’s style, marked most notably by a counter-quantizing of his drum machine: a drunken mechanization, a meeting point of analog practices (the mythic process of searching through crates of records) and digitization that concurrently sounded ill-programmed (off-beat), yet intentional and on-point. This is man-made modernism, in contrast to the conventional image of crisp lines and sharp edges. So what would J Dilla’s sound look like? Jack White’s Neo-Totems, on display at the African American Art and Culture Center, come to mind.

White is a native of rural North Carolina and has taught in art programs in the American South and Northeast. He describes his work as “Abstract Impressionism”; still, much like underground or “backpack” hip hop, White’s sculptures imagine a future as much as they point to a past. In Neo Totem #11 (2009), discarded and weathered lumber lies next to mass-produced combs, nails and objects: an over four-foot piece of found wood, dusty and handled pieces of metal peeping through stains, and a not immediately visible hair pick. The objects come together, but they are slightly off, or not perfectly symmetrical. Although it might be predictable to state as much about such work, White’s sculptures are soulful.

In Neo Totem #11, the pick comb–traditionally used for black hairstyles, most notably the Afro–at once alludes to the past (the 1970s) while also making manifest the prognostic cultural phenomena of Afrocentricity and Afrofuturism. Although ancestral, the “neo” (or newness) of these sculpture are different, imagined futures. They are objects that long for an additional function, point to places outside the gallery, and make sound.

White’s drawings and sketches allude to such narratives. Framed and tucked away, Totem study I (2009) and Totem study II (2009) are the last thing one notices in the gallery space, they are so unassuming. Still, Totem study I speaks to process, chronology and place. The ink drawing includes White’s notes: “part of an old chair, found in 2008” and “from shield from Kenya.” Spiral binding ridges remain, and a sketch of a work to come. Much like his musical grandchildren, White’s Neo-Totems sample, cut, and connect.

Jack White: Neo-Totems and Other Works of Art–a Continuum is on display in the Sargent Johnson Gallery at the African American Art and Culture Center, in San Francisco, through January 12, 2012.

Woodman most often acted as her own model, and the small black-and-white compositions, usually nudes, are visually straightforward but conceptually complex.  What complicates the work is the knowledge that Woodman is not just the vulnerable nude, but also the architect of that condition.  In many photos Woodman’s gaze is directed at the viewer; and yet knowing she was also the photographer mediates that directness, because ultimately what her model-self was looking at was her photographer-self, backwards through the lens of the camera, posing for her own view.  In this way, she was able to explore her femininity as a construct of at least partially her own making, bringing a feminist awareness to her investigations.

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 5 1/4 in. x 5 1/4 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Take, for example, Polka Dots (1976).  Wearing a spotted dress, Woodman crouches against a decaying, dilapidated wall.  Over her head there is a fist-sized hole punched through the plaster and lath.   Similarly, her dress is unzipped at the side, revealing part of her torso and the curve of her left breast.  Splayed fingers hide her mouth, heightening the vulnerability of her posture and semi-nakedness, and her messy hair corresponds to the ruined nature of the room.  Her awkward, submissive pose and undone dress belong to a madwoman—but her eyes are not crazy, they are guiltily sexual.  They dare the viewer to compare the hole in her garment to the hole in the wall and to see how they might be similar.  And yet the title is neutral, focusing coyly on the pattern of the dress and the concurrent black spots on the wall, redirecting the viewer to the composition as a whole and reflecting the conceptual slyness of the work.  Contradictions and ambiguity create depth as Woodman refuses to provide an easy summary of femininity or desire.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979-1980. Gelatin silver print, 3 7/8 in. x 3 7/8 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Woodman’s understanding of formal compositions was truly remarkable for someone so young.  Consider Untitled, New York (1979-1980), in which a nude body reclines on a striped mattress.  Echoing ancient Roman and Greek statues, the head is missing, cut off by the camera’s framing. The clean, bold stripes of the sheet direct the eye across the width of the photo, providing a strong horizontal pattern that is softened by the zigzagging line of the torso and knees.  Gentle folds in the flesh at the waist echo the soft ripples in the fabric.  An open barrette scattered on the sheet implies the sensuality of unbound hair that the viewer can’t see, yet the idea of that looseness is physically present in the undone fabric billowing from under the bed’s front edge. Two mysterious black disks lie near the ribcage, like pupils, alluding to sight. The configuration of elements appears intuitive, but the many correspondences indicate that it was very carefully composed.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 5 1/4 in. x 5 5/16 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

Identity is the main issue that arises repeatedly in Woodman’s work.  If she is located in front of and behind the camera simultaneously, then her sense of self is similarly flexible.  Nowhere is this idea more apparent than in Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island (1976) in which three naked women stand in a row in a dilapidated room. Each woman holds a photograph of Woodman’s face in front of her own visage.  The posture of the two women on the left indicates that their hidden faces are turned to each other behind the photographic facades.  The third woman, however, faces the camera.  Comparing this woman’s body to the other photographs in the exhibition, the viewer can deduce that this is Woodman herself, cheekily replacing her own face with a representation that claims to be her.  This tableau is further complicated by a fourth photo of Woodman’s face tacked to the wall, and by the paint that divides the wall horizontally making the row of women into an ersatz police lineup.  There are four Francescas in the room: which one is the criminal, which the innocent, or even the “real”?  Further, each woman is naked, but her face—the principle social marker of her individuality—is concealed, questioning what constitutes feminine identification.  Woodman’s own pose, leaning toward the viewer in knee socks and Mary Janes, seems to say you can see me naked, but I am unrevealed; exposed, I am protected.

Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22, and it would be easy to let this cast a pall over her work, robbing it of its sly humor and replacing its youthful sincerity with something darker. Knowing this fact, her nude body can suddenly look isolated, her propositions for selfhood change from playfully unfixed to confused, her blacks even more opaque than before.  But subjecting her oeuvre to armchair psychology is the wrong strategy: it’s too convenient to attribute her imaginative choices to the facile cliché of the tortured artist.  Although her photographs expose her physical body and her thoughts to a public audience, it is in the privacy of the darkroom that I imagine her: coaxing an image from light and shadows, sliding paper into chemical trays, bringing an ever-changing idea of herself to life, over and over again.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Standing), 2010 | 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

Seth Curcio: So Matt, currently you have an exhibition on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, titled HORIZON/S. The series pulls from cultural images that transcend time, location, and cultures. But, before we dive into these ideas, I’d like to learn some basics, like how these images are constructed. They seem so mysterious – can you walk me through the process of finding your source material and constructing the image?

Matt Lipps: Sure, this body of work, like the majority of my work since 2004, is an entirely analog process involving sculpture, collage, and theater staging on a small scale with a cast of paper dolls that I’ve cut out and propped up with supports so that they may stand on their own. For HORIZON/S I pulled from the first 10 years of Horizon Magazine, a bi-monthly hardback arts journal first published in September 1958. The magazine’s inaugural issue sets up a general invitation to the American people to join the editors of the magazine on a voyage towards an imagined “horizon” of high art and culture – examining art(ifacts), architecture, theater & film actors, and serving up what would be fine “taste” for those who weren’t in the know – a relatively antiquated way of thinking about art objects.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Form), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: Your work is ultimately exhibited as photography. Yet, your process starts with an appropriated image, moves into sculpture, draws heavily on painting, and employs the tools of theater. Ultimately it arrives back at an image. What do you feel happens in this transformation of material?

ML: I’m not sure that I know, but the transformation is evident, and heartfelt for me, too – which is what keeps me engaged in making the work. For me it has something to do with an embodied, phenomenological experience of encountering an image in a dislocated context at an unexpected size. Certainly, the scale of the image is key to this transformation, and photography allows me to play with scale and depth in ways that traditional collage doesn’t. I’ve done several works that exist as sculpture, but it’s generally a frontal presentation that fails to some degree when attempted to view “in the round,” and, the work feels diminished somewhat as mere paperdolls of an expected size.

Re-photographing those images back into a photograph brings a certain amount of seamlessness to the foreground and background that, I hope, holds the viewer’s attention for slightly longer. This is especially tricky in HORIZON/S when you’re confronted with photographic reproductions of varying quality and scale, that depict stone sculptures, painting fragments, illusionistic spaces, portraits, landscapes, etc., and it’s all tied back together and hermetically sealed under the photographic picture plane.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Reach), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: I like to consider how you categorize images and ideas in your practice and how this aligns and deviates from the basic cultural structuring – or lumping – that engages most museums. I know that HORIZON/S is also further divided in to two parts: Private and Public Collections. What are the main distinctions of these two collections?

ML: In assembling a cast of about 200 characters, obvious trends presented themselves – not only in my image selection process, but also in the kinds of images that were reproduced in the original magazine. This is highlighted when examining what size they were reproduced as, and whether or not they were printed in full color, black and white, or at times photogravure.

These decisions were made by the editors, thereby producing a secondary hierarchical structure. When all of the images are set to stand on their own, it’s clear to see what was deemed central to the idea of cultivating good taste, and what genres of art were seen as marginal or clearly dwarfed in comparison.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Women's Heads), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

An example of Public Collections – the first photograph I made in the series – is Untitled (Women’s Heads). I pulled from the group every image I had cut out that was only of a female head and shoulders, to see what that image would look like. In the magazine, as in art history and by extension museums and archives, it’s necessary to organize objects by region, chronology, and/or genre so that they can be “knowable,” or classified into a system. My project aims to question the logic of that practice, and asks what else can be learned from a different system of objects if set free from the typical constraints of the archive and introduced to elements of chance, disorganization, and a personalized re-mixing of art and art historical objects.

But, there were other connections I was making with individual objects that had no logical connection, other than the fact I was compelled to make pictures incorporating them. From this started the parallel series I call Private Collections – the idea being, rather than making a photograph curated around a single homogeneous premise to communicate a single idea, I would make photographs of disparate objects culled together by an individual taste. This act allows for a more narrative story about the individual who may have collected them to emerge.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Marble), 2010| C-print, 40" x 33" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: In this way, you are able to simultaneously mine images and objects that are collected and organized by institutions, and then by you as an artist. Obviously, the result speaks to your own taste, however someone else sets the parameters. This type of curating from existing structures references our remix culture. How do you feel the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of cultural information affects our perception of the world? Especially since so much of this information is already organized or “curated” by others.

ML: Previously, I had always talked about my work in relationship to “desire,” rather than “taste.” But, with HORIZON/S – a broader examination of taste-refinement is brought to the fore.

To answer your question about the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of information…I only feel safe answering how I feel it affects my perception of the world. It’s fantastic! It’s horrific! There are images I can never scrub out of my mind – that I wish I’d never laid eyes on…there are others I’ve had deep and meaningful relationships with/to (and, I mean this with much gravity). As an appropriation artist, I’m grateful to have these tools to employ, and I aim to do so with integrity and sincerity. If I were to offer a word of caution about the endless production and distribution of images, it’s that one might grow comfortably numb – that they’d lose their affect and ability to trigger outrage and mobilize change. Or, that people think they know the operation of any given image before taking the time to read it, because of some imaginary typological vault of pictures that contain finite and quantifiable data. That seems lazy to me, and, in part, with this project, I was trying in my own way to “re-mix” that.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (bar), 2008 | C-print on aluminum, 46" x 33" inches | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: That’s great insight on how you relate to imagery, both images selected by you and the endless barrage of images in the world. I’m also interested in how HORIZON/S remains so seemingly objective in nature, in contrast to the pictures in HOME SERIES. Was there a shift from your previous work that caused you to engage in a project that allows for your personal narrative to remain distant?

ML: There has been a shift, but for me, it’s been at a glacial pace starting from the first photograph I can remember cutting out when I was thirteen years old. The practice has always been about having a relationship with a person, place, or object – a photographic distance announced in the mediation of that object in its image-ness.

Early on in my work, this longing was explicit: my desire to be with a body pictured in a magazine to act as surrogate lover/boyfriend, resurrected from a late-1970’s pre-AIDS moment in time. It was a willful exertion of my desire for him to sit with me on our bed, and to take his portrait, thereby re-flattening him into a Barthesian photographic flat-death (again). For me, that work is about melancholia and loss in as much as it’s about a personalized, magical desire.

Coming to terms with my own sexuality and understanding the operation of these images in relationship to my desire, I was able to formalize a vocabulary around my work and turn it into a language that was legible across multiple genres of photography. This, in turn, allowed me to move past my immediate biography (though, never that far removed from it), and look at broader reaching themes in my work.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Satin), 2004| C-print on aluminum, 40" x 30" | Courtesy of the Artist

Fast-forward to the HOME series, I still incorporated ideas of desire (or, taste, or, selection) and loss in relationship to a personalized history of photography literally housed and cultivated within my childhood home. There, I’m compiling a cataclysmic dichotomy of “high vs. low” that examines the accrual of objects and memories in an intimate, domestic space in relationship to an unpacking of heroic baggage.

And, now with HORIZON/S, where it might appear as though I’ve stripped back all of the personal narrative found in earlier modules, I still employ my vocabulary of image-making, and its deeply concerned with ideas about photographic representation and the desire to understand its operation with respect to art history and the cultivation of taste. It still feels very me, even if I’m less apparent than before.

SC: Do you feel that you have reached a state of completion with HORIZON/S? Is there often a clear stopping point in your series, or do you feel that you can continue it indefinitely?

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Sculpture) 2010| C-print, 33" x 80" | Courtesy of the Artist

The impulse to “re-mix” HORIZON/S was endless – so, yes, it could have gone on indefinitely! In fact, I shot at least 50 images that I thought worked well – but it was ultimately edited down to about 22 photographs. Being a photographer and carrying the burden of seriality is always a delicate balance of editing, and having good friends and mentors helping you see your blind spots.

But, I ended up working on HORIZON/S for almost two years, mostly pre-production and making decisions about the look of the final image. Now, I’m feeling pretty done. Though, I will say that it was fascinating to watch people look at these images, and their need to know who each person/object was – a desire to unlock a deeper logic, or to give name to something that seems familiar but forgotten. I would be curious to push that notion further, partnered with my own fascination with how images traditionally operate, and how I might continue to confound that.

Fore’ n’ Aft Souvenir Book, May 21, 1943. Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

More a thoroughfare between the institutional offices and educational spaces than destinations, the second and third floor galleries at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) can be, at times, unforgiving display spaces. Nevertheless, as an institution, MoAD consistently presents exhibitions that expand one’s notions of race and identity. One need only to look at last year’s “African Continuum: Sacred Ceremonies and Rituals,” which contrasts with a more recent Richard Mayhew monograph: two exhibitions tenuously and productively held under the cultural umbrella of African Diaspora—or more pointedly, black visuality.

Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues," 1926. Illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias. From the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

In promotional material, MoAD is described as “presenting the rich cultural products of the people of Africa and of African descendant cultures across the globe.”  To be clear, this includes all Lucy’s progeny. To drive this point home, guests are asked both in a digital tour and in the writing on the walls, “When did you discover you are African?” “Collected: Stories of Acquisition and Reclamation,” MoAD’s current exhibition, includes selections from three collections: the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art and the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Although each of these collections are distinct, much of what is displayed is Black Americana from the 19th and 20^th centuries, including movie posters, paintings, signed first editions, an antebellum estate mortgage and ragtime sheet music. A really exceptional Charles White drawing, The Open Gate (1948), depicts a young black man standing before an open-metal gate; true to White’s practice, the figure and entrance allude to America’s postwar atmosphere—longed for opportunity at the cusp of change. In the second floor gallery are several film posters from both lesser-known independent cinema—1948’s Miracle in Harlem—and the classics, such as Carmen Jones (1954) and St. Louis Blues (1958). Here, Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt hum, projected on a wall for a room of empty office chairs.

Charles Borel-Clerc, French (1879–1959). "Zambesi Dance," 1912. Arr. by Carl F. Williams. From the Collection of Alden and Mary Kimbrough. Photo by Myles L. Collins, courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

“Collected” is an exceptional accumulation of objects, but the mandate to “better understand the cultural impact of these objects,” may have been missed. Curatorial consultant Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins based selections on the professed social or cultural significance of said objects without complicating questions of why, for whom, and what they might mean in contemporary communities—questions that are critical in a contemporary exhibition on collecting. Further, both what is seen as significant, and the collectors that shape the narratives around the objects in “Collected” smack a bit of dated class privilege (a nod to W.E.B. Du Bois, whose writings are included in the exhibition), which unfortunately goes unaddressed. Still, go see “Collected.”  The value of seeing a work by Bob Thompson, or the palpable excitement one feels finding Phyllis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, signed by the author nearly 240 years ago, are undeniable and well worth the visit—however uncomplicated.

Phillis Wheatley, "Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral," 1773. From the collection of the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum. Image courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Social Failure and Black Signs," 2010. Pigment print 34 x 24.8 inches; edition of 3. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Recently in the San Francisco Bay Area it has been impossible to walk down a street without running into (or trying to avoid) someone protesting something. The messages range from concise to ironic, sardonic to flat-out fed up. In the undulating sea of abridged manifestos, there is the rare message so poignant that it demands the sign-bearer’s cause receives deeper consideration. Geoff Oppenheimer’s current exhibit at Ratio 3 Gallery, Inside Us All There is a Part That Would Like to Burn Down Our Own House, presents a reductive, politically-driven narrative filled with violence, chaos, nationalism, pageantry, existentialism and self-reflection. The title may be a mouthful, but it creates an interesting opposite to Oppenheimer’s expertly edited works, and sets the tone for the show as a whole.

Installation View, Geoff Oppenheimer, "Inside us all there is a part that would like to burn down our own house," 2011. Courtesy of Ratio 3 gallery.

Depending on when you enter the gallery, your initial sensory experience will most likely be one of two things: visual or auditory. For some, a minimalist installation of sculptures and photographs will greet them. Others will not be able to ignore the deafening cacophony of marching-band instruments streaming from an invisible source. But we’ll get to that later.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Anthems," 2011. High definition video; TRT 0:04:40; Edition 1 of 3 with 2 APs. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

The two bodies of work in the main gallery, Social Failure and Black Signs and Modern Ensembles, act as examples of how conceptual art can effectively function. The images in the series Social Failure and Black Signs are almost identical—black-and-white studio scenes of a hand holding a black sign with bold, white text. At face value, each piece holds an intriguing, reductive beauty. After learning the origins of each work, a satisfying sense of quiet epiphany develops. Each sign has a different fragmented statement that Oppenheimer chose from interviews with political figures such as Regan, McNamara and Castro, in which each man discusses the failures of his ideology. Devoid of any of the expected contextual information associated with protest signage, the images transition to an interior plane—a subconscious battlefield on which each person struggles with the contradictions of his actions and beliefs.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Modern Ensembles," 2010–2011. Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminum; 20 x 23.25 x 23.25 inches. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

In dimensional and aesthetic contrast are the rectangular sculptures of Modern Ensembles. Oppenheimer made each piece by detonating various custom charges of explosive chemicals inside ballistic Plexiglas. The resulting cuboids are three-dimensional cross sections of a distinct explosion. By containing the blast, Oppenheimer makes us witnesses to a frozen moment of violence. Additionally, the time it takes to view the pieces’ six sides allows for the consideration of the relationship between space and time—an explosion takes place in an instant, yet with each ensemble, we are able to stop time and find the curious beauty in the chaos.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Social Failure and Black Signs," 2010. Pigment print 34 x 24.8 inches; Edition of 3. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

After or during your time in the main gallery, you will undoubtedly start hearing the sounds of Oppenheimer’s video piece, Anthem. Tucked into the side gallery, the projection features a marching band playing four different national anthems. Instead of hearing them in succession, Oppenheimer layers each anthem so they play simultaneously. The resulting meta-anthem and/or non-anthem is an assault on the senses. In the video, figures fade in and out of opacity, overlapping into an accumulation of tan and brass. Each anthem, recited with pride, becomes a futile attempt at nationalism—not one can be distinguished from the others. The longer you watch, the louder it gets, as if each anthem is competing to be heard. The notes crescendo to an unintelligible roar, and then, as if overwhelmed with sound and light, break into white silence.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Modern Ensembles," 2010–2011. Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminum; 20 x 23.25 x 23.25 inches. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Oppenheimer’s work truly benefits from deeper consideration. While each piece stands on its own, the combination of the three series, plus the title, opens an investigation into a part of all of us that maybe we are not very proud of: the part that never lets us forget we did something wrong, the part that would like to burn down our own house.

Carleton E. Watkins. Mendocino River, From the Rancherie, Mendocino County, California, c. 1863/68. Albumen silver print from wet-collodion glass negative.

Standing on a hillside gazing into the Pacific Ocean, one can’t help but to be overwhelmed by the beauty and ruggedness of the landscape. Rolling hills, steep cliffs, and thick forests bring to mind epic stories of western expansion and the conquering spirit of those who have traveled here, a spirit currently under investigation at Eli Ridgway Gallery. Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion brings together a group of San Francisco artists that restlessly explore our romance with both narrative and landscape alike, weaving together stories and dreams of uncharted lands and undiscovered peoples. The love for exploration needs no real truth here; each work presents a small part of a tale bound together by the love of the land.

Elisheva Biernoff. Inheritance, 2010. 80 slides of endangered wilderness areas projected onto mist from a humidifier housed in a plywood and fabric enclosure.

When entering the room that houses Elisheva Biernoff’s Inheritance, 2010, one’s eyes instantly begin to play tricks. Picturesque waterfalls and mountains go in and out of focus. Images dissolve and reconstruct themselves against a backdrop of fog, flashing in and out rhythmically with the subtle sound of a the slide projector. Just as 19th-century photographer Carlton Watkin’s images create mythic space, Inheritance reinterprets fabricated lands at the edge of our perception. Encased in fog, the images rest on the verge of becoming clear, allowing memory to fill in where our vision can’t.

In the adjacent room, Biernoff’s small, hand-painted postcard replicas maintain the same level of mystery, mimicking reality with a delicate hand. Just as Inheritance bends one’s perception of the landscapes presented, Biernoff’s small paintings create mystery and myth around the stories of the American West through simple gestures. The small paintings, quaint and distinctive, lovingly memorialize commonplace memories and remind us of the postcards still living in a shoebox from our childhood vacation.

Lindsey White. Observed in Salvation Mountain, Executed in New Haven, CT, 2011. Chromogenic Print.

Lindsey White‘s Observed in Salvation Mountain, Executed in New Haven, CT, 2011, a beautifully awkward and uncomfortable image that seems “real” upon first glance, presents us with a similar quandry. With more investigation, Observed in Salvation Mountain, Executed in New Haven, CT becomes more and more mysterious. The figure is harshly arrested by his own clothing, caught in a moment of uncertainty. The raking perspective instantly draws one’s attention to what lies just outside the frame, allowing one’s own imagination to construct this character’s identity.  Through the use of title, White playfully doubles the meaning of the word Execution—as it relates to both the subject’s narrative and to the creation of the image—while introducing an alternative meaning to the photograph: place. The mention of Salvation Mountain and New Haven, two fundamentally different Connecticut locales, turns this image away from the character pictured and towards the recollection of a location. The act of recreating a memory from Salvation Mountain also calls into question the authenticity of the moment, bringing one to imagine a new face just outside the frame.

Joshua Churchill. Trembling Void, 2011. Site-specific installation with light and sound.

The same mysterious discovery occurs with Joshua Churchill’s project, Trembling Void, 2011. The quiet sounds of equipment lies just outside of the room; a flickering light appears through a vent in the wall, which trembles and shakes. This simple and effective project reminds us how constructed the space of a gallery is. Churchill’s video project, Rise and Fall, 2011, provides the same realization. A video of what appears to be a heavy blizzard rolls over and over, blown out by a harsh light.  Given the mystery of Trembling Void, however, one can’t help but question the reality of the blizzard.

One of the most notable parts of this exhibition is sound. The quiet overwhelms the viewing experience, in the best possible sense, drawing attention to the subtle sounds of the work. Biernoff’s rhythmic slide projector hums quietly from the project space, and Churchill’s Trembling Void accentuates every other sound in the gallery. These projects ask each viewer to pay equal attention to the ambient sounds throughout the space.  Matt Kennedy‘s video It’s Come Down To This, 2011, provides a similar experience. A small box in the center of the upstairs gallery calls the viewer over with the sound of rocks being raked back and forth across the ground. Peering into the structure, a simple video presents a shuffling foot in the process of creating these sounds. Reminiscent of  a small child playing in the landscape, this approach to exploration returns the exhibition from lofty and Romantic back to exploration through repetitive and mundane experience.

Matthew Kennedy. It’s Come Down To This, 2011. Video, wood box. 36 x 30 x 30 inches.

Although the show is extremely satisfying overall, the mystery, romance, and exploration throughout the work is tame. The risk and reward that is referenced in such a poetic introduction is found in small, intimate doses throughout the space. There is no one who has “suffered, starved, and triumphed” because of the explorative, romantic spirit presented by the exhibition text. Exploration is a dirty sport, and the work presented in Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion is successfully clean and romantic, and most notably–bound to image. More than anything, the photography in this exhibition seems to be the most one-note. The landscape photographs by Richard Misrach, Sean McFarland, and Dean Smith are even more romantic and picturesque in this context, which provides less depth compared to the other projects. One hopes that exploration has more worth than romance, and one thing that Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion could benefit from is diversity in scale and experimentation. Most projects present a satisfying and bite-sized relationship to a romance with exploration rather than exploration itself.