JJ Valaya, Paradox 9 (2011)

The idea of contemporary India, and a quintessential one at that—a conglomerate of many Indias, with its fluid social fabric and multitudes of people—is the paradox that confronts the photo-artist, JJ Valaya, an accomplished designer and pioneering fashion guru. Through his viewfinder, Valaya captures the fascinating multiplicity of a burgeoning city where he has lived and worked for decades, tantalizing us with loving and nostalgic glimpses of this place he knows so well: glamour and grime; sophisticated and commonplace; classical and popular; rich and poor; old and new—whether spontaneous or carefully-planned—all are framed by the photographer’s eye in different parts of Delhi, India’s capital city. artes fine arts magazine

JJ Valaya at work on streets of Delhi

Selecting his images after eight months of research and planning for cast, costumes and settings, the final shots offer telling comments about his belovedly-complex and multi-layered India, as seen through the eyes of an expert. His locations include historic sites as well as popular local dens. His characters and scenes feature some familiar people and happenings in and around Delhi. The context is contemporary and the images reflect an interesting mix of well-known personalities; but he also offers portrayals of ordinary people, spanning several generations. Original and authentic costumes, some created by Valaya himself (and others borrowed from private collections, including those representing India’s royal past), are pictured in his work. Valaya’s pictorial personalities include illustrious dancers, entertainers, actors, designers, social activists, athletes, hoteliers and models, as well as some common folks—tailors, embroiderers and master cutters—most known to the artist. “The idea was to engage anyone who projected the aura required to recreate a particular era,” explains the artist.

Prop on way to photo shoot as models stand by

The production of Valaya’s images involves long treks through the busy streets of old and new Delhi- with a five team member photography crew, camera equipment in tow. The energy and excitement that accompanies these adventures assumes unexpected twists and turns, the occasional u-turn and a frequent change of plan. The artist is quick to choose the “right site” at “the spur of the moment,” setting up an impromptu studio and installations for the shoot. The strikingly avant-garde photography team is usually followed by amazed crowds and amused onlookers, some of whom were keen to appear in the shots and happy to join in, whilst others find the whole exercise bizarre enough to offer a loud, liberal dose of hilarious comments, most wondering if it was all for a Bollywood movie! The artist notes that the palpable excitement and commotion of the spontaneous goings on around him always add another dimension to the atmospherics. In spite of this commotion, he is nevertheless able to add breathtaking images, with his signature surrealistic touch, to the collection, as if they have emerged from an other-worldly twilight zone.

JJ Valaya during shoot for Paradox 19

JJ Valaya, the Jodhpur-born couturier, has always been fascinated by what has been described as his fondness for “gold braid and tassel.” In pursuit of his passion for art photography, he shifts his gear from the manicured glamour of the fashion stage to the dust and heat, hustle and bustle of Indian streets. The quest to create a niche for himself as a photographer in the nascent fashion industry began modestly, as he could not afford to hire a professional crew to work with him. He began by organizing his own fashion shoots, editorials and campaigns. His fashion photography quickly turned to a passion, with financial success following thereafter. Gradually his fascination with the camera flowered into a full-blown affair with art photography, as well, reflected in this collection of vivid images of the city he calls his own. Using a high-resolution Canon 5d Mac 2 camera, he makes limited edition prints etched with archival ink on archival paper. His artistic imagery is closely linked to what Valaya does in fashion. Like the world of fashion, the subject, casting and costumes are all pre-planned; but unlike his fashion shoots, the frames and the locales are spontaneous. The characters wear no makeup and there is no additional styling or artificial lighting. Relying on natural light only, the emphasis is on the subject and his/her surroundings—as featured in the images of the artist at work.

Paradox 1 (2011)

Portraying the past-as-present and the mundane as high culture, Valaya encapsulates the shades and shapes of India into a series of seamless shots. His spontaneous shots freeze the moment. His discerning eye and ‘ways of seeing’ turn old dilapidated buildings, disbanded furniture and old streets in middle class neighborhoods—already buzzing and action-packed—into Art Deco curios with iconic importance. Ordinary people turn into performers for each shoot, as they adorn costumes, vintage robes and ornate jewels; seeming to relish playing the dressing-game to the hilt and assuming various roles set against carefully-selected backgrounds. While the choreographed images evoke impressions of the Indian royalty of a by-gone era, the grandeur and persona of Valaya’s images continue to live in public memory in various erstwhile states-of-mind. They also capture the intangible quality of today’s changing India, “harking back to the past, but also yearning gapingly into the future,” bringing the history and reality of the many Indias to life.

Valaya’s photo sessions sometimes entailed the occasional on-edge moment, as well as some fun-filled ones. The expedition to Jama Masjid that took place on Bakra Eid, the holy Muslim festival—one of the busiest days of the year— was one such experience. The street markets were busy, with those milling about earnestly engaged in selling and buying goats for sacrifice. A much-delayed start, given the model’s late arrival, got disrupted further when it began to pour rain just as the photography session was to start. With no readily-available shelter, the crew sat, waiting, for over two hours in the car. And just as Valaya was about to call it off for the day, the rain suddenly stopped and clouds parted just long enough for him to capture the mosque bathed in the most magical surreal sunlight. “There was a definite divinity at play!” the artist told me while describing the particular incident.

Paradox 2 (2011)

Trying to compose the picture with Neesha Singh sitting on the steps at Jantar Mantar— one of India’s most photographed monuments—was also a bizarre experience. As the artist stood at its highest point, looking down at the stairs and the shadows below, it immediately struck a chord with him. But there was a stray dog that kept following him and the model, refusing to leave them or the site. He kept coming back despite getting shooed away by people who considered the animal a nuisance. Finally, “as soon as my subject took her place, the dog simply ambled in and placed himself at her feet, as if it had just hung around to tell me that I needed him!”

And Lord Shiva as a Child, blissfully asleep, is featured in another image; while the caption accompanying it speaks of a temple dedicated to Lord Hanuman, the monkey god! The cycles parked against the railing on the sidewalk in the busy, buzzing Sarojini Nagar market made a picture-perfect backdrop for the young boy reclining on the bolster in the photographer’s frame. Assuming a look of innocence and with bare feet, he was otherwise majestically decked out in cap, jewelry, ring, necklaces and angrakha (long flowing robe), posing in a style that implied royal breeding. Captured in another frame, while the artist worked on this image, are hundreds of amused people, converging to watch the goings on.

The concept of wrestlers’ court, known as the pehelwan akhada in local parlance, is a familiar one in India. Some such wrestling courts can be found even today in the heart of Indian cities! JJ Valaya takes his viewers to one such court at Aya Nagar in South Delhi. He frames his photograph in a ‘tongue in cheek’ manner, juxtaposing the fully-decked out young urbane athlete, seated comfortably in an ornate chair in front of a line-up of well-built, bare-bodied local lads dressed in just a loin cloths or underwear. The image engagingly captures a scene of one of India’s still-relevant classes.

Left: far: Paradox 6 (2011); near: Shoot on streets of Delhi 

Paradox 8 (2011)

Another familiar Indian sight is the roadside barber, known locally as hajam or nai. His presence is another unique feature integral to the life style and culture of this country. He can often be found in the most precarious and unlikely locations. Positioning himself in the middle of a bustling, congested cityscape, he sets up his impromptu barbershop, so that passers-by— amongst the teaming millions—will find him both easy to access and affordable. With scant tools-of-the-trade, including a mirror often perched against a wall or tree trunk, a rickety chair placed opposite, shaving brush, cream and a variety of oils neatly arrayed on a shelf or table, these impromptu barber ‘shops’ can often be spotted at the boundary walls along crowded roadsides, at bus stops and railways stations—anywhere and everywhere. The barber in this Valaya photo eagerly left his customer sitting in the chair to pose for the shoot, gripping his cycle, with the fashion model perched upon it, her arm resting on the shoulders of the young woman standing by.

Paradox 17 (2011)

The artist then takes his viewers to another forgotten historic site—the Ugrasen ki Baoli at Hailey Road, near Connaught Place—in central Delhi. The dilapidated, multi-layered architectural marvel carries great social and cultural significance for India. The sunken steps offer an imposing, textural contrast to the scale of the carefully-groomed, imposing image and majestic posturing of the Maharaja walking up the stairs. The royal aura looks somewhat haunting, augmented further by the comparatively distant and diminutive appearance of the local band players who are more often spotted playing at Indian weddings. The solitary dove that, “appeared at the perfect moment in the perfect place…” right above the Maharaja’s head, seems to add another element of intrigue to the image.

Paradox 19 (2011)

The blatant play of caste politics in different regions of India is manifest in the numerous statues of the legendry scholar Ambedkar, popularly known as Babasaheb, that dot the countryside. Though born in a poor, untouchable caste, he rose to great heights and is credited with drafting the Indian constitution. Some of his statues were built to honour the great man; but hundreds of others are located at crossroads, more for the sake of form and to win votes. In this frame, the young lad, Aryan, is dressed to the hilt and seated with crossed legs in an ornate chair in the company of Valaya’s master cutter, with Ambedkar’s statue perched on a high platform in the background. Knowing that the photo shoot took place in New Delhi’s diplomatic enclave, adds complexity and interest to an already-multilayered story. And as an ironic note to the day’s shoot, ten minutes into the project, the six-year old son of one of JJ Valaya’s friend, took everyone by surprise, including his own parents, when he declared, “for the amount of work you’re making me do, you should be paying me.” It served as a jaw-dropping comment on the modern world: from scholar Ambedkar, gazing down from his lofty perch, to youthful entrepreneur, Aryan, in the mix and offering a harsh dose of reality!

Two beautiful ladies majestically seated and immaculately dressed in similar ornately embroidered sarees and elaborate jewelry, appear in another Valaya image. Representing two different generations and cultural eras, coming together despite the age gap, it also speaks of a woman’s unflinching love for shringar or adornments.  This generational play is taken to another level, spanning religious and professional interests, in the picture featuring young Ananda, grandly-attired and seated in a chair, watched over by the aged embroiderer, Mohammed, standing behind in what looks like a shanty home interior (See Paradox 9, opening image). The scene takes place in Dhobi Ghat (washermen’s colony), situated in the centre of India’s capital city!

Paradox 20 (2011)

In yet another image, a celebrated Indian artist is featured, decked out as an emperor. Wearing a sherwani (long flowing overcoat) and pagadi (turban or headdress), offset with pearls and jewels and pointed embroidered juttis (shoes), he is shown walking through the precincts of the historic monument Qutab Minar, a hot-spot for tourists (see image-in-the- making with JJ Valaya, above, right). The calligraphic markings in the background offer a nostalgic, vintage commentary on another India of an erstwhile era.

The couturier’s parallel creative voyage reflects a secretly-nursed romance with his camera which he describes as his “karmic connect.” His engaging narrative compositions reflect his ability to seize the moment, reconstructing in the real world, images that are at first, only ideas. His canvas is the vast expanse of Delhi and the cultural melting pot of the Indian nation: its spirit and atmospherics, layers of buzz and humanity all serving as sources for inspiration. Once a seat of imperial power for several dynasties—and now the capital of an independent, democratic and ever-changing India, Delhi is Ground Zero for JJ Valaya’s compelling images of India and its people, executed with cultural sensitivity and craftsmanship.

Paradox 21 (2011)

His visuals manipulate context, bringing to the fore the complex socio-cultural fabric of the nation—piercing through and poking at its seemingly inconsistent hierarchy and heroism, feudal legacy and democratic leveling—to reveal its hauteur (on the one hand) and its textural, Realpolitik, on the other. The concurrence of contrasting opposites in Valaya’s photographs represents a pastiche of different time periods, which, while not deliberately premeditated, seem somewhat stage-set, all the same. His goal of highlighting the realities, tensions and dualities of life in our contemporary Indias, is successfully portrayed in his work.

Valaya’s cyclorama rolls back and forth, creating a multi-layered collage of many Indias—inundated with a range of colours, smells, feelings, visuals and ‘happenings’—as the country’s gritty underbelly comes face-to-face with the elegant and sophisticated. Juxtaposing the grand with the simple, mixing the bizarre with the sensible, his photographs manage to replay history in a contemporary context. Valaya’s images also remind one of historically-sensitive Company Period artwork, including that of Raja Deen Dayal. In Valaya’s world, there are royals and commoners, palace precincts and street bazaars, pedigree pets and stray animals, well-known figures and teeming, unknown crowds, ornate settings and graffiti-strewn backgrounds— the sum of which creates a cultural free-for-all space, blurring the socio-cultural divide between this and that India, or the Indias of then and now.

By Sushma Bahl, Contributing Writer

………….

Sushma K. Bahl, MBE, is an independent curator of cultural projects, arts adviser and writer, based in Delhi. Until 2003, she led on the British Council’s cultural policy and program for India, spearheading several initiatives, including the first-ever Festival of India in Britain and the Enduring Image exhibition from the British Museum together with numerous associated events and collaborative arts-related projects. In recent years, she curated a series of art exhibitions, including Keep the Promise, raising funds for the UN’s Millennium Development Goals; Contemporary Chronicles in Miniature Art, featuring works from India and Pakistan; Vistaar and Convergence, two separate exhibitions involving collaboration between artists and designers; Annanya, an overview of contemporary Indian art and Ways of Seeing, winning the IHC Art India Award for best-curated group show. Read Shushma Bahl’s article on the Convergence exhibition here: http://www.artesmagazine.com/2011/01/new-delhi-critic-sushma-bahl-examines-link-between-art-and-applied-design/

She was also the co-director for Indian arts at the Gwacheon Hanmadang Festival in South Korea (2004); guest director for XI Triennale-India (2005); co-curator for V9/U9 Indo-UK digital art project and Art Link, Indo-German artists’ residency (2006, 2007), Project Consultant for Bharat Rang Mahotsav XII and jury member for the 14th Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh (2010).

Sushma Bahl is author of 5000 Years of Indian Art (2011), by Roli Books (soon to be distributed in the U.S.). She has also edited and written for books on artists Thota Vaikuntam, Paresh Maity, Satish Gupta and Shuvaprasanna, amongst others, and is on the advisory panel of several arts institutions in India and abroad.

Contact her at: sushmakbahl@gmail.com

Alfred Wertheimer, Going Home (1956) Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Wash. D.C.

From December 24th to March 8th, 2012, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will host Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer, a collaborative exhibition developed by the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, and Govinda Gallery, and made possible through the support of the History channel. The idea of images of a pop culture icon displayed in such hallowed halls may raise the eyebrows of those whose sense of the Portrait Gallery is of a museum dedicated to the “art of portraiture,” or as an august arena for the presentation of such notable figures as the presidents. But–just as he did when he electrified the nation in 1956—Elvis at 21 will inevitably alter the beat of everyday Gallery life.

In photographs taken by Alfred Wertheimer in 1956, Elvis at 21 documents the explosive rise of a 21-year-old singer named Elvis Presley. A young freelance photographer, Wertheimer was hired to take publicity shots of Presley, but then “tagged along” and was able to capture Elvis’s transit to superstardom. For this exhibition, Wertheimer took his negatives to pioneer printmaker David Adamson, and the resulting 56 large format pigment prints provide a stunning storyboard of fame. fine arts magazine

Alfred Wertheimer, Starburst (1956) Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Wash. D.C.

The collection of Elvis images originally began its national tour at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery. Elvis at the National Portrait Gallery, you might ask?! Indeed! The Gallery is primarily a museum devoted to the personality of history, with a focus on those “who have had a significant impact on American life and culture” through “the art of portraiture.” Amidst this bipolar identity, the Gallery has managed to establish a reputable pop culture repertory with such major exhibitions as Champions of American Sport (1981), On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting (1987), and Red, Hot & Blue: A Smithsonian Salute to the American Musical (1996). Located in the heart of the sports and entertainment district of the nation’s capital, the Gallery is working to spotlight its sports and entertainment collections: the recent Americans Now exhibition of contemporary popular culture stars has proved to be a magnet for visitors.

Alfred Wertheimer, Jump (1956) Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Wash. D.C.

Focusing on a pop culture icon also allows us to consider the idea of ‘portrait’ from a different perspective—that of “the image.” Elvis’s image fits well with the postwar intellectual framework established by Marshall McLuhan, in which ‘the image’ becomes a cultural medium with a specifically-crafted “message.” As these photographs of Elvis illustrate, the idea of ‘the image’ was a defining element in the rise of media-generated celebrity culture. In the late nineteenth century, the graphic revolution created a technology able to disseminate stories and illustrations of famous people in an ever-widening arc. The emergence of such mass media as recordings, motion pictures, magazines, radio, and ultimately television vastly expanded the audience for fame and celebrity. With the rise of modern celebrity, the selection of ‘the famous’ became an election, only instead of a ballot box there was a box office, a corner newsstand, a recording industry, and a pop culture media that made celebrities part of everyday life.

In the mid-1950s, television was the new celebrity-generating medium, and Elvis—through several live performances in 1956 that launched him to stardom—broadcast a message of cultural transformation. The photographs in Elvis at 21 depict an image of youth and newness, but also document the face of a personality who jangled the calm of ‘peace and prosperity. To a culture of conformity, conspicuous consumption, and cars with fins, Elvis represented an intrusion as shocking as Sputnik would be a year later: he energized the emerging youth culture and helped create a new consumer market fueled by radio, recordings, and movies. His popularity also helped catalyze a revolution in the entertainment industry, paving the way for rhythm and blues, gospel, and rock into mainstream culture.

Alfred Wertheimer, Entering the Warwick (1956) Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Wash. D.C.

When the keepers-of-tradition began to understand the message of the Elvis image, red flags of warning sprouted across the landscape. Elvis was lumped with such other threatening new pop culture figures as James Dean—clearly, the image of leather-and-denim-clad ‘juvenile delinquents’ clashed harshly with the gray-flannel suit generation. One cultural steward, popular television host Steve Allen, invited Elvis to appear on his variety show, but forced him to wear white-tie-and-tails and sing “Hound Dog” with…a hound dog.

Elvis’s rise to stardom happened in a single year—from January 1956 to January 1957—and reflected television’s emergence as a cultural denominator. These were years of enormous social change, a feeling well-captured by the photographs of Elvis’s 27-hour train ride from New York to Memphis. These images evoke a different America altogether in a journey that rolled through cities, small towns, and farmlands with ‘all deliberate speed.’ Elvis is shown still remarkably alone, mixing unnoticed with everyone else on board, family and strangers, black and white.

With a cinematic luminosity, the photographs document a time when Elvis could sit alone at a drugstore lunch counter or wander unnoticed in mid-town Manhattan. But then things change, and he walks through the door to the rest of his life. What is remarkable is that Wertheimer was there. The exhibition’s final image is a brilliant moment of culmination: Elvis is onstage, saturated by a light that Wertheimer describes as a ‘starburst.’ It is an epochal image—the literal flashpoint of fame.

By Amy Henderson, Co-curator, Elvis at 21

Historian, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.

See more of what Richmond’s VMFA is exhibiting at: www.vmfa.state.va.us

Visit the Smithithsonian National Portrait Gallery at www.npg.si.edu

Barkley Hendricks, 'Black River from the Elgin Road View' (2005), o/c. Courtesy the artist & Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

Before even seeing it, I made a judgment on this show. And I was right. The landscapes that Barkley Hendricks has made are revelatory in ways so precise and disarming that they trained me instantly. An enlarged capacity to respond to them was guaranteed simply by looking.

Eleven of these scenes share a single tight space in the gallery. Not crowded, the varied shapes of the canvases obviously invite congregation, like an assemblage of mezzotints on a Victorian parlor wall. Each tondo and oval and lunette is like a shifting image in a lantern slide show, introducing a distant country to a dazzled audience. artes fine arts magazine

'My Back to the Bulldozer' (2008), o/c. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

This is Jamaica, but it is also resonant of Vietnam or any colonial landscape with violence just beneath its fantasy of paradise. On one canvas where an unpainted edge reveals the impasto around it, there is a literal equivalent to the many strata of memory that the surfaces of things can keep from us. But the process of exposing this underground is not all the work of nature; Hendricks is reading excavation, and not erosion, in the piece entitled My Back to the Bulldozer. The machine is made visible by the damage it has done. One single gouge of red earth across a wounded field tells the story of every other ravaged ground. A human mark has remade in the earth, and is now remarked by the hand of the painter.

These multiple small panels move the observer from stone to meadow to surf to darkening clouds, all the fragments from which the world is assembled. But each one is as complete in itself, as any of John Constable’s studies for patches of sky. A separate series of larger watercolors achieves a similar effect by different means. In both Turquoise Sky and Three Trees, the thin edge of a verdant horizon forces the eye up to the airy processions that push out over the paper’s end.

’Turquoise Sky’ (Lovers Leap Series) (1991), w/c on paper. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

Two of Hendricks’ signature full length portraits are hung at either side of the landscape grouping, making a frame out of another of the artist’s visions of the world. Set apart that way, they even more emphatically evoke the tradition which celebrates those figures of self-confident splendor found in the court paintings of Goya and Thomas Lawrence.

There is a further variation on that theme in two large format color photographs (The Twins and Swimming Pool Attendant) which go beyond being a record of a tourist’s encounter – or an anthropologist’s – to measure out the balance of stance and demeanor in the human figure. They are a reminder that the mysteries of affect have long been one of this artist’s central subjects.

‘Swimming Pool Attendant’ (1977), Chromographic print. Courtesy W. Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT.

Another grouping of work assembles a small constellation of unfamiliar fruits, and although only one of them includes the term ‘erotic’ in its title (and suggested by its framing) all of them are sensually charged, their taste and smell made tactile. But these are not Nature’s version of adult toys. Rather, they might serve as sexual reliquaries or votives – especially where the image is touched with gold leaf – small, but deeply felt prayers of thanks for passion’s gift.

There is thanksgiving, too, in the banana leaves which are both botanical record and exercises in form. That these are domesticated plants is a surprise revealed in the delicate pencil outline of their clay pots.

But for all the varieties of mastery here, the landscapes are what I went to again before I left, making sure of my remembering. There should be room for them in anyone’s memory.

By Stephen Kobasa, Contributing Writer

Barkley L. Hendricks: Some Like it Hot, focuses on the artist’s work created in response to his travels to Jamaica and West Africa. With their compelling scenery and inhabitants, these tropical regions have provided him with a wealth of inspiration, and the resulting photographs and paintings represent a significant portion of his creative output. The exhibition includes large-scale figurative paintings, a series of landscapes on lunette and tondo shaped canvases, renderings in oil and watercolor of fruits and vegetation, and photographs selected from his prolific production in that medium—among them a suite of photographs of activist and Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti  (left) that will be exhibited for the first time.

Now, through December 18, 2011

The William Benton Museum of Art,

University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

860-486-1705

www.thebenton.org

The Kolb Brothers Hanging, Grand Canyon (1904). Photo by Ellsworth & Emory Kolb, courtesy Cline Library, N. Arizona Univ.

 The Grand Canyon is wild and unforgiving. But it is also one of the most stunning landscapes on Earth—a place for recreation, reflection and reverence. A beautiful Smithsonian exhibition allows us to marvel at this natural wonder without camping equipment, emergency rations or rappelling ropes.  

Featuring 60 framed photographs, Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography is a collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the Grand Canyon Association. The exhibition is now midway through its national tour, and can currently be seen at the Littleton Historical Museum, Littleton, CO, on view through February 23, 2012. If you can’t swing a visit to see this natural wonder in Colorado, perhaps you can catch a glimpse of the canyon’s beauty when the Smithsonian traveling exhibition comes to a venue near you. The exhibition tour continues through 2013, and the full itinerary can be seen at www.sites.si.edu. ARTES Fine Arts Magazine  

Jack Dykinga, Toroweap Overlook in Morning Light (1987). Photo courtesy J.Dykinga

Grand Canyon National Park, 2,000 square miles of snaking river beds and sheer rock walls, is a world like no other, where vibrant cliffs and flowing water create a striking complement to the Western sky. ‘Lasting Light’ reveals the dedication of those who have attempted to capture the Grand Canyon on film from the earliest days to modern times. Covering nearly 125 years of photographic history, the exhibition includes images of early photographers dangling from cables to get the perfect shot, their cumbersome camera equipment balanced precariously on their shoulders. More modern images are bold and dramatic, revealing the canyon’s capricious weather, its flora and fauna, waterfalls and wading pools, and awe-inspiring cliffs and rock formations. The stunning contemporary images were selected by representatives from Eastman Kodak’s Professional Photography Division and National Geographic.  

‘Lasting Light’ chronicles the development of Grand Canyon photography as we know it today. As revealed in the exhibit, Timothy O’Sullivan, a Civil War photographer and veteran, took the first pictures of the Grand Canyon on behalf of Congress in the early 1870s. It took a minimum of three and half hours to make a single image, and he had to prepare the plates in the field using potentially explosive production materials. The work was dangerous and unpredictable.  

Dugald Bremner, Travertine Terraces, Havasu Creek (1990). Photo courtesy D. Bremner

Three decades later, Ellsworth and Emery Kolb, two steel-working brothers from Pittsburgh, brought the Grand Canyon to the masses in the early 1900s. The brothers became known for their pictures of tourists on mule rides, and later made history in 1912 as the first Colorado River travelers to film their adventures with a moving picture camera. As the brothers pointed out, the journey was not always glamorous. One afternoon, Emery reported that the group had “walked 22 miles and climbed over 5000 feet,” each carrying 20 pounds worth of film. Yet “the pleasurable thrills we experienced . . . when we developed our plates more than made up for any discomfort we may have experienced.”  

With evermore remote and unexpected images, the brothers greatly expanded the breadth of Grand Canyon photography. Following in the Kolbs’ footsteps, the 26 contemporary photographers presented in the ‘Lasting Light’ exhibition have also changed the way we see and experience the Grand Canyon.  

“What you do is keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American should see,” Teddy Roosevelt urged. Roosevelt, ever the naturalist, was just one of the canyon’s devotees. There are millions of others, including the 26 featured photographers of ‘Lasting Light’, who ran the river and climbed the rocks to capture these breathtaking images.  

S & A Partners, Rainbow (1995). Photo courtesy S & A Partners

“The Grand Canyon taught me a way of seeing. How to see light and design,” said featured photographer John Blaustein. Grand Canyon photographer Jack Dykinga notes, “I think I’ve experienced every single mood of the canyon, from sandstorms to ice storms, to waiting out dangerous conditions in a cave. For a photographer, mood is what elicits impact and emotion.” These and other intriguing narratives accompany the spectacular photographs, giving audiences the artists’ personal insight into the power of the Canyon.  

As photographer Stephen Trimble points out in his book, Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography, “…as every other photographer who comes to the Grand Canyon, I’ve been humbled by the place and its checklist of challenges: vastness, remoteness, ruggedness- and on the river, the constant danger of water damage to equipment and the sickening sound of sandy grit in lenses and camera bodies.”  

Trimble also notes that the exhibition gathers these stories, the pictures themselves “and the tales behind the photographs, intimate moments from the lives of men and women in love with the crazy notion of bringing home in their pictures the light and space and rocks and river of the Grand Canyon.”  

Travelers who want to see the incredible scenic chasm in person can celebrate the National Parks during fee-free days in August of each year, when visitors aren’t charged an entrance fees to the Grand Canyon. http://www.nps.gov/findapark/feefreeparks.htm.  

Learn more about the Grand Canyon Association, a non-profit membership organization that supports education, scientific research and other programs for the benefit of Grand Canyon National Park and its visitors, at www.grandcanyon.org.  

SITES shares the wealth of Smithsonian collections and research through a wide range of exhibitions about art, science and history with millions of people outside Washington, D.C. For more information on exhibitions and tour schedules, visit www.sites.si.edu.  

by Lindsey Koren, Contributing Writer

Ori Gersht, Time after Time: Untitled 1, 2007. See End Note #1 for full citation.

This survey of work by London-based, Israeli-born artist Ori Gersht (b. 1967), brought together for the first time, his trilogy of films based on 17th and 18th century still life paintings from 2006 to 2008, along with related still images that he enlarged into photographs (and his first solo exhibition in the western U.S., at Santa Barbara Museum of Art). The exhibition also included his most recent series, Chasing Good Fortune (2010)—large landscapes photographed at the height of cherry blossom season in Japan. Although the two bodies of work are distinctly different in terms of process and emotional effect, they are linked, as the title implies, by their thoughtful exploration of time in photography and Gersht’s stated ambition to make photographs that transcends the informational aspect of the medium to create a rich experience that invites the viewer to return again and again, as with a painting. It is no accident that all the works are presented like paintings: his prints are either displayed in framed light boxes or mounted on aluminum backings that come up to the edge of the frame, without mats or white borders. artes fine arts magazine

Ori Gersht, Blow Up: Untitled 4, 2007. End Note #2.

Drawing from the exhibition catalogue: Pomegranate (2006), Big Bang II (2007), Falling Bird (2008), and related photographic works featured in the exhibition fused the past with what the artist has called the ‘ultimate present.’ This is achieved through the creation of sublime scenes that become precipitously unsettling through both sudden and gradual obliteration. Each work renders a prolonged moment of suspense through the use of stop-motion photography and slow-motion film. Yet the visceral level on which these works operate most closely mimics that of their inspiration: painting. Referencing historic paintings by Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627), Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), among others, these photographs and films provide a meditation on life, loss, destiny, and chance.”

Bill Viola, Emergence, 2002 (video still). From Passion series. End Note #3

Gersht’s modus operandi for the three films was the same: create a still life based on a earlier painting, violently disrupt it, and record the action with a high speed digital camera at 1600 frames-per-second. When played back, time is drastically slowed so that the moment of impact and its aftermath register as a series of comprehensible images rather than a momentary flash of chaos. To put it in perspective, standard video is shot at about 29 frames-per-second, so 1600 frames packs in a tremendous amount of information below the threshold of normal perception. Each film is about four to six minutes long. It is a method closely related to that of Bill Viola’s Passion series videos from the early 2000s, in which Viola produced extreme slow motion tableaus enacted by costumed actors against simple backdrops, based on medieval and Renaissance paintings. Like Viola’s videos, Gersht has set a static image from centuries ago into motion, inducing a contemplative experience. However, the presence of actors gives Viola’s work the flavor of experimental theatre or modern dance, while Gersht’s – where inanimate objects begin movingwith no visible human intervention - became strange and unsettling.

With the film Big Bang and related photographic series Time After Time (2007), Gersht puts the “freeze” in “freeze frame.” Arranging his own versions of the 17th-century Dutch still life, consisting of flowers in a glass vase against a black background, the artist infuses the set-up with liquid nitrogen and lets the high-speed cameras roll. Soon, the whole floral display—suddenly frozen—is shattered with the aid of pyrotechnics experts, to create a violent explosion which sends fragments of glass, petals and leaves flying through a vaporous fog. This work references traditional Spanish and Dutch still-life painting in which precise arrangements of foods and fruit are shown at their peak, implying the inevitability of decay. These visual metaphors for the brevity of life are termed vanitas.

Right (near): Ori Gersht, Time after Time: Untitled 8, 2007. End Note #4a; (far): Henri Fautin-Latour, Chrysanthemums of Summer (c.1887). End Note #4b. 

Pomegranate (2006) duplicates the composition of Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (c. 1602), in which the melon and cucumber sit on a windowsill and the cabbage and quince—Gersht substitutes a pomegranate for the latter—are suspended above them by strings against a black background. We watch the tranquil scene for a while until a bullet soundlessly enters from one side, puncturing the pomegranate and causing it to swing in slow motion back and forth, releasing gelatinous fluid and seeds, which in both consistency and color are disturbingly reminiscent of blood and guts.

Ori Gersht, Pomegranate, 2006 (video still). End Note #5.

The great French painter Chardin’s Mallard Duck Hanging on a Wall with a Seville Orange (1720-30) provided the composition for Falling Bird (2008), with a pheasant hung upside down by its foot standing in for the duck, and grapes set on the bench below it instead of an orange. An unseen hand cuts the string holding the bird and it plummets — but extremely slowly — into what we suddenly realize is a pool of water, which splashes, roils and foams until the bird disappears beneath the surface.

Oddly enough, although the wall text and related still photographs inform the viewer what will happen in each film, it doesn’t reduce the impact of watching the action unfold. It’s hard not to flinch at the moment of impact, even when you know what’s coming, and the slow-motion images of gooey red ooze from the pomegranate, the lifeless pheasant swallowed up by black liquid, and the lovely flowers torn apart and falling through a smoky haze and bits of glass, all have a visceral impact. The damage bullets and explosions do to human beings inevitably come to mind, and yet it’s also kind of fun in a childlike way to see the results of these odd experiments—at the moment of impact, I noticed, many visitors giggled. Our curiosity is aroused by a rare opportunity to see phenomena that otherwise takes place at speeds to quick for our perceptions to process, and the surprisingly beautiful arrangements of color, pattern and form that arise.

Ori Gersht, Falling Bird: Untitled 5, 2008. End Note #6.

Catalogue essayist Carol Armstrong asks, “…to blow up the harmless, genteel flower pieces of Fantin-Latour: what else but modernist hostility to the decorums of the aesthetic domain and the pictorial tradition could lead a gentle photographic artist like Gersht to do such a thing?” This poignant question, included in the exhibition catalogue, sums up, perhaps, what is on the viewer’s mind when taking in the artist’s work for the first time. Gersht seemingly answers the inquiry during a gallery talk on separate occasion. “It’s all about pulling tension between the old masters and new technologies…We see a simultaneous moment of destruction and togetherness coincide.” (posted by Joseph Caputo on Smithsonianmag.com, February 25, 2009).

The mixed emotions produce an interesting, layered experience, in which the artist makes room for viewers to have a personal response. Although the wall text suggested some ways to interpret the work — such as a reminder that the European still life tradition Gersht riffs on was in part a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life, or that the pomegranate is a fruit from the artist’s native Israel — the works manage not to be reductive or didactic. Gersht has succeeded in what he set out to do in making photo-based experiences that expand, rather than narrow, the possibilities for interpretation. I’d certainly like to see them again.

Ori Gersht, Chasing Good Fortune: Imperial Memories, Night Fly 1, Tokyo, Japan, 2010. End Note #7.

The Japanese landscapes, an exploration of symbolism, though related by the curators to the rest of the show under the rubric of time, seemed more like the artist setting aside the process he had perfected over the past several years to try a new approach with different subject matter. They were, we are told, photographed at night with long exposures in Hiroshima and on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and other historic sites. The scenes are a riot of pink and white blossoms, and the method by which they were made causes some of them to glow as if lit from within. In others, the light has been allowed to overexpose the image, so the blossoms appear ghostly.

Yoshida, Toshi, Sanbu-Zaki Cherry Blossoms (c.1935). Private collection.

“The yin and yang of beauty and destruction,” according to museum sources, ”carries through in this series, produced in Japan between April and May 2010 [...] The cherry blossom has traditionally been the enduring metaphor for the nature of life, but its extreme beauty and quick death has also been associated with mortality. During World War II the flower was used to motivate the Japanese people, to stoke nationalism and militarism among the population. As noted by Michele Robecchi in her essay, Ori Gersht – Breaking the Silence, for the exhibition catalogue, ‘…[the works] have a slightly sinister post-atomic quality. This effect wasn’t completely unintentional. When Gersht visited Hiroshima, his interest in the outdoor was equally split between investigating the lost innocence of cherry blossoms…and how nature flourishes on nuclear-contaminated soil.’ ”

Ori Gersht, Chasing Good Fortune: Against the Tide, Diptych Monks (2010). End Note #9.

These images, with their all-over patches of color, evoke the paintings of the French Impressionists, who of course were themselves strongly influenced by Japanese prints, and they are quite lovely. However, these photographs don’t pack the punch of the still life series, either in terms of showing us something surprising and unfamiliar, or in the feeling-states they evoke. Wherever Gersht is heading with these, I couldn’t help but feel he’s not quite there yet.

Edgerton, Harold, Bullet Piercing Apple (1964). Private collection.

During the period in which Lost in Time was on view, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art is to be commended for programming a still life show from its collection that both contextualized Gersht’s work and may have given its regular visitors a fresh look at works they have seen before. Distilled Moments brought together 20th and 21st century paintings and photographs by American and international artists introduced by a curatorial statement that read in part, “The messages still lifes impart have changed over the centuries, but the genre still offers the artist possibilities for expression – political, spiritual, societal and cultural reflection.” If the name of pioneering scientific photographer Harold Edgerton (1903-1990) didn’t ring a bell to viewers to Lost in Time who were told that he was one of Gersht’s influences, Distilled Moments included Edgerton’s famous image of an apple at the microsecond at which it was pierced by a bullet. E.F. Kitchen’s 1985 photograph of flowers and petals floating in water and Chris Enos’s untitled photograph of a drooping rose on the verge of decay bore obvious relationships to Gersht’s exploding flowers, while Andre Derain’s oil Still Life with Pumpkin (La Citrouille) (1939) show the French artist engaging some 70 years ago with the same tradition emanating from Chardin and his contemporaries that Gersht represented in his films. This kind of coordination between exhibitions enriches all the work on display.

By Helen Glazer, Contributing Writer © 2011

Ori Gerst’s exhibit, Lost in Time was shown at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art during the summer of 2011. To see more, go to www.sbmuseart.org

 End Notes:

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1.Ori Gersht, Time after Time: Untitled 1, 2007. LVT print mounted on aluminum. 16 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

2.Ori Gersht, Blow Up: Untitled 4, 2007. Lightjet print mounted on aluminum. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museum purchase with funds provided by an Anonymous Donor in loving memory of SMD and Tangerine from EAD, 2009.

3. Bill Viola, Emergence, 2002 (video still). From Passion series, based on Masolino de Panacale, Pieta (1424).

4a. Ori Gersht, Time after Time: Untitled 8, 2007. LVT print mounted on aluminum. 14-1/2 x 13-3/8 in. Collection of Manfred and Jennifer Simchowitz.

4b.Henri Fautin-Latour, Chrysanthemums of Summer (c.1887). Collection Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Gift of Mary and Leigh Block.

5. Ori Gersht, Pomegranate, 2006 (video still). The Jewish Museum, New York. Purchase: Nathan and Jacqueline Goldman and Simon Lissim Funds, by exchange, 2008-219.

6.Ori Gersht, Falling Bird: Untitled 5, 2008, LVT print mounted on aluminum, 15-1/4 x 12-3/4 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Angles Gallery, Los Angeles

7. Ori Gersht, Chasing Good Fortune: Imperial Memories, Night Fly 1, Tokyo, Japan, 2010. Archival inkjet print mounted on aluminum. 47-1/4 x 70-3/4 in. Collection of Sandra and Jerry LeWinter.

8.Yoshida, Toshi, Sanbu-Zaki Cherry Blossoms (c.1935), Ukiyo-e print. Private collection.

9. Ori Gersht, Chasing Good Fortune: Against the Tide, Diptych Monks, Nara Region, Japan, 2010. C-type print mounted on aluminum. 2 panels: 60 x 47 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Angles Gallery, Los Angeles.

10.Edgerton, Harold, Bullet Piercing Apple (1964). Private collection.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (Great Salt Lake), 1970. Photo: George Steinmetz (2002)

The Utopian desire of 1970s ‘Land’ artists, who broke away from the stranglehold of the art market by producing earthworks far removed from cities, has given way to new projects that demonstrate a global ecological awareness through cross-disciplinary investigations concerning environmental sustainability. artes fine arts magazine

A move in this direction emerged in the early 1980s when Agnes Denes created, Wheatfield—A Confrontation, 1982 in Battery Park. She planted and harvested two acres of wheat on a landfill close to Manhattan as a discursive act to demonstrate that a wasteland could be made useful once again. (Below right) Agnes Denes, Wheatfield—A Confrontation  © l982. Two acre wheat field on Battery Park landfill, Manhattan. Commissioned, Public Art Fund, NYC. Photo: © John McGrail, Time/Life. [see: End Note 1]  Moreover, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, an artist in residence at the New York Sanitation Department, dealt with the problem of waste as early as 1983 and continues today. Inventively, she transformed a garbage-recycling center of the NYSD into a place where the public could come and observe how rubbish actually is disposed of in New York City. The walkway, bridge and viewing wall are made of recycled materials.

The expanding term of environmental art today encompasses a vast scope of territory and issues. Just as certain earthworks in the deserts of the American West, grew out of ideas of landscape painting, the growth of public art stimulated artists to engage the urban landscape as well as other environments as a platform to present ideas and concepts about the natural world to a diverse audience. According to John Beardsley, “Many environmental artists now desire not merely an audience for their work but a public with whom they can correspond about the meaning and purpose of their art.”[2]

In our day, certain artists persist in moving away from single-issue approaches toward a rising energetic hybridization of art, activism and engineering. The notion of sustainability has spread from the field of environmentalism to many areas of human activity, including art and culture. Some refer to this as sustainable art and this perhaps might be an alternative term to environmental or green art, in recognition of the challenges that sustainability brings to contemporary art as a whole. The co-curators stated “In fact, the closeness to sustainability of much challenging contemporary art practice owes more to the legacy of 1970s conceptualism, and even primarily the non-market East European variety of conceptual art, than for example to Land Art.”[3] Artists now have an impulse to grapple with pressing social issues as a means to enact communal change through new modalities of working that include working outside the usual art community and often collaborating with scientists.

The exhibition Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water, guest curated by artist and educator Carolyn Speranza for the American Jewish Museum of the Jewish Community Center (JCC) of Greater Pittsburgh, was a testimony to this emergent direction that artists are developing and their desire for social engagement. This wide-ranging show is emblematic of an upward thematic trend as evinced in numerous films, writings and exhibitions over the past decade. Once more the Fowkes stress, “There is a rising understanding that radical change is required, if we are to find a way to ‘meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”[4]

Still from film, The Day after Tomorrow, Courstesy 20th Century Fox (2004)

The perils of nature and environmental consciousness have become a cultural barometer globally. Our daily engagement with recycling contributes to a sustainable environment, and progressively more households engage in this act. Artists cannot but take into account the crisis facing our planet given the escalating daily news about the dangers threatening our environment as depicted in CNN’s documentary, Planet in Peril and in such films as, The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and I Legend (2007) that address an inevitable doomsday. In recent years, the topic of environmental crisis has been explored in several notable exhibitions. Unframed Landscapes, curated by the Fowkeses in 2004, offered a reassessment of landscape in contemporary art aiming to focus on humankind’s relationship with nature across the full range of media. Other significant exhibitions include Lucy Lippard’s, Weather Report: Art And Climate Change (2007), Mass MoCA’s, Badlands: New Horizons In Landscape (2008), Stephanie Smith’s, Beyond Green (2008), EPA: Environmental Performance Actions (2008) curated by ecoartspace with Exit Art, and Criteria (2009), curated by Jimena Acosta and Emiliano Godoy, at Chicago’s Columbia College Art Gallery.[5]

The exhibition, Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water reveals the increased interest of cross-disciplinary artists whose innovative work evinces the critical situation facing our planet.  Artists, scientists, writers, community leaders and others in the past decade have focused on this topic and are increasingly bringing an important message to a larger global audience. Too Shallow for Diving specifically focuses on problems surrounding water and its impact on our natural world, human health and public welfare. According to its curator, Carolyn Speranza, “…the sixteen artists aim to provide viewers with new insights and perspectives about our existing world and the enormity of the dilemma facing our water supply.” Several fuse aesthetic concepts with scientific findings as a catalyst for viewers to consider the future of water sources. However, in choosing the artists, Speranza was less concerned with aesthetics and more with concepts about acute water issues.

The investigations of the artists range from the macro to the micro and from local water topics to those in Africa. Each artist, in a unique inquiry, explores the implications of the ‘hard realities’ and ‘new materiality’ for political action, artistic theory and practice and sustainable living in the 21st century. They are working with transformative approaches and processes towards a new vision that is ecological and participates with the living cycles of nature. This work covers an array of responsiveness in which the artists tackle different topics including oceans, climate change, water quality, recycling, water purification and plants for restoration. Artists today are finding inventive ways to call attention to the problems facing our environment, as corporate greed and profit impose destruction on our planet. Each artist works very differently and explores viverse territories; yet they share an awareness about the critical loss of natural resources and a desire to save the planet from human destruction. Many of these artists have been aligned with the nonprofit organization, ecoartspace, founded in 1997 by Patricia Watts and New York City curator, Amy Lipton, who joined Watts in 1999. This was one of the first Web sites online dedicated to art and environmental issues. For over a decade they have curated exhibitions and programs, providing a platform for artists who are working with scientists to address our global environmental issues. In 2002, Amy Lipton and Sue Spaid co-curated the exhibition titled, Ecovention, for the Contemporary Art Center (CAC), in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Grant Kester, one of the leading figures in this emerging critical dialogue around “relational”[6] or “dialogical” work, has expressed that “Art takes its form not from a final object but through play forms, process and dialogue.”[7]  Many of the artists in the exhibition Too Shallow for Diving work along similar lines and incorporate sustainable thinking in their art and social change in their message. Additionally, several credit the collaborative team Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison[8], the leading pioneers of the 1970s eco-art movement, as being especially prominent to their thinking and methods.

This is primarily apparent in the projects of the team of Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, who often work with government and environmental groups on ecological restoration-based projects. Their installation is comprised of in-depth photographic documentation, booklets filled with statistical data and charts from two projects titled, Nine Mile Run Greenway Project (in collaboration with Bob Bingham and John Stephen), (1997-2000) and 3 Rivers 2nd Nature (2000-2005), left.  Through their research, Collins and Goto address the meaning, form and function of public space and nature in Allegheny County of southwestern Pennsylvania. These multi-year projects include extensive research and public educational components as well as brown-fields restoration projects, and their gallery installations highlight images and data about the cultural and ecological history of the region. They raise questions about nature and post-industrial public space; the focus of their work is always to benefit the public realm and to create outreach programs intended to enable creative public advocacy and change.

(above) Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, Documentation of the artists’ projects (detail), Nine Mile Run (with Bob Bingham and John Stephen). 3 Rivers: 2nd nature. All photos that follow, except Vanessa German, Love Song for Water Operetta, credit: Jenny Jean Crawford.

Felix Guattari in The Three Ecologies, published in 1989, anticipated many of the issues facing the globalized world of today and laid the blame squarely at the doors of what he called, “Integrated World Capitalism.” Guattari’s focus in ‘The Three Ecologies’ is his conception of ‘ecosophy’— the three related ecologies of environmental, mental and social worlds and their amalgamation into a methodological practice. His argument, and it is rather simple, is that we have an erroneous conception of ecology, of environmental struggle, and that only by broadening our views to include the three ecologies will we be able to affect any enduring changes in our social/cultural/natural environment. A number of the artists in this exhibition illustrate these concepts.

Carolyn Speranza & Frank Ferraro, with Angelo Gatto, Requiem for the Netmakers (detail), mixed media (2011)

This is especially noticeable in, Requiem for the Netmakers (2011), Carolyn Speranza’s impressive multi-screen, mixed media collaboration with sonic artist Frank Ferraro occupying two large walls (right).  Floating in front of an irregularly shaped parchment-like blue background, a transparent sheet resembling a wall hanging discloses quotes a section of President Richard M. Nixon’s State of the Union address of January 27, 1970, and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, as amended by the Clean Water Act of 1977. The president states, “With the help of people we can do anything, and without their help, we can do nothing. In this spirit, together, we can reclaim our lands for ours and generations to come.” Contrasting this idealist rhetoric, numerous monitor screens continuously display changing videos and still imagery capturing the actual realism of water today; images of catastrophic affects of oil damage to our oceans and environment, along with scenes of families struggling to make their livelihood from the fishing industry unfold. This assortment of imagery came from the artist’s online archive taken from the Associated Press Archive (media licensed for this exhibition), Library of Congress Archives, National Archives, Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica project and photographs made available through Creative-Commons licenses. Filling this space is a musical composition produced by Frank Ferraro inspired by conversations with Speranza about environmental calamity. Peculiarly this installation evokes a mode of poetic beauty spiked with an appalling realism about water and the catastrophe facing our environment today.

Prudence Gill, Wishes for Water and Memories of the Deep (detail), 2011. Thanks to Eve Dater, JCC.

Prudence Gill, too, is concerned about the fragile ecology of the Gulf of Mexico and the potentially devastating consequences of the oil industry’s negligence. In Gill’s cerebral minimalist text piece As Heard on NPR April 18, 2011, she paraphrases reporter Scott Tong’s commentary that “The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform killed 11 people. And, enough crude to fill maybe 10,000 or more average-size swimming pools gushed into the deep, dark sea.” An abridged version of this poignant message spans across the three large windows overlooking the JCC’s swimming pool. It states in blue vinyl, framed by a continuous black grid band of squares representing globs of oil, “…10,000 Swimming Pools of Oil Flowed into the Deep Dark Waters….” Incorporated within this streaming text installation is a small sign with alarming information: “1 1/2 cups of crude oil will kill all life in one swimming pool of ocean water.” Across the hall is a seemingly whimsical window box titled Wishes for Water & Memories of the Deep (2011). In this fantastical mixed media installation of suspended, floating, enigmatic star-like shapes and lights, Gill has manufactured an under-the-sea glittering world. Notwithstanding its lyrical elegance, the diffused and murky visibility of this setting devoid of any life forms suggests a haunting mystery about life in the underworld of water.

Jim Denny, Obstacle, o/c (2011)

The art of Jim Denney focuses on the natural and social history of the Pacific Northwest, especially in Oregon around the McKenzie Bridge region of the state. Frequently, the subjects of his dynamic environmentally rooted work include river dams, the distress of fire on the landscape and animals. Denney’s strong views about nature and his sensitivity about man’s destruction of the western environment stem from a deeply rooted personal connection. A native of Oregon–this is where he grew up and continues to live, however work part of the year he resides in New York City.

His large-scale, richly colorful paintings illustrate the ongoing manipulations of nature. He expressively portrays and captures the tensions existing between nature and society in the hope of sounding an alarm about the seriousness of this critical problem. In both works, Obstacle (2011) and Abandoned (2011), Denney points to a bleak future of the western landscape.

Richard Harned, This is the Tasteless Water of Souls...This is the True Sustenance (detail), mixed media (2011)

Richard Harned directs viewers to the importance of water and air on this earth in his conceptual sculptural installation, Laws of the Earth and Air (2011). His four-part construction consists of a map of the USA, a globe, a video and a silver plane resembling a 60s peace sign. The video, produced by his brother Douglas Harned, continually shows beautiful views of Yellowstone National Park; Glacier Park; and Great Falls, Virginia, while the sounds of Mocking Birds and the Ocean, recorded by another brother, Thomas Harned, fill the space. The artist calls our attention to all the available freshwater in the United States by placing red dots denoting FINE their locations throughout the wall map. The globe sits, encased in a transparent dome, and underneath it sits a tray of clear marbles intended for visitors to take away. The gem-like marbles, in scale to the globe, represents the 21-mile diameter sphere of all fresh water on the planet. Visitors are invited to take one with them as a reminder of the urgency of water issues. The blue blown-glass marble attached to the globe is made to scale with all water of any description on earth, comprising an 860-mile diameter sphere. One of the lessons to be had perhaps from this multiple part work is the importance of specificity and place and the reality of limited natural resources we easily take for granted.

Roger Laib, Glutttttttttttt-Hut mixed media (2011)

On the lawn of the JCC sits a bizarre skeletal structure titled Glut Hut (2011) that resembles a small mobile home made of found and discarded objects and equipped with the amenities of a house. Roger Laib is known as a master wood craftsman; however, in this one-of-a-kind, eccentric looking large-scale shack and transparent soft sculptural atlas, refinement is not an issue! Manufactured from diverse recycled objects, this construction is intended to catch rainwater and brim over. With sufficient rain, the water will eventually leak and spill out of the hut and onto the lawn, demonstrating to observers how water is wasted and how it could be saved and put to good alternative use, such as watering lawns. Laib highlights how environmentally friendly choices can make a difference if one bothers to pay attention and make the simple effort to recycle rainwater.

Jamie Gruzska, Notes on Water, 1940-2011 (detail) toned silver gelatin prints (2011)

Notes on Water (1940-2011), a selection of predominantly black and white a selection of photographs by Jamie Gruzska, is reminiscent of cherished snapshots found in a household album. The place, date and reference to a person are written under each of the fourteen images. The importance of water to Gruzska’s personal history is highlighted in this memory record of times shared and past. What we are witness to are uncontaminated scenes—no factories—only trees and water. These are places preserved and held in respect for enjoyment and solitude, yet one cannot assume from these bucolic images whether or not the water is contaminated.

Wendy Osher, Something in the Water, used plastic bags (2011)

Conversely, environmental activist artist Wendy Osher’s communal project, resulting in a floor sculpture titled, Something in the Water (2011), is opposite in meaning from the sublime portrayal of water depicted in Gruzska’s work. This collaborative eco-project connected women from around the globe by using plastic bags to crochet breast-like shapes. Osher joined each component to fabricate a sizable, eye-catching, colorful and organic shape intended to call attention to toxins seeping into international waters. A map of the world hangs on an adjacent wall to this arresting textural form. Framing this atlas are portraits of the women who participated in this worldwide project along with a list of names and locations of the crocheters. Dots placed on the map indicate the origin of each participant. Whereas this is an artwork in an exhibition, it is concurrently a public advocacy project intended to raise social awareness about the importance of rectifying water contamination. Jointly, the women point out how plastic bags are linked to poison that leaks into one’s bloodstream and directly affects women’s breast milk and the future of generations to come.

Ann T. Rosenthal & Steffe Domike, Watermark:Wood,Coal, Oil, Gas (detail), digital print, acrylic paint, water on canvas (2011). Thanks to Hilary Klein, graphic design

Ann T. Rosenthal and Steffi Domike have been collaborating on environmental installations for years. Rosenthal refers to herself as an eco-feminist artist and Domike is an activist artist who is inspired by real world events. Their most recent wall installation, Watermark: Wood, Coal, Oil, Gas (2011) consists of four panels that illustrate an evolutionary timeline of energy resources—wood, coal, oil and natural gas—and a delicate blue linear wall drawing depicts a local watershed. Regardless of being on canvas and hung like ancient Chinese scrolls, these color-field compositions amidst Technicolor blue, green and yellow graded tonal backgrounds, with a photomontage containing the silhouette of a bass (wood), an eagle (coal/mountaintop mining), turtles (oil) and a child (natural gas), in no way should be perceived as decorative pieces. The artists do not endorse beauty for beauty’s sake through conspicuous paintings; rather, their art is about the idea and an environment in decline. The silhouettes are life-size, and within each shape are scenes of the landscape and of water. Even though this salient metaphorical piece is perhaps the most aesthetically gratifying in the exhibition because of its rich color, facade and composition, it commands an edge that peels back the veil on mankind’s abuse of natural resources and the environment’s vulnerability. The message alludes to our culture over time and America’s conflicting use and relationship to water and land for energy.

Vanessa German, Love Poem for Water Operetta (perf. 5/14/11). Photo: Jae Roberto

Vanessa German, the youngest artist in the show, is a nationally recognized performance poet and multidisciplinary artist who, in her spoken autobiographical word poetry, bring into play the transcendent and indefatigable power of the human spirit. In her expressly orchestrated live performance operetta, Love Poem for Water [9], exclusively performed the opening night of the exhibition, she stunningly shared with her audience emotional episodes from her life and the mixed experiences she has had with water, ranging from terror, to love and respect. Her striking words, powerful gospel-like -music and projection of water textures onto a huge skirt, which takes up an entire dramatically lit stage, provides a platform for the contemplation of both destruction and hope. German’s bellowing words and bigger-than-life theatricality command attention, and this work signals its own illusion through a series of overlapping colors that unfurl as the message of her performance evolves. German’s powerfully gestural poetic essay addresses the precariousness of life and the involvement of water with all living things on earth.

Maritza Mosquera, The Conversation and Prayer, 30"x74", digital photo wallpaper prints (2011)

The celebration of water is very much present in numerous cultures manifested in diverse myths and folklore. Working in a highly personal manner, Maritza Mosquera utilizes myth and photographic documentation in the multiple-component piece Body in Water, composed of mythic text and digital prints depicting her treading water. After reading the wall allegory, it is apparent this artist comprehends the allure of water. She demonstrates that there are many connections between water and spirituality in her ritualistic performance, alluding that water is the central source of our being and it is part of every cell and fiber in us; it is our very essence. As I walked away from this piece, I asked myself, “Could water be the common denominator that weaves us all (earth, animal, human and plant) together as one? Is it the ultimate connector?

Lisa Link, Waterways Project, selected image (2011)

Lisa Link, an artist and web designer at the University of Massachusetts for the past thirteen years, has been creating artworks that address critical social issues. The focus of her work is directly political and activist rather than aesthetic. Link aims to give people voice and acts as a catalyst for conversation and connections because she understands solutions can only arise once disaster is recognized. Through her undertakings, she desires to make a positive impact that perhaps can influence public policy for the improvement of Boston Harbor and drinking water. The project, Water Ways (2010-2011) developed out of a series of conversations she had with scientists and residents throughout the Boston area, including Dr. Anamarija Frankic and Dr. Sarah Oktay of Boston’s University of Massachusetts. In this multi-component wall installation, consisting of twelve 21 x 21 inch digital photomontages and detailed text as well as an online map, the viewer becomes informed of the critical situation between water and humans. Pervading throughout the densely layered compositions is an eerie calm, perhaps because of the stylized organization resembling posters or advertisements. Nevertheless, on closer inspection, the juxtaposition of text against the visual image reveals the urgency of its message.

David Stairs,(upper) Powerful:Proposed Hydro Site at Bujagali Falls;(lower) Powerless:Lake Victoria at Source of the Nile, Jinja. large format inkjet (2011)

David Stairs is the executive director of Designers without Borders, a consortium of designers and design educators working to assist institutions in the developing world. He believes everything is connected and that we are all part of the problem and the solution. In his explorations of Africa’s water crisis through maps, photographs and statistics, he illustrates the culpability of global human behaviors. In both large inkjet images, Powerless: Lake Victoria at Source of the Nile, Jinja (2011) [10] and Powerful: Proposed Hydro Site at Bujagali Falls (2011) [11], he presents two water scenes in Uganda that have been exploited. Stairs expresses, “Water and power are inextricably linked in Uganda. Most of the nation’s electricity comes from the facility on the Nile at Jinja, and more dams are planned. Trouble is, 30 million poor people depend on this source (Lake Victoria), and it is unstable and shrinking.” His contrasting photographs, with the titles Powerless and Powerful, are most telling given the history of Uganda and the lack of consideration of both water and the people of this region!

It is overwhelming to think that during the past 85 years, human beings have imposed so much pollution on the earth’s water. As a civilized and informed society, it is now our obligation to become water’s caretaker and to cause it no further harm. On the other hand, this is a difficult task given the intertwined uses of water, issues of benefits and costs and the vested economic interests of numerous individuals and governments. Still, the real connection with our environment can only be found when individuals in unison feel their sense of true belonging. Today, we are in vital need of artists who can provoke this sense of attachment and stir up volition to act out and bring forth social, political and environmental changes. Artists are catalysts for change, and this “change” takes place when we feel deeply for a precious cause. The artists in Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water without a doubt are noticeably reacting to news about the perils distressing our natural water resources. Their intersections between globalization, ecology and contemporary art tackle the shifting ecological and political dimensions of water.

Recalling Milton’s Paradise Lost, and also perhaps regained, the question for our era is: where are we now, and what is the proper balance between nature and civilization? Or, is this after all a divine comedy performed before an audience that is too afraid to laugh? The hope for those of us who see the glass as “half-full,” yet awaiting the fulfillment of the empty portion, is that when destiny closes a doorway of one view upon nature’s garden, she always opens a window of opportunity to further explore “where no one has gone before” in placing the creative machinery of the one at the service of the needs of the many. With the growing privatization of water and impending global warming crisis, it seems more reasonable than ever that artists’ voices not only are heard but also that their work is seen and experienced by diverse audiences. It takes the unusual vision of artists to inform and alert us, and most importantly, to propose innovative ideas as to how we can aesthetically reclaim, restore and co-exist within our natural environment.

By Elaine A. King, Contributing Writer © 2011

Professor, History of Art, Criticism/Theory & Museum Studies

Freelance Critic/Curator

Carnegie Mellon University

End Notes

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[1] After months of preparations, in May 1982, a 2-acre wheat field was planted and harvested on a  Battery Park landfill in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty. Two hundred truckloads of dirt were brought in and 285 furrows were dug by hand, cleared of rocks and garbage. The seeds were sown by hand and the furrows covered with soil. The field was maintained for four months, cleared of wheat smut, weeded, fertilized and sprayed against mildew fungus, and an irrigation system set up. The crop was harvested on August 16 and yielded over 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat.
 
Planting and harvesting a field of wheat on land worth $4.5 billion created a powerful paradox. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept.  It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. It called attention to our misplaced priorities. The harvested grain travelled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called, ‘The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger,’ organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (l987-90). The seeds were carried away by people who planted them in many parts of the globe.

[2] Beardsley, J. (1998). Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York, NY: Abbeville Press.

[3] Fowkes, Maja and Reuben. The Implications of Sustainability for Contemporary Art: 27 February 2007, Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design.

[4] Fowkes, Maja and Reuben. The Implications of Sustainability for Contemporary Art: 27 February 2007, Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design. As translocal independent curators and art historians, Maja Fowkes and Dr. Reuben Fowkes organize exhibitions dealing with memory (Revolution is Not a Garden Party, 2006-7), ecology (Unframed Landscapes, 2004) and Translocal exchanges between the UK, Hungary and Croatia.

[5] Collectively, these exhibitions are about sustainability, ecology or environmentalism. The artists are concerned about our humanity and its incapability to sustain its habits and culture for future generations as well as the creatures living on this earth.

[6] Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Paris, France: Les Presses Du Reel. Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term relational art to describe arts that gain meaning through participatory engagement among the players: creators and audience. Bourriaud defined the approach simply as, “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”

 [7] Kester, G. H. Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art. Variant, 9, www.variant.org.uk. Kester, G. H. (2004). Conversation Pieces Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. In Conversation Pieces, Kester discusses a disparate network of artists and collectives—including The Art of Change, Helen and Newton Harrison, Littoral, Suzanne Lacy, Stephen Willats, and WochenKlausur—united by a desire to create new forms of understanding through creative dialogue that crosses boundaries of race, religion, and culture. Kester traces the origins of these works in the conceptual art and feminist performance art of the 1960s and 1970s and draws from the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas and others as he explores the ways in which these artists corroborate and challenge many of the key principles of avant-garde art and art theory.

[8] Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison (often referred to simply as “the Harrisons”) have worked for almost forty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions that support biodiversity and community development. http://theharrisonstudio.net/. A key early endeavour was Portable Farm: The Flat Pastures (1971-1972).

[9] Pierre-Félix Guattari’s concept of interrelatedness of ecological and social issues and the three interacting and interdependent ecologies of mind, society, and environment stems perhaps from the outline of the three ecologies presented in Gregory Bateson’s Steps in an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, University of Chicago Press. 1972.

 [10] Scott tong, “Era of ‘tough oil’ won’t deter drillers” Marketplace, Monday, April 18, 2011.  http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/04/18/pm-era-of-tough-oil-wont-stop-drillers/

[11] Vanessa German performed A Love Poem for Water at the opening reception of Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water on May 14, 2011, at the American Jewish Museum at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO9ogS_iueE

Robert Blair, White Horses (c.1950-60), watercolor on paper. Courtesy, Blair family

“Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.” – Roy Lichtenstein

The Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, Pennsylvania, not only recognizes the truth in this concept, expressed by prominent pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, but furthermore, acts upon it in the best interest of its surrounding community. For what the Hoyt is doing in terms of its shows’ diversification and increased accessibility goes well beyond a museum’s call of duty, reaching out in unique ways to form and enlarge visitors’ perspectives, allowing their immersion in its ambient sights, sounds, and experiences. While the facility’s efforts are certainly not limited to New Castle’s youth, local students make up a significant contingent of those benefiting from its distinctive approach to fulfilling its role as a cultural center. fine arts magazine

The Hoyt Institute, New Castle, PA. Courtesy of The Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts

The Hoyt will soon unveil two very different shows, back to back, in a continuing effort to foster the public’s understanding and appreciation of fine art. Through Another Lens, June 7 – July 29, will include a mix of local, regional, and nationally recognized photographers, and Faces of War & The Landscapes of Robert Blair, August 2 – September 24, will feature that painter’s critically acclaimed watercolors. The former show’s photographs by nationally recognized artists, William Workman and Kelly Coursey-Gray, will share the spotlight with regional artists, Skip Allen and Bryce Herrington, and local photographer, Jesse Katrencik.

Workman’s photos explore the fine line between abstract concepts and the realism of pure nature photography. His work has hung in the Pentagon and the Smithsonian Institution, and he was honored by Black & White Magazine as the winner of its international competition in 2007. Coursey-Gray has shown in Colorado, and her work may also be found as part of the permanent collection at Chateau de Pourtales, Srasbourg, France. Allen’s contributions reveal a deep feeling for the human experience through his portrayal of nature’s continuous evolution.

Herrington’s watercolors will hang on the Hoyt’s third floor, known as the Ballroom Gallery, channeling the original use of that space during the early 1900’s when the spacious Greek Revival estate was built and occupied by the Hoyt family. The artist’s compelling use of color lends an abstract quality to realistic scenes. And Katrencik’s engaging photos of New Castle and surrounding areas will complete the show by expanding viewers’ perspectives, giving them a look at their own locality through yet another lens.

Robert Blair, Tanks in Battle (c.1946), watercolor on paper. Courtesy, Blair family

Robert Blair’s installation will include evocative depictions of World War II and a number of highly complex landscapes. His work expertly merges abstraction and realism. Known for his instrumental role in elevating the status of watercolor to a primary medium, his paintings were regarded as highly experimental. During the 1920’s and 30’s, Blair introduced into the studio tools that had not previously been considered for that milieu. He is credited with the development of the Smear Technique, which offered the artist the essence of movement that Blair aimed to capture in his paintings.

As a soldier in World War II, Blair painted from sketches done on location, already developing his own style. These feature a strong narrative element, evoking the urgency inherent in the real battles that he had witnessed. Using a limited palette, comprising mainly of grays, browns, burnt sienna and ultramarine blue, and integrating primary colors only to depict fire and explosion, Blair painted wet into wet, thereby fusing many of the scene’s elements . In Tanks in Battle, there is very little solidity to the ground; it is merely suggested. The emphasis is on action and design. This piece, like several others in the show, is about the calligraphy of the brushwork that lends to the scene a necessary tumultuousness. The only sculpture in the show, comprising mostly watercolors, depicts a German helmet atop a human face, almost completely destroyed.

William Workman, Bilger Rocks XXII-Clearfield Co PA (2007). Courtesy of the artist

The landscapes are stylistically similar to the World War II pieces, but less focused on narrative. In contrast to the ephemeral feel of the ground in the war paintings, the figure-ground relationship in White Horses is far more substantial, perhaps because the artist himself is no longer dealing with the transience and impermanence of war; still, one recognizes a rolling, tumbling energy there. Again, Blair works with a limited palette, but produces a very personal vocabulary. Strongly influenced by Charles Burchfield, his landscapes are design-oriented, but Blair’s highly evolved style is clearly his own. His work portrays nature as an integrated, unifying force.

Through Another Lens will hang during the Hoyt’s youth art camp in July, one of the facility’s most anticipated annual events, attracting nearly 700 visitors in 2010. The Hoyt has attained a uniquely intimate understanding of the needs of its community, striving to recognize, and maintain, a real connection with its audience, thus debunking the myth that museums are only for artists or the socially elite. Because the Hoyt family was once one of the wealthiest in the city– the estate and surname remain prominent on the north side of New Castle– the exhibitions effectively work to bridge the perceived class division, balancing local history and creative efforts with nationally or even internationally recognized displays of historic figures and events. In this way, the Hoyt maintains a high standard while avoiding inaccessibility. Visitors are encouraged to compare and contrast multiple degrees of talent in single media shows like Through the Lens , and to infuse new meaning into historical events, as in the first-hand accounts of war in Robert Blair’s exhibit. Both approaches enable viewers to transcend what they previously knew through a broad range of life perspectives, while developing a sound frame of reference.

Kelly Coursey-Gray, Strasbourg Cathedral Buttresses (2007). Courtesy of the artist

The Hoyt demonstrates an inspiring ability– despite unprecedented cuts in funding for the arts– to bring prestigious shows to the Rust Belt of southwestern PA, including Wolf Kahn, Oscar Bluemner, Charles Burchfield, Robert Motherwell, and Will Barnet. They have also curated shows from other museums including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, and hosted a number of exhibitions from the Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina including Romare Bearden. The Bearden show was held in conjunction with an eight week exploration of the Harlem Renaissance, beginning with an opening night, appropriately-themed to the era, featuring gospel concerts, Soul Food Dinner, lectures, school tours, and a teachers’ workshop. Photos and memorabilia of local black history were also exhibited for the duration of the event.

The Hoyt’s mission over the past fifteen years has been “To encourage an awareness, understanding, appreciation and practice of the Arts & Humanities through visual, educational, and enrichment programming for learners of all ages,” and it has succeeded beyond expectation. It has risen to the challenge of invigorating a dwindling arts program in the middle of a bankrupt city which, like many others suffering from a post-industrial economic downturn, is struggling to redefine itself.

Bryce Herrington, Eastbound, watercolor on paper. Courtesy of the artist

The facility itself comprises a pair of historic mansions and outbuildings– one Greek Revival in style and one Tudor Revival– referred to as Hoyt East and Hoyt West. They are situated side by side on New Castle’s North Hill. Hoyt East, once the home of elder sister May Emma Hoyt, houses galleries, classrooms, the Shenango China collection and the Gertrude Chapin Fine Arts Library. Hoyt West was originally the estate of Alex Crawford Hoyt (c. 1917), and is now used as a Period House featuring an abundance of art and antiquities dating as far back as the late 1800’s, including a large collection from third generation furniture magnate Louis J.G. Buehler. Spacious rooms, leaded glass windows and intricate woodwork of both three-story houses speak to the former prosperity of the city of New Castle. It has been connected, in recent years, to Hoyt East by an all-glass walkway, allowing visitors to easily experience both the majestic beauty and grace of the Period House, and the ever-changing fine arts displays in Hoyt East. The estates are surrounded by manicured gardens and magnificent trees, rare Japanese maples and an enormous beech, all part of the original landscaping. The Hoyt has recently installed an updated security system and UV filtering for the windows, positioning itself to attract increasingly high caliber shows.

Skip Allen, Desert Canyon (2006). Courtesy of the artist

Very few cities along the east coast– large or small– boast a facility that compares to the Hoyt in breadth and depth, in what it’s doing in terms of public education and community outreach. Most of the major shows, including Wolf Kahn and Will Barnet, feature complete curriculum guides integrated into local schools’ otherwise minimal art programs in an effort to supplement what is lacking, due to budget cuts, and to ensure that local youth are given an opportunity to learn about, and appreciate, fine art. The Winslow Homer curriculum guide, for example, included 27 pages of images and information, in color and two-sided, beginning with the artist’s life, work, historical setting and contemporaries, with a detailed explanation of wood engraving printing processes used by Homer, finishing up with actual lesson plans, including student objectives, vocabulary lists, instructional aids, and procedural outlines, all broken into a four week timeline, key questions, and instructions on the printmaking process using various materials. The guide printed earlier this year in conjunction with the Will Barnet exhibit featured an insightful compilation of quotations by, and about, the artist.

How does the Hoyt do it? In partnering with the Midwestern Intermediate Unit IV, funding has become available for printing the curriculum and making it accessible to local school districts. In conjunction with New Castle school administrators, Director Kim Koller-Jones has been able to identify means for strengthening the public school curriculum throughout the Arts & Humanities. This includes professional development opportunities and the Hoyt offers continuing education programs to educators needing Act 48 credits through the IU, as well.

Through Another Lens will include simple gallery sheets rather than full curriculum guides, and the exhibit will feature alternative, interactive means by which visitors may experience the photographers’ work. Featured contributor Jesse Katrencik will participate as a visiting artist at the summer art camp and guide students through the show, visit classrooms, and work with them to build pinhole cameras using recycled materials. This hands-on experience will enable students to personally create the “other lens” through which they can view their surroundings, including the art on display, itself. The Hoyt will, in this way, maximize its resources for the good of the community.

Jesse Katrencik, Factory (2007). Courtesy of the artist

Robert Blair’s exhibit also will feature a variety of supplemental experiences for all types of learners in the audience. Painter and former Blair student, Wendy Warner, will speak on her 10-plus years of sharing the artist’s studio in East Aurora, New York. Tentative plans would integrate the World War II-themed Blair work into an upcoming film series to be offered as a free event at the Hoyt later this year. Bob Presnar, Hoyt Programs Director, will record and integrate veterans’ interviews into the display. Narratives from local heroes, such as WWII fighter pilot, Mr. Fred Rentz, will add a human element resonating within the New Castle community.

Students visiting the Hoyt’s Blair exhibition will be invited to engage in a writing exercise on current events in an effort to connect with the artist’s experience as a soldier, and to study his theory of painting. They will also have the opportunity to explore their own visions in watercolor by painting in that medium, themselves. In the words of Hoyt Executive Director, Kim Koller-Jones, “Whether it’s Through Another Lens or the works of Robert Blair, we’re looking to build an experience, not just have an exhibition.”

By Autumn C. Miller, Contributing Writer

Visit the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts at www.hoytartcenter.org

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All Blair photos: Courtesy of the Blair Family

All facility photos: Courtesy of The Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts

All photos of Through Another Lens photography: Courtesy of the artist(s)

I

A recent visitor to the gallery commented, “A part of Harry Wishard lived several hundred years ago.” Her observation was insightful. Wishard’s representational paintings don’t simply give us a historical glimpse of old Hawaii. They transport us into that world. There is a keen intimacy between the painter and his subject that is startlingly apparent. As viewers we are ushered into this almost sacred realm where Hawaiian heritage connects with the land or aina.  

(Above) Harry Wishard, Pohaku Opio (Hanalei), 2010, 20×30″ available as Giclee on canvas fine arts magazine  

Harry Wishard, Stream Above Honokane (2010), 20x30"

Unlike viewers of Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, we are neither caught off-guard nor embarrassed by Wishard’s scenes. Awe, reverence, and respect are our responses. If great art is autobiographical, Wishard’s paintings tell his story. Growing up on a plantation in Hawaii, Wishard lived a Huckleberry Finn existence—hunting, fishing, hiking, surfing and painting. It is this natural landscape of his childhood innocence where he is most comfortable. His paintings beckon us to follow him deep into the forest, to crouch on a stream rock overlooking a vast canyon, to fly like a seagull into lush waterfalls, and to feel the surf tumble at our feet.  

What keeps his paintings from being sentimental or simply nostalgic? His realistic style is meticulously accurate in foliage, geography, atmosphere, color and light. Using the centuries old glazing process of the masters, which he learned as a boy by watching his uncle, renowned artist Lloyd Sexton, he recreates forest terrains, stream beds, and ocean scenes he has explored all his life. Although related to Sexton by marriage, Wishard is self-taught.  

Harry Wishard, Kawai Nui (2010) 26 x 42”, frame: koa, green suede liner, gold fillet

His limited formal training may also be what keeps his art fresh. He continually experiments with painting techniques and insists on having fun with his subjects. Recently he began using an abbreviated form of pointillism and the vivid colors of the California Impressionists. Clearly his images have become lighter and brighter over the years.  

Although Wishard depicts idealized scenes of long ago, his personal love of the islands and the vantage point he selects for his paintings immerse us directly into his scenes. As observers we are always clear where we are in the painting—waist deep in the waves, walking along a forest trail, or at the top of a lava formed hillside (pu’u). This double connection: first between the painter and his scene, and secondly between the viewer and the painting is present in the best Wishard works.  

As viewers we are transported inside the painting until we feel our spirits join hands with Wishard and journey back to our true island home. His framed paintings literally function as windows of a world of long ago where panoramic vistas of snow capped mountains fall into lush canyon walls and blush colored Ohia trees.  

Elmer Adams, various Mediterranean-style vases, Mango, Milo and Cook Pine, 40" to 70" tall.

Wishard’s art translates into a desire to conserve and preserve all that is unique to the islands. The best of his paintings literally take our breath away so that for a moment we can feel the wind against our cheek and the water lapping at our feet.  

Wishard Gallery is host to other ground-breaking artists as well; notable among them are wood workers Elmer Adams and Tai Lake, sculptor Holly Young, photographers Michael Cromwell and Julie Eliason, and fellow painters Lynn Capell and Edwin Kayton.  

Recently deceased wood turner Elmer Adams has several pieces in the gallery. Using massive logs of Mango, Milo, and Cook Pine, Adams created gigantic Mediterranean style vases measuring over 40” tall, 70” in circumference, and weighing less than 10 pounds!  To do this he custom built a lathe made to handle the weight and large logs. He devised a series of 2” X 3” steel beams with a hollowing tool the size of a pencil attached to the end. These allowed him to hollow out wood length weighing up to 170 pounds from a distance of eleven feet. The results are stunningly light, graceful, yet massive wooden vessels.  

Tai Lake, Trestle Table, Kao wood, ebony inlay, 90" x 40"

Preeminent Koa craftsman Tai Lake is also represented in the gallery. Tai’s work tours with the SOFA shows. You only have to look at his Koa table to understand why he was chosen President of the Hawaii Wood Guild and the Hawaii Forest Industry Association. Tai designs and builds fine furniture from island hardwoods and from the Koa forest project he manages in Kailua-Kona. His work has received numerous awards, and images of his work have been published nationally.  

The Koa dining table in the gallery is over 90” inches long and 40” wide. Aside from the Ebony inlay, there is not a ninety degree angle anywhere. Every edge of this red Koa table is slightly curved. The legs are fashioned after a Kyoto temple and allow for people seated at the corners to have ample leg room. Although large in dimension, this classic table is both elegant and unassuming. His dining table chair legs and back duplicate the arc of the table leg creating an overall unity to the set.  

Sculptress Holly Young uses bronze and marble to build life size monuments, as well as portraits, reliefs and abstracts. A former biochemist, Young’s work has gone from the chemical to the realms of the alchemist. Her sculptures capture the harmony, gratitude and peace she feels when sculpting.  

Photographer Michael Cromwell’s work is reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe canvases in size and focus, but his subject is Hawaiian flora. Julie Eliason uses her marine biologist background to strengthen her sea images and to create unique borders for her photographic paintings. (Photos on right, left-to-right: Julie Eliason, Dancing Light; Michael Cromwell, Amber Night Bloom)  

Lynn Capell, Young Girl in Hammock (2008) 30 x 50”, oil on masonite

Lynn Capell loads her oil brush and palette knife for her mason board paintings. Gauguin and Hawaiian artist Madge Tennet appear to have influenced Capell. Her paintings depict modern scenes with a relaxed but haunting loneliness. Loosely painted couples cling together in a dance hall amid dim lights. A girl lounges in bed with a TV in the foreground. Seascapes are un-peopled.  

Prize winning Edwin Kayton uses muted tones to capture the Hawaiian cowboy “paniolo” life. Pau Hana (“finished work”) shows the back of the cowboy as he and his horse gallop toward home. Comin’ in Outta the Rain, one of his most popular paintings, unites horse and cowboy as they struggle against pouring rain.  

By Nancy Slain, Guest Contributor  

Wishard Gallery, Parker Ranch Center, Waimea, Hawaii  

Representing over 30 different artists, Wishard Gallery is definitely the place to visit, when you come to the Big Island of Hawaii, or at our website www.wishardgallery.com. For further information or to view more artists and their work, contact Nancy Slain at art@wishardgallery.com, or by phone at (808) 887-2278. [Right: Wishard's, The Front Yard (2010), 30 x 40”]

Silhouette, Bridgehampton, 2003

Home Stills leave home or stick around. Bastienne Schmidt wanders, metaphorically or on foot, in and out of a woman’s life and imagination, her own and by inference, many another’s. At home and not-home, amid order and disorder, roaming and staying put, hiding out in plain sight, she builds narratives where multiple meanings glimmer below the surface and ambiguities fill the frame. The end papers propose the circle of (woman’s) life with drawings of a child, a young girl who might be Dorothy in Oz, a man or two but more female types: sexpot, sophisticate, mothers with babies. The photographs expand the circle into concentric realms.fine arts magazine  

Tax Time, Bridgehampton, 2005

Photographers have an advantage. They can rearrange life for a moment or two. They can make visible what’s on their minds while the rest of us are stuck inside our heads. Schmidt’s photographs refashion the world that life’s cycle has already remade for her. She stages images of a woman (the photographer, for she is her own model) at home, with children, as well as inside other people’s homes and imagined lives. She wanders away from home for a day in search of the freedom to leave home for anywhere, anytime that came with an earlier part of the cycle, when she was single.  

Once children came into Schmidt’s life, another world did too: tiny toys that lived miniature lives. They beckoned her to imagine “an artistic reorganization…in the midst of the chaos of a household” [1] (while most of us were merely imagining the toys being miraculously put away). In her photographs minuscule knights and warriors cascade down from on high behind a curtain and pint-size adults run purposefully across other curtains, defying reason in favor of artistic reorganization.  

Domestic DNA, Soaps, Bridgehampton, 2003

Disorganization makes itself at home. Tax Time has spewed papers over everything. In Money Counter, coins sit on a table, some in neat little stacks, others waiting for order. Life’s nagging repetitions discreetly present themselves: the floor needs vacuuming again, pieces of paper must be picked up. What’s really at work is entropy, the relentless decline of everything into disorder. In one engaging and distinctly feminine riff on the grid, that staple of modern art, Schmidt has imposed regularity on half-used soap: mathematically correct lines across a flower-patterned fabric. (Sol Lewitt would not approve.) The soaps have become muddled shapes in the service of cleanliness; regular or not, they are on the way to their own kind of death and disappearance because we are trying so hard to avoid exactly that.  

Where Cindy Sherman has imagined herself as someone else – anyone, everyone — Bastienne Schmidt imagines herself in other places. She inserts herself into places she does not live in, attempting to think herself into other lives. She tries on what it might feel like inside a mac-and-cheese residence: a cheap motel, or a place where you put on a dressed-up dress and house slippers to sit in a row of oversize, tacky armchairs. She tries out a grand Long Island mansion or two with vistas of still waters. For a thirtieth of a second, she inhabits another life, as if she were a subdued version of Woody Allen’s Zelig. Only artists, actors, a few people on reality TV swapping-lives shows – and a photographer– get to act out the sense of being inside someone else’s life, though envy or compassion can stir that sense in anyone.  

Curtain, Shelter Island, 2006

Schmidt wanders a lot in Home Stills, across her home territory, the fields and woods on the eastern end of Long Island. Years ago, when still a fairly recent immigrant, she wandered around the country with a camera in her hand in search of America, a search that produced a book called American Dreams. [2] Once she had a family and so much less time, wandering without a fixed goal along the road to unexpected discovery turned in her mind “from a necessity into a luxury”. Her “roaming” photographs minimally reconstruct a period of her life and comment on the kind of on-the-road photography that has produced books like Len Jenshel’s Travels in the American West, Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi, Burk Uzzle’s Just Add Water, and Schmidt’s own.  

Philippe's Photographs, Bridgehampton 2009

She thinks of herself in her wanderbilder as a lone housewife in the unlikely act of walking out of the picture into the proverbial sunset, a journey commonly reserved for cowboys in westerns. Her territory is too domesticated and suburban to fit the allusion: once she walks along the yellow do-not-pass lines of a tree-lined street, a middle-of-the-road path quite unlike the lonesome, flatland highways that Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank photographed. It must have crossed the mind of many a mother, faced with caterwauls and runny noses, dust balls and yet another dinner to provide, that it might be a relief to step out of the picture. The housewife and mother’s need to be alone isn’t a wild west restlessness but a temporary desire for respite, hardly the cowboy’s solitary drive to write his own road movie by inventing his own road under his horse’s hooves. A few women do up and abandon their children, a baffling notion for most of us, but in general women who leave have either been abused or fallen prey to passion. For the rest, there are pictures in the mind, which a photographer can transfer to paper.  

           * * *  

The Red Dress, 2009

Schmidt’s photographs are composed of light, color, geometry, and secrets. Light is the soul of the medium; the word photography means “light writing”. Schmidt creates geometries of light, as that elusive, formless element responds to the rectilinear rules we have laid down for our right-angle homes. In Home Stills, rectangles of light blaze in doors and windows, strict shapes of light hover on walls and floors. In one picture, windows cast three light squares across three solid rectangles (a mirror, two pictures) that hang on the wall, as if the squares in a painting by Joseph Albers had decided to get up and dance. And in the darkness just before night definitively clamps down on earth, a black house at an odd tilt has four small squares of light cut out of it like features in a jack-o-lantern. Light can subvert geometry as well: looking down a staircase in a house that is probably white but registers as gray in the photograph, the camera angle skews the perspective while sunlight throws blurred reflections and clouds like splotches of paint across the walls, turning a rational interior into a Frank Gehry experience.  

Schmidt’s color can be as punchy as an exclamation mark: the normative yellow staircase in that irregular white house, a bright red dress atop a haphazard mass of gray cut logs, and most striking of all, Schmidt’s red skirt and stockings above her green shadow. (Uncommon as it is to take a picture of one’s own standing feet, this photograph commemorates an uncommon occasion, the day that Bastienne Schmidt became an American citizen.) Other times, other palettes: a room may turn monochrome, like the white room with a white bed covered with white pieces of paper, the room with turquoise walls that impose a turquoise aura on everything, the green glaze coating a hallway and glancing over a figure’s clothing.  

The Laundry Spiral, Bridgehampton,2009

And then there are the secrets, first and foremost the photographer herself, hiding in full view. Though there is a thread of autobiography here, the protagonist remains essentially unseen, faceless, unidentifiable. She turns her back to us. Typically a viewer is expected to identify with a person seen from the back, as both look in the same direction. Here, though the experience is shared, the back becomes a denial: you shall not know me intimately; I will only let you into my ideas. She hides behind and blurs behind sheer curtains, behind a screen, behind a complicated, spider-web like pattern of threads, behind her hair. Light obscures her as surely as darkness does and sometimes only a shadow describes her.  

The story in Home Stills, about a woman imagining other homes and an earlier life with its freedoms, is a story that extends too many women’s lives. Maintaining a private face, a kind of physical anonymity in the cause of widening the reference, is nonetheless an anomaly in an era when millions of faces (and bodies) are unveiled on the Web every day and ordinary folk scramble to achieve their fifteen minutes of fame in one visual medium or another. Schmidt is not just protecting her privacy but saying that women even today are not fully visible but seen through a mesh of perceptions. She presents images from cinema too — women portraying women in a medium that projects popular notions of women’s roles in society — but renders them hazy behind diaphanous flowered fabrics. This is not an entirely outmoded notion, much as we’d like to think so. The preliminary report of the Global Media Monitoring Project in 2010 found that only 24% of people seen, heard, or read about in the news worldwide are female, only 16% of news stories focus specifically on women, and fewer than one out of five experts interviewed is female. In effect, the news presents a world in which women are largely absent – or invisible. [3]  

Woman in Field with Water Tower, Southampton 2007

Not exactly secret, nor always readily apparent, are multiple layers of meaning. Photograph has an uncanny ability: a single photograph can encompass almost as many types of expression within its borders as a library does — fiction and non-fiction, short story and document, history, sociology, theater, history of art, fantasy, myth, poetry. Every photograph that hasn’t yet met Photoshop, as well as most that are not pure abstraction, qualify as both fact and fiction. Whatever is in the picture is a fact of sorts – it was there, in front of the lens, and looked very like that at one particular angle and in a particular light. But photographs are now acknowledged as fiction more readily than fact: excerpts – the eyes would have seen more than the viewfinder did – and obviously not the real thing but a representation and version of reality, however that is to be defined in these doubting days.  

Schmidt’s Home Stills are almost as variously informed and informative as a card catalogue. Take Laundry Spiral, a picture of a woman standing in the center of a spiral made of rolled-up laundry, her child running toward her across the lawn. Non-fiction, yes; the woman, the child, the lawn, the autumn tree, and the spiral were all where the photograph says they were. Fiction, yes, or theater: constructed, staged, and invented. Autobiography too: her son, her lawn, her tree, her environment. And her laundry. Married women, mothers, women living with male partners generally do more of the household laundry than men do (even today), so add to the other elements a statement about women. She looks trapped in the middle of that spiral, as if the dirty or unfolded clothes had her in their grip. (I remember that when my children were very young it occurred to me that I might be suffocated by the weight, the sheer quantity, and the fierce repetitiveness of the wash.)  

The Curtain, Shelter Island, 2006

Then there’s mythology or symbolism: the spiral is frequently said to represent the Goddess, the womb, femaleness, fertility, female sexuality – and/or the evolution of the universe. On top of that the photograph explicitly points to art history: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which in its subdued, stony palette is almost as multi-colored as Schmidt’s conglomerated shirts and trousers. She says she chose soft materials because women artists often use them: another statement about women. It’s possible to infer in addition a subtle psychological conundrum: her child runs toward her, and she begins to raise her arms as if prepared to receive and embrace him, but if she is indeed trapped in her own female nature, can he trespass on the spiral or negotiate it? The photograph very quietly hints at the difficulties of motherhood.  

Or take woman in field, which refers to Andrew Wyeth’s Cristina’s World, that famous painting of a young blind woman in a brown field yearning toward a house on the horizon. Art history again: Schmidt freely borrows ideas or images from painting, photography and film, a practice entirely appropriate to an era of appropriation and a time when the media have put the history of all manner of imagery before our eyes. Woman in field rings a number of changes on Wyeth; Schmidt always reworks the sources of her inspirations. We know the woman in question is not blind; she is, after all, a photographer. What stands on the horizon is not a house, not a home, but a water tower, one with a particularly efficient shape that always strikes me as a vague sort of female symbol. The woman not only does not lean hungrily toward the tower as Cristina does toward the house but walks in another direction, and the dry stalks on the left lean away as well.  

Woman on Bed, Southampton, 2008

Woman on bed makes an even more obvious reference to Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun. The changes are many – light room vs. dark, clothed vs. nude, sitting vs. standing. Facing left vs. right — but the respectful nod to the Hopper is unmistakable. The stillness, the air of contemplation, and the power of light are more than close enough. Hopper’s influence on art has been immense, on artists as disparate as Eric Fischl and Red Grooms and myriad photographers from Harry Callahan and Robert Frank to Robert Adams and Stephen Shore. A recent and much more exact rendition of A Woman in the Sun was exhibited at the 2010 Whitney Biennial: R. H. Quayman’s Distracting Distance, Chapter 16, an installation with a monochrome image of a nude woman standing in the light by an image of one of the Whitney Museum’s distinctive windows.  

Woman with Housedress,Mixed media on Paper 30"x40" (2004)

Several photographs of Schmidt, a.k.a, the woman, looking out a window reprise a theme that was common in nineteenth century painting (and occasionally appeared in the twentieth; see Salvador Dali’s Woman at the Window). This subject had a lot to do with the way women were regarded in the past, as domestic creatures who did not belong outside but may have longed for something beyond the hearth. More than two thousand years ago, Euripides wrote, “A woman should be good for everything at home, but abroad good for nothing”, a sentiment that reverberated across centuries. Schmidt’s photographs pick up on the history of women’s roles and how they were seen, commentary informed by both art history and sociology.  

At the same time they can be seen as metaphors for photography itself. Looking, looking – what else would a photographer do? (Coincidentally, the first known photograph is an 1826 view out a window by Nicéphore Niépce.) From the beach Schmidt looks out to sea, a subject practically owned by Caspar David Friedrich in the nineteenth century. From the corner of a house Schmidt looks out at a field. What is beyond our constricted personal compass, or beyond even our vision of our little life? Earth-bound photography does not, cannot answer, nor can painting (which tries hard); a camera can only pose the question and picture the wish to venture farther than the place where our feet are planted.  

The Turquoise Room, Samos, 2008

Schmidt’s extensive catalogue of implied genres includes mysteries aplenty. In the turquoise room, she hides behind mosquito netting, her child is practically deconstructed by movement on film, and the very pictures on the wall are carefully wrapped and entirely covered from view. Whatever goes on here, and why? And what is Schmidt doing in the picture where she is dressed in red on a heap of sawn-up logs? She can scarcely be wandering across this hassle of wood. Her large, bright figure rising into the sky and her wide-spread legs declare her dominance, yet she has no arms: a conqueror without adequate means.  

The narratives these photographs propose are open-ended, even open sided, half a story without a perceptible closing half. They raise questions they do not deign to answer. If the scenes that go beyond a mere snippet of autobiography into the region of ideas sprang from her imagination, they ask to enter ours. We may fill in the blanks ourselves or accept these as stories that end with a comma rather than a period. Yet one cannot miss the sense that a woman is mostly seen through a screen [of preconceptions] that clouds her image; she is unmistakably there but not often fully present. Working on the edge of ambiguity, Bastienne Schmidt can drive a point home still.  

By Vicki Goldberg, Contributing Writer  

Bastienne Schmidt’s book, Home Stills is available at most bookstores or can be ordered through Amazon

Schmidt’s photography and paintings are on view at Harper’s Books, 87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY through May 8, 2011  www.harpersbooks.com  

______________________________________________  

1  Quotes are either from notes that Schmidt herself made or from interviews with the author in May, 2010.  

 2 Full disclosure: I wrote the introduction to this 1997 book published by Stemmle.  

3 http://www.africafiles.org/article.asp?ID=23064   The information is from a preliminary report, based on a sample sample of 42 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Pacific Islands, and Europe.  Retrieved May 20, 2010  

W. Eggleston, Shotguns- Lucia Burch, early 1980s

 William Eggleston’s photographs document that space where the banal gives way to the beautiful; the ordinary to the extraordinary. For Now offers unique images from a unique artist and it marks yet another pairing of two creative minds who have similar blind spots for those borders that supposedly exist between high art and low. 

Dylan Poster- T.C. Boring, Greenwood, Mississippi, early 1970s

Eggleston is most widely known for images of iconic objects and spaces like his tricycles and ceilings. In the Eggleston monograph, The Democratic Forest, author Eudora Welty offered up this pantheon of possible subjects that might find themselves within Eggleston’s frames: “old tyres, Dr Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same curb.” 

With, For Now, Almereyda clearly had something different in mind. He’s populated the book with photos of people; some candid, some posed, but all participating in the frisson that results when Eggleston’s creative instincts crash into the individual presence of each woman, old friend, child or bystander that he takes as his subject. While this is not the first glimpse of Eggleston’s people-pictures, these unique, career-spanning selections add up to a nice surprise. Viewers who’ve seen Eggleston’s pioneering video, Stranded in Canton, know that the artist has a knack for capturing the spirit of his subjects in moving images too, and it’s not incorrect to think of For Now as a dialog between two filmmakers. 

Fireworks- Winston Eggleston, Oxford, Mississippi, early 1980s

Perusing the images in the catalog, one never senses that Eggleston is asking questions or even making specific statements. His subjects speak for themselves in declaratives as elemental as drunken tears or spontaneous eruptions of laughter, and the people in For Now have plenty to say. 

Flipping through the book’s 144 pages, a boy’s beaming smile is partly obscured by a gluttonous pile of 4th of July fireworks on a kitchen table. Gleaming wrenches, sockets and other tools in red packaging frame the doorway of an auto supply store; the dark room beyond transformed into sacred space by the ritualized symmetry of the display. A candid snapshot of a friend on the phone is contrasted with the shirtless portrait of a young, blond boy posed beneath a window sill. Various women smile and scowl and cuddle and cry throughout the book. 

Shirtless Boy- William Eggleston III, Oxford, Mississippi, early 1970s

 Many of Eggleston’s photos are taken in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee and in other locales in the South. Because of this cultural pedigree, commentators often compare Eggleston’s images to the writing of William Faulkner. However, one of the hallmarks of Almereyda’s insightful examination of the photographer and his archive is the suggestion that Eggleston’s work is better compared to that of New York School poet, Frank O’hara. Almereyda says, “If you want a true literary parallel for what Eggleston does, look to O’Hara. Eggleston’s pictures feel similarly tossed off and prismatic; hard edged fragments refracting a world of inner and outer experience.” 

O’Hara’s poetry also seems to parallel the spontaneous, impromptu ‘feel’ of Eggleston’s photographs in the reflections of Helen Hennessy Vendler, on the work of the poet in her, Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (1980), when she analogizes the snapshot nature of O’Hara’s verses: “…the offhand remark, the fleeting notation of a landscape, the Christmas or birthday verse, the impromptu souvenir of a party—these are his common forms, as though he roamed through life snapping Polaroid pictures, pulling them out of his camera and throwing them in a desk drawer sixty seconds later.” One can easily imagine an iconic Eggleston image of an ordinary figure, caught on film in an unguarded moment, in the words of O’Hara, “Have you forgotten what we were like then / when we were still first rate / and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth” (Animals, 1960). 

'For Now', book jacket: Girl sleeping in bed- Rosa Eggleston, Memphis, TN, 1971

Almereyda’s deft choices and comments imbue For Now with a fresh perspective on Eggleston and his career, while simultaneously illuminating the central, poetic alchemy at play in the photographer’s work. Eggleston rarely finds anything new to show us through his lens. Instead, the power of his work lies in his ability to transmute the inconsequential into the iconic. In addition to Almereyda’s text, the catalog includes essays and examinations by Lloyd Fonvielle, Greil Marcus, Kristine McKenna and Amy Taubin. 

By Joseph E. Nolan, Contributing Writer 

Joe Nolan is a poet, musician, inter-media artist and writer living in Nashville, TN. His cultural reporting is heard on WPLN, Nashville Public Radio and he publishes a monthly arts column in the alternative weekly, Nashville Scene. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com 

Purchase this (book jacket, left) and other books on photography and the arts by Twin Palms Publishers (2010), 144 pages. Available at www.twinpalms.com