Three takes and three fates on photo process.
Just this morning, playing on the radio as I made my way to work, was the ’80s track “How Soon is Now?� by The Smiths. With remorseless seduction, the notes and lyrics flooded me back to teenage-hood, to that time when all the music that one liked seemed to work as a snapshot of one’s own***image1*** emotional state. How did The Smiths know exactly how I was feeling? How was it that the band seemed to be in communication with a bunch of other bands, all working together to dissect my moods and desires?
My response to
Pay No Attention To The Man Behind That Curtain
, the current exhibition at Salon Mar Graff, is somehow similar to my young grasp of music. It used to be that music fell into these categories: emotionally compelling, cool but mysteriously beyond me or mostly horrifying. This is likewise how the three artists exhibiting are now classified in my memory.
Borrowing the famous “curtain� line from the
Wizard of Oz
as a title implies the mysteries and manipulations within the artist’sâ€"specifically the photographer’sâ€"process. The exhibition might have read like three artists conspiring behind the one curtain, but so far afield from each other are these works, that it is more like each artist is behind a curtain of his or her own making.
Andrea Volkoff-Senutovitch has dropped her customary found-object assemblage of antique this and curious that in favor of a series of tea-stained photograms. Although the works, produced directly with light and without a camera, appear to use a vintage necklace as the primary silhouetted image, Senutovitch manages to drop the importance of the object from this series. The necklace reads more like a cellular conflagration, a formalist cabal of microscopic organisms, than like an antique physical presence. The result maintains a kind of sci-fi antiquity, analog future vibe, as the artist’s sculpture often has implied, but does so less overtly, more subtly and more successfully. The effect of allowing the images to be stained with teaâ€"which evokes both a narrative and a printmaking qualityâ€"may be something Senutovitch eventually needs to leave behind for the work to stand as well as possible on its own. But for now, it’s the final touch that makes me think, standing before each piece, that she secretly knows something about my emotions.
Andre Ruesch exhibits work from his
Murder of Crows
series, seen last year at Phil Space, but this time done with the arcane and alluring technique of carbon printing. The unique matte tone and particular grayscale of the process, along with a disintegrating tissue imprint at the edge of each image, makes for stark and graphically haunting images. Probably the technique would allow that effect on family photos from an amusement park, but Ruesch’s series depends on a crow inserted into each photograph, sometimes as the protagonist, sometimes altering the meaning through its mere, coincidental presence; the images are intense to begin with. On one hand, the images, with the omnipresent crow, are funâ€"a way to bring some life into frames that might have otherwise grown dull to a practiced photographer. On the other hand, the crow is a Situationist agent, a provacateur of context, always propelling the narrative toward some new and epic conclusion at the behest of unknowable motives. The interplay between elegance and humor is confounding. In my teen-aged-music-adoring state, Ruesch is like a classical composer: I know the work is good, maybe timeless, but I’m not always certain I understand why.
Using digital images in bright colors and chromed highlights, Michael Shippling stands in deep contrast to his fellows. It’s not only the digital vs. the manual process, or the color against the grayscale and drifts of sepia tea, it is that Shippling’s work reads like a series of album cover mock-ups for some kind of horrifying ’80s electro-metal band. If every image didn’t include a woman’s breasts, Shippling might even be doing a work-up for a Christian ethereal rock opera. In other words, while it is almost certain that the artist spent a great deal of time carefully finessing his imagesâ€"and some of them almost speak, almost prodâ€"the end result is a quality print of what you get with your basic Photoshop filter. The portraits of women, dubbed
Sirens & Furies
, fit perfectly into the juvenile music mode. The manipulated nudes come together at two dominant focuses of teenage life: sex and robots. It’s great for a poster when you’re 16, but pretty dubious as a display of mature artistic process.
A visit to the exhibition (Mar Graff is open from 1-5 pm Saturday or by appointment), will also secure a viewing of considerable remnants from this past winter’s
Currents
show, including a full room dedicated to Steina, also on view at SITE Santa Fe and Evo Gallery. Other highlights include Hisao Ihara’s “Multiple� and James Coker’s video stills printed on canvas.
