After reading a Brooklyn Rail interview, whilst the heat is off in the VA, I decided to descend the 2 flights of stairs into the basement, and review the Junior Photo Show. For those unaware, I'm a painter without much knowledge of the technical aspects of photography; I feel I can critique painting quite thoroughly, after hundreds of critique hours in college, but photography interests me in its own place in the visual arts as well as aesthetically. Many students were in this show, so I chose to thoroughly critique on aspects that I feel most pertinent to what I typically deal with in painting and the visual arts in general.
A few trends were noted throughout the show while writing about each artist individually, the most dominant being the photographing of the American family in the home - the drab, emotionless suburban interior. Artists that I deemed to be partaking in this sort of theme included Trisha Keeler, Rebecca Iasillo, Ashley Gallo, Ellisa Keller, Brittany Colson, and Molly Doherty-Vinicor (though in hers, figures were mainly absent - it seemed that the remnants of the family on their "home" were the focus of the pieces.) Katie Corcoran's pieces seemed to be portraying the family or at least an interaction of friends in their spaces as well, though used outdoor as well as indoor environments to place them in.
The body as landscape was another subject I noted in a few pieces. The pieces of Kellyann Petry evoked this thought, as her close-ups of the figure expressed the liveliness of skin in its most "real" way. The three vertical pieces done by Kate McCormick felt as though they were dealing with this as well - though her figures seemed to be expressing the life that exists inside a body, with a level of uncomfortability present in them.
The presentation of a number of pieces in the show really appealed to me as well. I believe photography has many options as far as presentation goes - maybe more so than painting (or at least more than have already been explored). Peter Zervas had presented two archival pigment prints on foamcore. This allowed the photographs to lean more towards being objects to me rather than "pictures." I saw these also as film stills, snapshots of a moving film which were then printed as photographs. If this is a correct evaluation of the process (or if not), it made me curious as to what photography is when it is OF a video; I compared the two visual mediums, the portrayal of time they each exhibit.
Colleen Logan presented a small piece of glass with 25 tiny "thumbnail" photographs behind it, placed neatly in a grid. The images seemed to catalog a sick woman's hospital stay. The grid and similarity in size of photographs evoked the passage of time and changing states of mind that occurred in the hospital room at that time.
Rita Baunok presented small photographs matted very precisely behind glass. One was of a strange, obscured urban or wasteland scene, and the other a close-up of a dictionary page with the definition of seclusion. The juxtaposition of these two very different subjects together creates an unusual but curious investigation of place and definition of place. Another artist who used glass to her aesthetic advantage was Katelyn Menard - glass as frame, together as object.
Catherin Gaston used a Fuji Film Instant camera - something I have seen a few times recently in my social life - seemingly to document the life of an adolescent. The use of this instant film conjures up thoughts of time-specific events and casual documentation.
Caroline Schub and Michael "Shibby" Lambert exhibited pieces which affected me strictly in terms of their content and aesthetic in the content. Schub's portrayed scenes which had unusual placement of objects - likely constructed by the artist (at least from what I gathered) - which obscured our view and made us unable to fully see what seemed to be the subject of the piece. The center photograph of a stuffed coyote or some sort of dog which had a telescope blocking its face seemed the most quirky, beautiful, and lonely to me. Lambert's pieces displayed 3 scenes which were reminiscent of construction/destruction, but hardly exhibited any real indications of this. About 15% of each piece was the focus of the photograph - light flooding onto mulch, dirt or rocks from within the "crevice" of the hill created by the earth. To me, this read as the destruction of land by the construction of something commercial (maybe a road, building) but did so in such an elegant and beautiful way that the aesthetic still remained most significant. Joseph Maguire also seemed to be talking about the man-made in the landscape, the human affect on existing earth.
Process in art is always a consideration of mine when making or critiquing. The layering that Dave Medina uses in his pieces is one of interest to me - the juxtaposition of a person and a place makes for a direct interaction between them and their environment.
Other artists with pieces in the show included James DiMauro, who seemed to present place as abstraction, Steven Paradise, Serena Shkreli, Alexander Krauss, Hannah Tashkovich, Britney Chiacchiaro, Skylar Blum, Hannah Browning, Christina "Tin Tin" Muller, Blathana Zimmerman, and Jes Walsh.
No comments:
Post a Comment