ARTIST BREAKDOWN P.II: Photography is Dead...
Photography is Dead... Long Live Photography!
GROUP EXHIBITION
January 8 - February 20, 2021
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting works currently on display here at the gallery. Follow along here and on social media for some background on each maker and their process. The call for this show was centered around 2020: what were the artists’ works-in-progress? What was that one-off piece that felt right in the moment, but didn’t fit into a larger series? What was their current reality? What were their thoughts and feelings about the future?
Derrick Waller. Seen, 2020. Fujifilm Professional Paper, 24 x 36 inches. 1 of 1 in this size. $500, Framed. Inquire to Purchase
2020 served as host, not only to a global pandemic, but to widespread civil unrest. Police brutality took center stage in May as many of us were confronted with the stomach-turning footage of George Floyd's violent murder by police. A preexisting air of despair and frustration from a disappointing presidential administration ignited into rage. What followed was an explosion of protests across the country to denounce a legacy of prejudiced and hateful systems. Charlottesville photographer, Derrick Waller, shares a moment of unity he witnessed during protests amid the pandemic:
"This photograph is part of my recent work documenting the movement for racial justice in this country, which is by far some of my most meaningful work. On one end, you have the struggle, the loss, and the pain, and on the other: the victory, the joy, and the love. All of these stories need to be told and I chose to do so with my camera and lens."
Barbara Diener. Holding Missile, Peenemünde, 1940/2019. Archival Pigment Print, 13 x 19 inches. $975, Framed. Inquire to Purchase
Though Barbara’s piece was technically made in 2019, we couldn’t help but feel that nuclear warfare + examining one’s place within problematic systems and histories was pretty on brand for 2020 ☕️
"The Rocket's Red Glare traces the history of instrumental rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, whose story embodies my ongoing interest in the complicated German heritage surrounding WWII. A NAZI turned NASA scientist von Braun’s life represents as much contradiction as his groundbreaking rockets do, which were used as missiles and spacecrafts alike.
In 1932 Wernher von Braun went to work for the German army, which fell under National Socialist rule the following year. Accounts of when he joined the NAZI party vary but by 1937 he was the technical director of the Army Rocket Center in Peenemünde where the V2 rocket (Vengeance Weapon 2) was created and tested. After the war, when von Braun was brought to the U.S. under the controversial Operation Paperclip, a government initiative to secure and extract German scientists, his talents were called upon by the U.S. military. He settled in Huntsville, AL with members of his original rocket team, where they eventually developed the Saturn V and put the first man on the moon.
To create some of the works for The Rocket's Red Glare I have superimposed archival images found in the Wernher von Braun Archive in Huntsville, AL with my own photographs. The first date indicates the year of the archival photograph, the second the year in which I made my photograph and the composite. With these pieces I am literally compressing time and place.
Rather than presenting a complete view of this complex part of German-American history—classified for decades—I am posing questions, looking at the way that history is passed on through generations, and how facts are distorted, embellished or undermined."
Hannah Altman. Old Births, New Deaths, 2020. Archival Pigment Print, 16 x 20 inches. $700, Framed. Inquire to Purchase
At first glance, Hannah Altman’s abstracted portrait conveys the too-familiar themes of isolation, mortality, and identity experienced by many these past months. The timely image is part of an ongoing project steeped in Jewish folklore.
"Old Births, New Deaths is part of an developing body of work that considers Jewish depictions of time and narrative devices. It is up in the air whether dusk belongs to the day or to the night; the debated thinning sky is consequently treated as neither, holding attributes of both but treated as a safeguard against one infiltrating upon the other. Similar techniques are used in Jewish folklore - filled with tales of liminality, of the impossibility of landing on an unchanging truth. I am interested in how these frameworks relate to image-making and how, by incorporating familiar symbols and scenes, photographs can leave room for open ended past, present, and future worlds."
Elea Jeanne Schmitter and Le Massi. Ode à la, 2020, Single Channel Video, Edition 1 of 3. $1500. Inquire to Purchase
The talents of Elea Jeanne Schmitter and Le Massi come together in this short film about how imagination plays a role in our individual perceptions of freedom. Soft instrumentals accompany the poetic lines and dreamy video, creating a meditative effect for the viewer.
“An Ode.
An Omen.
This video essay, this lyrical conjugation between text, image, and music, is set to enlarge one’s perception of freedom within a context of limitations. It is an homage to the sublime, to this feeling of grandeur, of communion between what we are and what we can be. It is not a stand on the epistemology of liberty, but rather a call for something still undetermined where one is free within its own imagination.
Nabokov said: “The imagination is a form of memory”. What we understand as reality is the cumulation of all the things we believe in put in correlation. No more, no less. It is why the imagination is a form of memory, functioning also in redefining what we are, can be, and will be. It is a tool of complete liberation, of aspirations and desires, of history and storytelling. It is set within a context of timelessness where causality does not exist, where only possibilities subsist.
Acknowledging our position on this earth, the privileges we were given at birth, we -Elea&Massi- do not claim to have a universal understanding of what freedom means. We do not claim we know. We do not intend for you to march the path we allowed ourselves to follow. And we certainly don’t seek for the truth. We simply wish for hope to be felt as something tangible and malleable, as something personal but also communal.
This visual piece is an attempt at rendering a feeling of self-detachment from one’s reality as to elevate the beholder into a hovering state of weightlessness, where floating rhymes with everlasting.
It is in sort a poetic manifesto retracing the rediscovery of senses, a tribute to the forgotten notion of priorities lost in our societies. Following the metamorphosis of an expanding mind grasping at what’s what and what will be, it is an invitation into the emotional transformation of an individual touching at the wonders of wandering into its own imagination."
Muriel Hasbun. Study for Pulse: Corazón (Homage, Luis Lazo), 2020. Unique Archival Pigment Print on Anodized Aluminum, 24 x 12 inches. $2275. Inquire to Purchase
We continue our exhibition breakdown by highlighting another 2020 work in progress by the brilliant Muriel Hasbun. This lovely celebration of Salvadoran identity, printed on aluminum, is part of a growing collection of constructed imagery which began with the pandemic.
"Is it possible to trace our journey through a visual record of the land’s pulses? Can we metaphorically mark our personal and cultural legacies onto the land and in the process make it our “terruño” and diasporic homeland? Can we repair misrepresentation and erasure?
Pulse: New Cultural Registers/Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales"" reframes the cultural legacy of El Salvador during the 1980s and 1990s using personal and historical archives. It imprints the rescued archive of the renowned Galería el laberinto --an epicenter of cultural activity in El Salvador during its civil war, founded by my late mother Janine Janowski-- along with my own photographic archive of the time onto the national seismographic record of El Salvador. The constructed photographs transform the land into a fully lived and witnessed “thirdspace” of memory and art, mapping our personal and collective history into a new meeting ground for an inclusive, equitable and restorative future.
With 2 million Salvadorans living in the United States, we are the 3rd largest Latinx population, and the largest immigrant group in the Washington, D.C. area. I invite the public to celebrate us, to get to know us, to empathize with us through the recognition of our art, culture and personal stories.
I have been working on these images since the beginning of the pandemic after a trip to photograph the seismic records of El Salvador at the Archivo General de la Nación at the end of February. This image is the first successful study printed on anodized aluminum, just finished today!"