ARTIST BREAKDOWN P.VI: 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?
Dylan Everett. Dust, 2018/2020. Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 30 inches. Edition of 3 + 1 AP. $1,700, Framed Inquire to Purchase
Dylan Everett’s “Dust” is a multi-layered still life celebrating LGBTQ identity, and questioning traditions of arts and culture:
‘"Dust" is part of a larger body of work that combines still life, collage, and re-photography, creating layered surfaces that speak to both my personal life and serve as symbolic references to other creative figures, especially LGTBQ people who have inspired me.
The preface to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a series of aphorisms about art and beauty, including the declaration that "all art is at once surface and symbol."
If all art is at once surface and symbol, I create symbolic surfaces. Through the use of photo-collage, still life, and re-photography, my pictures collapse figure and ground into surface. Drawing from a range of references – my personal life, literature, art, pop culture – and cultural signifiers, these surfaces are loaded with symbols. The viewer is invited to decode these symbols, or at least to try.
The symbols in my images often function as homages to the people and things that I love or admire: LGBTQ-identified creative figures, gay icons, and personal relationships. In one instance, this manifests as a room constructed of cyanotypes inspired by John Dugdale; in another, a grisaille room winks to George Platt Lynes’ black-and-white male nudes that remained hidden until after his death; rose wallpaper hints at the titular setting of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. This series of homages is held together by an aesthetic that strips away any sense of hierarchy among cultural signifiers. In my fabricated spaces, there is no distinction between highbrow and lowbrow, personal or famous, historical or contemporary. The resulting photographs are layered, symbolic works that simultaneously speak to contemporary art and culture, while questioning classic ideas of taste, sensuality, and beauty.”
Elin O’Hara Slavick, Pandemic Portrait: Wear A mask! Save Lives!, 2020. Unique, Original Vintage Print with Acrylic Paint, 10 x 8 inches. $400, Framed Inquire to Purchase
Though Elin O’Hara Slavick’s imagery is bright and quirky in aesthetic, her message is urgent and sober: wear a mask. Her recent work carries this theme throughout varying portraits and time periods.
“This is one of at least 100 from the Pandemic Portrait series done during the Covid-19 pandemic and quarantine. Using vintage photographs from all over the world and from all time periods, I mask all the humans, evoking previous pandemics and plagues while linking the past to our present in hope for our future.”
Justin Hamel, Paso del Norte, 2020. Archival Pigment Print, 24.5 x 18 inches. $1,250, Framed. Inquire to Purchase
While the country has experienced tensions with several nations over the past year, our relationship with Mexico’s border continues to be a topic of debate, despair, and frustration. Walls and fences continue to be erected, families separated, some detained in deplorable conditions, and a suspicious amount of migrant people have gone missing. Justin Hamel shares an image from his work, Almost America, which documents life in the borderlands.
“Mt. Cristo Rey is a holy mountain at Paso del Norte where people have traveled through centuries between what is now the intersection of Texas, New Mexico, and Chihuahua, Mexico. The mountain is the last remaining part of the US - Mexico border in the region without fencing and is seen here illuminated by Border Patrol floodlights. This is part of an ongoing body of work in the US - Mexico borderlands entitled, Almost America.”
William Glaser Wilson, Baby, 2020. Transparency Print, LED Panel, Glass, 48 x 48 inches. Edition 1 of 2 + 1 AP. $8,000 Inquire to Purchase
Like many artists in the pandemic, William Glaser Wilson altered his practice to mold to his new lifestyle. But the pandemic wasn’t the only factor in the change: The recent birth of his daughter has greatly influenced what he finds worth producing. He shares this transition in his MFA artist talk:
”After the birth of our daughter, my wife and I had significant changes in our practice. Whether that be to meet the needs and demands of being a parent, or logistically dealing with what's possible in a pandemic, I’ve really taken a 180º turn with what I'm interested in (and what I find to be the most fun). In the very beginning, I was interested in getting this highly detailed, total-visibility photograph or painting. Now that I'm having to entertain my daughter, who is four months old, I’m realizing how much information she's actually able to receive, and, to some degree, what fascinates her, what keeps her entertained and stimulated, and how that compares to an adult. As adults past adolescence, it really takes a lot for us to become interested, stimulated, entertained by an object, an image, or a moving picture, and I realized when I was trying to show some of these to my daughter, how little she was actually interested in some of these highly detailed photographs. It was so far along the spectrum of adult entertainment, if you will, that she really couldn't understand what she was seeing. It was only until I was able to actually break it down and show her simple shapes and objects, and actually, in some cases, almost completely refrain from color, that she was able to be captivated by it. I thought it was really interesting to think that what interests an adult may fall completely flat for a child, and vice versa.”
Iris Wu, Untitled (Scratch on Chest), 2020, Silver Gelatin Print, 24 x 20 inches. Edition of 3 + 1 AP. $1,800, Framed. Inquire to Purchase
William & Mary student, Iris Wu, shares an intimate slice of time and skin, embodying her own outlook on living in this current reality.
“This image was shot not long after the pandemic started. I have no recognition of how but the scratch just showed up one day on the chest. It happened out of blue. I believe that this image reflected my state of mind back then -- overwhelmed with everything happening in the world, and trying to understand what it means to be living in the world right now.”