Bill Daniel, “Black Flag w/Henry Rollins,” 1981

News coming off the wire from experimental filmmaker, tireless photographer, and American Romantic Bill Daniel:

Many readers of this blog are undoubtedly familiar with Who is Bozo Texino, Daniel’s mesmerizing documentary about the “secret society… of hobo and railworker graffiti.” The artist has just released a fine-looking portfolio of black and white fiber prints that showcase the rail drawings of Herby, The Rambler, Coaltrain, and Bozo Texino himself, in addition to a portrait of the elusive Colossus of Roads. The entire suite of prints, which Daniel dubs “Moniker,” runs for remarkable price of $250.

But wait, as the wise man once said, there’s more.

Daniel has also opened the archive to his classic Texas Punk Pioneers and Texas Skatepunks work from the early ’80s, which found the artist at basement and backyard shows for seemingly every important punk band of the era (Hello, young and skinny Henry Rollins. Aloha, Jello Biafra.), as well as poolside with skate legends like Jeff Phillips and Craig Johnson. I’ve geeked out on these photos many, many times, and I’m really excited that he’s selling 8×10 fiber prints of a lot of this work for $25. That’s crazy cheap, especially when the prints are being sloshed around stopbath and fixer under safelights, rather than rolling en masse off an inkjet printer. To check out these sweet pics, hit Daniel’s new print site, Tri-X-Noise.

Finally, this seems like the perfect time to mention that Daniel’s work appears in the new issue of Hamburger Eyes, which is evidently out now.

Sara Vanderbeek, “The Principle of Superimposition 2,” digital C-print, 2008.

Unless my instincts are way off,  phot(o)bjects will undoubtedly be the most important photography show to hit the Northwest this summer (if not this entire year). On view at Lawrimore Project in Seattle through August 1, phot(o)bjects includes some of the most critical and forward-thinking voices in contemporary photography, including Walead Beshty, Trisha Donnelly, Roe Ethridge, Guyton/Walker, and Sara VanDerBeek, in addition to videos by Wolfgang Tillmans and Torbjørn Rødland. Organized by indie curator guru Bob Nickas for Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver, the work in the show appears to be largely sculptural, offered in response to Nickas’ query, “Beyond a carrier of an uninterrupted image, what else can a photograph be?”

I’m heading up to see the show later this week, and hope to secure a forum for a proper review of this important show. I will have a brief report of the show here in upcoming weeks, along with a few thoughts on the Gursky retrospective and Anthony Hernandez shows from earlier this month in Vancouver.

phot(o)bjects at Lawrimore Project, 831 Airport Way S.,  Seattle, through Aug 1

Amy Stein, “Riverside,” from the series Domesticated, digital C print

Most readers of this blog are surely familiar with Amy Stein’s fantastic photographic tableaux, and those who live in Portland have hopefully caught her current show at Blue Sky Gallery. I’m working on a proper review for the Oregonian, but thought I should break to spread the word about her upcoming artist talk on Saturday, Aug 1. In addition to the lecture, Stein will also be signing copies of Domesticated, which was published here in Portland via Photolucida’s Critical Mass. (Only three days left to apply for your own Critical Mass monograph!)

I saw a version of the Domesticated show in San Francisco last year, and despite the Blue Sky exhibition being unframed, the current incarnation is a stronger showing. I have no doubt that Stein’s talk will be equally smart and engaging.

Domesticated at Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW 8th Ave, through Aug 2. Amy Stein artist talk Saturday, Aug 1, at 3 pm. Free.

Laurie Simmons, “Big Camera, Small Camera,” silver gelatin print, 1977

This was indeed a pivotal moment for art. Pictures Generation features women who entered the art world at levels equal in importance to their male counterparts for the first time. Often, they surpassed men in terms of invention and impact. Most of the women—Kruger, Levine, Lawler, Sherman, Charlesworth, Bloom and Laurie Simmons—worked with photographic imagery, partly because photography was still regarded as a bastard child of art. This was a field they could have pretty much to themselves, while gaining the support, rather than the envy, of the bad-boy painters around them.

“I turned to photography because I thought it was the dominant language of our culture,” says Charlesworth, who is represented in the show by photographs from her first two series of newspaper appropriation works, “Modern History” (1978) and “Stills” (1977). “I remember seeing Richard Prince’s first show at Anina Nosei and thinking, ‘Oh! This guy is interested in the same stuff I am,’” Charlesworth recalls. “Photography suited the things we wanted to address.”

Prince, the token male in the New York group, was taking a critical approach to appropriated photographs, most famously of the romantic Marlboro Man cowboy. But no man in the 1970s could have made Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-80). Nearly a dozen works from the series are in the Met show. Here, Sherman presents female movie stereotypes with a caustic humor that mocks the way men fantasized about women, while giving women who internalize those stereotypes a sharp poke in the ribs.

Bloom remembers seeing Levine’s appropriated Walker Evans photos and thinking, “Oh my God, that is so radical and so insane. It was also brilliant. Sherrie didn’t address any of the esthetic issues, just narrowed it down to the most essential idea about what constitutes ownership of an image, and that was it.”

Read “Photo Play” in its entirety at the Art in America website

The Pictures Generation at the Met

via AFC

In the past two or three months, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting three photographers who are fairly new to Portland, and are doing some very interesting things. Keep your eyes open for these talented artists:

Jennifer Boomer of Dallas, TX and New York, NY: Hey Hot Shot Winner Fall ‘07, currently in the Nymphoto Presents exhibition at Sasha Wolf Gallery.

Lauren Henkin of Washington, DC: Current artist-in-residence at Newspace; preparing for June-July show at Camerawork Gallery. Henkin’s prints from Displaced: Part I, based on her self-imposed Nova Scotian exile, are astonishingly frank and beautiful.

Blake Shell comes to PDX from Tucson, AZ, where she taught in the renowned UofA Photo Dept. Working with images and user-generated text culled from the internet, Shell frequently incorporates audio and video into her conceptual remixes of online culture. Also: make note of the blog!

Jim Kazanjian, Untitled (Implosion), Archival Pigment Print, 2009

Aberrations, an exhibition of Jim Kazanjian’s hallucinatory photo-composites are on view at 23 Sandy through the end of the month. Kazanjian’s images are pretty amazing, and I was happy to pen a short essay about his work, which can be downloaded here (PDF). Aberrations is on view through Saturday, May 30.

Chen Quilin, from the Garden series, 2007. From China Urban at Reed College.

Readers of the Oregonian might have spotted a few of my reviews in the paper last month. This new gig is particularly exciting to me for two reasons: I haven’t penned local reviews on a regular basis in a few years, and the O is the only daily I’ve ever written for. So far, they’ve been great editors and have been more than generous with their creative allowances, so I’m excited to help the paper expand its critical presence in the local art community.

The three pieces I’ve written so far can be read by following the links below:

Review: Susan Seubert at Froelick Gallery

In its best moments, Seubert’s balancing act of horror and beauty yields artworks that are exquisitely tense and captivating. At other times, though, the two qualities work against each other, creating the sensation that the photos want their proverbial cake and to eat it, too.

“Science/Fiction,” Seubert’s sixth show with Charles Froelick, walks this tightrope with a lighter touch than we’ve come to expect, and employs an array of techniques and strategies to explore notions of home and family, scientific achievement, natural beauty and — just to keep things interesting — mass annihilation.

A Short Editorial Recap of Photolucida

While the Portland nonprofit has garnered a stellar national reputation for serving the needs of its conference attendees, Photolucida is still figuring out its relationship to the local community. While early incarnations of the biennial emphasized citywide exhibitions and public photography events, the increasing popularity of its portfolio reviews has made it even harder for the small organization to organize broader programming.

Review: China Urban at Reed College

Chen Qiulin’s video cycle and color photographs bear poetic witness to the demolition of her hometown, which was flattened and flooded to make way for the [Three Gorges] Dam. Beginning with “Bei Fu,” Qiulin intersperses footage of Wanzhou’s destruction with operatic vignettes of costumed characters engaged in their own destructive dramas. Subsequent videos continue this blend of documentary and performance practices, casting the regions’ drowning death as the central arc of Qiulin’s epic Chinese opera. The artist’s most recent video, “Garden,” follows two migrant workers as they haul cumbersome vases of artificial peonies by foot on an all-day journey through the dense, hazy city. However unnatural, their pink floral arrangements are bright explosions of color in the dingy landscape of overpasses and narrow alleyways.

Tim Lee, “Untitled (James Osterberg, 1970),” C-print, 2004

GLOOMY SKIES MAKE GREAT SOFTBOXES
NORTHWEST PHOTOGRAPHY NOW
A Presentation by Chas Bowie

PNCA • 1241 NW Johnson, Portland OR
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 • 12:30 pm

In Gloomy Skies Make Great Softboxes, Portland art critic Chas Bowie surveys the state of contemporary Northwest photography, assessing the work of regional artists who are actively cultivating new photographic idioms and avenues of exploration.

The Pacific Northwest has a longstanding and multi-faceted engagement with photography, as evidenced in part by the legacy of Portland’s Blue Sky Gallery; Seattle’s acclaimed Monsen Collection; and Vancouver BC’s concentration of noted “photoconceptualists.” These disparate traditions are not only well-documented, but markedly at odds with one another, rendering any Northwest photography “scene” more compartmentalized than unified.

As the demographic makeup of the Northwest shifts, however, so too does the application of photography in the fine arts. Gloomy Skies Make Great Softboxes demonstrates how emerging artists such as Isaac Layman (Seattle), Andrew O’Brien (Eugene), and Holly Andres (Portland) are transcending regional aesthetic trends and moving toward an increasingly progressive and critical mode of image-making.

Peter Brown, “Snapping Turtle Sunning on the Road, Sand Hills, Nebraska,” C print, 2005

The Fall/Winter issue of SPOT arrived today, sporting a cool cover from emerging Houston artist Ariane Roesch. The Houston Center for Photography’s twice-yearly mag is a critical and sentimental favorite, so I’m pleased to be included in the new issue with a review of Peter Brown and Kent Haruf’s collaborative ode to the High Plains,  West of Last Chance. The review has been added to the Selected Writings section of this site, but I encourage everyone to hunt down an actual copy of this handsome photography magazine for themselves.

While West of Last Chance never set off to be an encyclopedic record of the region (the Midwest’s penitentiaries, army bases, cookie-cutter suburbs, and migrant workers are among the absent), Brown and Haruf depict a sort of lyric taxonomy in their subjects: Hand-painted signs, pickup trucks, superhighways and gravel roads, Wal-marts, grain elevators, crosses, high school mascots, diners, swallows, post offices, cattle, and mechanics all coalesce into an ambiguous geography of unequivocal alone-ness. In one lonely Nebraska highway scene, Brown presents a suitcase-sized tortoise, camouflaged by the baked sandy asphalt of the roadway he paddles across, like a holdover apparition from the Plain’s Paleolithic era.

Doug Keyes, “Chuck Close,” 1999, dye destruction print

In recognition of the “unprecedented number of applications by photographers” to the 9th Northwest Biennial, the Tacoma Art Museum is hosting a five-hour extravaganza Saturday entitled Taking Pictures Through Multiple Lenses: Photography in The Biennial.

Rebecca Cummins, who teaches at University of Washington and is a very interesting artist in her own right, will moderate a conversation between four Biennial photographers: Michael Kenna, Doug Keyes, Isaac Layman, and Susan Seubert. The lineup promises to be a compelling mix—the artists, all extremely good at what they do, each approach photography with very different conceptual and aesthetic attitudes.

Layman is incredibly bright and talented, as I’ve mentioned here before, and I was a fan of Keyes long before moving to the Northwest. (Keye’s recent monograph, Collective Memory, is fantastic, and from what I gather, the first printing is going fast.) Kenna’s work isn’t a personal favorite, but that’s about my tastes and preferences, not the merit of his photography.

His relatively traditional approach to the medium, his exquisite attention to craft and technique, and his years of popular success should all nicely balance nicely the younger artists’ experimentation. Portland’s Seubert the wild card I’m curious about; some of her series, including “The Ten Most Popular Places to Dump a Body in the Columbia River Gorge” and “Chimeras” hold up really well and continue to impress me, but I wish more of her work had the same effect. (Actually, her editorial work knocks me out. If you want to see really well-done assignment work, look no further. I grew up around this kind of photography, and can’t help but stop in my tracks when I see it done so well.)

Taking Pictures Through Multiple Lenses: Photography in The Biennial
February 28, 11 am-4 pm

Submissions to The 9th Northwest Biennial saw an unprecedented number of applications by photographers. These numbers reflect the tremendous growth in this medium over the past decade. Historically, artists were bound by the limitations of film and equipment, but today many select from a myriad of technologies, processes, and tools.
Biennial artists Michael Kenna, Doug Keyes, Isaac Layman, and Susan Seubert participate in a half-day program discussing photography’s role in fine art and commercial imagery. Rebecca Cummins, Associate Professor at University of Washington School of Art, moderates a panel conversation.
Cost is $10 and includes museum admission; $5 for members and students with ID. Email Education@TacomaArtMuseum.org to reserve your seat.

Thumbnails, from top:

Isaac Layman, “Bookcase,” 2006, archival inkjet print

Michael Kenna, “Skyline, Study 3, Shanghai, China,” 2008, gelatin silver print

Susan Seubert, “Mask,” tintype