Archives 1999 ()

19 November - 17 December 1999

Inventing (my) History

This work derives from an interest in the use of photography, historically, as a means to document and encode the body with identity. I am also fascinated by collections particularly the practice and desire to classify photographic representations within an archive. Specifically, I am attempting to create a dialogue, an exchange, between systematic uses of photography and those that are more common to domestic rituals.
Cartes-de-Visite or “visiting cards” were first introduced in 1854 in France and later England. These small photographs made of loved ones and celebrities were a commodity collected and cherished predominantly by the middle class. They were the earliest and the most popular form of mass produced portraiture used by commercial photography studios. The home that I grew up in included photographic portraits and cartes-de-visite of my dead ancestors displayed on mantles and in family albums. I loved to look at these photographs and I would sometimes study the facial features and gestures searching for a resemblance to my own (self). Something familiar in their unsmiling yet confident gazes.

Quantum Leap

I have taken these portraits of myself to emulate a collection of anonymous cartes-de-visite. Presenting these people from the past and creating myself as the anonymous subject(s) of (an) anonymous photographer(s). I insert myself into the ninteenth century. Simultaneously I have become the anonymous collector and curator of these images within this impossible archive. I am no longer singular and outside but all at once inherent. The cause and effect of an unlikely but fantastical inheritance.
Is a collection ever really complete?

Leaps of faith

As a photographer I think of the camera as an extension of my body. It provides a means to search for answers that are ultimately resolved with the formulation of new questions that I ask myself. What becomes significant in an accumulative process of surveillance and recording? When one makes a photograph, what happens to the information as it becomes translated into a purely visual dialogue? What is present? What is absent? I feel that this gap in the process of translation is fascinating, like the threshold between internal and external spaces and like the margins between the figure and the ground.

15 October - 12 November 1999

10 September - 8 October 1999

“depiction is a photo based installation that looks at identity and the ways that image and language systems can be used to make us and/or take us apart.” The show consists of a dimly lit gallery filled with a number of small illuminated boxes hung at eye level for you to examine. Looking into a box through a round glass window you see a face. Dirt obscures the view and you have to lean in and look more closely. Inside the box you see the distorted image of a child. Boy or Girl? Their eyes are juxtaposed, their small hands clasped underneath. Faces and hands the only clues except for text. Disembodied text about the sky, the sea, mountains and haunting. Does the text explain this face or name the place where the rest of the body was lost or is to be found? Questions arise about the “depicted” body and their responses of your own “real” body. The installation “depiction” seems designed to make you want to identify your own feelings and ideas in an effort to re-build the image and identity of the ghostly young faces that stare back out of you from the darkened gallery.

Artist Statement:
My name is Scot and I build objects and situations for you to consider the construction/occlusion of self with. I use light dirt wood text photographs located objects and dark to effect environments that implicate my and your body as repository of/reagent for structures that contextualize consciousness. language gender class race plus more and you can touch or think my work but your whole body will always be encouraged and that means smell and fear too and sometimes joy - catch phrase : the contingency of self upon the contextualization of body. oh and you and I are both others.

6 August - 3 September 1999

A reflection of southern California from an invisible/alien/outsider perspective, “The Lay of Your Land” invokes the purposes of traditional landscape painting, pointing up the impossibility of looking being a way of owning for women or other people who may be socially marginalized, as well as the “neutral empiricism” of geography, through which looking is a way of knowing. Visuality is accorded primacy for the way in which space is represented, yet the occupation of space is socially and psychologically inscribed on subjects, from spaces as small as the metaphorical, psychological and literal implications; our subjectivity relies on “seeing” itself centrally in space in order to have a perspectival point and a coherent identity. The ego, whose basic construction is dependent on an integrated understanding of the space it occupies, is affected by the comfort level of occupying psychic and social spaces.
In this wok I am investigating the constitution of subjectivity and the profound implications of the located gaze, through intersection of geography, landscape and feminism and the relationship of my own body to aerial photographs of southern California, which are cropped and enlarged, without horizon or vanishing points. Through the visual inscription of an outsider perspective on southern California, I attempt to engage the viewer with a fresh view of this dystopia, in what I hope will be an embodied experience.

2-30 June 1999

In the age of the flourishing illusion of interconnectedness throughout web facilities, every statement appears to be worthwhile listening. The overall content of it, though, uncovers mundane if not purely boring informations with the only quality of being revealed from an individual point of view. Nevertheless, loads of hungry computer-whiz hunters are aimed at gleaning day after day spicy intrusive informations from some folks only too happy to open themselves widely to the view of others,
Unfortunately, not everybody has the internet. Not everybody has the  chance of cultivating the hope of finding one day something really really succulent, I mean JUICY from the web.
For those either resisting technology, too poor to follow the lead or not enough cool, OFF THE RECORD was designed. There you’ll find out all about the artist’s boring life throughout accumulative spinning genuine confidences.

-Catherine Prefontaine

30 April - 28 May 1999

Ear, Mise, Single Male, 1997

Artists Statement:
The metaphor that the human body is a “holy” temple became stunningly apparent for me while participating with my wife in the birthing of our three children. Those gifts of life led me deeper into an exploration of all the body openings as gateways of consciousness,
“The Hole Project” expands upon my previous subject matter to include human bodies outside of the family, and to focus much more closely on aspects of the body itself. As the images become smaller in focus yet greater in magnification, I move from a preoccupation with the personal family to inclusion of the universal family.’ One of the reasons for undertaking this project is to attempt transformation of the ordinary to the extraordinary through visual magnification. The holes are something we all have in common and use daily without much thought. They form our doors of perception, experience, pleasure and pain. Through them we enter and exit our reality and the physical body at birth and death. We are fascinated with exploring one or another of them at various times of our lives.
Cultural, religious and social values influence our acceptance of some of our holes and repression of others. Photographically they are given the same status. Visually, the holes are an expression of unique individuality, differing pigmentation, the process of aging, and the life force - each “orifice” landscape is dramatically different from any other.
It is my belief that consciousness shifts depending upon the way in which we use our holes, or the “ten gates”(1), as they are called in some religious and yogic texts. They are entry points into the realm of the senses, and sensory experience can take us towards or away from our relationship with our soul. Around the holes revolve many of life’s important questions and choice points of activity: to see or not to see, to speak or not to speak, to have sex or not, to give birth or not, to experience cosmic states of consciousness of not etc… They can also be gateways for the release of various energies from within us - from vocalization to ejaculation to the expressing of mother’s milk. The gates can let in some of the great forces of nature - light, sound, smell and taste, shaping our experience of reality.
(1) Some yogic texts and religious scriptures speak of the place at the top of the head where the bones merge as the “10th” gate, a place where spiritual energies may be received and where, it is said, the soul exits the physical body at the time of death. This “hole” is included in each section of photographs.

-Har Prakash-Khalsa

26 March-23 April 1999

reflux ou les herbes fraiches, 1995

Memory and photography have always been inevitably linked. From its earliest stages, photography has appeared as an incarnation, a tangible manifestation of memory. Today the metaphorical representation of memory dominates photographic imagery. But beyond banalities and generalities, what is the nature of this relationship?
Within the short history of photography, this mnemonic quality is evident in images permeated by the desire to set apart and preserve elements of the real. This quality also seems apparent in all other images which maintain a distance with reality by presenting the real in an altered, different or residual form. The representation of memory therefore spans photographic language on both sides. It haunts reflective work, but is also integral to the fabrication of an image; through its link to reality, memory infiltrates the genesis of the photographic act from within.
Nonetheless, can be the photographic trace penetrate the mnemonic domain? Can the insistant visibility, as well as the evocative strength of the photographic image result in a modification of the entire field of memory? Is there not, between this capacity of remembrance and the photographic act of recording, an elective complicity which projects both of them into a never-ending cycle of renewal, which might form and transform our “being” without our knowing it? How should this photographic activity, which I pursue relentlessly, be interpreted? Is it approached as an intuition, a knowledge not tyet realized which leads me to invest reality with residual memories not recognized as such?
This, succinctly put, is the origin of this last photographic series. Reviviscence, assembles images which seek to embody, in a multitude of ways, the possibilities offered by these thoughts.
If photographers are often sure of the origin of their images, they occasionally have doubts about certain ones. When this happens, they are overcome by a presentiment that certain images come from elsewhere, and that maybe, in the end, these iages travel in an opposite direction: they return.

-Sylvie Readman

18 March 1999

12 February-12 March 1999

Curated by Jules de Niverville for Artist’s Choice

Curatorial Statement:
I first came into contact with Eve Fowler’s work about two years ago through a mutual friend who had then just recently purchased a print of hers. The image was an extension of her prostitute series, and had also been published in an issue of blind spot magazine focusing on images of youth. My attraction to her work was rooted first in her subject matter, lost youth in the big city, and secondly in its simple and direct approach. It’s with an unforgiving and almost brutal clarity through which we see and are made to confront the disenchanted gazes of her subjects, and with an equally uncanny sense of familiarity in which we first examine these portraits. Out of context, we have somehow seen them before. Her strict use of form engages us to scrutinize her subjects individually. We are drawn to inspect the details of their hardened expressions, the repeated format further urging us to define what may be linking these young men together, or rather what may be setting them apart as unlikely objects of sexual pleasure. This well constructed series, if only a tiny window onto her subjects collectively “chaotic” lives, makes the portraits all the more identifiable and poignant.                 -Jules de Niverville

8 January-5 February 1999

In Heaven, Stacey Lancaster compartmentalizes the landscape into 68 views as seen through lenses attached to the ends of black tubes protruding from the wall. Lancaster’s scenarios offer a mixed bag: open landscapes, skies and seascapes mixed with pockets of urban dwellings, garden paths, highways and railroads, as well as the occasional close-up of the rocky terrain on the surface of Mars. Yet, the images are somewhat obscured and irresolute, denying specificity. Blinking slowly on and off in irregular rhythms, there is little time to focus on a single image. Our eye is forced to hover between sites, never quite landing in a fixed location. The difficulty is situating ourselves easily in any one of Lancaster’s  telescoped vistas hints that we are looking too hard, relying too much on our expectations about site as exemplified through our tunnel-vision views of the world. If we absorb the total field of images, instead of fixing our gaze on one, we may be able to give in to a comfortable ennui within which identity and a sense of place are malleable things, whose forms can change to suit the scenery. Many of these landscapes darken to an idealized corner of heaven to be had. Maybe, as the song says, heaven “is a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.” Maybe we’re there already.