picture takers

picture takers

Paul Chiappe Willie Cole Anne-Karin Furunes Joy Garnett Gail Gregg Diana Jensen Cassandra C. Jones Whitfield Lovell Penelope Umbrico Aaron Williams

picture takersSeptember 14 - December 2, 2012

Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

objects of fascination by Mary Birmingham

Any photograph has multiple meanings; indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the real-ity must be like if it looks this way.” Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.1

In 1973, when Susan Sontag wrote her controversial essay about photography, “In Plato’s Cave,” it is doubtful she could have imagined how “inexhaustible” the stream of photographic images would become. The revolutionary developments of the digital camera and the World Wide Web in the late twentieth century created an endless avalanche of readymade images.

In spite of the ubiquity of the photographic image, many artists recognize it as “a potential object of fascination” that can enhance or inform their art practices. Filtering photographs taken by others through their own aesthetic vision, these artists extend the invitation to us, the viewers, to deduce, speculate and fantasize about these images.

Vernacular photography can be loosely defined as photography of the everyday, or photog-raphy not originally intended as art. Snapshots, wedding photographs, news and advertising images, family pictures, travel albums, passport and ID photos, mug shots, historical archives,

1 Sontag, Susan, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography. (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., Sixth printing, 1980), 23.

and school portraits all fall into this broad category. Websites like Craigslist and eBay have en-larged the marketplace formerly confined to flea markets and antique stores. News, social media and photo-sharing websites also provide limitless image sources.

While many people look at, collect and display vernacular photographs as cultural artifacts or aesthetic objects in their own right, the ten artists in Picture Takers re-use these images in ways that transform them. Some translate the images from photography to another medium—painting, drawing, sculpture and video; others alter or rearrange photographs, changing the way they are presented. By “taking” pictures originally made by others and creating new contexts for them, the artists in this exhibition suggest alternate readings for the images, and in the process explore ideas about personal or collective history, memory, identity and longing.

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Gail Gregg’s Album Series addresses the dual nature of the photograph as a physical object and an intangible idea. Working with found family photo albums and scrapbooks, Gregg removes the individual photographs, leaving the ad-hesive corners and any hand-written text. She replaces the missing pictures with “ghost images” in graphite or pastel, creating abstract place-holders for lost moments in time. Gregg imagines she is a collaborator with the anonymous makers of these family albums. “My hope is that this new ‘non-photo’ communicates a sense of loss, a sense of the

tenderness with which important benchmarks in a life are recorded.”

Attracted to “the visual autobiographies of others,” Gregg invites the viewer to re-invent the miss-ing people, places and events. “The forms are tragically empty—and yet, they also can stand as blank slates on which new futures, new lives can be written.” Photographs are such powerful mementos that even the suggestion of a missing photograph may conjure up a picture in the viewer’s mind.

Gail Gregg, Album No. 23 (detail), 2010

Issues of absence and presence are also central to Diana Jensen’s work. The artist is interested in the people depicted in found photo-graphs, like those in her Baton Rouge Polaroids series. By trans-forming them into paintings, she turns ephemeral snapshots into something substantial and per-manent. Her goal is to “rediscover and resurrect the people I find in discarded photo albums acquired at flea markets… I like to think that my paintings are physical placeholders for the persons who are absent.” Jensen uses the physi-cality of the paint to impart new meaning: “I counter the flatness and ephemeral quality of the original photographs with a thick, visceral paint application. I impart a weight and physicality in depicting the persons in the lost photographs, restoring the presence of those forgotten.”

While history and archival materials have always fascinated her, she is most interested in photo-graphs from the eras she herself has lived through, specifically the 1970s and 1980s. The artist often works with related collections of photographs that may document a particular family or group of friends, looking for possible connections between individuals. The arrangement of the paintings by pairs may suggest narrative threads.

Joy Garnett also transforms photographic images into paintings, although her sources and subjects differ from Jensen’s. Based on images she gathers from various Internet sources, her paintings investigate the “apocalyptic sublime,” a metaphysical condition of astonishment and awe. Garnett’s Boom and Bust series is sourced from photographs of military events, but she suppresses the contextualizing details, purposely allowing her imagery to remain ambiguous, inviting multiple interpretations from the viewer. “What’s important to me, from the point of view of

Diana Jensen, Baton Rouge Polaroids 2, 2011

someone who makes paintings, is to allow the viewer to come to any meanings—any interpreta-tions of content—on their own. What matters most is contemplation.”2

Like Jensen, Garnett relies on paint as a “de facto agent of transformation.” She suggests, “Perhaps perversely, the very unctuous medium of paint is an excellent tool to turn on the dominant form of the image today, which is electronic and photo-based. Paint offers us a real counterpoint as a material and as a mode of communication, and it packs a serious backlog of motifs, languages and genres…”3 Her paintings slow down the speed at which we “read” images, translating them from the rapidly moving mass media image stream of the Internet.

Paul Chiappe’s tiny meticulous drawings resemble black and white vintage photographs, but the artist actually makes them using pencil, acrylic and sometimes airbrush. He collects his source material from Google image searches, books, postcards, and photographs. Chiappe alters the found images, often com-bining elements from several photographs and blurring selected portions. The addition of surprising elements and the unexpected scale of the drawings give them a Surrealist edge.

In his Yearbook series, Chiappe incorporates differing levels of sharpness and blurriness, creat-ing portraits of schoolchildren that look slightly out of focus. They seem a perfect metaphor for memory, with their hazy edges and imagery that sharpens and fades; like memory, these draw-ings sometimes seem to play tricks on us. The non-specificity of the faces invites us to invent identities for them, and may even allow them to stand in for our own friends and family.

While Chiappe scales his drawings down to miniature size, Anne-Karin Furunes does the op-posite, dramatically magnifying the scale of her source images. And although the two artists use vastly different scales, both successfully create a sense of intimacy between the subject and the viewer.

2 Ryan Bishop interview with Joy Garnett (http://theoryculturesociety.blogspot.com/2010/04/interview-joy-garnett-with-ryan-bishop.html)

3 Bishop interview

Paul Chiappe, Untitled 27, 2008

Furunes turns photographs from historical archives into haunting large-scale portraits by hand-punching thousands of different sized holes into the surface of black painted canvas. The result-ing image, which resembles a halftone black and white newspaper photograph, coalesces in the viewer’s eye when seen from the proper distance.

The artist is drawn to visual archives that reveal shameful or hidden truths. Her subjects have included Communist women fighters in the Finnish Civil War, Norwegian Jews deported by the Nazis, and people lost during and after World War II. Portraits of Archive Pictures, III uses imagery derived from a Swedish racial purity archive that categorized citizens into groups like Gypsies, criminals and Jews and earmarked candidates for sterilization.

Furunes notes that while each of the people she depicts was important to someone in the past, that context is lost or hidden from today’s viewer. Her work attempts the “historical recovery” of these anonymous people. Their faces are elusive images that come in and out of focus accord-ing to the viewer’s perspective, making them perfect embodiments of memory, which is always fleeting and subjective.

Whitfield Lovell is known for work that associates two-dimensional portrait drawings with found objects. His imagery evolves from vintage photographs of African Americans, hand-drawn with Conte crayon. By juxtaposing three-dimensional objects with drawings, he creates sculptural “tableaux” layered with meaning.

In Lovell’s Kin series, a purchased cache of identification photos—mug shots, employment IDs, photo booth images and passport photos—provides the inspiration for the drawn portraits. Making the heads life-size in scale, he attaches found objects directly onto the drawings. The change in scale and medium recontextualizes the original photographs; the addition of a single, enigmatic object to each drawing creates a tension between the physical presence of the real object and the intangible image of the absent person. The combination of portrait and object invites the viewer to imagine personalities and narratives for each character.

“My project has been inspired by my fascination with history, by stories told to me by my grand-parents, and a desire to signify the lives of the people who inhabited those stories. Focusing

primarily on images of anonymous black people from the period between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement, I attempt to illuminate the humanity and richness of these ordinary people.”

Aaron Williams is interested in the photograph as a found object. By manipulating and altering mass-produced posters and stock photographs, he explores differences between the hand-made mark and the mechanically reproduced image.

Williams’ source material comes from what he calls “populist” imag-ery: “It’s all cheap materials, used books and bargain posters, things that have very little physical value but have great cultural or emo-tional currency.” Using ubiquitous images like pop star Justin Bieber or bucolic Alpine landscapes, Williams “interferes” with them by crin-kling or cutting the paper, and sanding and airbrushing the surfaces. In his sculptural work he creates fractured wood constructions that provide an equally interrupted context for the cut and pasted images.

Williams explains: “I’m working in the intersection between the image and the material; the space between the emotive capacity

of the image and the physical reality of the paper and printing process. There’s a lot of ques-tioning of the validity and reality of the images I work with, particularly in light of them being so broadly disseminated.”

Like Williams, Willie Cole also sees the found photograph as an object weighted with cultural currency. Best known for his assemblage sculptures that transform ordinary found objects like shoes, irons and telephones into powerful works of art, Cole is also a prolific producer of two-dimensional works. His sculptures and images often carry references to the African-American experience and West African spirituality and mythology.

Since the mid-1980s Cole has explored the domestic iron as both an aesthetic object and a cultural symbol. His Diviners series derives from found archival photographs of students at

Aaron Williams, Stock Photography IV (Two Images), 2012

the Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, which operated as a segregated board-ing school in Bordentown, NJ from 1886 until 1955. Working digitally, he manipulates and distorts the photographs, which show uni-formed female students engaged in the activity of ironing clothes. The women fill the frames of the photographs, creating a simulta-neous feeling of constriction as well as monumentality.

Cole recontextualizes two iconic images from popular culture, pairing them in a lenticular photograph titled It Takes a Tribe. Each picture illustrates an adult female (a black mammy and a white movie star) holding a baby of a dif-ferent race. Lenticular printing allows both images to be seen by shifting the viewpoint, and also melds the images together in a hybridized mix. The new pairing poses questions about race and stereotypes, and creates a new and more powerful context for each of the individual images.

Cassandra C. Jones’ Lightning Drawings are digital collages made from stock photos available on the Internet. By digitally cutting and pasting sections of lightning bolts Jones “draws” circles with lightning. Each drawing showcases a different quality of line—for example, serrated, fine or meandering. In order to make a cohesive overall arrangement, Jones must reorient each image, turning it sideways or upside down; her process creates a new context for each photograph.

In her video, Wax and Wane, Jones strings together nine hundred downloaded photographs of the moon in various phases and transforms them into a time-lapse video of the waxing and waning cycle, effectively turning each photo into a video still. Jones collected the images from many sources, including friends, family and acquaintances as well as photo-sharing websites,

Willie Cole, It Takes a Tribe (two views), 2009photo: Joerg Lohse; image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York, NY

stock photography agencies, thrift stores, eBay, and public domain archives of the US Army, NOAA and NASA. The aggregated images form a collectively authored story of the moon’s movement. While the position of the moon remains in a fixed arc on the screen, the images created by nine hundred photographers flash in the background, creating a virtual slide show of moon photographs.

Jones speculates that picture takers may see something more appealing in images of the

moon’s waxing phase because she found more photographs of that phase posted online. The technology used by photo sharing websites makes it possible to search for specific subjects and to gauge their popularity by tracking the sheer number of images shared.

Penelope Umbrico has pursued this idea in great depth, investigating subjects that are col-lectively photographed: “I take the sheer quantity of images online as a collective archive that represents us—a constantly changing auto-portrait.” Umbrico, who considers photography both the medium in which she works and the subject of her work, is interested in the ways in which we as a culture make and use photographic images. Her well-known (and ongoing) series, Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr, began in 2006 when she searched the word “sunset” on the image hosting website, Flickr and found 541,795 pictures of sunsets. Cropping the suns from the pictures, she displayed a large grid of printed copies, a practice she continues. Each time the work is displayed publicly she re-titles it to reflect the number of “sunset” search results on Flickr for the day she prints the piece, “the title itself becoming a comment on the ever increasing use of web-based photo communities, and a reflection of the ubiquity of pre-scripted collective content there.”

TVs from Craigslist, are images of the screens of TVs for sale on Craigslist that Umbrico down-loads, crops and prints. The surfaces of the television screens subtly reflect the sellers and their

Cassandra C. Jones, Wax and Wane (video still), 2007

personal spaces, revealing glimpses into the private lives of the anonymous owners. She observes, “These unconsidered images almost seem like pleas for atten-tion. If you look closely you can find, hidden in them, little gestures of private exposure to the great anony-mous ‘out there.’ I isolate the site of these gestures to expose the promise, and ultimate absence, of intimacy that the Internet fosters.”

There are interesting formal and conceptual relation-ships between Umbrico’s TV screens and Gregg’s album pages: both comprise arrangements of dark rectangu-lar forms, contain spatial ambiguity, and reference the idea of the photograph as a visual auto-biography or self-portrait. These works also convey an intrinsic sense of mystery and remind us of Susan Sontag’s advice to look at the surface and then to feel what might lie beyond it.

Her advice is especially relevant for vernacular photography. Because the viewer lacks the con-text of the original “picture taker” there is always a distance that separates the two, and the artists in Picture Takers operate within this gap, helping us to fill the space between reality and photographic image. When we look at anonymous wedding portraits or ubiquitous sunset snap-shots, we never really see a true picture; removed from the original contexts we can only guess at their full meanings. They may prompt memories, thoughts and longings surrounding our own experiences of weddings and sunsets, or lead us to invent new stories.

As Sontag noted, it is this very inability of photographs to “explain anything” that makes them “inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy.” In this sense it empowers the viewer receiving the invitation. One might argue that the “multiple meanings” Sontag ascribed to every photograph include those that originate in the memory and imagination of the viewer. Perhaps what is most fascinating about other people’s pictures is what they reveal about us.

Unless otherwise noted, quotes are from artists’ statements or conversations with the author.

Penelope Umbrico, image 0-64-2f-2.jpg (from the series TVs from Craigslist)

artists

Untitled 36, 2009

Paul Chiappe

Yearbook Series III, 2011

Willie Cole

Diviners 2, 2012Diviners 1, 2012

Anne-Karin Furunes

Portraits of Archive Pictures, III, 2011

Joy Garnett

Sploosh, 2010

Album No. 16 (detail), 2009

Gail Gregg

Album No. 1, 2008

Diana Jensen

Baton Rouge Polaroids 1, 2011

Cassandra C. Jones

Lightning Drawing, Overlapping, 2011 Lightning Drawing, Fluid, 2012

Lightning Drawing, Fractured, 2012 Lightning Drawing, Feathered, 2011 Lightning Drawing, Looped, 2012

Whitfield LovellKin XLVII (Rimshot), 2011

Kin VI (Nobody), 2008 Kin XXIII (Dance or Die), 2008

Penelope Umbrico

image 0-57.jpg (from the series TVs from Craigslist)

TVs from Craigslist, 2008-2011

Aaron Williams

Untitled (Alps), 2012

exhibition checklist

Anne-Karin FurunesPortraits of Archive Pictures, III, 2011Acrylic painted canvas, perforated63 x 88 ¼ inchesCourtesy of Barry Friedman Ltd., New York, NY

Joy GarnettRose, 2010Oil on canvas48 x 60 inches

Sploosh, 2010Oil on canvas54 x 60 inches

All works courtesy of the artist and Winkleman Gallery, New York, NY

Gail GreggAlbum No. 1, 2008Pastel on album pages19 ½ x 19 inches

Album No. 2, 2008 Graphite on album pages 42 ¾ x 27 ¼ inches

Album No. 9, 2009 Pastel on album pages 32 ¼ x 26 ½ inches

Album No. 10, 2009Pastel on album pages20 ¾ x 21 ¾ inches

Paul ChiappeUntitled 27, 2008Pencil and acrylic on paper1 1/10 x 1 ½ inches (image)Collection of Nate and Nancy Kacew; courtesy of Madder139, London, UK

Untitled 36, 2009Pencil and acrylic on paper1 ¾ x 2 1/3 inches (image)Collection of Deborah Goodman Davis; courtesy of Madder139, London, UK

Yearbook Series III, 2011Twenty pencil and acrylic drawings on paper5 x 4 ¼ inches (each), overall dimensions variablePrivate collection; courtesy of Madder139, London, UK

Willie ColeDiviners 1, 2012Digital print30 x 25 inches (image)

Diviners 2, 2012Digital print30 x 25 inches (image)

It Takes a Tribe, 2009Lenticular photograph33 inches (diameter)

All works courtesy of the artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York, NY

Album No. 16, 2009Graphite on album pages16 ¼ x 16 ¼ inches

Album No. 23, 2010 Pastel on album leaves 13 x 14 ¼ inches

All works courtesy of the artist and Luise Ross Gallery, New York, NY

Diana JensenBaton Rouge Polaroids 1, 2011Oil on linen12 x 24 inches

Baton Rouge Polaroids 2, 2011Oil on linen12 x 24 inches

Baton Rouge Polaroids 3, 2011Oil on linen12 x 24 inches

Baton Rouge Polaroids 5, 2011Oil on linen12 x 24 inches

Baton Rouge Polaroids 6, 2011Oil on linen12 x 24 inches

All works courtesy of the artist

Cassandra C. JonesLightning Drawing, Feathered, 2011Archival inkjet print11 x 14 inches

Lightning Drawing, Fine, 2011Archival inkjet print11 x 14 inches

Lightning Drawing, Fluid, 2012Archival inkjet print11 x 14 inches

Lightning Drawing, Fractured, 2012Archival inkjet print11 x 14 inches

Lightning Drawing, Looped, 2012Archival inkjet print11 x 14 inches

Lightning Drawing, Meandering, 2011Archival inkjet print11 x 14 inches

Lightning Drawing, Mercurial, 2011Archival inkjet print11 x 14 inches

Lightning Drawing, Overlapping, 2011Archival inkjet print11 x 14 inches

Lightning Drawing, Serrated, 2011Archival inkjet print11 x 14 inches

Lightning Drawing, Split, 2011Archival inkjet print11 x 14 inches

Wax and Wane, 2007Video4 minutes

All works courtesy of the artist and Eli Ridgway Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Whitfield LovellKin VI (Nobody), 2008Conte on paper, wooden chain30 x 22½ x 7/8 inches

Kin XXIII (Dance or Die), 2008Conte on paper, plaster and plastic wedding figurines30 x 22½ x 1 ½ inches

Kin XLVII (Rimshot), 2011Conte on paper, cardboard display advertisement30 x 22½ x ¼ inches

All works courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

Penelope UmbricoTVs from Craigslist, 2008-2011Digital c-prints on metallic Kodak paper11 x approximately 17 inches eachCourtesy of the artist and LMAKprojects, New York, NY

Aaron WilliamsUntitled (Alps), 2012Acrylic on poster, mounted on panel23 ¾ x 36 inches

Untitled (Mountain), 2012Acrylic on poster, mounted on panel35 ¾ x 24 inches

Stock Photography IV (Two Images), 2012Posters, museum board and scrap wood62 x 40 ¾ x 20 ¾ inches

All works courtesy of the artist

It is a pleasure to open our 2012-2013 exhibition season with the presentation of Picture Takers. This timely and provocative exhibition showcases an international group of ten artists who explore ideas about identity, memory and history using pictures taken by others. These artists work in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, prints, drawings and video as well as photography. Through the artists’ work, this exhibition examines our evolving relationship to the photographic image.

I am most grateful to the exhibiting artists as well as to those individuals and galleries who lent works to this exhibition. I want to particularly thank Curator Mary Birmingham who, through this exhibition, helps us expand our audiences’ knowledge and appreciation of contemporary art in all its forms. I would also like to thank our Exhibitions Manager Katie Murdock, Design & Publications Coordinator Kristin Maizenaski, Exhibition Associate Yadira Hernandez N., and my entire staff for their hard work and commitment to all that we do. I extend my special gratitude to our Board of Trustees who continue to support all of our efforts.

Marion GrzesiakExecutive Director, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

acknowledgements

Joy Garnett, Rose, 2010

Board of TrusteesRachel Weinberger, ChairJim Welch, Vice Co-ChairJohn J. DeLaney, Vice Co-ChairJay L. Ludwig, SecretarySarah Johnson, Treasurer

Patricia A. BellMarie J. CohenMillie CooperKelly J. DeereEllyn DennisonKeith C. DolinMalcolm D. KnightDavid McLeanVictor NicholsMary-Kate O’HareMitchell RadinJenny ReinhardtLacey RzeszowskiAnn SchafferLaura SchafferR. Malcolm SchwartzPamela ShipleyElizabeth F. SkolerElisa Zachary

Staff Marion Grzesiak, Executive Director

Mary Birmingham, CuratorMari D’Alessandro, Director of

Programs & CommunicationsErnie Palatucci, Director of Finance &

Operations Nancy Shannon, Director of

Development

Rupert Adams, Building Superintendent

Vanessa Batista, Studio School Manager

Fabiana Bloom, Membership & Special Events Manager

Cara Bramson, Programs Manager Shannon Cannizzaro, Exhibitions

InternJen Doninger, Customer Relations

AssociateDeborah Farley, Customer Relations

AssociateMonica Finkel, Operations Manager

Founding VisionaryWilliam B. Nicholson

Honorary TrusteesSally AbbottShirley Aidekman-KayeVirginia Fabbri Butera, Ph.D.Millie CooperElizabeth C. GumpMarion NicholsonJoseph R. RobinsonRoland WeiserSue Welch

Jennifer Graham-Macht, Exhibitions Intern

Yadira Hernandez N., Exhibitions Associate

Bruce Lyons, Communications & Marketing Manager

Kristin Maizenaski, Design & Publications Coordinator

Amber Nelson, Studio School Associate

Alice Mateychak, Customer Relations Associate

Teresa Mendez, Customer Relations Associate

Katherine Murdock, Exhibitions Manager

Leon Norris, CustodianMara Norris, CustodianLisa Owens, Customer Relations

AssociateBarbara Smith, Registrar Pat Tiedeman, AccountantLan Wei, Bookkeeper

Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

Major support for the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey is provided in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The Horizon Foundation of New Jersey, the WJS Foundation, Audrey & Zygi Wilf and the Wilf Family Foundation, and Art Center members and donors. To learn more about Art Center programs, visit our website at www.artcenternj.org or call 908.273.9121.

68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ 07901908.273.9121www.artcenternj.org

Gallery HoursMonday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Friday: 10 am – 5 pmThursday: 10 am – 8 pmSaturday & Sunday: 11 am – 4 pm

Cover ImageAnne-Karin Furunes, Portraits of Archive Pictures, III (detail)

ColophonDesign by Kristin MaizenaskiPrinted by Prestige Color

© 2012, Visual Arts Center of New JerseyISBN: 978-0-925915-42-9