Slow and Cranky

I like the site The Creative Independent, usually a lot of good food thought in the realm of “just keep at it”. Today’s interview with Richard Kern started out that way and I like this quote:

We’re going to take some pictures later. We have something to do today. We’re going to have fun. We have a purpose. We’re going to do something. It was always a reason to do something. That holds true to this minute for me. We’re not going to just sit around and look at Instagram. We’re going to go and actually do something.

Then you get into the weeds and realize all the garden variety stuff emerges that one can rail about: the male gaze, shooting rock stars for power and money (so over that!), the standard issue drug addiction that evolved into photographing porn. A continuation of documenting young girls (at this point much more than) half his age, still. I didn’t get the feeling he’d learned much from any of it, that there is any indication this work had been transformative for him. I am left more depressed than inspired for sure. I don’t even want to post any photos of his work, I don’t feel any of this brings much new to the table.

I do like the idea of doing anything besides being on Instagram. I miss blogs and the voice of the slower world out there that I am trying to half-heartedly do something about. There has to be more to life than what is currently offered as the gold standard of being on this planet.

I think I will go look at some Jean-Luc Mylayne photographs to cheer me up this morning.

Jean-Luc Mylayne, No 320°, Avril May 2005

The photos of Soichi Sunami at Cascadia Art Museum

Just back from the little museum that could, Cascadia located in Edmonds. An absolutely gorgeous photography exhibit is currently the main attraction, showcasing the work by photographer Soichi Sunami who I had not heard of before stepping foot into the show today. The exhibit is appropriately titled Invocation of Beauty, The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami.

Cascadia focuses on artists who were here in the Pacific Northwest in the early part of the 20th century. The curation places an emphasis on giving the art a historical context, so there is always a local history lesson to be had too.

Soichi Sunami was born in Japan and came to Seattle in 1907 at the age of 22. His stunning gelatin silver prints are elegant and evocative reminders how sophisticated and intellectual the dance and art world could be in that era spanning the late 1920s to early 1940s.

He was known locally at the time as a member of the Seattle Camera Club where “in 1920, with the art museums yet established in Seattle, the local department store Frederick & Nelson sponsored a photography salon” -1

At that time he was working for the  Ella E. McBride Studio which is how he started documenting the visiting dancers who came through the region. Subsequently a large portion of his most acclaimed work focused on portraits of modern dancers. 

There are dramatic images of such greats as the dancer/ choreographer Martha Graham, who I was unaware spent a year teaching at Cornish College here in Seattle in 1930.

Sunami moved to New York City where eventually worked for The Museum of Modern Art as their internal photographer (from 1930 until 1968) a position that kept him safe from internment during World War II

It was also in New York that he met author Anais Nin, and become the photographer for many of the cover for her books. At this point again I ask, why am I unaware of him having spent a large part of my 20s reading all of The Nin Diaries.

Here is Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter Pegeen and husband painter Jean Hélion.

Photos from when he was at the Museum of Modern Art line one wall, then rounding the corner you are pulled back to a poetic photograph of Mount Rainier seen from the vantage point that you yourself have witnessed from living here.

It is hard to express how consistently lovely the photos are as one looks around the exhibit from wall to wall.

Cascadia has also given room to video clips of a handful of modern dances he photographed as added context to his work. 

The exhibit coincides with the publication of a book of the same name by Cascadia Curator David F. Martin, an art historian who has been a long running champion of our regional artists.

Invocation of Beauty, The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami has been published by the University of Washington press.

Cascadia Art Museum is located in Edmonds, WA
They are open Wednesday – Sunday: 11am-6pm
Art Walk Edmonds: Third Thursdays, 5-8pm  – FREE

I was unaware of this institution until recently. They opened in 2015 in a building that used to be a Safeway grocery store and then an antique mall. They are genuine in their championing of local artists and are taking their job as cultural historians quite seriously.

The Sunami exhibit is on view through January 6th. -2
Free parking is ample in Edmonds.

Here is the Everett Herald’s Review of the Exhibit.

Seattle Time’s piece on Curator David F. Martin.

 

Footnotes:

1- Invocation of Beauty, The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunamipage 21

2- This is a total aside but after pondering it for a bit the imagery in this exhibit reminds me of the 1928 movie the Passion of Joan of Arc by director Carl Theodor Dreyer.

 

For some reason this is my favorite from the exhibit, it strangely could have been taken today:

Georgetown Galleries – November

Visiting art galleries is usually a means to inspiration for me and today was a good one in Georgetown.

I wasn’t going to miss the closing of Kim Van Someren’s exhibit and artist talk at Bridge Productions and I’m really glad I made it there. Kim’s discussion was facilitated by her friend and fellow artist Emily Gherard, a pair who have a long history together. Both are artists who place an importance on mark-making in their work, executed in very different manners though.

A few takeaways from Kim’s talk:
She has a deeply entrenched respect for printmaking that she feels she will always be with her. She emphasized it is important to her to have a skill that involves using her hands if electricity goes away. I’m paraphrasing poorly, but that is something I absolutely think about all the time. What endures in our culture if electricity and our digital world go away, essentially collapse? Our reliance on something so fragile as the electric grid seems tenuous at best. She asterisked her comment saying well she would be able to do printmaking in daylight hours at least.

Double Half Hitch, sugarlift, aquatint, 18″ x 15″2018

The topic I most appreciated hearing them discuss was about the planning her studio time. She is now a Mom to twins (three years olds) and has a printmaking job at the University of Washington. How does one find the ability (and energy) to put together a show like the one that was installed around us in the gallery one wonders.

She stated she found she has to really hone in and take advantage of any quiet time (a rarity) and to be very disciplined. She spends 2-3 hours every day after teaching running prints in the studio at the University. Then from 10-1p every night she intricately assembles her pieces. Cutting collages, looking at compositions of different parts of her work from photos she takes, downloading and rearranging imagery on her computer and making micro decisions about what belongs where is all part of her practice She is currently learning how to weld as it was mentioned her work feels like it is growing off of the paper. I personally think artists need to challenge themselves with new materials to keep their internal search mechanisms and curiosity sharp, so that was exciting to hear. I hope we (the public) are privy to the results.

It was lovely to be privy to the back and forth between Kim and Emily, both whose work I heavily admire. I appreciated hearing the contemplative nature of what is behind the artwork, how humor seeps into the imagery and the query of did her midwest background have anything to do with her execution (yes).

The funniest thing Kim said was that printmakers are the serial killers of the art world as they are always strategizing, a hilarious aside.

As I mentioned this was the closing for Kim’s exhibit. Follow Bridge Productions at their website and on Instagram. Kim is here and here.

A snippet of her gorgeous work:

 


The Alice across the hall from Bridge Productions has a fiber-cross-pollination-one-person-show up of Jeanne Medina. I always appreciate seeing fiber arts creep into galleries and being taken seriously. She also uses performance heavily in her final work. There was a video example in the Alice of her wearing one of the pieces on the wall.

Here is a video example I found on her website appropriately titled for this weekend Daylight Savings Project that utilizes Laurie Anderson’s Walking and Falling (from Big Science) as a backdrop.

Daylight Savings Project from John Lui on Vimeo.

Here are installation shots of the show:

  The exhibit is up through November 17th. The Alice is here and Jeanne is here.

 

Finally I ended my day by driving five minutes and stopping by Studio E Gallery where I happened upon the closing of Molly Magai’s painting exhibit (which I liked and was too busy absorbing to document).

Her work, which I was unfamiliar with, has a certain kinship with Portland’s Michael Brophy whose landscapes I have admired for many years. I’m a sucker for painterly execution and her work demonstrates that beautifully while sitting on that fine line between representation and abstraction. She states, “I paint the landscape in motion, as we usually see it, from our cars“.  Sadly that’s how I witness most nature these days. I should add she works on somewhat tiny rectangles of canvas which I was pretty drawn to for the amount of visual information she managed to insert into each one. I’m glad I stopped in to see the show.

Molly Magai, Playground Cedar, 12 x 12 in., Oil on panel, 2018

Upstairs there was a one day pop-up of Michael Doyle’s work. If I use the word whimsical you’re going to groan and after saying it I think it is possibly inaccurate but that’s the first thing that popped into my head when I entered the room. I also was said out loud “I love it”, so make what you want of that. I thoroughly enjoyed the portraits and head cut-outs on display.

Studio E is here, Molly Magai is here and Michael Doyle is here.

Studio E. lived true to their welcoming offering of coffee, nice conversation and a warm reprieve from the traffic and rain outside before I got back on 99 and headed home. A good day was had.

The People’s Voice

After reading two trashings of the new Bjork Exhibit at MoMA, something from 3000 miles away that has penetrated my radar, I had to remind myself that the two voices were the famous and married art critics Smith (NYTimes) and Saltz (New York Magazine).

Here is a fascinating 2013 interview with them in Interview Magazine on their working style (no they don’t share notes) and they go to an incredible amount of art exhibits each week.  What was most interesting to me here is Jerry’s commentary on his own sensibility:

 I was looking at Artforum every month. Then, as now, it would just scare the hell out of me. I didn’t really understand much of what was written in there. It was a foreign tongue to me. And I realized that if I were to be a writer, I would never want to be that kind of writer—not that there’s anything wrong with it—but I wanted to be a writer for somebody. I wanted to be understood by anyone who would possibly pick up my work in a dentist’s office and say, “Oh, I think I understand what this guy is talking about.” I wanted people to know when I was wrong and that they could come at me and that I would be radically vulnerable. People would be able criticize me as much as they could criticize an artist. Then I would be as out there, open, and vulnerable as an artist was when they showed their work. So I started teaching myself to write, and I was terrible, just terrible. I learned what anyone who writes knows—writing is hell. You can’t listen to music. You’re always having to read stuff that you can’t understand. It was just awful.

And that explains why I am so much more inclined to read Jerry first before anyone else if I am trying to decipher what is currently going on in that fine city. I am still not sure if he completely translates to the dentist office, but I appreciate his intent.  As an aside he was recently dismissed from Facebook temporarily but is a whole other ball of wax.

There is also some take down on his stint as the art critic on the massively heinous reality TV show Work of Art, which Saltz states was bad TV but a positive experience personally:

I wanted to see if I could perform art criticism to a very wide audience. And the experience was phenomenal.

Anyway, a bit convoluted about what I am getting at here, still trying to figure out if artspeak translates to the “real” world at all.

Here’s another bad review  of the Bjork exhibit to add to the pig-pile via AV club. And they told two friends and so on and so on.

Sheila Farr

Thank you Seattle Met and who ever made the decision a couple of years ago to hire Sheila Farr to write about art again.

 

Here she is in fine form in this piece about Francine Seders: Francine Seders, Accidental Art Dealer.  francine-seders_e9h3ve Photo credit Seattle Met/Brandon Hill From the article:

Then in her 30s, Seders still looked as fresh-faced and candid as a schoolgirl. With her high heels and lilting French accent, she was appealingly mediagenic. One local reporter described her as “dark eyed and fragile…like a figure from a Degas painting.” A bit reserved with strangers, she was still more comfortable around artists than customers who needed to be coddled and convinced. In a business known for competitiveness, calculated maneuvering, and backroom deals, Seders was straightforward and transparent. If someone asked about the future value of a painting (akin to predicting the stock market), she’d answer bluntly: “I have no idea.” She cared about the art, not the ingratiating rituals of salesmanship.

More Farr /Met archives here.  

Farr was the Seattle Times art critic from roughly 2000-2008 (her sign off here)/(her favorite pieces here).

Notes from an ICP visit: Kiki Smith

Ding dong the witch is dead, which old witch, the wicked witch!

Here I sit in the side cafeteria/cafe/school lunch room on the bottom floor of International Center of Photography’s main branch. I am sipping on my really delicious and oh so worth it $1 and 90 cent coffee. Mmmm.

Okay, I have just come to see the Hans Bellmer show, which unfortunately I find a might bit boring. Why all the buckle shoes? And the bows. A little too much German sensibility for my tastes. To be fair this era (1930s and 40s) has been covered so much before, I have lost my interest in picking apart the sexual/political overtones of that time.

There is an photo he took of a human head wearing a bird cage, which immediately brought to mind the famous photo of Anais Nin dressed in the same manner. Maybe she saw the photo and decided to make her costume for that “Come As Your Madness” party she went to. My problem is I read too much Anais in my 20’s and then bookended it all with that Deirdre Bair biography where she kind of let the cat out of the bag. Yeah, how did Anais live so wonderfully and charmingly on her little houseboat? Her husband paid for it! The one she never mentioned. Oh.

Kiki Smith : Telling Tales

At any rate, the other two shows at ICP I enjoyed a lot more. First off, I found it nice that the International Center for Photography let Kiki Smith install not only photos, but her sculptures, videos and drawings as well. Working with 3 intermixed fairy tale themes,she also uses doll imagery,(yes), like Hans Bellmer, but I personally found her take on it a lot more engaging. The first thing you see as you enter the gallery is series of poisonous black apples that are nice and wicked. Smith has always had a certain organic quality circulating throughout her work, and the photos shown here are a natural extension to what she has previously done. The exhibit is titled Telling Tales.

The other show, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together,1840-1918 gathers daguerreotypes, tin types and other photos from the mid 1800’s. The photos documenting male friendships from the Victorian era are almost alarming in their show of intimacy. The very tender depictions of (now anonymous) friendships are surprising, and in this day and age, very refreshing.
For myself it was a very interesting window into how acceptable behavior in our society has changed,and how social norms have shifted over the course of time. I think people would now be far too self-conscious to shine through a photo with such genuineness.
Of course you have to take into consideration our conception of photography, and why you would be posing for a portrait has undoubtedly changed in the past 150 years. It was lovely though to see such a comfortableness depicted between people,especially considering the Victorian age brings the word “stuffiness” immediately to mind. This small but very interesting gathering of photo documents was a wonderful surprise to find out about.

So, there you go. There was much to take in at ICP Midtown. I like knowing now that they are open late on Friday nights and offer a “pay-as-you wish” program. My coffee cost more than my admission.

Here is a nice review of Kiki Smith’s work in the show, unfortunately the photos have disappeared since I viewed them yesterday.