The Drawing Board

An excerpt from her interview with Humble Arts on her Solo show:

“JF: Without reducing you to a specific “school” of photography, you seem to be in company with a generation of young photographers interested in the physical process of photography, yet your work also deals with larger issues/metaphors related to illusion, performance and perception. Do you see your work being in dialog with that of say Jessica Eaton, Sam Falls, or Lucas Blalock? How do you see it standing apart? Do you see a dialog between early photographers like Man Ray as well? What do you think spawned this rebirth of process driven work?

JL: Photography is evolving as a medium, and things that were once uniquely photographic are now being questioned. I believe that the prevalence of process-oriented photography is a response to the saturation and ease of digital technologies. I don’t think that photographers are necessarily reacting against the digital technologies; more that we are inspired by the creative potentials new technology is opening up. There is a feeling of freedom to appropriate techniques from other mediums, as well as looking to the past for more tactile approaches to photography. The popularity of photograms and collage are good examples of this. I also think elaborate and complicated photographic processes are a way for artists to slow things down. Everything moves with such speed in our lives, creating works that require the investment of hours of labor seem to be a way to counteract this.

Continue reading →

There are two artists I am looking at right now that both excite me and are influencing the direction of my work: Jan Dibbets and Spencer Finch. Jan Dibbets currently has a show up at Gladstone Gallery titled “New Horizons”. After going through a two year stint of focusing on photographing horizon lines, I immediately related to this exhibit on a personal level. The show is comprised of two photos matched up in various ways by the horizon and cropped into various geometric shapes that create a formalistic harmony throughout the series.

Taken from the press release:

“For this new body of work entitled “New Horizons,” Dibbets returns to the optical structure that has become his hallmark. As Erik Verhagen says in his recent study of Dibbets’ oeuvre, “The horizon is not a subject like other subjects, for it exists only through and in relation to our sense of sight.” It is objective and subjective, circular and rectilinear, static and mobile. In these photographs, which conjoin different photographs of a landscape and seascape along the line of the horizon, Dibbets channels it as structuring principle, not only determining space and point of view, but also—in a very painterly way—the composition itself. By subordinating the mobility of the camera to the standardization of a straight line, these panoramas create a subtle tension between the seamlessness of the horizon line and the disjunction of land and sea, only further accentuated by the resulting asymmetrical compositions.”

Sea-Land C/B1, 2007 Two unique color photographs mounted on mat board with graphite; 26 1/4 x 61 1/8 inches (66.7 x 155.3 cm) framed

Land-Sea AB3, 2007 Two unique color photographs mounted on mat board with graphite; 40 7/8 x 56 inches (103.8 x 142.2 cm) framed

Continue reading →