In: art
Lauren E. Simonutti | 1968 – 2012
July 25, 2024LAUREN E. SIMONUTTI | 1968 – 2012
It is somewhat at a remove, but no less sad, to mourn the passing of a person whose artwork comes into your purview and you find it enticing and uncanny and unsettling in the best way ― and then you find out that they passed some time ago. There won’t be anything more than what is already there, and there is a finality there – even a loss, perhaps, though it’s oddly ‘retroactive’, though that word seems inexact – that adds a further tinge of sadness.
Simonutti passed at the age of 44 : her struggle with schizophrenia ‘consumed her until she torn from life’ (to quote one of the many online testimonials to her).
A number of Simonutti’s evocative images appeared in my social media feed, and that led me to research a bit more, and become enamoured of her haunting photographs. Perhaps that’s a dangerous word – ‘haunting’ – to use : she passed over a decade ago, and her images still proliferate appropriately, but there’s that notion of what is left behind and lingers…like a ghost. If you believe in such things, that is.
These are powerful images, and have even more to consider in that the artist died so young, and struggled with mental illness. Often, as a critic, I wonder if my words add more or simply distract : when considering writing about her work, this was a concern, and so I thought it best – most appropriate – to present them with the more resonant words of others that engage in a dialogue with the photos, perhaps in unison, perhaps in a contested manner.
I will say very little, but will try to be like Bruno LaTour’s assertions about what an art critic should be, and try to simply offer a bit of direction while not being overt and overbearing….
Simonutti, in speaking of her life and work, was unapologetic and frank about her struggles with mental illness. When I read her words, I was reminded of one of my favourite statements about ‘sanity’ (it comes from G. K. Chesterton, whom I have mixed feelings about, but I became familiar with it from Timothy Findley’s fine book HEADHUNTER – which I cite below – so I feel Findley’s empathy overrides Chesterton’s smug catholic ‘knowing’…) :
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.
The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
This was where Marlow began the treatment of every patient.
I also thought of Findley’s HEADHUNTER for an exchange between Doctor Marlow and the sister of one of his patients. They’re discussing how Marlow wants Olivia’s permission to discharge her sister Amy, who is an award winning, acclaimed poet but also suffers from bouts of schizophrenia :
Olivia who had been faithful in her visits—and had seen Amy twice a week—said: “But she hasn’t been cured.”
Marlow said: “She will never be cured, Mrs. Price. Never. As a consequence, we have two choices. We can opt for one Amy or another.”
“One or another?”
“One of them—assuming we can adjust her medication successfully—would spend the rest of her life in a drugged condition that would amount, in effect, to sedation. This Amy would have no poems, no birds, no Wormwood [her cat], no other world but the dead world out there now—and she would be incapable of responding to it. It would simply be a landscape through which she moved— deadened, uncaring and uninvolved.”
“And the other Amy?”
“The other Amy would have a minimum of medication. Only enough to reduce the extremities of her anxiety. She would be a slightly less tense version of the Amy we have now.”
Olivia looked from the window. “What would become of her?” she said.
“She could go home to her house—and be with her birds.”
“But—dear God. Doesn’t freedom put her in jeopardy?”
“Not in my view, no,” said Marlow. “It would give Amy back the only life in which she can function—in which she is happy.”
“What about her writing?”
“There is every chance this Amy would continue to produce poetry. After all, the Amy who wrote in the past was very nearly the Amy we have.”
An excerpt of Simonutti’s own insightful and almost painfully self aware words :
This is a visual narrative of an unexpected & devastating situation in which I find myself, which also is relevant to the lives of many others. It’s just not often spoken about.
Madness strips things down to their core. It takes everything, and in exchange offers more madness, and the occasional ability to see things that are not there.
I’ve selected a number of Simonutti’s images below to share, with my ‘speaking in collage’ to accompany them. I have attempted to find a synchronicity between the tableaux the artist has presented, and the titles and words she chose to accompany them.
You can explore those at the main post here.
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Emmanuel Georges | America Rewind
July 16, 2024Emmanuel Georges | America Rewind
I am making final edits on this article on the evening of the day of the incident where Trump was shot at, at a Reichsparteitag in Butler, Pennsylvania. I’ll offer no further commentary on this, as at the time of this writing, rumours and partisan commentary is moving at a speed faster than light, and all I can think of is the Reichstag ‘fire’…..that is the disclaimer I offer, before we proceed.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It is nigh impossible to consider Georges’ images and solely ‘read’ them as a commentary on the ‘American Dream’ and not be overwhelmed with how it’s a visual essay that is part of contemporary dialogue about the fate, if you will, of the United States, even if some of the images are over a decade old.
When I began considering this series, I was impressed with the way the photographs both inspired and intersected with socio – historical commentaries on the United States. Some of these are older, like de Tocqueville, or Howard Zinn‘s fine People’s History series (I will even admit to revisiting Eric Hobsbawm, and in a peripheral manner rereading parts of Margaret MacMillan’s Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World). But others are more immediate, like Morris Berman‘s series on the United States that seemed to resonate the most with Georges’ images and intent.
And living in the Niagara region, or as a Canadian (though I suspect this applies to most people in the world observing) watching the decline of the American Empire with a front row seat (whether we want it or not, like attending a play where you might get splashed by the king’s blood when MacBeth does him in) we consider our Southern neighbour and their national imaginary as much, if not more, than our own….
Unlike some of the previous photographers featured – Jordano, Fairbairn, Green, many others – these scenes that Georges has presented us seem more sterile, more abandoned, less about a #rustbeltwonderland or ‘ruin porn’ aesthetic but are about actual ruination and catastrophe without an aesthetic barrier. Also a contrasting factor to when I respond to many artists, especially photographers, I feel that with Georges’ images I have so much to say, so many threads to pull together because of not just the evocative nature of his work but also the subject matter he’s exploring, that any words I say will inadvertently miss something important. Perhaps because I see Georges’ images as much as a historical document as they are art….
The words of Gore Vidal, whose commentary on ‘America’ was often clear if caustic, also came to mind : The world Julian wanted to preserve and restore is gone; the barbarians are at the gate. Yet when they breach the wall, they will find nothing of value to seize, only empty relics. The spirit of what we were has fled.
Amusingly – or more bleakly, edit as you will – that quote is from Vidal’s ‘bestseller about the fourth-century Roman emperor who famously tried to halt the spread of Christianity’ : that failed, of course. To quote another writer (putting words into the mouth of Caesar Augustus) “there are two futures, you see. Two ways it could go. In one future, the Romans sputter and flare like Greek fire, last a few hundred years and are gone — eaten from outside by barbarians, from inside by strange gods….”
Those bleak words of Vidal (and Neil Gaiman) mesh with the statement about the photographs from the artist :
Traveling across the United States, the French photographer Emmanuel Georges went in search of the American dream.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Georges’s recurring motifs—decaying façades of industrial buildings, garages, motels, movie theaters—become iconic images of American urban landscapes. Profoundly permeated by an omnipresent sense of melancholy, the empty streets, old cars, and abandoned gas stations are testimony to the end of the American dream.
I mentioned Morris Berman above. He’s written several books about the contemporary socio political sphere – specifically focused on decline – in the United States, with the most recent one being ominously titled Dark Ages America The Final Phase of Empire. It was published several years before Georges began his America Rewind series, so the current atmosphere in the United States is not surprising nor unpredictable to those paying attention and with a sense of history….
Berman’s words :
[Noam] Chomsky and [Michael] Moore would, metaphorically speaking, say that we have been raped by the corporate-consumerist-military establishment, but I suspect it was more like a seduction: if this was sex, it was definitely consensual.
We are in a state of advanced cultural disintegration, or what might be termed spiritual death. Given the emptiness, alienation, violence, and ignorance that are now pervasive in this country, it is hard to imagine where a recovery would come from. The self-correction theory is at least partly based on the popular reaction of an informed citizenry. In this regard, the nature of the American populace today is not a source of inspiration or hope.
In a bit of synchronicity, as I was working on this I was also having a conversation with Juliana D’Intino about her Connecting Rods work (which I’ve previously written about here). We were having a conversation about trying to create works and foster a conversation that is not just ‘ruin porn’ but that speaks to larger issues of social history and – as with Georges’ images – what is now lost, and likely never to be regained or recreated….
This raised the issue of the challenge when the aesthetic pleasure invoked by an image is in stark contrast to the concepts that inspired it. When I first encountered Emmanuel Georges’ America Rewind, I had this same concern. As I often do, I found the ‘right’ words by speaking in the voice of others, and I’ll end with a quote that I shared when I first reshared some of this artist’s images in the social media sphere. These are the thoughts of one of the characters in Atwood’s The Robber Bride, who is an historian with an affinity for choosing unique places to stand in considering the past:
Who cares? Almost nobody. Maybe it’s just a hobby, something to do on a dull day. Or else it’s an act of defiance: these histories may be ragged and threadbare, patched together from worthless leftovers, but to her they are also flags, hoisted with a certain jaunty insolence, waving bravely though inconsequentially, glimpsed here and there through the trees, on the mountain roads, among the ruins, on the long march into chaos.
I have selected a less positive place to stand than Atwood’s character : perhaps I am feeling my age, or not. But I am thinking of the T.S. Eliot line (from The Wasteland) of these fragments I have shored against my ruins…..For you know only a heap of broken images.
Many more images from this series – and more of Georges artwork – can be seen here.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Barry Smith | What’s Your Stance? | 2024
June 29, 2024Barry Smith | What’s Your Stance? | 2024
Barry Smith’s exhibition What’s Your Stance? was on view at Mahtay Café & Lounge in downtown St. Catharines for the majority of the month of May 2024 and into early June. Smith’s exhibition was the 18th in my continuing series of shows in the space platforming visual artists of the Niagara Region that is soon to mark two years.
Smith is not – on social media or in life – shy about his own ‘stance’ and his own political views. I’ve known him for most of my time in Niagara, and the exhibition is a series of images of photographers taking photos that Smith has captured in the act. There’s a voyeurism to the work, but the nature of the installation in the downtown St. Catharines space also allows play and interaction between the ‘characters’ as they seem to be taking pictures of each other, or are looking at people and events unknown and unseen to us.
Smith’s statement : Everyone has their opinions. Whether it be in the social, political or religious sphere. Some are based on fact, some on faith, and some are emotional due to personal experiences, education and (sadly) social media.
We all have a point of view. Some are balanced, conservative or outright risky.
I see this in the way people take photographs. Some are amateurs, some hobbyists and others are professional – but everyone has their own stance.
What’s your stance?
To say we live in a time when contention and division between peoples’ respective stances is intense is an understatement. Smith, for example, is a vocal advocate for Palestine and against the ongoing genocide perpetuated by the state of Israel and her enablers on the international scene. In our shared community – and many, many others – this is a ‘stance’ many of us see as being a default one, while others choose to stand somewhere else….
I often see things – I choose to stand, in my interpretation – through the lens of the art world, both in Canada (that imaginary nation we live in) and the larger international discourses within that sphere.
With the current situation in the Middle East, fractures – splits that expose or exacerbate hypocrisy – are becoming harder to deny. The termination of Wanda Nanibush from her position at the AGO, for example, spearheaded by someone who will allude to how art should have a social conscience and challenge us, but ‘just not that way’, or more exactly NOT in a way they ‘disagree’ with is a fine example.
I’d offer another : as many of you know, I spent nearly two decades in Saskatchewan, a place rife with racism regarding Indigenous and Settler relations. I was deeply amused – and not surprised at all – at the hypocrisy of someone I had the lamentable experience to work with in the ARC spaces publishing an article with Galleries West, decrying what he saw as ‘rising antisemitism’ in the international art world. This same person was instrumental in attempting to silence and blackball me when I published numerous factual articles about the institutional racism at his employer, the University of Saskatchewan, and I thought when I saw his blinkered whining that perhaps he had begun to see that dehumanizing others is not something that can be contained to one space, and bleeds into others, especially when you legitimize it for your own ideology, thinking it is ‘unique.’
Recently I read an engaging article from ArtForum about the rise in protests in museums and in gallery spaces and the writer – Charlotte Kent – offered a number of ideas and writers that I’ve been researching since I read the piece about how cultural spaces are stakeholders and often consistent – if not eager – manufacturers of alibis for the status quo, whether that status quo be that only one ‘type’ of art is ‘actually art’ or that some people and ideas are simply a denkverbot (to paraphrase Žižek) : of them, ‘we’ are ‘prohibited to speak.’
But, as Kent asserts ‘Museums [and by extension what fills them, as art] have never not been political.’
…I suspect I told you more about ‘my stance’ with that tangential response to Smith’s work than about his work, but I also suspect Smith would be comfortable with that, in that I ‘answered’ his question.
Born in Scotland and raised in Niagara, Barry Smith has always had a flair for humour and wit which he often employs in the titles of his photographs and his compositions. A self taught photographer, Smith has found his own unique photographic style and approach, concerned with using natural light. Smith’s photographs come to life like a fresh painting on canvas.
A past St. Catharines Art Award nominee, Smith’s pictures can be found on display throughout Niagara at various art shows and galleries.
What’s Your Stance? A Selection of Photographs by Barry Smith was on view at Mahtay Café & Lounge in downtown St. Catharines in the Spring of 2024.
You can see more of his work at his IG here.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Lowell Shaver | Process
April 12, 2024Dave Green | Self portrait in the window of the Greenwood Cemetery chapel, Owen Sound, 2024
‘Time is nothing. We have our memory. In memory there is no time. I will hold you in my memory.
And you, maybe you will remember me too.’
(J.M. Coetzee, The Pole)
There is a Salvatore DiFalco quality to Dave Green’s photographs. It’s not just the scenes he presents us, but also the deep almost oily blacks and the grain of the film in many of his photographs. There is a physicality to these scenes, even when seen online : unsurprising, as he’s a photographer who is all about the photographic print and not just within the digital milieu of the present day, that has both its advantages and failings….
DiFalco is a writer and literary critic : I first encountered his fiction in a Canadian literary magazine in the early 2000s and this inspired me to seek out his book of short stories Black Rabbit & Other Stories.
These are urban stories, gritty snapshots of people who are frequently flawed and even, perhaps, a bit repellent. They take place in Toronto or Hamilton or even my own territory of the rust belt wonderland of Niagara, and several memorable ones that are situated in the latter two sites are as engaging as they are grotesque. The characters that inhabit DiFalco’s Black Rabbit (from Stories or Outside or Rocco or Alicia) could also populate some of the scenes that Green presents to us. Green’s work is not quite so dire or dour, nor quite as nihilistic, but his photographs do intersect with DiFalco’s world, whether literally (in his choice of places or his on the cuff captures of his immediate world) or through implication, with the unembellished frankness of Green’s photographs.
Death is also close in DiFalco’s stories : and the image that spurred this response to Green’s work – Self portrait in the window of the Greenwood Cemetery chapel, Owen Sound, 2024 – also speaks to an affinity, if not a comfort, with stark endings and perhaps remembrance, perhaps not.
[gallery link="file" size="medium" ids="5984,5985,5986"]
From the artist’s site : Dave Green was born in Toronto (1963), Ontario and grew up in the small Southern Ontario city of Owen Sound. In the early 1980s he moved back to Toronto to study photography at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University). He has worked as a house painter, a fibreglass worker, a photography technician and as an educator. He served as an instructor of photography at Ryerson’s Chang School of Continuing Education and has taught photography to youth affected by violence. He has travelled extensively throughout Canada, the United States and Europe, always with a camera.
The words of LP Farrell, from the introduction to Green’s book Personal (Dumagrad Books, 2017):
Looking at some of these photographs now, the prescience startles and the storefront facade windows, the tired barren highways, the sombre diners seem less a lament or nostalgic yearning for a different time, which is what I thought back then, than a crystal ball, sometimes literally reflecting, but often revealing a life marked by deep solitude. It is as though Dave saw, understood and then showed us what would happen to us all before life hit. Dave Green has photographed a world already disappearing like a picture not quite fixed, time remorseless and unrelenting. Time doing its thing.
———————————————————
This is a book of contrasts, the tension in the dialogue a whisper. Look here: youthful lust and yearning, women and lovers juxtaposed with landscapes busted and stripped down. Lust is a counterpoint to dilapidation. The tang of tungsten light in cavernous bars and then a street lamp, suddenly a votive light in a night sky over lovers like some crazy benediction. As if there was hope…
You can see more of Green’s work at his site here and his IG is here. Green is also represented by the MF Gallery.
If there is a reckoning, it is on the road. The photographer/passenger, the night and a beautiful woman at the wheel; a motorcyclist with a life garbage-bagged and strapped to the saddle of his BSA, maybe in flight. A bleak stretch of road ahead, road the arbiter. Love goes but the road always stays. Road, the redeemer.
LP Farrell, from the introduction to Green’s book Personal (2017)
They drove in silence, the landscape a work in charcoals and flaked quartz.
———–
What the fuck did he just do? He stopped running. He was out of breath.
He looked around him. He was standing nowhere.
(Salvatore DiFalco, from the short story Pink, from Black Rabbit & Other Stories)
I’ll end with how I feel an affinity for Green’s images of the rust belt wonderland : I could be looking at the streets I haunt in St. Catharines or Welland, and even the older images from the 1980s offer a run down weariness, a punky nostalgia, that I also remember from my youth in Niagara. I see echoes of Chris Killip or Tish Murtha, in the images of Dave Green as much as I see my own city, too.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Print is Not Dead | Photography That Matters ON PAPER
April 12, 2024PRINT IS NOT DEAD| PHOTOGRAPHY THAT MATTERS ON PAPER
APRIL 22, 7PM
Registry Theatre, Kitchener, ON
Tickets HERE $15 (also available at the door)
Camera sale starts at 5:30PM @londonvintagecamerashow
In a world of fast image-heavy, screen-based storytelling, why do artist still see value in slow printed photographs? Is it still possible to become a published artist/photographer in Canada? Why are these photographers still concerned with the analog world?
Join local photographers, Colin Boyd Shafer @colinboydshafer , Robin Claire Fox @robinclairefox , and Karl Griffiths-Fulton for a panel discussion hosted by photoED Magazine’s publisher Rita Godlevskis @photoedmagazine to share the pros and cons of (now) rare analog experiences.
This live, in-person discussion will NOT be recorded and will exclusively share the behind the scenes stories of IRL humans that have successfully presented their work in high-quality PRINT.
Join us to learn more about how these local folks created their legacy works, and stick around for some qualitative peer-to-peer networking, connecting, and supporting these incredible (and rare) Canadian projects.
Stick around to review these artists works on paper. Photo books and magazines will be available for sale. Support incredible local photography IN PRINT.
SPECIAL BONUS! Ron and Maureen Tucker of the LONDON VINTAGE CAMERA SHOWS will be onsite, allowing us all to ogle and purchase their quality analog cameras and accessories Sale starts at 5:30 until 6:50 and then after the panel discussion.
Presented by curated. @thecovertcollective
Want more information? DM @thecovertcollective
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Richard Misrach | The Desert Cantos series | 1979 – Present
April 22, 2024Richard Misrach | The Desert Cantos series | 1979 – Present
You look at landscape, but it’s not really landscape, it’s a symbol for our country, it’s a metaphor for our country.
(Richard Misrach speaking about The Desert Cantos)
If you’ve read my past writing, you won’t be surprised to know that I am a fan of the horror genre, both in terms of books and films. This is an underrated and often unfairly dismissed genre : not all horror is equal, of course, but that can be applied to any genre.
In Clive Barker’s film Lord of Illusions (based upon one of his short stories in the Books of Blood series), the opening sequence of the film has often been one of my favourite scenes in the occult horror tableaux. A cult with a charismatic leader who displays abilities that can only be magic is speaking to an entranced group of followers : their ‘headquarters’ is a long abandoned hotel in the California desert, overgrown and run down, a lone fragment shored against the ruins of a dream of prosperity now left unwanted and desolate, blanched and burned by the unflinching sun and sand. The establishing shots as we approach the derelict buildings are entrancing in their ruination, and the state of the cult members mirrors this sense of discarded abandonment….
If that seems somewhat ‘lowbrow’ then let us consider Cal Flynn’s book Isles of Abandoment | Life in the Post-Human Landscape and her chapter that is titled The Deluge and the Desert : Salton Sea, California, United States. This is a fine fit as many of Misrach’s images are of the fetid abomination known as the Salton Sea in Southern California.
It is a poison lake whispering sweet nothings. It promises cool succour, quenched thirst. Despite what I know of this shimmering mirage – despite the stink and the rot and the waste that surrounds it, despite the staring eyes of the dead and desiccating fish that litter its shrinking shores, despite the absence of vegetation – I can’t help but quicken my pace. I stumble through sucking mud towards this false vision, on and on until the muck is over my feet, and up to my ankles, and I am shin-deep in a warm broth that, when stirred, releases a draught so stagnant I can taste it.
Richard Misrach began this series in 1979 – nearly half a century ago – and “this ongoing project explores the southwest American desert landscape, and the impact of our human presence.” In that light, considering Misrach’s intent with this work, these images are not so much passive landscapes as active ones : these are scenes of the results of human action and remind me of my time on the Canadian Prairies and the plethora of abandoned oil wells, or the legacy of Uranium City in Saskatchewan, that speak to an attitude towards the environment that is not just an indicator of the Sixth Extinction but our unwillingness to consider the planet as something other than to be exploited and left when no longer of ‘use’, framed within a capitalist regime. As I’m engaged in my usual tangential style of criticism, I must also cite Richard Rodriguez’ essay The God of the Desert where he offers an aside that the three Abrahamic religions – being birthed in the desert – have an adversarial relationship to nature, instead of a more fostering, co dependent one….
Let us return to Clive Barker – specifically his book The Damnation Game (and considering some of the things I’ve mentioned already, citations about horror and hell may seem less forced, now. Ponder that ‘hell’ is a place we make, not a ‘place’ we ‘find’…which is perhaps what Misrach is documenting with these images) :
In a wasteland a few hundred yards from a highway overpass it finds a new incarnation: shabby, degenerate, forsaken. But here, where fumes thicken the atmosphere, minor terrors take on a new brutality.
It had once been an impressive building, and could have been again if its owners had been willing to invest in it. But the task of rebuilding and refurbishing such a large and old-fashioned hotel was probably financially unsound. Sometime in its past a fire had raged through the place, gutting the first, second and third floors before being extinguished. The fourth floor, and those above, were smoke-spoiled, leaving only the vaguest signs of the hotel’s former glamour intact.
From The International Center of Photography :
Richard Misrach was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and received a BA in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. He helped popularize large format color photography in the 1970s and 80s and is best known for Desert Cantos, his ongoing study of the American desert and man’s relation to it. The project presents a variety of images, from traditional landscapes to the space shuttle landing, which Misrach considers a singular work, with each canto acting as the equivalent of a (book) chapter heading. Misrach also works in a social documentary style, which can be seen in his Louisiana photographs of Cancer Alley, the corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In addition, he also has taken pictures of the desert sky; the Golden Gate Bridge; the beaches, water, and jungles of Hawaii; Stonehenge; and the Pyramids.
Misrach’s photographs can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
More about Richard Misrach’s photographs and aesthetic (both the Desert Cantos series and other works) can be enjoyed here and here.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Dave Green | Self portrait in the window of the Greenwood Cemetery chapel, Owen Sound, 2024
April 12, 2024Dave Green | Self portrait in the window of the Greenwood Cemetery chapel, Owen Sound, 2024
‘Time is nothing. We have our memory. In memory there is no time. I will hold you in my memory.
And you, maybe you will remember me too.’
(J.M. Coetzee, The Pole)
There is a Salvatore DiFalco quality to Dave Green’s photographs. It’s not just the scenes he presents us, but also the deep almost oily blacks and the grain of the film in many of his photographs. There is a physicality to these scenes, even when seen online : unsurprising, as he’s a photographer who is all about the photographic print and not just within the digital milieu of the present day, that has both its advantages and failings….
DiFalco is a writer and literary critic : I first encountered his fiction in a Canadian literary magazine in the early 2000s and this inspired me to seek out his book of short stories Black Rabbit & Other Stories.
These are urban stories, gritty snapshots of people who are frequently flawed and even, perhaps, a bit repellent. They take place in Toronto or Hamilton or even my own territory of the rust belt wonderland of Niagara, and several memorable ones that are situated in the latter two sites are as engaging as they are grotesque. The characters that inhabit DiFalco’s Black Rabbit (from Stories or Outside or Rocco or Alicia) could also populate some of the scenes that Green presents to us. Green’s work is not quite so dire or dour, nor quite as nihilistic, but his photographs do intersect with DiFalco’s world, whether literally (in his choice of places or his on the cuff captures of his immediate world) or through implication, with the unembellished frankness of Green’s photographs.
Death is also close in DiFalco’s stories : and the image that spurred this response to Green’s work – Self portrait in the window of the Greenwood Cemetery chapel, Owen Sound, 2024 – also speaks to an affinity, if not a comfort, with stark endings and perhaps remembrance, perhaps not.
From the artist’s site : Dave Green was born in Toronto (1963), Ontario and grew up in the small Southern Ontario city of Owen Sound. In the early 1980s he moved back to Toronto to study photography at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University). He has worked as a house painter, a fibreglass worker, a photography technician and as an educator. He served as an instructor of photography at Ryerson’s Chang School of Continuing Education and has taught photography to youth affected by violence. He has travelled extensively throughout Canada, the United States and Europe, always with a camera.
The words of LP Farrell, from the introduction to Green’s book Personal (Dumagrad Books, 2017):
Looking at some of these photographs now, the prescience startles and the storefront facade windows, the tired barren highways, the sombre diners seem less a lament or nostalgic yearning for a different time, which is what I thought back then, than a crystal ball, sometimes literally reflecting, but often revealing a life marked by deep solitude. It is as though Dave saw, understood and then showed us what would happen to us all before life hit. Dave Green has photographed a world already disappearing like a picture not quite fixed, time remorseless and unrelenting. Time doing its thing.
———————————————————
This is a book of contrasts, the tension in the dialogue a whisper. Look here: youthful lust and yearning, women and lovers juxtaposed with landscapes busted and stripped down. Lust is a counterpoint to dilapidation. The tang of tungsten light in cavernous bars and then a street lamp, suddenly a votive light in a night sky over lovers like some crazy benediction. As if there was hope…
You can see more of Green’s work at his site here and his IG is here. Green is also represented by the MF Gallery.
If there is a reckoning, it is on the road. The photographer/passenger, the night and a beautiful woman at the wheel; a motorcyclist with a life garbage-bagged and strapped to the saddle of his BSA, maybe in flight. A bleak stretch of road ahead, road the arbiter. Love goes but the road always stays. Road, the redeemer.
LP Farrell, from the introduction to Green’s book Personal (2017)
They drove in silence, the landscape a work in charcoals and flaked quartz.
———–
What the fuck did he just do? He stopped running. He was out of breath.
He looked around him. He was standing nowhere.
(Salvatore DiFalco, from the short story Pink, from Black Rabbit & Other Stories)
I’ll end with how I feel an affinity for Green’s images of the rust belt wonderland : I could be looking at the streets I haunt in St. Catharines or Welland, and even the older images from the 1980s offer a run down weariness, a punky nostalgia, that I also remember from my youth in Niagara. I see echoes of Chris Killip or Tish Murtha, in the images of Dave Green as much as I see my own city, too.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Clarence John Laughlin | Southern Gothic
March 12, 2024Clarence John Laughlin (1905 – 1985) | Southern Gothic
Laughlin was a New Orleans photographer : he’s best known for his black and white, sometimes uncanny and disquieting images of the Southern United States. Considering the ethereal and dream like quality of many of his scenes, he’s sometimes spoken of as the father of American Surrealism. In considering his photographs, the ‘original’ definition of Surrealism from André Breton was to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” Less pretentiously (Frida Kahlo did refer to Breton as being among the ‘art bitches’ of Paris, whom she disdained, ahem), in the work of Laughlin, one can see that he was attempting to both re interpret and define his own memories and experiences of a site, while also employing the place and people within it, that is rife with contested narratives.
I tried to create a mythology from our contemporary world. This mythology — instead of having gods and goddesses — has the personifications of our fears and frustrations, our desires and dilemmas.
(Clarence John Laughlin)
For those unfamiliar : ‘Southern Gothic is an artistic subgenre…heavily influenced by Gothic elements and the American South. Common themes of Southern Gothic include storytelling of deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo [or the large sphere of the occult], decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or stemming from poverty, alienation, crime, or violence.’ (from here)
As darkness set in, the mist drifted off the deep acreage of sugarcane that flattened back to the surrounding slough and mire. Blooming loblolly bushes, palmettos, and thick fields sprouting a type of flower he’d never seen before filled the evening air with an assertive but sweet fragrance.
The Nail family lived in an antediluvian mansion that had been built long before the separation of states. He saw where it had been rebuilt after Civil War strife and he could feel the dense and bloody history in the depths of the house. He glanced up at a row of large windows on the second floor and saw six lovely pale women staring down at him.
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A tremendously wide stairway opened to a landing where colonnades rose on either side abutting the ceiling. He could see the six sisters huddled together at the banister curving down from the second floor, all of them watching him, their hair sprawled over the railing. He waved, but only one of them responded, lifting her hand and daintily flexing her fingers.
(Tom Piccirilli, Emerald Hell)
The book I quote above takes place primarily in Louisiana – where the artist who’s the focus of this essay was born, and a place, whether in terms of New Orleans (his birthplace) or the greater Southern Reach (a term I borrow from another author), that defined his aesthetic. In that book, there are many dark characters that are pervasive within Southern Gothic horror that’s a wide genre, one which I’ve been quite interested in of late. The aforementioned Nail family’s daughters suffer under a ‘curse’ where they cannot speak, and seem to move about the massive manse like apparitions, veiled and almost insubstantial, like a breeze accentuated by their long dresses and hair (like so many lamenting female ghosts of the South, and elsewhere).
Another player in Emerald Hell is known only as ‘the walking darkness’ or ‘Brother Jester’ : a former evangelical preacher who, after surviving an attempt made on his life, wanders the highways and byways of the state, leaving human wreckage in his wake. A later day incarnation of Robert Mitchum’s ‘man of god’ in the film Night of the Hunter (1955), perhaps. I am also reminded of some of the desolate – but drenched in histories and stories, almost like a stain on the ground – landscapes from the first season of True Detective, which is another iteration of the essence of the Southern Gothic.
One could imagine Laughlin’s images as characters and tableaux for such a chronicle. In this sense, Laughlin is a storyteller, an historian, just like Michael Lesy, who took us on a Wisconsin Death Trip…
Ghosts exist for a purpose. Unfinished business, delayed revenge, or to carry a message. Sometimes the dead can go to a lot of trouble to bring a desperate warning of some terrible thing that’s coming.
Whatever the reason, don’t blame the messenger for the message.
(Simon R. Green, Voices from Beyond)
I attempt, through much of my work, to animate all things—even so-called ‘inanimate’ objects–with the spirit of man….the creative photographer sets free the human contents of objects; and imparts humanity to the inhuman world around him.
(Clarence John Laughlin)
Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Laughlin had a difficult childhood, and this – in tandem with his ‘southern heritage’ and literary interests – are touchstones for his work. The family moved to New Orleans in 1910 after further economic hardship, with his father working in a factory in the city. A quiet, introverted child, Laughlin had a close relationship with his father whose encouragement – especially in terms of Laughlin’s interest in literature – was important to his development as an artist. His father’s death in 1918 affected him greatly : the dark, funerary, epitaphic nature of much of his work, perhaps, echoes this loss.
Laughlin never completed high school, but was a “highly literate man. His large vocabulary and love of language are evident in the elaborate captions he later wrote to accompany his photographs.
Laughlin discovered photography when he was 25 and taught himself how to use a simple 2½ by 2¼ view camera. He began working as a freelance architectural photographer and was subsequently employed by agencies as varied as Vogue Magazine and the US government. Disliking the constraints of government work, Laughlin eventually left Vogue after a conflict with then-editor Edward Steichen. Thereafter, he worked almost exclusively on personal projects utilizing a wide range of photographic styles and techniques, from simple geometric abstractions of architectural features to elaborately staged allegories utilizing models, costumes, and props.” (from here)
From the High Museum of Art in Georgia (the accompanying text for a retrospective of Laughlin’s work) : “Known primarily for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture that proliferated his hometown of New Orleans, Laughlin approached photography with a romantic, experimental eye that diverged heavily from his peers who championed realism and social documentary.”
More about his work and life can be enjoyed here and here : and perhaps, while perusing these images, consider listening to another Southerner – Johnny Cash – and his song The Wanderer, that also offers (ironically, considering the title) a place to stand, intertwined with histories both personal and more public, when considering the photographs of Clarence John Laughlin.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Curtis Doherty | Who Knit Ya? | 2024
February 25, 2024Curtis Doherty | Who Knit Ya? | 2024
February 20th to March 9th 2024 at Westland Gallery, London, Ontario
Out of these you make what you can, knowing that one thing leads to another. Sometime, someone will forget himself and say too much or else the corner of a picture will reveal the whole.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I am alive in everything I touch. Touch these pages and you have me in your fingertips. We survive in one another. Everything lives forever. Believe it. Nothing dies.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As the past moves under your fingertips, part of it crumbles. Other parts, you know you’ll never find. This is what you have.
(Timothy Findley, The Wars)
Mining family history in terms of artmaking is both a rich and a dangerous field. On this front, Amy Friends’ exhibition Assorted Boxes of Ordinary Life is a touchstone for me. In her exhibition, the assemblage – the editing, as to what might be revealed – of inherited objects that had significance that might be discerned by a visitor (others of which were opaque to an outsider) and the works that they inspired had a universal appeal. I say this as someone who has been exploring their ancestry in Niagara and found out some things that are also problematic (United Empire Loyalists as ancestors did not please me, ahem. I was comfortable with dissidents and criminals). Perhaps more of the ruminations of Timothy Findley is apropos here : “The occupants of memory have to be protected from strangers.”
In that same manner, Doherty presents a personal story that resonates with many of us, on many levels. Due to the locale – the sites he’s revisiting in paint being referential to Newfoundland, and the diaspora that has often been an experience of the people there, seeking work and economic stability far from home – the works of the late David Blackwood also come to mind, as an expansion of the conversation. One might see Blackwood’s works as one chapter of a story about Newfoundland, and Doherty’s as an addendum, decades later, but of the same ‘families.’
The artist statement :
“In 1930 a one-legged woman gathered all she had into a raggedy old chest and left Newfoundland for Quebec with her 6 year old son. Armfuls of photos, documents, and objects [lay] there for a century. What you are about to see is all of this brought to light [and] brought to life.
Witness the reality of the boy and his one-legged mother navigate the harsh landscape and time, the abandonment from the father, and the beauty of The Rock. The tangible and the intangible collide with areas of flat colour [so you must look] under the ribs of the wooden chest, to see the heart that lay under the ribs of the living chests.
“Who Knit Ya?” is a common Newfoundland term that asks who one’s parents are – a question this young boy asked his whole life. It begs to ask who we really are, and what legacy will we leave? It would be beyond folklore for anyone depicted here to imagine themselves captured in artworks a century later, and [moreso] what their toil paid forward. So as you view this work, be inspired to acknowledge the fact that we are just the tip of a larger iceberg, in a larger historical story. Ask yourself with introspection: WHO KNIT YA?”
I spoke to Doherty about his paintings (this new chapter added to family lore) after the reception for the exhibition, when conversations about the works led to wider considerations about the series. The words of the artist in conversation :
“It is a family story of mine…the small boy in the paintings is my grandfather, whose mother was the one legged woman, and whose father abandoned them.
There is also depictions of the mother’s parents (The Seal Hunter being her father- my great great grandfather). Through receiving this old trunk from my grandmother and all it’s neglected artifacts from 1880-1930, I’ve been able to piece together some family history, tell their story, and bring it to life from everything I found within that trunk. That was the trunk they moved to Quebec from Newfoundland with in 1929 / 30.
There are a few themes I’m touching on…stories of broken families, reconciliation of that brokenness, and lack of privilege and opportunity my grandfather had and [yet] still overcame it…And also just paying homage to hard working people of the past and the [amazing] thought [that] they could have never imagined they’d be depicted [and celebrated] in the future.”
In engaging with Doherty’s paintings, I’ve found myself looking through the lens of (appropriately) Canadian authors like Timothy Findley or Margaret Laurence whose characters are trying to make sense or discern a larger pattern of both their experiences or events that have defined their lives. This mirrors Doherty’s impetus for his paintings, and how sometimes the fragments are pushed together in a way that might not match the ‘reality’ but speak a contemporary truth to the descendants and inheritors of these objects and memories….
Now I am rampant with memory laments Hagar Shipley (from Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel) as in the declining days of her long existence she looks back on her life, in flashes both more intense and ‘real’ than her current state and often suffused with emotions both joyful and despairing. In some ways, she’s trying to reconcile conflicting and contested elements of a difficult story, just as we see in Doherty’s paintings, with his own family.
Doherty’s exhibition Who Knit Ya? – which the artist has subtitled ‘a vibrant exploration through a forgotten “new found land”‘ – is on view until March 9th, 2024 at Westland Gallery, London, Ontario. It’s presented in tandem with another exhibition titled Tales from the Rock (a group show of artists inspired by Newfoundland). I’ve relied heavily on literary references here in speaking to Doherty’s exhibition – and why not? It’s the stories we tell ourselves, or modify, as seen in Doherty’s paintings that define us. This is true even in the title of the show being a question that asks for similar stories from the viewers themselves : consider your lineage, and the people who defined and deformed you. Perhaps you see yourself as the latest link in a chain, or a break, instead.
Thus I am also comfortable to suggest you seek out David French’s play Leaving Home. It was one of the first stories I consumed, as a young man, about Newfoundland (though it takes place in Ontario – another parallel to Doherty’s paintings) that was not pure sentimentality but real and unflinching and difficult.
Although I have approached Doherty’s work while standing in the sphere of literature, I would indicate that when you look at his painting, that visual art has a significant advantage when exploring familial spaces with the inherent entanglements and contradictions: the multiplicity of interpretation, the possibility for injecting your own experiences into the works, is more rampant and possible. There is a vagueness – a subjectivity – to visual narratives that aligns with the vagaries of family history. The manner in which figures overlap and are constructed by other characters in the story acts as a visual depiction of how they are ‘knit’ from their ancestors. Some figures are just shadows in the background : and painting is the creation of a moment moreso than how photography is capturing one, and that is instrumental in what is presented here, which is perhaps dependent on facts but is also more demonstrative of feelings.
From his site : “Curtis Doherty is a Canadian painter who works primarily in oil who currently resides in Ontario. His work explores themes of history and the modern world through the complex relationship of the tangible and the intangible. He has studied at Sheridan College of Art & Design and abroad, as well as teaching at all levels.”
More of his work can be seen here.
The header image for this essay is titled Shule from the Scut : the images shared here are just a few selections from this series and were all created between 2019 and 2024. The full body of work can be enjoyed here.
Who Knit Ya? is on view at Westland Gallery (in London, Ontario) until the 9th of March 2024.
~ Bart Gazzola
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Katerina Belkina | The Dinner, 2016
February 15, 2024Katerina Belkina | The Dinner, 2016 (from the series Repast)
(Photography, Digital Painting)
“God sendeth and giveth both mouth and the meat.”
(Thomas Tusser, 1524 – 1580)
I will admit that there are certain fascinations (or perhaps less charitably or more directly classified) obsessions that ‘feed’ my interests in terms of artworks.
Meat – and how many artists employ flesh as inspiration or subject – is one of them. I offered a previous essay (centered on the fine paintings of Scott Conary) that explored this, but when I was making artworks prior to my exile or migration to Niagara (edit as you will) I often worked with fat, meat, bones and other organic matter, to make works that I described as ‘inappropriately beautiful.’
Sometimes, amidst the cacophony – or idiot choir – of ‘art criticism’ these days, with references pedantic and claiming to be ‘philosophical’ it is good to return to simply a notion of beauty. One of my best teachers, Patrick Traer – a fine artist whose work dealt with these contested, perhaps conflicting, narratives – spoke of this to me years ago, when I was still on the Prairies.
Belkina’s artwork that I share here is gripping, and perhaps inappropriately (to some weaker constitutions) beautiful. She offers some interesting ideas about her motivation and ideas that sometimes intersect with my own subjectivity, but this is an image that is striking and that, frankly, is enough.
Her religious connections are not of particular interest to me : but I must admit that my own religious upbringing (or indoctrination) have sometimes directed my interests, too – and there is a fecundity of potential interpretations that contest or converge that make her work worthy of consideration, whatever your pre existing assumptions (and I include myself in this statement).
From her site :
“Repast is an allegory of life cycles. Cyclicity perfectly characterizes humanity and our perception of time.
The Morning (childhood) means acquisition and accumulation. At the beginning of life we receive a certain foundation and potency both from our family and from the society in which we live. We learn to recognize the beauty around us and to feel it — we use all this for the rest of our lives. Even if “breakfast” is sparse in physical reality, it is often filled to the brim with intangible treasures such as love, fantasy, discoveries, strong impressions and first disappointments. In “breakfast” the abundance of dairy products is symbolic. The milk is associated with purity and virginity. The memories of breast milk are still fresh. The fullness you see is an exaggeration. The yellow of orange juice symbolizes concentrated emotions, the taste of life, sincere joy, and the energy of children. A lemon or an orange signifies the unquenchable thirst for action, knowledge, and discovery.
The Day (youth, adulthood) — creation, destruction, giving and taking. The flesh (the fruit) and the colour red are symbols of life and sacrifice. Youth is a period of expending — some build, others destroy. “Time to throw stones and gather stones” — there is a balance in this. We all make sacrifices and give everything at this point in our lives. More or less.
The Evening (age, completion) — contemplation, silence. A meditative part. Scarcity of dinner does not mean scarcity of life, or poverty. The table is set for one person. We come alone to the end of our lives, and yet we merge face to face with the divine in this world. It is a time of transition where all matter fades and loses all meaning. I believe our spirit reaches its peak here and we either accept or reject this transition completely. The set of elements depicted is simple: the fish is the symbol of Christ, the potato (the second bread) — the body losing the spirit (steam), the black tea — the drink of the gods and sages, not for simple thirst quenching, but for contemplation. The position of the hands in the triptych refers to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper”, in which the master emphasized the hands. Here they recede into the background and invite the viewer into this or that phase of life — past or future.”
Katerina Belkina was born in Samara in the southeast of European Russia : her mother was also a visual artist. Belkina attended the school for Photography of Michael Musorin in Samara and she’s exhibited her work in Moscow and Paris. In 2007 Katerina Belkina was nominated for the prestigious Kandinsky Prize (comparable to the British Turner Prize) in Moscow, and she has also been awarded the Hasselblad Masters Prize. She lives and works in Werder (Havel) near Berlin.
More of her work can be enjoyed here and here.
~ Bart Gazzola
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