A new exhibition uses photography, collage and video to reimagine – and defuse – one of art history’s most famous misogynists.

Artist Paul Gaugin was a chauvinist, a colonialist, and, like many celebrated painters, a pivotal perpetrator of the historical male gaze. His portraits presented native peoples as a sometimes barbaric, often sexualized fantasy. And if that doesn't bother you, perhaps his taking of underage brides in on the South Pacific Islands of Hiva and Tahiti in the late 1890’s, infecting them with syphilis and other diseases might make you twitch.
Despite being widely recognized and exhibited in most major institutions since his death, he was, like many men of art history, a predatory scumbag.

And here lies the jumping off point of Rachelle Mozman Solano’s latest exhibition Metamorphosis of Failure, on view through February at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY. In Mozman-Solano’s series of films, staged portraits, and collages, she removes Gaugin's power, reimagining the mythology behind his conflicted French / Peruvian identity and satirically lampooning his search for subjects.

Mocking Gaugin's process with captions like "I Could Not Find The Authenticity I was Searching For," and " Here I am in Panama, In Excellent Health as Always," Mozman-Solano creates a sardonic narrative of Gaugin's process that empowers the women who were his muses. In no-frills studio setups, Gaugin's imagined conquests as well as an anonymous male figure dress in pseudo-nude body suits beside fake "native" plants in Home Depot buckets labeled "Let's Do This" and various other signs of perceived exoticism. Mozman-Solano's photographs and videos push the stories we know or imagine about Gaugin’s life and quests into absurdity that is light-hearted without simplifying or overlooking its history.

I spoke with Mozman-Solano to learn more about her show and interest in Gaugin.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Rachelle Mozman Solano

PostedJanuary 23, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesExhibitions, Artists, Galleries

TagsRachelle Mozman-Solano, Rachelle Mozman, New Photography, New York Photographers, Gaugin, art history, male gaze, Smackmellon, Smack Mellon, Jon Feinstein

© Sally Mann. Blackwater 3, 2008–2012. Tintype. Collection of the artist — © Sally Mann. *Blackwater 3, 2008–2012.* Tintype. Collection of the artist

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings isn’t just a glorious smattering of the artist’s photographs. The exhibition brims with tension between Sally Mann’s identity and a landscape tainted with racist history.

As a white woman who grew up in the American South, Mann’s representation of history and memory is loaded and heavy with complications. Most of the photographs on display in A Thousand Crossings – on view at the Getty Center until February 10, 2019 – are about memory and history: a cluster of domestic photographs of her children exploring the Virginia wilderness on vacation is juxtaposed with numerous images of Civil War battlefields, of Southern rivers and streams, of the Black woman who helped raise her, and the Black men she never noticed in her segregated community as a child. The sense of mystery and wonder she conjures in images of Civil War battlefields – and the swampy river beds where enslaved people found refuge and escape – is challenged by the inherent nature of these locations as sites and reminders of the horrific system of American chattel slavery.

Exhibition review by Deborah Krieger

PostedJanuary 8, 2019

AuthorDeborah Krieger

CategoriesExhibitions, Artists, Galleries

TagsSally Mann, A Thousand Crossings, Getty Museum, Deborah Krieger, Blackwater River, The Two Virginias, Controversial Photography

Humble editors select standouts in 2018 (online) photography writing

In his essay in Blindspot’s 2006 issue #32, Tim Davis wrote “people never read book introductions…,” a statement that, written more than a decade ago, unfortunately, continues to resound more than ever before and can be aptly applied to today’s “content” hungry landscape. We scroll rapidly through Instagram and eat listicles (like this one!) like Cheetos. Onto the next, onto the next, onto the next like an accelerated tangent of highway billboards in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. And defensiveness among countless photographers to write about their work seems ever present – just search “artist statement” into any Facebook photo group (yes we know, FB is for “old people” - go watch some YouTube "influencers," kids..) and you’ll hydrate yourself on the haterade for weeks. BUT! BUT! BUT!

But the “don’t make me think” attitude towards writing is counterbalanced by a ton of thoughtful essays, interviews and long form think-pieces on the current state of photography, its evolution and key issues that tie it to the larger cultural landscape. Below are 22 pieces on photography that moved us, in no particular order. You’ll notice that many of the pieces we selected are heavy on discussion of “the gaze,” which seems to have garnered a renewed attention in criticism and popular discussion over the past few years, and likely has been on our minds gearing up for the BlueSky Curatorial Prize this May.

Grab a couple coffees, mute Instagram for a bit, and have a read.

Lindsay Metivier finds soul in fleeting moments.

For the past few years, North Carolina-by-way-of-Boston-based Metivier has gathered her often random-seeming photos into an archive of quiet musings. On the surface, they might appear unrelated, but there’s a strange specificity to her chaotic eye.

Cheap drinks in clear plastic cups beside a chlorine-green swimming pool. An obtuse circular imprint in a concrete slab. A blue paper card that reads “crisis” – found, or intentionally placed on a patch of grass (it’s unclear, and that’s fine.) A barrage of sometimes fresh, sometimes moldy sun-soaked oranges and orange peels obsessively collected and sent to the artist from friends near and far. These pictures gather details from daily life and celebrate the charge below their arbitrary surface.

Following her thesis exhibition earlier this year, I reached out to learn what brings her work together.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Lindsay Metivier

PostedDecember 18, 2018

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsLindsay Metivier, New Color Photography, color photography, art photography, contemporary photography

In her latest series Swallow The Tail, photographer Elizabeth Hibbard addresses how pain and uncertainty manifest between various states of being: physical and psychological, intimacy and isolation, consumption and expulsion, desire and revulsion.

Hibbard’s photographs are dark and swathed in inelegant natural light that captures and accentuates her state of unease, often peering through windows, doors and other structures in the home environment. They’re staged, and on one level bring to mind the 90s to early 2000s narrative photography of Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell and Charlie White, but with more anxiety and less theatre.

They look at how the construction of female identity may go deeper than external cultural and social forces, cycling into internal family dynamics. In one picture, shot at a voyeuristic angle through a bedroom doorway, Hibbard’s mother lays in bed, sewing hypnotically. It feels like a cryptic riff on a Norman Rockwell painting – a concerned look into a casual, repetitive, everyday routine. In another, Hibbard leans into her mother's arms while her mother peels a sheet of dead skin from her back. The pictures are loaded with these states of embrace, mimicry, consolation and confusion.

I spoke with Hibbard about her work, influence, and how Yale – where she’s currently working on her MFA fits into it all.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Elizabeth Hibbard

PostedDecember 6, 2018

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsElizabeth Hibbard, New Photography, Narrative Photography, Crewdson, Yale MFA, Yale Photographers, interviews with photographers

Rachelle Mozman Solano Disarms Gaugin's Predatory Gaze With Absurdist Wit

Negotiating History: Sally Mann’s "A Thousand Crossings" Exhibition and the Question of Photographic Privilege

Reading's Not Dead: 22 Essays, Interviews and Other Sharp (Online) Photography Writing You Should Have Read in 2018

Lindsay Metivier: Archiving the Ordinary

Elizabeth Hibbard Photographs the Spaces Between Physical and Psychological Anxiety