Photo: © Tanya Habouqa. From the series Tomorrow There Will be Apricots
SF Camerawork’s diverse group show uses photography, film, and performance to examine the in-limbo experience of immigrants straddling cultures.
Exhibition review by Roula Seikaly
Photo © Zanele Muholi
A multidisciplinary exhibition at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts challenges the social and economic barriers of the art world.
I know I’m in for a treat when a Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts show is in the Richard C. von Hess Foundation Works on Paper Gallery. It’s an intimate three-room space with low ceilings and warm, gentle light, making it perfect for taking in prints, drawings, or, as in the case of Zanele Muholi and The Women's Mobile Museum, photography.
Child Pose. © Rachelle Mozman
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
© 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
Image: Everett Collection
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.
