Flat Pictures You Can Feel manipulates and repackages how we see (and feel!) images on screens, on walls, and in our hands.

Some of my favorite photographic series are ones that seep ambiguity. While I love typologies and projects with a clear beginning, middle, and end, pictures and sequences that at first bewilder me or make me think “What is this photographer actually thinking?" "What's going on in this image?" or ” Why are these photos organized like this?" often have the most staying power. Will Douglas’ latest book Flat Pictures You Can Feel, published earlier this year by Ain’t Bad, does just that.

Images of bullfights volley against religious iconography, photos of smashed surfaces, gravesites and others balancing soft and hard, peaceful and violent, immediate and metaphoric. Some are Douglas' own photographs, others are appropriated images from advertisements, rephotographed on walls or digital monitors. It's often unclear which are his own, and which are borrowed, but it doesn't really matter. The notion of "feeling," them, pulled from the book's title, is central to them all. Douglas collects and collates these haphazard moments into a strange meditation on how the process of viewing an image – whether it’s on a screen or in physical form – can change or even numb how we understand their place in the world.

After meeting Douglas at Portland, Oregon’s 2019 Photolucida portfolio reviews, I followed up to dig deeper into his ideas, process, and clarify the confusion that first drew me in.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Will Douglas

PostedJuly 3, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Publications, Portfolio, Photobooks

TagsWill Douglas, appropriation, masculinity, Flat Pictures You Can Feel, Ain't Bad Books, Photobooks

Hannah Wilke Gum in Cherry Tree 1976 Califonia Series Archival Pigment Print 2019 24x36

Hannah Wilke’s Sculptures in the Landscape exhibition showcases previously never-before seen photographs from the 1970s feminist icon.

Walking into Sculptures in the Landscape at Temple Contemporary, knowing only that the late Hannah Wilke was a second wave feminist artist and that these works were positioned to explore femininity and nature, I anticipated seeing a passé, narrow representation of the female body standing in for the experience of womanhood itself. Chalk it up to my coming-of-age in the twenty-first century, but art that substitutes biological female anatomy, as opposed to other experiences shared by women, doesn’t come across as particularly brave or bold in the way it must have in the late 20th century. Despite these concerns, the exhibition is an expansive, playful, and sometimes psychedelic exercise in feminist art’s sculptural malleability, and subverted the preconceptions I had going in.

Sculpture in the Landscape does center the form of the vulva, but the materials used to recreate it– chewing gum, ceramics, metal – in ways that comment on both common women’s experiences as well as the natural surroundings where these pieces of gum are placed. Most significantly, Wilke’s photographs don’t raise the form of the vulva as something unknowably magical or mysterious, but presents them in matter-of-fact contexts to emphasize their ordinariness and naturalness.

Exhibition Review by Deborah Krieger

PostedJune 27, 2019

AuthorDeborah Krieger

CategoriesExhibitions, Artists

TagsHannah WIlke, 70s feminist art, Feminist Art, yonic art, 2nd wave feminism, second wave feminism, Deborah Krieger

The Dining Room © Guanyu Xu — *The Dining Room* © Guanyu Xu

Beijing-raised, Chicago-based Guanyu Xu’s latest series, Temporarily Censored Home processes the complexities of living and working as a queer artist across cultures of freedom and restriction.

A recent graduate of School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA program, Guanyu Xu is free to pursue projects that examine his intersectional experience of race, sexuality, and citizenship when in the United States. In Beijing, however, where Xu grew up and where his parents presently live, revealing these significant personal details and their importance to his creative practice gets complicated. It invites unwanted attention from both family and a repressive political regime that prides itself on controlling the lives of its citizens.

In his latest series, Temporarily Censored Home, for which the artist was recently shortlisted for Aperture’s prestigious 2019 Portfolio Prize, Xu covertly creates installations in his parents Beijing home when they are unaware, and photographs them. Straddling a line between installation art, sculpture, and photographic document, he combines images from his childhood and adolescence with portraits of his present-day self and other gay men, forcing an otherwise censored space to recognize his humanity.

After a productive portfolio review at SPE National in March, we communicated about his latest work ad the experience and ideas driving it. He wrote at length about how desire is shaped, the tension of mounting and breaking down clandestine installations while his parents are out of the house, and the varied media and textual sources that influence his practice.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Guanyu Xu.

PostedJune 20, 2019

AuthorRoula Seikaly

CategoriesArtists, Portfolio

TagsAperture 2019 Portfolio prize, Guanyu Xu, Roula Seikaly, photographer interviews, new photography, SAIC photography MFA, queer photography, photographic interventions

The Rust Belt Biennial is looking for new photography made in the region.

The United States’ Rust Belt holds an often overlooked place in American history. Once known as a bastion for steel production, industry in the collection of Northeast cities has been in decline since the 1980s. Once thriving cities have been impacted by economic downturn from technological shifts and companies moving business and production overseas. As one might expect, it’s been a pivotal area during election periods when candidates attempt to reach its disenfranchised, yet voting-heavy population.

Seeing its unique position in American history, curators Niko J. Kallianiotis, Dana Stirling and Yoav Friedlander came up with the idea of hosting a biennial for photography made in the region. The exhibition opens in August at Wilkes University’s Sordoni Art Gallery in two parts: one part artists who have been invited to participate, and an open call juried by photographer Andrew Moore, with a deadline coming up on June 28th.

I emailed with Stirling, Kallianiotis and Friedlander to learn more. We’ve included some of the pre-selected images of the region to give folks a sense of what to expect (and maybe take a hint toward what the curators are looking for!)

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Niko J. Kallianiotis, Dana Stirling, and Yoav Friedlander 

PostedJune 10, 2019

AuthorJon Feinstein

Tagsphotography opportunity, photography open call, call for work, Rust Belt Biennial, Yoav Friedlander, Dana Stirling, Niko Kallianiotis, New Photography, Documentary Photography, Dave Jordano, Lori Nix, Kathleen Gerber, Ed Eckstein, New American Photography, Michael Froio, Jeffrey Stockbridge, Lauren Davies, Lisa Elmaleh, Lauren Orchowski

Self Portrait As My Mother As A Cheerleader, 2018 © Vaughan Larsen — *Self Portrait As My Mother As A Cheerleader, 2018* © Vaughan Larsen

Inserting himself into existing family photos, the artist questions and queers how we represent gender identity through the photo album.

Family photos are often our first experience of photography. The images collected in analog albums or on computers and phones capture everything from the momentous to the mundane. Usually organized according to time’s linear progression, these snaps offer proof of the beauty, awkwardness, and hard-fought grace that settles over us as we age.

Those same photos also reveal who or what is missing, if we look long enough.

Vaughan Larsen’s series Rites examines and destabilizes the gendered rituals that family photographs capture. In re-staging both important and trivial events, Larsen inserts himself - and countless others - into familial rituals and rites of passage that are too often off limits to queer-identifying people.

I met Larsen during a brief portfolio review at the SPE National conference in March. In advance of his exhibition, on view at New Orleans’ Myth Gallery through June 8, we spoke again about Rites, the role of humor and performance in the series, and the importance of representation and what viewers take for granted in vernacular photography.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Vaughan Larsen

PostedJune 4, 2019

AuthorRoula Seikaly

TagsVaughan Larsen, Roula Seikaly, queer photography, Vernacular Photography, New photography, Family Photographs

Will Douglas' New Photobook Flattens and Complicates Our Relationship to a Screen-Based World

A New Exhibition of Second-Wave Feminist Photography Has Vulvas (and Chewing Gum) On The Mind

Guanyu Xu Creates Domestic Interventions That Reflect His Double Life

A New Photographic Biennial (and call for work) Looks to America's Rust Belt

Vaughan Larsen Destabilizes The Gendered Rituals of Family Photographs