Leading up to my mural recently installed project for the Seattle Children’s Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic (see earlier posts) I had been seeking opportunities to produce larger scale work. After starting that commission I followed up with my First Encounters series of life sized portraits of strangers. Now I’ve created the three works below for submission to a billboard project in Williamsburg, Brookly. If selected they will be part of an ecoartspace.com project, I Am Water, focused on water as a source of life that mediates our planet’s ecosystems.
All Water is One Multilayer photographic archival pigment printSole Caught in a King Low Tide Multilayer photographic archival pigment printReGenesis Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
I can’t seem to stop producing landscapes, not that I am trying. When I do complete a new one it is likely less to present a recognizable place than a consideration of one or more real places and how I respond to them and connect them to each other.
After the Storm Multilayer photographic archival pigment print
Kyiv Stands Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 44 x 44, edition of 4 24 x 24, edition o 8 17 x 17, edition of 12State of Change Multilayer photographic archival pigment print editions tbd
Spring Exhibitions and an Auction
March 31 – April 23: Sarah Spurgeon Gallery, Cemtral Washington University, Ellensburg. Work included:In Between and All Around (above) and Anthropocene Wyoming. Juror Faith Brower, Haub Curator of Western American Art at the Tacoma Art Museum, will speak about the exhibition via Zoom, with in person screening in the gallery, followed by reception, 5:30 – 7:30, April 7.
Ode to Public Lands #9: The Spectacle (2023) Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 44 x 75 On exhibition June 5 – Aug 22 Kent Summer Art Exhibition Centennial Center Gallery Opening Reception and Purchase Awards, June 5, 6-7:30 pm Email me for edition, price, and size details.
April 7 – June 5: Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle. PCNW’s gallery is recognized as one of the country’s top venues for contemporary photography. Work included: Still Life in Situ. Join me at the April 14th reception, 6 – 8 pm, which coincides with the Capitol Hill Second Thursday Art Walk.
Ode to Public Lands #9: The Spectacle (2023) Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 44 x 75 On exhibition June 5 – Aug 22 Kent Summer Art Exhibition Centennial Center Gallery Opening Reception and Purchase Awards, June 5, 6-7:30 pm Email me for edition, price, and size details.
April 7 – April 24: Artist Trust Annual Auction. My Dog Walkers, Othello Neighborhood, Seattle #2, along with the whole auction catalog, can be viewed by appointment at Axis Pioneer Square, at three events at Axis, or online. I am so pleased to have been accepted for the third straight year. There may be no better place to see the best of Washington’s current art scene–or to support Washington Artists than this event.
Alas, I had to withdraw my Precurated Legacy series from the Rotterdam Photo Festival. But I will have a new work there nonetheless, also on the theme of “The Human Blueprint,” when and if it takes place. In it full installation (not at Rotterdam) this large print will be accompanied by smaller prints of each frame that observers can rearrange in ways that make the most sense to them. They will then be able to share their curations to supplement the exhibit.
Contact Sheet: 36 Shots at Remaking Tomorrow Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 80 x 96 (unframed, hanging solution provided) Edition of 4 $1,750
I’ve used more than 250 photographic layers from nearly two dozen places in thirteen countries and six art museums to produce this work, which suggests that the key to thriving tomorrow is connection and effort today. The reuse, recombination, and replacement of its layers the work tells us to test what to hold on to, to look at different options to use what we have, and to willingly toss what holds us back or erodes the good. The contact sheet format further suggests that today is an unfinished work. NOTE: Immense levels of detail are lost in the online image. So I will be glad to provide detail files on request.
The following three works are part of my Precurated Legacy project that was selected for the 2022 Rotterdam Photo Festival, whose theme this year was “The Human Blueprint.” Since museums are a cross between time capsules, cultural advertising, and a catalog of samples of what we have produced. For that reason they offer a wide range of considerations for a human blueprint—though in my mind we are in no position to provide blueprints and ought to go no further than to offer notes and critiques instead.
Installation, Art Institute of Chicago Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 36 x 52 (unframed, hanging solution provided) Edition of 4 $445Representation is Always a Deceit Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 36 x 56 (unframed, hanging solution provided) Edition of 4 $445Between the Louvre and the Reichsmuseum Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 36 x 56 (unframed, hanging solution provided) Edition of 4 $445
I believe that we experience and understand a place, as we do with so much else, by forming connections between it and our experience of other places. So I cannot fully appreciate Shilshole, where the semi-panoramic layer here was taken, with the wetlands of the Union Bay Natural Area, or two spots on the outskirts of Yellowstone, which provide the rest of the image layers here. Note that you should try to view this as large as possible to see both texture and detail like the cars on the shoreline or the pole on the jetty), which will be finer in the final print.
In Between and All Around Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 17 x 49, unframed, edition of 6, $400 or 24 x 68, unframed, edition of 4, $600
This looks both south and west from the same point on a trail at the Union Bay Natural Area. None of the layers were shot at night. In fact, beyond the impact of the normal ambient nighttime light, the area is just northeast of Husky Stadium at the University of Washington. So the added light from that part of campus means that true night never arrives here. This condition of a seminatural reserve that cannot find night was my inspiration for this piece.
The Night Visitor, Union Bay Natural Area Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 27 x 44 (unframed, hanging solution provided) Edition of 5 $375
I’ve been thinking about the aging of place but had not yet produced any work on the theme until this one. We grasp the concept of geologic time through tropes of scale. So we correctly understand its comparative enormity to our lifespans by comparing grains of sand to beaches. But the tropes and the lack of a distinction between notions of the pace of time and the speed of aging trick us into thinking that the geologic time is keeps to a steady pace. And so we dangerously misunderstand our times, when the pace of geologic change is nearly the same as human time.
Geologic Stratification, Nisqually Delta Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 31 x 44 (unframed, hanging solution provided) Edition of 5 $375
I’ve be invited to design art for about 550 square feet of wall space in the new branch of the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, now under construction in the Seattle’s Othello neighborhood. By contract I cannot show the chosen work until the clinic’s formal announcement later in the year.
Here are some of what I created as possibilities for the site but that will not be included in the final project but are available for exhibition, rental, and purchase. Note that this is large work, intended to be over 8 feet in height. So the images here lack considerable detail.
Mr. and Mrs. Le Step Out of the Kitchen of their New Deli, Othello Neighborhood, Seattle Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 73 x 44, edition of 4Dog Walkers, Othello Neighborhood, Seattle #1 Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 73 x 44, edition of 4Dog Walkers, Othello Neighborhood, Seattle #2 Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 73 x 44, edition of 4 On exhibition Oct. 2 – Nov. 13, Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY
The work above reinvigorated an interest in portraiture, which has occupied me at summer’s end. Here are some of my thoughts on portraiture, followed by additional works in my now growing project. First Encounters is a series of multilayered photographic images in which I’ve asked complete strangers to pose for me and then blended the portraiture layer with several from the surrounding location. The three portraits above and the first three below are part of the project.
I didn’t interview the people in my First Encounters series and I know no more about them than I leaned from asking them to pose. Why should I pretend that portraiture captures. At its best it suggests.
Visual portraiture is a unique form for so many reasons. It takes the expansiveness of a human life and frames it, something that gets clumsier and more unreliable with every attempt to be objective. So it is more effective if it offers up a open story. Even when the subject is well known the visual portrait is a much about a life, a person, as it is about a specific, named life. We may know that we are viewing a named individual but we respond to that person as a construction we build from the information in the portrait–and thus as an identity, real and defined but without history or verification. We know what we know about that identity and feel what we feel. But if we are wise enough we recognize both the difference between our constructions and the lives of the subjects and the value of understanding those constructions.
So the detailed presentation of the physical person should not be central to portraiture but merely as one of many elements whose inclusion may help the observer form a subject identity and connect it to his or her understanding of human lives. Some of my portraiture work places the physical subject at the core of the portrait but includes elements to supplement the information about that person’s life. At the opposite end of the spectrum are portraits that exclude the physical appearance of the subject from the array of ways to establish her identity. In other portraits I offer a generally representational image of the subject but obscure it in some way that suggests we need to look beyond the facial recognition to grasp something of the life.
Bouquet Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 73 x 44, edition of 4Kid Creed at Work, American Visionary Art Museum Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 64 x 44, edition of 4Hey Mister, Take Out Picture / Chicago’s Welcome Wagon Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 32 x 32, edition of 8Me, Aging in Place in a Covidian Landscape Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 44 x 64, edition of 4 (not part of the First Encounters series)Tess in the Studio Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 36 x 24, edition of 4 (not part of the First Encounters series)
I continue to create for other projects as well. The following piece is one of three recent efforts that each grew out of an interest in grasping the aging of place, which is the topic of a curatorial project that I have proposed for a possible residency.
Still Life in Situ Multilayer photographic archival pigment print Three separate prints, each 73 x 44, to be hung as shown, edition of 4
I’m still thinking in mural mode as a result of the commission. So I created for a proposal for large still life work for display at a transit station, where it would be shown at 75″ x 225″. I also will offer it at 44″ x 124″ in an edition of 3.
Sourcing Dessert Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 44 x 124, edition of 3
Grasslands Restoration Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 32 x 32, edition of 8E Unum Unum / A Stand of Aspen is not Aspens Multilayer archival pigment print 36 x 24, edition of 12Walking the Ravine Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 24 x 36, edition of 12
Stage 2 Loss Revisited Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 43 x 31, edition of 7Conjunction and Kinship Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 31 x 43, edition of 7January Manifesto Multilayer archival pigment print 44 x 30 (unframed), edition of 7
Sunset Comes for the Orchard Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 32 x 40, edition of 7Homebody Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 30 x 44, edition of 7
At the Art Institute Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 31 x 43, edition of 7Why Crows Sing Karaoke Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 31 x 43, edition of 7Construction Multilayer archival pigment print 30 x 44 (unframed), edition of 7November at the Zoo Multilayer archival pigment print 32 x 32, edition of 7The Chestnut Trees Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 31 x 43, edition of 7
One Last Picnic for Homo Demens Multilayer archival pigment print 30 x 44 (unframed), edition of 7The Zoo Penguin Swims into Autumn Multilayer archival pigment print 44 x 30 (unframed), edition of 7Clean the Slate Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 24 x 100, edition of 3Many Hopes, One Pond Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 24 x 100, edition of 3El arduo trabajo de soñar Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 24 x 100, edition of 3Automatic Reset Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 24 x 100, edition of 3We Are the Wind Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 24 x 100, edition of 3Sailors’ Delight Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 24 x 100, edition of 3
And So Into Tomorrow Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 43 x 31, edition of 7Ode to Public Lands #10 Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 31 x 43, edition of 7Threat and Promise in the Heartland Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 43 x 31, edition of 7Changing Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 24 x 52 (unframed), edition of 5Frond’s Eye View Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 31 x 43, edition of 7Ode to Public Lands #8 Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 31 x 43, edition of 7Wildfire Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 32 x 32, edition of 7Ode to Public Lands #7 Multilayer photographic archival pigment print 31 x 43, edition of 7