Photography’s Not possible Attempt at Freezing Time
SAN FRANCISCO — In order to encounter the passage of time, we will have to freeze it in position. This is the delicate paradox at the heart of Deemed Interactions, a team exhibit of black-and-white pictures at Casemore Kirkeby in San Francisco. The 5 artists involved employ a array of tactics to activate area and time in just the static graphic as a signifies of interrogating the medium’s means to collapse each into a singular, suspended second.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is John Divola’s “ENSO: 36 Proper-handed Gestures” (2018), a grid of 36 gelatin prints of photos built in the deserted housing tract at an Air Drive foundation in Southern California. Divola has altered the deteriorating space by painting circles on the walls close to distinct specifics in just about every photograph body (stains, bullet holes, drinking water destruction). By highlighting elements of the damage, Divola reveals particularly how images preserve.
Steve Kahn, who also shot in dilapidated interiors — notably a single condominium complex in Los Angeles in the course of the mid-70s — approached the matter of photographic entrapment in another way, staging spaces which frequently surface inescapable. “Running” (1976/2016) is a cinematic, triptych pigment print, in which a figure is observed dashing toward a doorway, showing to go forward in each individual frame. Clever cropping provides the piece its heightened feeling of movement, the figure’s entrance end minimize off by the edges in two shots and then by the doorway in the 3rd. It becomes tricky not to see just about every frame as a doorway in and of alone to be entered or escaped, just about every photo a second of time held hostage.
Artist duo Raymond Meeks and Adrianna Ault experiment most didactically with the medium’s electrical power to seize time. In the 7-print collection Winter season Farm Auction (2019), the two memorialize the titular occasion by photographing farm instruments tossed in the air. The photos seize the essence of letting go: the uncertainty and underlying dread of what will arrive future.
Tarah Douglas’s series of pigment prints, Untitled (no 1-15) (2020), alternates frames between two figures — just one roaming a hilly landscape in lookup of one thing, the other kneeling on a seashore, executing what seems like a collection of rituals with different objects, these kinds of as bouquets, a book, and a pair of binoculars aimed back at the viewer. Listed here, Douglas reveals how photography, too, is a ritual of looking, a report of looking for and at anything, a collection of times designed with a wide-solid net.
There is a little something nervous about photographs. What ever the individual visual matter of a picture, its implicit topic is generally the passage of time itself a photo’s presence implies the concern of its absence, the artist’s concern of time slipping away. The operates in Viewed as Interactions worry this rigidity, each and every artist deciding on visible subjects elucidating the transience that photographs defy. The plan that a person could steal a second of time generally feels a little transgressive to me. But which is 1 of the fantastic pleasures I consider from on the lookout at images — seeing somebody endeavor the extremely hard.
Considered Interactions is on view at Casemore Kirkeby gallery (1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, California) by May well 28. The exhibition was structured by the gallery.
