MoCP Newsletter

August 1, 2005

Curator Abroad: Report From Ireland

In March of 2005 I was invited to participate in a Curators Visit to Northern Ireland sponsored by the British Council. I was fortunate to spend a week with eight contemporary art curators from North America while two hip British Council members from Belfast introduced us to the thriving art scene of Belfast and Derry. We were introduced to nearly seventy artists working in all media.

The other curators with me were surprised, at first, that I was along because I came from a media specific institution (photography) but they quickly realized that almost all the artists we met work with photographic materials (mostly video) or in someway photographically related ideas. One inside joke that developed was to figure out which artist the MoCP could not show. We were almost stumped by Belfast based abstract painter Colin Williams who pours paint onto very large canvases, but nonetheless he also decided to make a beautiful video of different colors of paint being poured on the canvas creating distinct rivers of color as they flowed together. In light of our show Painting on Photography: Photography on Painting, his work could have fit in beautifully.

The use of photographic ideas in contemporary art is ever so popular because of photography’s accessibility to the viewer. As viewers, we fundamentally know how to read images even if they are intended to be conceptual. When we watch a video of paint flowing together we get it.

As viewers, we fundamentally know how to read images even if they are intended to be conceptual.

Maybe we’ve all watched too much TV, but we can say “this is a video of paint being poured.” But for some reason when we look at a finished abstract painting we tend to say, “I don’t get it.” We often critique photography differently than other media. It’s difficult to look at a photograph without bringing to bear knowledge of all the uses of the medium. As Rod Slemmons, my boss, likes to say, “when we talk about photography we talk about it all—fine art, commercial, technical—but when we talk about painting as an art form, we seldom discuss painting houses.”

With that said there were loads of interesting artists in Ireland that were fun to meet and hopefully the museum will be working with some of them in the near future. Some straight photography to mention that I found intriguing includes Mary McIntyre’s eerie Belfast nightscapes; Dan Jewesbury and Ursula Burke’s documentary project about one of Belfast’s politically and economically changing areas, Lisben Road; Maolisa Boyles’ interiors of soon to be demolished institutions; and John Duncan’s landscapes of Belfast neighborhoods that show the walls and barricades that separate the Catholics from the Protestants. John Duncan is also the editor of Source, the photographic review out of Northern Ireland that is worth checking out. A final work that I found highly charged was Willie Doherty’s new video entitled Non-Specific Threat VI (Unforgiving Ruthlessness) where the camera slowly circles a skinhead as his thoughts are spoken in poetic verses—Doherty had an exhibition several years ago at The Renaissance Society here in Chicago.

- Natasha Egan, Associate Director

Artists to Watch

Recent increased attention to student demands, generally related to the desire to work across traditional academic disciplines, has changed the complexion of work coming out of universities and colleges. Initially this was met with huge resistance from entrenched departments. Sometimes media based departments had what appeared to be good reasons for resisting. For example, it takes too long to train somebody in the subtleties of both photography and printmaking in a couple of years. But engaged students, given the chance, are quick studies and can pick up what they need without going to technical depth in each discipline.

I take this as a very good sign. The students are rummaging around for the sharpest tool in the box for what they want to do. Recently a university in Michigan stopped hiring Photographers, Print Makers, Sculptors, etc. and started hiring Artists.

I imagine the effect of this will be that the people we used to call Techs in each of the traditional “areas” will do what they have always done…

I imagine the effect of this will be that the people we used to call Techs in each of the traditional “areas” will do what they have always done: help students do what they need to do to make their ideas visible. And the people hired as artists will concentrate their efforts on ideas not connected to craft, but still including notions such as the effect on ideas of the resistance of materials. Sort of like the Bau Haus or the Institute of Design—this is not a brand new idea. Academic change is glacial and full of crevasses.

Two newer artists I have been thinking a lot about lately who have struggled against media specific academic departments are Jeff DeGolier and Tim Roda. Jeff was a student of mine at the University of Washington in 2000 and 2001. He couldn’t decide between ceramics and photography, so made ceramic objects that contained photographs, and/or objects that he used as subjects for his own photographs. He managed to show his work at Soil Gallery in Seattle and the New Museum in New York and went on to get his MFA here in Chicago at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is currently making a variety of sculptures, some kinetic, that will either exist as photographs or free standing.

Tim Roda also is suspended between photography and ceramics. He recently completed an artist residency at the prestigious Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, and has shown his large photographs regularly at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle. Tim has turned his sculptural energies into creating large tableaux that refer to his growing up in a rather chaotic household. The tableaux include his ceramic pieces as well as himself, his wife, and son. Both DeGolier and Roda present their work more as sculpture than traditional matted and framed prints which will also, hopefully, challenge traditional media divisions in the museum world.

- Rod Slemmons, Director

New Addition to MPP

The Midwest Photographers Project (MPP), our rotating archive of regional work, has the pulse of a living thing. Its character shifts slightly every month as portfolios at the end of their two-year loan leave the collection and newly accepted portfolios find their place on the shelves. And it’s usually only figuratively that they ever cross my desk.

Which is why I first thought the Kodak box near my keyboard belonged to my assistant or perhaps one of the other curatorial assistants who spend a great deal of time in the darkroom – it did, afterall, feature the playful doodle of a bucktoothed creature with well-defined nostrils and an oversized head on the cover, amusingly situated just below the words “Kodak Professional”. This creature, however, was holding a thought bubble-like sign at the end of each serpentine arm that stated quite unequivocally that the contents were for MPP and that the photographer was Ed Panar.

Ed Panar’s quietly quirky Golden Palms series is, among other things, part of MPP’s continual revitalization and currently the project’s most recent addition. It charts the Michigan photographer’s exploration of the Los Angeles basin, and the curious moments he met with year after year in that journey.

Ed Panar’s quietly quirky Golden Palms series is, among other things, part of MPP’s continual revitalization…

A tree root in front of the Redondo Beach post office resembles a wizened hand reaching over the curb, for instance, or a series of trash cans line up as if solemnly marching to the street. The closest thing to a cloud in the blue Southern Californian sky is a piece of sappy skywriting.

In an age of mural printing and unprecedented digital popularity, Panar’s traditional chromogenic development prints are 8×10 inches at their biggest, and usually quite a bit smaller than that. The once-traditional-now-anomalous style of these pictures echoes the not-so-much-unusual-as-unexpected visions they depict, in a medium that suggests a minimum of manipulation and at a scale that respects these small events for what they are. And if that’s not enough to spark your curiosity, you should know that Panar’s voicemail identifies the man exclusively by the brief, but distinctive, dip and rise of a slide whistle.

- Kendra Greene, Manager of Collections

New Publication

Don’t miss the latest publication from MoCP: Eirik Johnson’s Borderlands. Coinciding with the solo exhibition of his work now on display at the museum, Borderlands reinforces and extends the exhibition’s spirit through its ingenious physical strategies. There are no margins, no gutters, no marks of binding - one could say no borders, save where the paper physically ends. These are pictures you do not look at, but look into. Special thanks to the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation for their generous support of this publication. Buy it now at the MoCP online Shop!

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