Art Out: Brea Souders, Dionne Lee, Bea Nettles
Brea Souders, Untitled #38 (from Vistas), 21.5 x 30 inches
Brea Souders, Vistas
Bruce Silverstein Gallery: July 8 - August 20, 2021
Vistas is a series of hand-colored photographs that present disembodied shadows of human beings found in national parks throughout the American West. While researching Google Photo Sphere images of the parks, the artist observed that the algorithm removed people from its shared photos, seemingly for privacy reasons, but left behind their distorted and artifacted shadows. The shadows are shown just as the artist found them, the result of the west’s radiant sun and algorithmic interventions. The original photographs were made deep in nature, by individuals who trekked to areas where roads or trails don’t exist.
Referencing early twentieth-century picture postcards of the American West, the hand-colored prints of Vistas recall bygone methods that were used to romanticize interactions with the natural world. Today, most armchair travel is filtered through the internet. We regularly see shadow selfies in landscapes in our social media feeds, echoing previous moments through photographic history. Vistas was made at a time when climate change is already altering the national parks and conservation efforts will need to be modified to adapt to profound change. The viewer’s placement in relation to these scenes suggests a witnessing of their own selves, transmuted into archetypal forms populating the land. Traces of wanderers, cowboys, adventurers and earth goddesses can be imagined in the shadows imprinted in the land. In Vistas, many of the shadows appear to have feminine forms. Though photography of the American West has long been thought to be the domain of men, here we see evidence of women trekking into the wild, documenting and mapping it.
These works enter into the long traditions of American landscape photography. The series poses a plurality of questions centering on how our relationship to nature has evolved and is changing, how our virtually mediated world is affecting human behavior, and the roles that photography plays in ecology, mapping, tourism, sublimity and representation of the self. As we witness accelerating effects of our global climate crisis, and as modern living continually brings us further from our origins, Vistas explores what the landscape means to us now. The exhibition features a large installation of hand-colored photographs, as well as several large-format, hand-colored works. In addition to the hand-colored pieces, a small selection of black-and-white images is shown, gathering together found shadows of hands holding phones in the Western landscape. Concurrent with the opening of the exhibition, a monograph of Souders’ work spanning eleven years will be published and available by Saint Lucy Books. A book signing with the artist will take place before the opening reception on July 15th from 4-6pm. The reception will take place from 6-8pm. The gallery will be open to the public Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm, for the duration of the exhibition.
Dionne Lee, Fire Starter
Dionne Lee: A Muscle Memory
The Center for Fine Art Photography in Collaboration with Gregory Allicar Museum of Art:
July 14 – September 19, 2021
Through the use of photography, collage, and video Dionne Lee explores power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape. Understanding American soil as a site of trauma, Lee looks to larger historical narratives, such as the unfulfilled post-Civil War promise of 40 acres and a mule to newly freed Black people, as a touchstone for understanding how history acts as a system that determines the autonomy and resilience of people across time. Lee’s work considers the complications and dual legacies that exist within photographic representations of the American landscape that is often presented as a space of peak contentment and peace, despite being steeped in trauma and violence.
These works mostly pre-date the pandemic. Initially, this work, Lee describes, was in a way to grapple with the repercussions of climate change and natural disasters of the elements: wind, fire, water, earth. All of which felt more immediate after the artist moved to California at the height of a historic drought and experienced the yearly wildfires of Northern California. An important question for Lee is: who is best positioned to survive?
Bea Nettles, Events in the Water, 1972. From Events in the Water. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist.
© Bea Nettles
Bea Nettles, Harvest of Memory
George Eastman Museum: July 9-October 10, 2021
Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory will return to the George Eastman Museum this summer. This exhibition of photographic and book works originally opened on January 31, 2020, but just six weeks later, the museum closed due to COVID-19. While a virtual version was offered online, the Eastman Museum has brought back the exhibition of one-of-a-kind photographs for visitors to explore in person. It will reopen on Friday, July 9, and be on view through Sunday, October 10, in the museum’s main galleries.
Bea Nettles explores the narrative potential of photography through constructed images often made with alternative photographic processes. Combining craft and photography, Nettles’s work makes use of wide-ranging tools and materials, including fabric and stitching, instamatic cameras, the book format, manually applied color, and hand‐coated photographic emulsions. Her imagery evokes metaphors that reference key stages in a woman’s life, often with autobiographical undertones, and her key motifs draw upon mythology, family, motherhood, place, landscape, dreams, aging, and the passage of time.
Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory features more than 150 photographs and objects that represent the diversity of Nettles’s 50-year career. The museum has added some works to the exhibition that were not in the 2020 presentation, including Nettles’s most recent artist’s books. Published between 2018 and 2020, these three books explore the myth of Persephone, three tales of motherhood, and the artist’s chronicle of the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other works added to this iteration include photographs made while Nettles was a university student that show her early use of textiles and printing techniques in combination with photographs. To accompany the exhibition, the George Eastman Museum and University of Texas Press have published a 200+-page book that provides a survey of Bea Nettles’s groundbreaking mixed-media photography.
Events
Photos at Zoom Discussion Session: Terry Evans
MoCP: Friday, July 9, 12 p.m. CDT
Presented virtually on Zoom, Register here
Join our Curator of Academic Programs and Collections every Friday at noon for a casual drop-in session where we closely read and discuss one photograph together in the museum's collection. This week we will look at Petcoke piles in southeast Chicago at Koch Industries site along Calumet River, made by Terry Evans in 2014.
This session will not be recorded in order to better facilitate conversation amongst participants.
If you require special accommodations for this event, please contact mocp@colum.edu.
Register in advance and pay what you wish to join us on Zoom.
Online Event: SFC Fast Forward - Sanaz Mazinani. In Conversation with Shirin Makaremi
SF Camerawork: Tuesday, July 13, 2021 - 6:00 - 7:30 PM PDT
Please join us on Tuesday, July 13th for an artist talk with Sanaz Mazinani, which is the first talk of our new Fast Forward series. In the Fast Forward series, we reunite with previous SFC exhibiting artists, who share how their photographic practices have evolved since their time at SF Camerawork. Mazinani will reflect on her exhibition Signal to Noise, presented at SF Camerawork in 2017, and share recent work from her projects Light Times and Rolling Reflections. We welcome you to learn more about her practice in a moderated conversation with curator and programming committee member Shirin Makaremi followed by audience Q&A.
Da 5 Bloods. 2020. Directed by Spike Lee
MoMA: Wednesday, Jul 14, 3:00 p.m.
The war never ends. Four veterans—the titular “5 Bloods”—reunited in present-day Vietnam for the first time since they were GIs, are searching not just for the remains of their fallen friend Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), but for treasure they buried 50 years ago. Grappling with the ongoing trauma of fighting on behalf of an imperialist empire with the fight for Black liberation raging—still—at home, Spike Lee imbues this story of memory and loss with both rage and humor. Though the old friends reunite during a few booze-filled days in slick Ho Chi Minh City, much of the action takes place in the jungle, both in flashback and present day. Wynn Thomas recalls spending “months in the jungle just walking around and trying to figure out where the scenes were going to take place.” Prior to filming on location in Vietnam and Thailand, Thomas scouted “big, huge vistas” and then “began to eliminate the sky from the movie, as the jungle begins to encroach on [Delroy Lindo’s character Paul].” The film’s climax takes place amid ancient temple ruins, designed and constructed by Thomas and a group of local artisans in a suburb of Chiang Mai City. Though the film was released on Netflix in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, this will be the first opportunity in New York City to see Da 5 Bloods on the big screen.
Learn more or reserve tickets here.
