Quarantine Chronicles: Drive-by-Art and the role of Photography
© Steve Miller
By Warren Neidich, East Hampton, 2020
When the fifty-two artists accepted my invitation and challenge to participate in the exhibition I organized two weeks ago on the East End of Long Island entitled, Drive-By-Art ( Public Art in This Moment of Social Distancing) the choice of medium was left up to them. The idea of the exhibition was that spectators would drive around in the safety of their own cars to view art installations presented by artists on their private property near roads and highways. Of the artists participating many of them had at one time or another dedicated their practices to the medium of photography. As a result they had developed what I am calling a photographic mind-set that was reflected in their works as if their experience with photography had left an indelible trace in their mental dispositions. The specific challenges of an out-of- doors exhibition drove many of them to adapt their art practices in unexpected ways creating works that appear non-photographic. However when subjected to a deeper analysis they unveil the intricacies of their photographic genealogy like process, frame, format, illumination and subject matter.
© Jeremy Dennis, Destinations.
Jeremy Dennis’s work Destinations, 2020 uses digitally manipulated photographs, printed on laser jet paper, mounted on cardboard and wood giving them the homespun look of a travel posters of places we might never be able to visit again.
© Frank Gillette, Post Apocalypse 3
Whereas Frank Gillette’s photographic palimpsests, entitled, Post Apocalypse 3 series 2015-2018, created, using Photoshop, straight photography and collage, moody and brooding compositions, illustrated in vivid black and white tonalities which illustrate the relation between the pandemic and the ecologic disaster to which it is tied and predates.
© Steve Miller, Health of a Planet
Sharing this theme of the relation of the Covid-19 Pandemic to the climate change, Steve Miller’s Health of a Planet, 2005, employ radiographic techniques of flora and fauna of the Amazonian Basin to create translucent anachronistic photographs in glass reminiscent of 19th century gelatin dry plates.
© Clifford Ross
Clifford Ross, employing military aerial film and his M1 camera, chose to collapse the distinction between the still and dynamic photograph by a unique application of weaving processes in his digital video work Harmonium Mountain. The seamless landscape image of a mountain scene is fractalized into a raging fragmentary symphony of images taking place upon the surface of a digital Mobius strip.
© Christine Sciulli, Suspension Hanging Low
Christine Sciulli’s work Suspension Hanging Low, 2020 is made with a highly complex assemblage of imaging devices such I phone 8s, final cut pro video editing suite and an Epson 5040 back projection device. The images produced are photographic documentation of projected images on corner, frosted glass. As such they introduce an image vocabulary rendered visible in Surrealism that today symbolize the narcolepsy and somnambulism of the ‘being secluded’.
© Jill Musnicki, Deer Fight
Finally the artist Jill Musnicki begins her painting with a stop-action photograph of a deer in the forest, taken by a trail camera. The photograph is transformed into a wonderful Primitivist painting entitled Deer Fight, 2020 which is precariously suspended, between two trees as dappled sunlight plays upon its surface reminding us of the light at the very core of photography’s first definition as drawing with light.
My wager in this essay is that the challenges posed by this open-air exhibition unleashed the latent pluri-potential capacity of the photographic medium from its traditional presentation as print. That this in fact unmasks an overall trend operating in photographic practices today. That being the case, many of the variety of works exhibited here, no matter how they are camouflaged as other media, are still rooted in a photographic conceptual sensibility.
