San Francisco
Jason Kalogiros: The Measure, The Weight, The Ground, The Scale at CAPITAL
Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you a review of Jason Kalogiros’ current solo show at Capital in San Francisco. Author Danica Willard Sachs notes, “[T]he artist employs the methodology of photography to interrogate the discrete boundaries between media.” This article was originally published on July 2, 2015.
Jason Kalogiros. Untitled (Drawing), 2015; unique gelatin silver photograph; 24 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Capital, San Francisco.
The process of making a photograph bears striking resemblance to the process of making a bronze sculpture. Just as a photograph begins with a negative, bronze sculptures begin with a clay model, sometimes followed by a plaster cast, and are eventually cast in bronze to produce the final result. Clay models can be replicated endlessly into plaster casts (and eventually bronze sculptures) in the same way that multiple photographs can be generated from a single negative. Jason Kalogiros’ artworks in The Measure, The Weight, The Ground, The Scale, on view at Capital, bring to light the inherent reproducibility shared between this mode of sculpture and photography, in turn raising questions about the supposed autonomy of the art object.
The exhibition features three very similar photographs—all of the same 24-by-20-inch size, with the same composition—interspersed with five small bronze sculptures hung on the walls in between. Kalogiros’ process begins with a simple drawing. Using a T-square, he forms an irregular grid in black ink across the surface of white paper—a nod to minimalism further amplified by the exhibition’s unifying black-and-white palette. Next, Kalogiros photographs his drawings head-on, creating an additional level of mediation. At first glance, Untitled (Drawing) (2015) and the two other photographs in the show pass as drawings. Close examination, however, reveals a uniformity of the black line, and a lack of a trace indentation left on the paper by a pen, signaling to the viewer that these are in fact photographs.
