Rebecca Belmore. Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowen: Speaking to Their Mother, 1991; Presented by the Walter Phillips Gallery as part of the exhibition Bureau de Change, July 12–September 28, 2008. Banff National Park, Johnsons Lake, July 26th, 2008; Courtesy of the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre. Photo: Sarah Ciurysek.

Your voice matters.

A desperate holler, a drunken song to the moon, a cold and broken hallelujah. A prisoner’s prayer.

The words take shape, the vision becomes a picture, a sculpture, a photograph. This is yours. And it really matters.

Wrapped in the word author of course is authority, who gets it and who doesn’t? Many doubt they have a voice at all.

We live in a frightening time of political crisis. Maybe this truth always depends on where you’re standing. Where does art fit into this, if at all? I have often heard art disparaged as useless frippery, as a distractive entertainment, as a commodity for the rich, or as useful only when hitched to a distinct political doctrine. Art in service of the revolution. Many think art is totally useless, a few even hold up art’s uselessness is its most important trait. An art that advances human rights and an “art for art’s sake” are not mutually exclusive. John Berger wrote in The White Bird (1985): “Several years ago, when considering the historical face of art, I wrote that I judged a work according to whether or not it helped men in the modern world claim their social rights. I hold to that.” But he goes on: “Art’s other, transcendental, face raises the question of man’s ontological right.” Or in other words, our social right to existence, our right to make and explore meaning for ourselves, our right to a consciousness and a voice, no matter what we might say with it.

Read the full article here.

Rosângela Rennó. Exhibition view with (left to right) Los Angeles (Lori Shepler, Los Angeles Times); Senador Camará (Wania Corredo, O Globo News Agency); Assunción (Ruben Alfonso, Reuters), 2009; Digital print, inkjet, on Hahnemülle Photo Rag 308 paper; 
66 x 44 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In Body of Soul (the state of the world) (2003-2016), Rosângela Rennó amplifies and digitally modifies newspaper pictures that document a diverse range of public demonstrations. From a distance, Rennó’s three large-format photographs show crowds, but are zoomed in to focus on one person who stands holding a small portrait of, presumably, a lost loved one. From afar, the images are crisply legible, but sharpness dissolves as viewers approach the images and the halftone dots that were hard to distinguish from a distance appear outsized when up close. It becomes evident that the dots are not uniformly distributed; there are different densities deliberately arranged throughout the image, with tighter and smaller dots composing the image of the loved one, thus rendering it visible from all distances.

Although in her artist statement, Rennó aims to create a link between the spectator’s reflection in the frame’s glass and the daguerreotype technique of mirror imaging, what is most striking in the context of this show are the work’s titles. Each is named for the image’s original photographer, or the operator for Barthes: Ruben Alfonso from Reuters, Lori Shepler from the Los Angeles Times, and Wania Corredo from O Globo. It is the photographers who are identified—a surprising contrast to their amplified yet anonymous subjects. However, it is not these photographer’s original works we are seeing, but an image cropped and modified by Rennó to highlight a certain feeling; thus the work shifts not only each image’s authorship, but also its original punctum. By focusing on the image within the image, Rennó is altering the photograph’s effect from one that emphasizes the force of collective mobilization to the power of an individualized story, while granting the right of those who have already physically disappeared to not be swallowed in a sea of mechanically flattened visual narratives.

Teresa Margolles. El Exhumado, 2014; Armchair and plastic wrap; 47 x 35 x 43 in; C-print; 64 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In El Exhumado (The Exhumed, 2016), Teresa Margolles disrupts the safe distance between viewer and image by bringing a piece of evidence—a specter itself—out of the photograph that hangs in the gallery’s wall and placing it in the exhibition space. Concerned by structural violence in northern Mexico, Margolles photographed a dilapidated home in Juárez, a city infamous for its permanently high rate of femicides and drug-related crimes. In the photograph we see a sofa—framed by wooden ornaments and once flamboyant red upholstery highly significant of a middle class status—trapped beneath the rubble of the collapsed ceiling. Exhumed as if it was a wounded body, the sofa now stands stoically in the gallery, its colors and features barely visible under protective plastic that wraps it and keeps it together. By saving this object from its otherwise inevitable demise, the artist refuses to accept what appears to be an unchangeable, doomed fate of Juárez, while also invoking a powerful embodiment of human struggle into the otherwise immaculate exhibition space.

Fredi Casco. The Return of The Sorcerers, Vol. 1, 2005; Digital prints; 7.8 x 9.8 in., each. Courtesy of the artist.

In the gallery’s lower floor, Fredi Casco’s The Return of The Sorcerers (2005, 2011, 2012) is presented in its three volumes, each a separate episode in which the artist uses a different set of photography-based strategies to confront the toxic legacy of Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay’s dictator from 1954 until 1989. The eponymous horror story by Clark Ashton Smith, written in 1931, seems to have influenced the artist whose dark humor is unmistakable even when dealing with his own country’s most harrowing episodes. While in Smith’s story the unarticulated limbs of a corpse come back from the grave to haunt its killer, in Casco’s work, it is the lost or amputated images—collected by the artist in Asunción’s flea markets—of military men and their enabling cronies that come back to our present day to be identified, if only metaphorically, as culprits in the many crimes of Stroessner’s regime.

Fredi Casco. The Return of The Sorcerers, Vol. 1, 2005; Digital print; 7.8 x 9.8 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Twenty-four black-and-white pictures belonging to Volume 1 of the series line three walls of the gallery. At first sight the photographs appear to document diverse state dinners with middle-aged men and women, older military and clergymen, and what looks like leaders from different countries talking, signing papers, and drinking in official monotony. Upon closer inspection, we see that these characters not only appear homogenous in attire and attitude, but they’ve actually been digitally cloned; some have had their faces interchanged, while the heads of others have been covered with gas masks. The effect is both comical and disturbing, as the artist’s manipulations highlight the fact that in order to succeed in its genocidal enterprise, the Paraguayan dictatorship required—as all repressive regimes do—the compliance of an interchangeable set of minions coming from civil, religious, and political circles, both national and internationally.

From Strossner’s years of cold-blooded rule in Paraguay to present day Juárez, Spectres presents a distressing picture of a continent in which institutions seem to suffer systemic amnesia. The artists in this exhibition prevent their respective specters from vanishing by zooming into appropriated images to get to their symbolic cores, unearthing the symbols of a domesticity interrupted by crime and corruption, and by creating archives and imagining their corresponding stories out of what the system conveniently deems trash.

Written in the first person, Camera Lucida was Barthes’ attempt at grasping the power of photography to invoke the dead in the eyes of the living. For as important as the spectrum was for him, it was the spectator—himself in grieving—who was at the center of his argument. In these images it is again the spectator who is pressed to recognize the power of photography to have effects on things far larger than sentiment, indeed making us see and feel, but also forcing us to remember, think, and even act.

Spectres is on view at Mor Charpentier through December 22, 2016.

[1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

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Vancouver-bases artist, Jason Gowans currently serves as the Director of Gallery 295 and  is a founding member of The Everything Co. art collective. He received a BFA in photography at Concordia University in Montreal.

Celie Dailey: Regarding your series titled 5 Landscape Modes, what do you mean by the word ‘modes’ exactly?

Jason Gowans: I like the word ‘mode’ because it sounds like modus operandi. A mode is sort of a way of being. Representation of landscape reveals it’s structure. I also like the word ‘mode’ because it makes reference to art history’s two rectangles: portrait and landscape. To make this series, I built my maquettes and then photographed them with a 4×5 camera in multiple exposures. I literally rotated my model to photograph it from different perspectives. This rotation was significant and when thinking about a name for the work I liked the idea of people with smartphones cameras, rotating them portrait mode to landscape mode.

Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes, Installation at Gallery FUKAI

Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes

CD: The standard 35mm format of a photograph dramatically diminishes the immense scale of an exterior space. Shooting in medium format, you enlarge beyond the model’s size, but I don’t think your interest is to display the awe of landscape. Rather, you combine a variety of materials to talk about the constructed space of landscape (evidenced in the visible plywood).

JG: The format of film is a funny thing in my work. I shoot all the models with large format 4×5 inch film and thus there is a hyper realism to the models. The plywood is crisp and detailed even when printing large scale. However, my source material is often 35mm images from the 60’s and 70’s. This is not something you can tell from web reproductions but the different formats of film act a bit like plains of focus. Some areas are very sharp, some very soft, and this is meant to talk about how the camera views things as opposed to our eyes.

Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes

CD: It seems that these works are about the photograph, what it does to space, and how editing can abstract the landscape. You refer to Robert Smithson’s Provisional Theory of Non-sites, a confusing little essay,  but I get a sense of your influence when he says “Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance…. The Non-Site…is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains)…. A logical intuition can develop in an entirely ‘new sense of metaphor’ free of natural or realistic expressive content.”

JG: Smithson describes Sites being the location and experience of the actual landscape (actually being immersed in the space) and non-sites are everything else we can take away or map from the site. A photograph of a site (taken without artistic intent) would therefore be a non-site. The artwork is in between site and non-site.

CD: You reference western movie sets–in the idea of spacial facades– by your framing of the mountainscape. I see the appeal of the orange/sienna palette with Le Region Centrale, the 1971 movie by Michael Snow.  Watching part of the film on Youtube, long slow moving camera shots and no dialogue make this film a meditative experience, an homage to the landscape while the viewer sits inside. A hum in the background feels like the camera itself or perhaps the sound of the “motorized tripod” and the intermittent synth sound is like a bug coming up in the ear.  The shadow of the camera pans along, over the field of vision.

Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes

JG: I’ve mentioned Robert Smithson and Michael Snow but I probably could have listed a number more artists who, throughout the 60’s and 70’s, began to atomize the structure and theory of landscape art. Michael Snow claimed he wanted to make a gigantic landscape film equal in terms of film to the great landscape paintings of Cezanne, Poussin, Corot, Monet, Matisse, and in Canada, The Group of Seven. See also Joyce Wieland’s work 109 views.

Works like Le Region Centrale expose the tropes and construction of the landscape genre. Upon a repeat viewing I had forgotten how slow the camera moves and how saturated the film stock is. I have a memory of it where the camera is moving faster and much of the time the image on screen is devoid of any horizon line. It was not the romantic imagery I was interested in but how he mechanically dissected every angle and possibility of the space. 

CD: A Youtube user comments “Is this better than going outside?” which gets at the conundrum of photography or artistic representations of reality in general, especially of the natural world–is a representation ever as good? As Lucy Lippard says, talking about the spiritual element of being in the landscape, “For those who have literally “seen the light,” no painting or photograph comes close to the power of the experience itself.”

Jason Gowans, 5 Landscape Modes

JG: I work as a photography technician in Vancouver Canada, a city on the edge of a beautiful wilderness. Vancouver is not without a lot of amateur landscape photographers. It’s a genre that’s quite prominent in this city and the more I see it the more I am aware that a tradition of composing a landscape has carried out through western art. William Gilpin wrote some general rules of how the picturesque landscape should be composed, these same rules are carried out today in the images from hoards of nature enthusiasts with digital SLRs.

In a sense, I’m guilty of this as well. I did my education in Montreal, on the east coast. Landscape was not part of my vernacular while I was living there. As soon as I came back to Vancouver I immediately started taking photos outdoors. I am a bit of a poser as a landscape photographer because my dedication to being outside is pretty low. Most of my imagery comes from finding negatives in second hand shops, images from the internet, and scans from books. When I’m missing pieces of a composition, that’s when I’ll go out and photograph. Photographing, for me, is just finding a piece of a puzzle to complete the image.

CD: It is funny that you have little interest in being in the landscape but choose it as your subject.

JG: I really do like being outdoors but as a photographer I’m not interested in taking my camera everywhere or waiting for the right shot. Jeff Wall talks about starting to make an image by “not photographing.” He’ll see something happen in the street and decide to recreate it in the studio. I think this is similar to my approach on landscape. I’m not interested in the constant waiting, timing, and paying attention to weather, that comes with photographing landscapes. I would rather my relationship to the outdoors be a casual one where I can use the time to think and look.

CD: The young jagged mountains of the West that you portray are very different from the East’s.  Upon seeing the Rocky mountains, the journals of Meriwether Lewis say “While I view these mountains, I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri, but when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most certainly throw in my way to the Pacific, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I’d felt in the first moments which I gazed on them.”  He expresses a true awe, seeing both fear and beauty in the landscape, and disappointment of the failure to find a water passage to the Pacific Ocean.

JG: I like that when settlers first came that there was a (justifiable) fear of the landscape. The western mountains were deemed ugly because they had little to do with the English countryside that was considered a proper landscape to experience nature. Now we approach nature with a sort of groomed sublime. The west is now like the English garden, still vast but structured, no longer a terrible beauty. 

Kelcy Chase, Abracadabra (1 of 3 sets), 2012. (digital print) 5''x7'' framed each.

Carmen Winant: You are fresh off the graduate school boat. How has the experience affected you, or your experience of making and thinking about your work?

Chase Folsom: I thought that graduate school would be an incubator, where all my ideas would quickly evolve and come to fruition. I thought it would be a haven in which I could ‘find answers.’ In fact, what grad school gave me was the luxury of time. Before going back to school, I was waiting tables and bartending in Atlanta, and, even though I had done some fantastic residencies, I never had due time.

CW: And what was the effect of that realization for you?

CF: Well, I used to make constantly. I was sort of a frantic maker — maybe there wasn’t time to think. I was a bit of a slave to the work in that way, and that has since shifted. I spend a lot of time now reading, writing, sketching, and sorting out my ideas before I begin on production. Sometimes it takes me many months to make a single piece. I also shifted from making semi-architectural installations to making objects. That was a pretty stark change, and one that sort of gave me my life back. Graduate school was good for me in that way, teaching me how to be disciplined without losing some inherent curiosity in process.

Kelcey Chase, What If I Could See My Reflection, 2012. (porcelain, platinum, steel pins). 3''x2.5''x1.5''.

CW: Can you speak a little bit about being a ceramic artist? You graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder with a degree in ceramics, which is a very established and well-regarded department. However, as you know, ceramicists occupy an in-between place in contemporary art. Your own work crosses mediums, but can you speak a little bit to that position?

CF: My undergraduate degree was also in that field, so I never thought it unusual. But, as you mentioned, I work across mediums, as do many people in the department. I think a lot of people hold the misconception that ceramic programs are far more conventional – or less elastic – than they are. As with any area, some people did not work with clay at all. Leaving school now, and entering the vortex of the contemporary art world, I imagine that being an artist who works in ceramics will afford me certain challenges and opportunities. There is a lot of potential there.

Kelcey Chase, What If I Could See My Reflection, 2012. (porcelain, platinum, steel pins) 3''x2.5''x1.5''.

CW: Let’s talk more specifically about your work. It summons up, for me, a feeling of amorous longing. Much more so than a subsequent union, or the eventual meeting of desire. You seem to be interested in describing a perpetual and sustained distance between two lovers.

CF: Here is how it goes: I make work first, and attempt to understand the experience or feeling that prompted it second. Never the other way around. I think I have to produce at that distance like that, at a detach, in order allow myself to do it. The work then serves as evidence more than anything else. Evidence that I must have missed the first time.  I don’t psychologize myself. Maybe the work can do that for me.

CW: That premise is a lonely one, though. As if you are forever awaiting the idea of love (or requited love) to come. In your works It Is Never Really 50/50 (2012) and Paper Covers Rock (2012), there is a physical distance between objects, which appear to me to be stand-ins for figures. Without losing an element of hopeful tenderness, they feel like isolated bodies.

Chase, Folsom, It Is Never Really 50/50, 2012. (ceramic, platinum, steel pins) 6.5''x14''x2.5''.

CF: The experience of the work is the experience of being with my lover. The questions that arise: what is he thinking? What if this isn’t what I think this is? In fact, I made a piece with that latter title early on in grad school – a white arch-way — so I have always been concerned with that, with making this sort of invisible line of questioning manifest. Cathy Wilkes’ has influenced me a great deal on this subject. She writes about our inability to reach other people. I wonder: What do those feelings look like? What does anticipation look like?

CW: Your work for your thesis show all revolved around one person, your long-term boyfriend, a relationship that has since ended. I wonder about this – creating, or perhaps dedicating, a whole body or work around one person. There is a rich legacy of this of course, from Picasso’s paintings of Olga to Nabokov’s dedication of every book he ever wrote to his wife, Veŕa. Do you consider him a vehicle to approach the work, or the subject itself?

Chase Folsom, Paper Covers Rock, 2012 (ceramic, glaze, mahogany, white oak, polished steel, cinder blocks) 6'x5'x2.5.'

CF: Right. In some ways, he is an anonymous slate, ripe for projection. But in other way’s he’s not. He is a real person, not an idea. Those are both good references. Another person I think about is Felix Gonzales-Torres, and the work he made about Ross Laycock, in life and in death. How to make work about someone without reducing him to material? I don’t have answer to that.

CW: Is there ever a conflict? As in, he feels too vulnerable or exposed by your interest in deriving work from the relationship? Is anything off-limits?

CF: I have never felt that way. He has never given me any indication of feeling violated, and I feel as if I should be able to make work about the relationships my own life. But he has certainly been generous. In one case, for the piece The Shape of Smell #1 and #2 (both 2012), I asked him to stand naked in front of the computer with Skype open, so that I could trace the outlines of his underarms and pubic hair. Other than sex, how much more intimate does it get?

Chase Folsom, The Shape of Smell #1(DETAIL), 2012. (ceramic, glaze, steel, brass plate) dimensions variable.

CW: Does it help you two know one another? I am thinking now about what you said earlier about not physcologizing yourself to make art, but using art to psychologize, and perhaps, treat oneself.

CF: Yes, definitely. It has taught me a lot about him. And of course, about my own interests.

CW: There was one piece in particular that really stood out to me in your thesis show, Little Bit of Me, Little Bit of You (2012). This piece consisted of two, touching floor to ceiling pieces of wallpaper, each about 13 x 5 feet. From far away, they appear to be abstract patters, but up close they were not.

Chase Folsom, Little Bit of Me, Little Bit of You, 2012. (hi-resolution scan of lint roller sheets printed on wallpaper). 13'x8.5'

CF: Right. Each is a high-resolution scan of a used lint roller paper, one from me and one from my boyfriend at the time. They are banal but completely unique from another; covered in dirt, skin cells, fabric, and little hairs. I liked the idea of being immersed in those little clues, the detritus from our own bodies.

CW: That leads me to my last question. When an openly-out Roland Barthes published A Lover’s Discourse in 1978, he was interviewed by Playboy magazine, where he stated, “I refused to proffer to a homosexual discourse, not because I refuse to recognize homosexuality, not through censure, or prudence, but because a lover’s discourse is not any more related to homosexuality than heterosexuality.” I wonder if you feel the same.

CF: Sexuality is very much inspirational for my work, but, at its heart, it is indeed more concerned with the details of romance than those of queerness. I am a “gay” man, but I prefer to address the work with a more universal approach. I look for in an element of sameness in my work, but not in a mawkish way. There is more pathos and desperation in my search. Regardless of sexuality, we must all relate to this.