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2020 Aperture Portfolio Prize Winner: Dannielle Bowman
New York–based artist Dannielle Bowman has been selected as the winner of Aperture’s 2020 Portfolio Prize, the annual award that aims to “identify trends in contemporary photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.”
Chosen for her ongoing series “What Had Happened,” which captures notions of displacement, family history, and home in the Los Angeles neighborhoods where she grew up, Bowman will receive a $3,000 cash prize and have her work featured in an upcoming issue of Aperture magazine. An exhibition of her work will also be staged at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York in Manhattan.
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The Moon Belongs to Everyone
Stacey Mehrfar
Baxter St at CCNY community member Stacy Mehrfar’s new photobook was written about in the British Journal of Photography.
‘Stacy Mehrfar’s new photobook captures the emotional effects of migration and the loss of stability, self, and belonging that can be felt during this transitory experience. Through repetition and the sense of movement, Mehrfar creates a world within her book that mimics the oscillating feelings of this state of limbo. “I want the book to feel like its own universe — once you enter this space, you cannot leave.”’ – Marigold Warner
The Moon Belongs to Everyone by Stacy Mehrfar is published by GOST.
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As a result of our programming at Baxter St former Workspace Resident Tommy Kha was invited to participate in The Creative Billboard Project in Los Angeles, California. This is the non-profit organization’s sixth exhibition bringing large format art from emerging and established artists to 34 billboards across Los Angeles.
On view at the corner of Gardner Street and Beverly Blvd for the month of February.
‘Insensitive Flesh’
Tommy Kha first caught my attention when I saw a photo of him dressed up as Elvis on the cover of VICE’s 2017 annual photo issue. Actually, it was a photo of a cardboard cutout of a photo of him as Elvis, engulfed in a teal 1950s vintage kitchen scene, with a posture divested of Elvis bravado. His cardboard face revealed no irony, but there was something in his expression that both attracted and mystified me. I am from small-town Indiana. The nostalgic scene was familiar yet off-kilter, like being in between a world I knew and a world I didn’t. I liked the feeling.
I watched Tommy’s Instagram for more—his self-portraits continued to feed into this feeling as he explored a space of precarity and intimacy. Strangers sandwiched him. Men hoisted him up high over their heads. Friends baptized him in a river. A professional wrestler body-slammed him into a swimming pool. His body is an index for signifiers of conflict and fantasy of conflict, the intimations of ‘fun and games’ alternate with potential violation. It could go either way. I got the sense Tommy enjoyed playing through areas of unease.
I had finished my second season of hosting a documentary television series called GAYCATION when I came across Tommy’s work. I was back home in New York after interviewing hundreds of LGBTQ+ people around the world, often hearing about the discrimination and violence they faced, universally, yet particular to each country, town, and family. I felt my function on that show was to unearth these stories, to create space for people to represent and release their hidden selves. Tommy and I, I felt, were both exploring the space of being ‘other’; queer bodies placed in constant negotiation with the status quo. Tommy’s creative ways of expressing this familiar angst were fresh air to me in a time when I was feeling stuck in a certain seriousness.
Through Instagram we expressed a mutual love for each other’s work. A month later, Tommy came to my apartment in Brooklyn to shoot some photos, with the unspoken understanding that we were, in a way, auditioning each other as artistic comrades.
He shot away on his camera as if learning me through the lens. What started as more neutral ground between us shifted balance into more collaborative, playful exchanges. Tommy introduced me to his latest project—a series of movie poster recreations and he wanted me to be his first test.
I’m not totally sure why I trusted this stranger to pose me as Jane Wyman (as in a 1955 All That Heaven Allows poster), as he, Rock Hudson, would wrap his arms romantically around my head and kiss my cheek—but I did. Maybe I was just that eager for different roleplaying. Maybe I knew the dynamic advertised in that poster and fell into step with it, easily. These images are iconic; they’ve created a standard for how intimacy should look. This makes the experience of producing them awkward—a type of intimacy, as I come to discover.
When you work with Tommy, because these staged self-portraits demand a release, your relationship to him and yourself bends as the photograph morphs into shape. My sense of togetherness, or composure, felt ruffled. The result is laughter, and an uneasy sense of ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’ Somehow I trust him with my uncertainty. It was all kind of uncomfortable, yes. But in our moment, I felt a little freer.
That was my introduction into the world of Tommy Kha.
Here I am, a year later, in his world again.
Tommy recently opened his first solo show “Insensitive Flesh” at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, an artist-run non-profit with a gallery in Chinatown. We decide to meet at a cafe in Williamsburg. I want to talk with him more about his work, but in person. I do not come as collaborator, or comrade, or even Jane Wyman. This time I play a role that had been my reality for the duration of GAYCATION. I need to see Tommy interact with his work to understand the story of his art and the pieces in this show.
He arrives carrying a portfolio of his latest pieces, a bit dizzy off a red-eye from a shoot in Palms Springs. After our coffee, he’ll head to Paris to help install a new exhibit of his work. He’s working on pieces for a two-person show this summer. This fall, another solo-show in New York. His work is getting noticed, and he has the jet-lag to prove it.
We go through the photos one by one. I feel intentional and candid as I point out every detail that catches my eye. I feel his confidence shine when he talks about concepts that occupy him: intersubjectivity, authorship, replication, intersectionality.
He does not like the word “identity.” What are we talking about, then? I am in journalist mode. Tommy has clear mastery of the intellectual language that is the foundation of academic institutions and the cultural elite. I like this on a personal level, but annoyingly, I need to understand the emotional core in his work, that I have felt from his work and through his words, but have not yet met with on a gut level.
“What are you feeling when you are making this work?” I ask.
“I want to see myself,” he says.
I think I understand, but I want to know how he uses his camera to do this.
What is he trying to capture?
When will he know that he’s seen himself?
The 13 pieces in “Insensitive Flesh” offer clues. This is a journey of confrontations with self-hood and its shattering as contexts shift. He merges materials, historical eras, parts of people, into miniature moments of a carpet being taken out from underneath you. The feeling is of an intimate dance between detritus and depth.
“I source my own stuff, not from the internet, but through either family albums, my own body, my own representation, and put that out in the world, so a lot it is recycled and cyclical in nature. I’m talking about feeling absent or not represented in a Western Media context,” he says.
Tommy shows me the photos of 3D-printed masks made from his photographed face– ‘photo-sculptural’ self-portraits. In earlier work, he taped the masks over the faces of traditional European busts, which he then photographed and presented, in line with the genre conventions of a photo of found objects or a historical relic.
That earlier series also includes photographs where emblematic–looking people hold his ‘face-masks’ over theirs. The masks look sutured on; making us look harder at the divisions or boundaries between where one thing ends and one thing starts. You almost always do a double take.
In its latest iteration, Headtown (II), the resin mask sits alone, a strangely still face, ensconced like an overgrown bon-bon in a just-opened gift box. This one has gotten away from its context of issue, the conditions of its receipt. To me, its meaning disperses into drifting connotations when the mask resides in its own space.
Tommy’s work is rife with references to how contexts and conventions shape our expectations, but he isn’t interested in correcting people or making a cultural shift. Those dynamics are in play already, he says. Instead, he wants to consciously and subconsciously insert these experiences that other people can look at and say: Oh yeah, he’s just out of place there. Maybe that is the point.
This takes on new depth when he tells me about his upbringing.
As a kid growing up in Memphis, Tommy says he never felt like he belonged in any space in particular. He went to an all-black elementary school. “I thought all teachers were white,” he says. Outside of his family, he saw no one who resembled him, whether in real life or television or the movies.
“I want to explore my otherness, the extent of my otherness. I’m Asian, I’m queer, I’m from the American south, I have an accent, I’m left-handed. Things like that.”
Growing up, he was drawn to “Wonder Woman…Buffy The Vampire Slayer…shape-shifting archetypes.” In a blink of an eye, women switch from ordinary to beyond-human, motored by a magic that allows them to parlay freakishness into heroism.
I can relate. Transformers. Care Bears. James Dean. Queerness in relationship to our childhood environment, I tell him. Being outside the status quo is uncomfortable. To varying degrees, from small-town Indiana to Memphis, TN your identity and how you play it must be motile, a button-press away from a safer iteration.
People who don’t fit in learn to see through the eyes of others. We need to in order to adapt. I felt I had to reconfigure and suppress my more feminine aspects. The threat of violence was not always stark, but was confusing because of how deeply it was embedded in everyday life. I saw how real the threat was to many participants on GAYCATION. I had spoken to mothers who had sons and daughters that were murdered simply for walking down the street.
I share with Tommy that I realize I would have been treated differently as a white kid in Tennessee; I don’t share his particular intersection and maybe that disqualifies me from experiencing comparable marginalizations. As we talk, I realize these differences as well as our growing commonalities. Cultural chameleon, performance artist, public figure. Self, always on the move.
These thoughts echo as I recall the quote by Claude Cahun that inspired the title of his show, “Insensitive Flesh.” “If I vibrate with vibrations other than yours, must you conclude that my flesh is insensitive?” (Héroïnes, 1925).
Tommy cites Cahun, who is best known for androgynous self-portraits and gender role reversals, as one of his influences. In this show, what is being reversed is not explicit.
“My performed self in my photographs are constantly changing in every photograph, too, and then so is the source material, ” Tommy says. He mentions Hegel; I wonder how Tommy’s dialectic affects his real life. The cardboard Tommy seems like a springboard for this question.
In “Insensitive Flesh,” cardboard Tommy is fully-clothed and cut off at the torso. Previously he has worn only an orange Speedo. He’s worn Elvis too. Tommy explains of his cardboard stand-in, “it’s a blueprint for how people can interact with me.”
In the photograph Constellation (XII), Whitehaven Memphis, cardboard Tommy is propped up next to his mother in his childhood bedroom, on his childhood bed. The bedroom is immaculate yet soft with its pale hues, a round bamboo fan laid upon the bed. I ask a lot of Whys, why the bedroom, why do they sit like that, why the fan on the bed? Everything looks like an arranged still life yet made more beautiful by it’s interruption by the fraught, almost devastating tension between cardboard cut-in-half Tommy and this mother.
“That cardboard cutout is the most neutral expression I made and, in a way, she only sees me like that, ” he says with a quick shrug.
Tommy’s mother has been a big part of his work. In earlier photographs, he poses next to her in what feels like would be very personal exchanges, except they appear always at a distance, looking off. She mostly is looking away.
“How does your mom feel about being part of your work?”
“She doesn’t understand it, really…she has no relationship to art.”
“Where is your family from?”
“1930s China and Vietnam. She’s Chinese-Vietnamese”
“What about your dad?”
“Who cares?”
“Oh. Your dad was never around?”
“No, never around.” He fidgets with the curl on his forehead.
“Same here.”
“He had like four children with two other women. He crashed a car high on cocaine,” he adds, “There’s a gritty detail for you.”
That gets my eyebrows to raise.
Tommy was raised by his mother…and grandmother too.
“Very matriarchal,” he says with a beam.
“Same here,” I say.
He calls his photographs with his mother, “performative investigations”—a way to have safe conversations in order better understand himself. Tommy recently went back home to photograph his mother in his childhood home—one of the last opportunities to spend time in the house that she is about to sell. This is an opportunity, he feels, to see themselves from within the house, eyes peering out from the wallpaper.
In Constellation (XII), Tommy’s mother sits close to his cutout self, which suggests a potential for warmth between them. But her face is turned away from her cardboard son, eyes askance at the camera with what looks like reluctant and dreadful suspicion—or perhaps she was caught by surprise. Her posture is slumped; she doesn’t need to pretend everything is ‘great’. She survived the Fall of Saigon—she has no time for games. But she plays along with his performance investigations anyway. It feels like they are at a crossroads that no one is ready to name.
“Tell me more about your mom,” I continue.
“She doesn’t know I’m gay. But I’m sure she suspects it,” he adds, matter-of-factly, as if giving in to this.
I’m a bit shocked. I had assumed this entire time that she knew. Realizing now, I’d misinterpreted the cardboard, their photos together, the tension, even, as evidence of a deeper closeness. His work was also obviously queer to me. Was his mother unaware of gay iconography?
“Has your mom not seen your work?” I add.
“My mom doesn’t have access to the internet…eventually she will find out.”
I joke with Tommy that I feel like I’ve turned our conversation into a GAYCATION episode, but more seriously, “I wish I had known you when we were filming the Deep South one.”
“I watched the episode where you went to Japan,” he says, excited at the mention of GAYCATION. He trails off a little. I can tell by his reaction that he’s watched the whole episode. I had learned I could tell from people’s faces whether they had or not. It had been an intense episode.
We talk about the scene where a young Japanese man sits down with his mother to tell her that he likes men. She goes through a range of micro-expressions and chokes back tears. She says, with a small voice, “I can’t do this,” and quickly leaves the apartment. I sit there with the son for a long time; no words. The mother does eventually come back at the urging of a friend. She looks humble and brave, but her sadness is clear. She faces her son and tells him that she loves him and they will work this out together.
“Uh, that made me cry,” Tommy says.
I can’t imagine Tommy crying.
But I also am aware that my imagination of Tommy is inseparable from cardboard Tommy and camera operator Tommy.
“Ugh, coming out sucks, as you know!” he says in exasperation about the conversation he’s been stalling to have.
His new work, Assembly (II) looks like a new space to work out the potentialities presented by their component pieces: mother and son with their fragments fused. The resulting piece is an image that is murky, almost deformed, as the edges of the puzzle pieces don’t match up quite right, the skin tones shift, the harshness in someone’s turn of expression belongs to one of them or both. The image as a whole is a space in-between the past and present.
“Half her DNA is my DNA,” he says as he points at the puzzle pieces in the photo. In these “half self-portraits” he’s experimenting with the pieces of what they already have “where do I end and where does she begin?”
When he works with her pieces he must contemplate her within the field of presence her person occupies most tangibly: her physical body. Tommy can begin to access beyond the outlines of mother, survivor, the woman he cannot talk to.
“After the war in Vietnam,” Tommy explains, “She cleaned the minefields in one of the indoctrination camps. Somehow she didn’t blow herself up.” He conjectures that his art might be “antagonistic, because she hid so much…the more I understand her history, the less I know about her somehow.” The further he moves from his perspectival understanding of her, the more he sees.
Maybe the responsibility of articulating what he sees requires a stage of fragmentation.
“No one in my family talked to me when I studied art in undergrad,” he tells me, “not until I got into Yale and then they took it more seriously. My family is all about appearances and I don’t like being told what to do.”
Tommy’s appearance as a cardboard son was an insight he manifested in the form of art. This is a confrontation that also marks a point of hope. Vulnerability and resistance made static–through masks, plastic, replicated images–pay a form of respect to the Asian cultural value of “saving face“, while offering a challenge. The challenge is not a revolt or wholesale conformity to a new status quo. These pieces speak to the potential of incompleteness and separation in this completed art-image.
I see their relationship with more empathetic eyes now. The silence shared in their photos, as in life, feels more like an unspoken promise to acknowledge unfinished business.
One thing I’ve learned first hand, and on GAYCATION, is that traumatized people prioritize survival through escaping the present. The shock of trauma is a text to unravel. If the text is always in movement, a “constant slippage,” the threat of violence is a chilling effect on communication. Tommy and his mom don’t yet talk about personal things. Their relationship right now is a dance around emotional minefields. Tommy knows coming out as gay could blow up the whole thing; that his mother will have to pay the social consequences that go along with acknowledging her choice in rejecting him or accepting him.
So the story is incomplete, I imagine Tommy saying, but we are entangled. It is okay that we are broken in places and parts of us are missing from the other.
What happens if I speak? What will happen to the art? What will we be when the blueprint is gone?
It could go either way.
“If she’s not ok with me coming out, then these are the pictures that survived at a time when we were ok with each other,” he tells me.
“That makes me sad,” I say, “But I understand. It’s okay.”
We sit in silence for a minute.
This happened a lot during my conversations on GAYCATION. I found myself sitting there, in quiet, sometimes speaking up to say “everything will be okay,” even though there was no real guarantee. I could not control the outcome but I could provide witness. I saw them, and that seemed to count for something.
-Ian Daniel
Jessica Lynne on Zalika Azim’s ‘in case you should forget to sweep before sunset’
A place where the soul can rest (visiting Aunt Louise), 2019
I have always loved the way bell hooks celebrated photography’s role within Black Southern homes. In Art on My Mind, a book that continues to linger with me, hooks acknowledges that within the domestic interiors, photography often takes on a ceremonial role, enshrining its Black subjects with a perpetual dignity. As I have learned, it is often the matriarch who uses a narrow mantle to proudly display that one photograph of the aunt captured wearing her favorite Malcolm X t-shirt, her grin wide as she points to the late Civil Rights Leader’s face while sitting in a white dining room chair. Sometimes we gaze at the photograph mounted on the hallway that leads to the bathroom that features your eldest cousin in his best Easter suit from three years ago because, as grandma had reminded you, he looked so sharp that day. Other times, grandma will leaf through an old photo album from her girlhood, stored in the attic, to find that photograph in which she and her girlfriends slyly pose for the someone off camera.
These vernacular images become embedded with meaning beyond what we immediately see. How do we reconcile ourselves to their subtexts and subplots, the invisible stories from which they emerge? How do we, as Tina Campt suggests in Listening to Images, listen to them in order to unfold these subtexts and subplots? This question becomes especially important as we consider how these images have traveled through time, passing through the hands of generations of kin. Each encounter introduces new moments of interpretation.
I am reminded of Emmanuel Iduma’s words in A Stranger’s Pose: Photography is a charismatic medium. Sometimes it takes five decades for a photograph to unravel itself.
So, what does it mean to come to these photographs and their (psychic) landscapes in new contexts and eras? These questions emerge in Zalika Azim’s exhibition, in case you should forget to sweep before sunset.
Azim, who grew up in Brooklyn, follows her paternal traces of these remnants back to South Carolina, as a careful, if not spiritual, pilgrimage to a place that is of her lineage but from which she is still removed. How to describe a relationship with a place that we have known, primarily, through the memories of others?
I have often thought the American South to be the soul of Black America. A site in which we can see the origins of a cultural lexicon that spread north and west, in large part, via The Great Migration, even as it remains a pivotal nexus within the African Diaspora. As Black folks dared to escape the violences of the region in great numbers as the twentieth century rolled on, they followed the train routes away: Mississippi to Chicago and Milwaukee; Louisiana and Texas to Los Angeles and San Francisco; South Carolina on up to Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City. If you look and listen closely, you can see, hear, feel the South as it pulsates far beyond its geographic boundaries.
Forging a new intimacy with an ancestral home, Azim approaches this task through a sacred communion that includes images made by her late grandmother Mary E. Lemons (It is always the matriarch, isn’t it?). Azim’s reconciliation contemplates the tools needed to close a proverbial loop that is defined by an unknowing and she undertakes the task of unraveling blood memory by collapsing, merging, and layering temporalities and materials—in which memory, text, and the photograph itself are all included.
Sunday Portrait (Habibi), 2019, is a 5”x7” image comprised of five smaller black-and-white archival images that have been layered on top of one another and covered with an archival photo sleeve to collectively become a familial homage to a Black cool. The photograph most clear is the image of a toddler in a swing. The last and largest image is of a sharply dressed young man wearing a suit whose likeness appears as a bust due to the manner in which the other photographs have been stacked. I have known these images in my own way, a particular kind of inherited visual code that denotes the occurrence of a significant occasion, play, or a rite of passage.
I know this too: this textual intervention, this minding of the gap, if you will. This nonlinear grappling with an intangible inheritance. To make sense of who we are as Black people in the U.S. and from whom we have been made, we might also have to conjure our haints. A gesture of significance that is taken up by Azim in To speak of a lush hot blooded land, to the dispossessed, too busy to visit, 2019—a striking image of a forest at sunset on Edisto Island, South Carolina that becomes a plot on the map that Azim is creating as she calls forth familial connections:
He use to bring those pretty yellow flowers home on weekends when
he’d work long hours uptown at the jazz club. They were the kind my
sister Carrie said reminded her of the first time she laid eyes on Lina,
and those evening trumpeters she placed in her hair on their last night.
I’d sit by the window for hours, long after I’d put Junior and them down,
watchin’ as the street lights flirted with the curtains
while thinkin’ those thoughts.
Every now and then I’d get a whiff of that perfume Mama wanted sprayed
On her resting dress, so she’d still feel warm—like sandalwood,
newspapers and vanilla. Or the saltwater Papa always joked about
sending up, lest we forget we had a place to come back to.
Finally he’d round the corner, stopping briefly at the ol’ fruit stand before
entering the building and climbing the three flights to our apartment.
In he’d enter, kicking his shoes off at the front door, before whispering his
evening greeting which nowadays sounded more like a dispossession than
the first few notes of a hymn.
Is this not what it means to embark on pilgrimage?
Like Azim, I am wrestling with my origin (story). I say this to her the day we meet for coffee and she greets my admission with that familiar Black women affirmation—a deep, guttural yes—an embodied spiritual code itself. And as a Black Southerner, I understand the desire to wade through memory and re-memory in the effort to untangle my relationship to a place that remains more complex than it is often considered to be.
Photography, for Black folks, carries our many knowledges even as it makes space for us to expand upon, revise, and reckon with these ways of knowing. With in case you should forget to sweep before sunset, Azim steps into this work, this infinite unraveling (can this task ever be really be finished?), creating, as an exhibition, her own shrine to the Black Southerners, in particular, of whom she is part.
Sam Margevicius and Beau Torres on Twenty-Six
The following text comes from a conversation between Sam Margevicius and Beau Torres about the exhibition Twenty-six. They spoke over coffee at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York on February 4th, 2019.
Installation
Sam Margevicius: I call this an installation piece because it’s not reproducible. When I show someone one of these pictures or even an installation shot, it really has very little relation to the renascence of actually being here because your body becomes this vessel for engaging with the work, and you create the meaning through the sequencing, through your own subjective sequencing and which images you encounter before and after every other image. So, you kind of are given this active role as a body that can walk around this space and so you build the narrative through that traveling.
The sequence of these images has been for the most part fixed—It’s still the same every time that you’ve seen it. What’s changed is that I’ve shown the piece on one long wall, two intersecting walls, and the current installation is spread across three walls.
Intent
SM: In many ways I think of this piece as a kind of film. A moving images film where you can, as the viewer, become enabled to move forward and backward within the film. It’s almost like you’re looking at the timeline, let’s say on Netflix, it says the film is two hours and you can just zip your mouse and go wherever you want. That’s how I sometimes imagine being here with these images.
That is really at the heart of what I wanted to do with this work, to somehow provide a way for other people to get in, to contextualize that situation without it being from a distance. I wanted to give the viewer an opportunity to go through that.
I think that it’s the act of viewing and deciding to read pictures in a way where you’re really looking into and trying to pull meaning out of it. Reading is a creative act that requires a lot of filling in blanks.
Twenty-six , 2017-2019, Image by Olympia Shannon
Process
SM: I tend to lean more towards a structural model of making work. To think more intuitively with this piece you can start at the first picture and say “okay, those vessels are about the chemicals in the air in a darkroom,” then take that sentence and run with it, go to the next picture, fill in a couple more sentences, and keep going. But then you can step back and look at what’s happening with the whole structure and ask, “what are the factors that establish relationships between pictures here—there is a middle line and a then fluctuation above and below that.” I think I had to remain, in ways, more aware of that structure throughout the making of this piece.
As a viewer I appreciate moments when I discover something new or recognize a new version of something I already know. I enjoy when someone sees this piece and it reminds them of a walk they might have taken yesterday. I think that those moments reveal a chance circumstance within a sequence of so many decisions they have made and so many they have not intentionally made. That’s a very fortunate event, when a viewer can really relate—it’s rare. We might not even have these experiences every day. There has to be a balance of having lows and having highs and having in-betweens. So, when you get those moments of resonance, it’s this beautiful appearance and can seem as though everything led up to that momentary understanding.
Beau Torres: I think sometimes that looseness, letting go of structure is really the most helpful thing. Sometimes I’ll have three or four stacks of reference materials, where there’s this stack of books for this project and that stack is for that other one. I also have this one program, Papers, it’s essentially iTunes for PDFs, where I have a selection of readings for this project, and a selection for that project. I’m also adding to source imagery folders in Adobe Bridge. Everything’s constantly being sorted and everything’s ready for me to look at. And then I realize I’m spending all this time sorting and the project’s not even started—The project is all jumbled in my head and stored in piles and files. Sometimes we have to throw all that away and do the project. Actually start the project and then see where the next step goes. Once you let everything commence, you start to find what you’re looking for, and then you begin to make meaning. I think that’s the most important thing about meaning, and about this project—nothing has meaning. It’s not about a fascination with nihilism, it’s more about meaning not being inherent, but that it’s, in fact, made.
SM: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that!
Cinema
BT: I was curious to know if you were thinking about cinema as film or cinema as a space; a place for meeting. And then I started thinking about the coffeehouse, and a nostalgia for this place as a beatnik environment for intellectual conversation. The same goes for the idea of the cinema of the past as this place where one would throw on a suit to have an experience. Even tonight when you go to Anthology Film Archives to see the Merce Cunningham films.
SM: Nathaniel Dorsky, whose book is on that shelf right there—Devotional Cinema, he’s talking about the cinema as a place. Essentially you’re in a large cavernous space that’s dark and you see at the edge of the room, illuminations. He describes that as a very good analog for our brains and the process of seeing through our eyeballs. Sitting in there having this experience where you’re totally focused and honed in on the screen. The other day I watched Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, it’s about a person who gets in an accident and is stuck severely in their body—“locked-in syndrome” it’s called. The character can think, hear, and see; he can move his eyeballs and blink, but he can’t control any other part of his body. I thought, wow, this is the perfect content for a film. It’s almost like every film should be about a person who can only see and not physically interact with the world, because that is the condition one is put in when watching a film. You get audio and visuals, and you can think but you cannot engage anything.
What initiated my real appreciation for going to the cinema was actually the space of getting out of the movie theater and walking home or walking to the train. That five, ten minutes, one hour, whatever that time is that elapses once the film has concluded lets you think of the work and kind of place it into your memory in a way that makes sense. It’s an important time and space to develop your interpretation and build it into your day-to-day life.
Reading Photography
BT: What’s your impression of reading photography in a wider context? Is reading photography something that anyone can easily do? A couple of photographs that I’m looking at here have visual clues we as photographers would recognize. This one has bits of grain where I can tell it was taken with a film camera. And then you’ve got this other one that maybe was taken with an iPhone and it’s not digital or film grain, it’s concrete and that surface texture could be a nod to film grain. So how do we as photographers who do have a kind of photographic language bring that to an audience who might not be photographically trained? How can we make pictures, in a way, words?
SM: It’s hard work to sit in front of a photograph, and try to describe, or create some system of meaning for oneself. So, how do we contextualize that? Well, I like to remember that everyone has their own ways of trying to put meaning onto things.
I feel like I speak with people a lot who are really eager and open, they are confused and curious and want to understand an artwork. They want to know, “What does it mean?” and “What’s going on here?” and “Why have you done this?” But then sometimes people are inclined to say, “Hey, I don’t get this!” and are really critical right from the onset. I think that it’s the act of viewing and deciding to read pictures in a way where you’re really looking into and trying to pull meaning out of it. That is a creative act that requires a lot of filling in a lot of blanks.
Filmmakers and Directors of Photography take wonderful images, but I think it would be strange for them to pull one image out and say, “Oh yes, this is the best image,” because it has to work within that narrative. I think that’s one reason I don’t work so much with film, even though I’m really interested in all these ideas around motion picture film. One of the original media theorists, Marshall McLuhan, identifies motion pictures with sound as a hot medium. When you watch a film, it’s giving you the sound, and it’s giving you a ton of moving images, and you can sit there and not move at all, there are a lot of stimuli dropped into your lap. Painting, photography, music, and other mediums are seen as cool mediums because you come to the picture and it’s not giving you very much—it’s mute or it’s invisible. So you have to do the work and become an active interpreter.
So, that is something that I find daily in life. I think it’s good to be talking to you about this, because of apophenia and, When Things Come Together (referring to BT’s exhibition of the same name). The idea that sometimes everything is right and easy and flowing and seems magical, and you’re walking around, and because of something that you saw on the last block, then you see something on this block and you experience this moment of total awe and joy. This possibility of something that loosely resembled magic to me.
BT: It’s all magic.
Keisha Scarville, The Placelessness of Echoes (and kinship of shadows), by Daniella Rose King
There is a poetry and lyricism at work in Keisha Scarville’s photographic and mixed media series Placelessness of Echoes (and kinship of shadows). It appeared in the narrative assembly of works across the Camera Club of New York’s white walls. The images lean on, extrapolate, and depart from the words of Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kinkaid, the artist herself, and other writers who have sought to explore the complex interplay of subjectivity, place, and power. Placelessness of Echoes… speaks of landscapes that are alive, possessed, and have stories to be told.
Untitled (topographic map), 2018
Journeys – both metaphorical and actual – are the foundation of Scarville’s artistic inquiries. Whether tracing her parents’ migration from Guyana to the United States (Passports); addressing her mother’s passing through material ciphers and their potential to conjure (Mama’s Clothes); or the excursions undertaken to produce Placelessness of Echoes… movements that transform bodies and individuals are explored by Scarville’s photographic gaze, in images that convey texture and shadow in seemingly impossible ways. Placelessness of Echoes… luxuriates in darkness, simulating the experience of an eye adjusting to the lowest levels of light. The series is performative and process-oriented; from scouting, to returning to traverse and negotiate the chosen terrain, to camping, observing, and engaging in the discrete and little-known rituals Scarville created to capture her photographs – this body of work meditates on time, place, and space and how each informs, overlaps with, and produces the other.
The “placelessness” of the work’s title, calls attention to the paradox of space, of how the wilderness confounds our attempts to command, locate, and describe it. The landscape in Scarville’s photographs refuses to be fixed in place. Further, the composite nature of the series, staged as it is in numerous, unnamed topographies, is quietly suggestive of the un-geographic facts of Blackness. (After all, where is Black?) To be dispersed, located, placeless, and out of place – all at once.
Untitled (River), 2017
With her camera – a tool for fixing in place and measuring time – Scarville creates bifurcating narratives of a black female body in and of its rural surroundings. In these we see how the landscape lives in the imagination of the artist – and how perhaps, it stands as a signifier for other spaces. One of these is the fictive space of Harris’s Mariella, the territory in Guyana that is the setting for his novel Palace of the Peacock. Another is the idea of a landscape at night, that in the artist’s words, “becomes everywhere and nowhere, occupying multiple spaces at the same time.” This sense of multiplicity and hybridity is intimately tied to subjectivity’s constant process of formation, and how these transformations are prompted and determined by spatial paradigms. For Scarville, the series is a way of decentering the body in thinking about place – resisting the urge to describe it as a dichotomy of body and nature, instead to think, in Katherine McKittrick’s words about “how bodily geography can be.”
The scenes created by Scarville are the diametric opposite of the cityscape, that which is constantly illuminated, surveilled, and controlled; these qualities programmed into its very topography. As such it is largely vacated of mystery, intrigue, darkness, and the unknown. For Black Americans, experience has taught a suspicion and fear of rural landscapes for the stage they provided for acts of racial terrorism; from lynchings and slave blocks to centuries of uncompensated and cruelly-cultivated labor all carried out on stolen indigenous land. Adversely, the landscape (especially at night) evokes stories of refuge and sanctuary, it conjures the fugitives who traversed the land in the era of the underground railroad. Scarville’s series captures glimpses of the ghosts of those whose self-emancipatory journeys are etched into the land. Making space for the unknowable, mystical, perhaps even magical qualities of the landscape at night mirrors the very capaciousness of the land, and seeks to recuperate the Black female body in nature. Partly through the guise of the shapeshifter – a central figure in Palace of the Peacock, and across a selection of Kincaid’s short stories – she is at once a metaphor for the placelessness of the Black female, the diasporic figure, and a vessel through which the individual navigates, commands, and is enveloped by space.
Untitled (back), 2017
In a number of images, we see a woman’s body, and the foreground and ground illuminated by red light; chosen in part as it is invisible to most nocturnal animals, and therefore undisruptive to their nightly pursuits. These strongly invoke traditional spiritual practices of the Black diaspora, themselves radical acts of resistance. They also call to mind the mystic or the witch – a maligned figure, whose roots are located in the first anti-capitalist struggles of feudal Europe and the newly-colonized Americas. Scarville’s photographs allow us to grasp and consider the complicated embodied history of the landscape: as a terrain of many terrors, as a fertile ground for growth, a place of imagination and becoming, and a setting for kinship and community.
Untitled (topographic reimaginings), 2017
– Daniella Rose King
