SAN FRANCISCO — In order to encounter the passage of time, we should freeze it in place. This is the subtle paradox at the heart of Viewed as Interactions, a group exhibit of black-and-white pictures at Casemore Kirkeby in San Francisco. The 5 artists included make use of a vary of tactics to activate house and time in the static picture as a suggests of interrogating the medium’s means to collapse each into a singular, suspended instant.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is John Divola’s “ENSO: 36 Proper-handed Gestures” (2018), a grid of 36 gelatin prints of images created in the abandoned housing tract at an Air Force base in Southern California. Divola has altered the deteriorating house by painting circles on the walls all over unique specifics inside of each photograph frame (stains, bullet holes, h2o hurt). By highlighting factors of the wreck, Divola reveals specifically how pictures protect.
Steve Kahn, who also shot in dilapidated interiors — notably one particular condominium intricate in Los Angeles through the mid-70s — approached the topic of photographic entrapment differently, staging areas which generally look inescapable. “Running” (1976/2016) is a cinematic, triptych pigment print, in which a determine is seen dashing towards a doorway, showing up to shift forward in every single frame. Clever cropping offers the piece its heightened feeling of motion, the figure’s entrance conclude slice off by the edges in two photographs and then by the doorway in the third. It becomes really hard not to see each and every frame as a doorway in and of itself to be entered or escaped, each individual picture a minute of time held hostage.
Artist duo Raymond Meeks and Adrianna Ault experiment most didactically with the medium’s electricity to seize time. In the 7-print sequence Wintertime Farm Auction (2019), the two memorialize the titular party by photographing farm resources tossed in the air. The images seize the essence of letting go: the uncertainty and underlying dread of what will arrive subsequent.
Tarah Douglas’s collection of pigment prints, Untitled (no 1-15) (2020), alternates frames between two figures — just one roaming a hilly landscape in research of some thing, the other kneeling on a beach front, accomplishing what looks like a collection of rituals with numerous objects, these kinds of as bouquets, a reserve, and a pair of binoculars aimed again at the viewer. Listed here, Douglas reveals how images, too, is a ritual of browsing, a history of wanting for and at a thing, a collection of moments manufactured with a wide-forged internet.
There is one thing nervous about photos. No matter what the certain visible subject of a image, its implicit subject is normally the passage of time alone a photo’s presence implies the anxiety of its absence, the artist’s anxiety of time slipping absent. The will work in Considered Interactions anxiety this stress, every single artist choosing visual topics elucidating the transience that pictures defy. The strategy that one could steal a minute of time usually feels a very little transgressive to me. But that is one of the fantastic pleasures I consider from wanting at images — watching a person try the unachievable.
Thought of Interactions is on see at Casemore Kirkeby gallery (1275 Minnesota Avenue, San Francisco, California) by way of Might 28. The exhibition was structured by the gallery.
