Humble
In the new* Humble Arts Foundation group show, there's a portrait of potted plants.
Intrigued, I learned more about the artist. Peter Happel Christian explores the nexus of landscape, representation, perception and history through conceptually driven photographs that include elements of sculpture and performance art. What does that look like exactly? Like this:
Site in Sight
In Person 3. (The nylon net is as tall as me and as wide as my arms stretched out.)
These two photos are part of a larger ongoing work called, Near the Point of Beginning. The Point of the Beginning refers to a marker erected in 1785 which designated the boundary of new lands west of Ohio surveyed, mapped, and opened for colonization.
The area of the Americas West of the Point of Beginning.**
Make Believe (Birds)
He says there's a "synchronized mutation drifting between a descriptive reality and a constructed reality that resonates" within his work. This is true for Point of Beginning where the land and landscape (as understood by geographers and surveyors who grid the space) are interacted with, imagined, and documented. He approaches the subject(ive) place from a variety of angles, including the interaction of unseen others who have left their mark. (He calls these Pictures of an anonymous happening that I've missed.)
A synchronization of referent description and in-house construction also describes his installation, Dead Reckoning where his subject, water, is referenced (in photographs) within a space in which he highlights the resident controlled source (pipes).
The conception and control of nature are two themes recurring in Happel Christian's work. Familiar Ground: Front Yard Topography, 2003, is a series of 20 line drawings, portraits of rocks in his Tucson AZ home. Nothing else, just the outline of specific rocks, no other coordinates or landmarks. Singled out from the crowd, as it were, he lays eyes on the individuals, they are drawn, made familiar. Just like in his current work in Ohio, he was getting to know the ground he lived on. Yet these drawings are not the territory any more than a map or a photograph would be, but a familiarization with it in a signifying process much like naming, which is also a claiming process. My drawing of the rock.
I like what he is doing, taking this calculated approach to understanding and experiencing the world, extending the photograph's (and the map's) claim to representation to whimsical lengths. "Dressed up to look official; secretly stitched together," is how he puts it.
Hot Shot
John Mann is another new-to-me photographer discovered on Jen Bekman's online juried show, Hey, Hot Shot!
Like Happel Christian, Mann is a photographer interested in relationships to the land. He is also a map-maker, a map-manipulator in an even more direct way. These constructions are Folded in Place.
An exploration of his website is an exploration of the woods. The Cut Path is a series of exquisite black and white photos focused on some centrally vertical line emerging from the midst of trees or out of the mist.
I like this one especially.
Often overwhelmed by the plethora of images on the ether waves, I am so grateful for these online venues which conscientiously sift and cull for me. There's a certain stylistic consistency to their choices as you can see, say, by looking over the Humble cover shots of past group shows.
But that in itself is saying something about the current language of photography—something I think I will only really understand after some time passes. For now I am just pleased as pie when I discover something good, something I like, somebody new.
[*This post is late to be published—the Humble show to look for is #27]
[**You know I like maps and I'm interested in the designations of what's West and what's Midwest, etc. For other recently noted artist maps look here.]
