Jan. 15 - Sept. 10, 2006

Contrasting Objectives:
Fifteen Pacific Northwest Photographers

ARCO Exhibits Building Gallery

JIM BREUKELMAN   MARSHA BURNS   REBECCA CUMMINS   STEVE DAVIS   DIANE EVANS  

KRISTINA JAUGELIS   STU LEVY   TAMARA LISCHKA   CHRISTOPHER RAUSCHENBERG   SHAWN RECORDS  

HENRI ROBIDEAU   LAUREL SCHULTZ   REECE TERRIS   KAI YAMADA   CLAUDE ZERVAS  

Diverse visions of the world as captured through disparate viewfinders comprise this photography exhibit at the Whatcom Museum of History & Art. This exhibition showcases a variety of subjects, techniques and styles by regional photographers such as Jim Breukelman (Vancouver, B.C.), Rebecca Cummins (Seattle, WA) and Christopher Rauschenberg (Portland, OR). Each of the artists produces distinctive images. The exhibition highlights the differing reasons why individual photographers produce the photographs they do. The multiple subjects represented underscores the objectives these photographers sought to achieve and at times what stories they are trying to tell.
For more information about this exhibition, please call (360) 676-6981.

JIM BREUKELMAN

In 1999, I happened upon a small taxidermy shop, overflowing with reconstructed animals of all kinds. My concept for a new series called After Life evolved as I reviewed the first photographs I made inside this place. The images started me thinking about ideas and impulses concerning wildness and wilderness that exist within all of us and how, eventually, these manifest themselves in tangible ways wherever culture intersects with nature. These situations make interesting photographs, not only for what they show, but also for what they can imply.

I chose the title, After Life, for the work you see here because, while it is descriptive of my subject, it can be interpreted in a number of different ways, reflecting the complexity of this topic and my ambivalent feelings about it. In these photographs, I have tried to retain the richness of detail that exists within this place in order to provide viewers with a wide range of elements to examine and make their own thoughtful considerations or speculations.

These images show the work of a taxidermist who I think is exceptionally good. There is much artistry in what he does. So much so, that his animals feel alert, skittish, sometimes frantic or threatening and, paradoxically, full of life. This, along with the unlikely mix of species and the incongruous, confined space they occupy, is what drew me to photograph in this unique place. As I became increasingly involved, I found myself relating to the animals as if they were still alive, still capable of feeling. Rather than causing me to think only about taxidermy or hunting, looking at this shop and its contents presented me with a disquieting diorama or scene that is analogous to larger problems for wildlife taking place throughout the world; natural space for wild animals is changing as well as shrinking.

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MARSHA BURNS

A photograph represents evidence from the past; much like a chard of pottery to the archaeologist, the photograph gives greater significance to the event. The intentionally limited details in my work, depend on the viewer to verify a greater or comparative experience from the fragment. Inevitably, even the most trivial sighting cannot help standing as a symbol when extracted from the whole.

I am currently working with ideas that traverse all of the ideas in the work I have done. I have resisted judging, but not judgement. For many years I worked with a discipline and a vision that eliminated the context for my Subject. Now I am interested in the context as the subject. The photographic representation being as dependent on the mechanics of the Camera as on my direction. In selecting and printing an image I hope to make a new but also familiar experience in the world.

In my portrait work, I chose to photograph people for whom negative or prejudicial attitudes might exist and let them see themselves and the viewer as dignified and important and sometimes vulnerable.

Now I am excited to be working as an evidence gatherer without intention. I work randomly and unconsciously, even frivolously, alert to the surroundings. I am continually interested in what I am learning from these pictures.

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REBECCA CUMMINS

Over the past two years, I have been investigating the apparent movement of the Sun and Moon photographically and sculpturally. Several photographic projects record the movement of shadows (in many cases my own) over regular intervals of time; at the Roman Forum in Italy, over lunch (in Rome, London, Berlin, Sydney, Seattle), at the Palo Alto Red Barn (site of Eadweard Muybridge’s earliest horse experiments), Equinox at Sydney Harbor and in the desert by moonlight. Giant sculptural sundials have also been created collaboratively with Astro-biologist Woodruff Sullivan; these works continue to exist as photographic documentation.

Modern day timekeepers have profoundly affected the way we conceptualize time; unlike classic sundials, these Sun works are not designed to measure the exact time of day, but to stimulate a greater awareness of how the Earth’s movements affect daily and seasonal light and shadow occurrences quite specific to the moment and to geographical location. Other, almost domestic, poetic, humorous or intimate ways of interacting with science and technology are being actively explored.

This body of work is an extension of installations created over the last decade (www.rebeccacummins.com) in which I have explored the sculptural, experiential and sometimes humorous possibilities of light and natural phenomena (often referencing the history of optics). Works include a camera obscura / fiber-optic journey through the center of the earth (photographic), paranoid dinner-table devices (silver periscope goblets), an interactive computer/video rifle (To Fall Standing updated E.J.Marey’s photographic rifle of 1882) a periscope birdbath, a singing rainbow machine and site-specific portable camera obscuras.

These artworks represent the aspiration to provoke curiosity and pleasure in the boundaries between experience and thought, aesthetics and science.

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STEVE DAVIS

Since 1997 I’ve been photographing incarcerated teens in Washington State. They live in state and county institutions, often referred to as "schools." In fact, they are jails for juniors—full of secrets and hidden from the public’s eye. Inside, everything is bright and fully exposed. Everyone is watched. The residents are here for committing crimes, but bad luck and the accident of birth contribute to the likelihood of imprisonment.

I’ve been continually struck by the simultaneous vacuity of these institutions and the intensity and passion found in the faces of its young residents. It is these faces that I asked to do the talking. There is more to learn from the eyes than from the architecture. There are exceptions. The Green Hill School’s Intensive Management Unit, for example, demanded my attention as the most inhumane living environment I ever witnessed.

It is my hope that as viewers look at these images, they consider some of the messy and complicated issues surrounding such a great number of young people who live, laugh, and suffer in exile.

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DIANE EVANS

My photographs are driven by intuitive rather than theoretical or critical impulses. After the fact, my interests and perceptions may coalesce into something resembling a theme, but a fully articulated intention is not there at the outset. My career has been marked by a diversity of means, methods, and subject matter, characterized by my curiosity about the world and in the ways the camera can make both formal and social meaning out of certain visual moments. The particular qualities of photos taken with toy cameras and, more recently, pinhole cameras continue to fascinate me, especially distortions of form and space. Despite (or possibly because of) their technical limitations, these crude little devices bring a considerable degree of warmth and spontaneity to the image.

 

 

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KRISTINA JAUGELIS

Behind the edifices we construct for ourselves and the comfort of our possessions, a matrix of complex forces shapes our lives. Sometimes these forces are visible—more often they are not. I am consistently drawn to this territory, motivated by a desire to explore the ideologies, power relationships, cultural fears and desires that lie beneath the surface order of our surroundings.

I am interested not only in how these systems bind us, but also in the degree to which we are able to negotiate freedom and agency within the narrow roles prescribed by culture. The tension between freedom and subjugation, social harmony and dissonance, surface order and underlying disorder is a theme I return to. In my photographs, sculptures and performances this tension is expressed through the unsettling juxtaposition of precise, economic design with elements of violence, aberration, or discord.

Much of my work reflects my ongoing fascination with the relationship between personal narrative and social critique. I often use self-portraiture together with sculpture to examine the ways in which my identity as an artist and a woman intersects with art history, feminist criticism and theory, and contemporary society.

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STU LEVY

Grid-Portraits
Perception involves the visual synthesis of incremental spaces at finite points of time. These photographs of artists and craftspeople explore and challenge our perceptive processes by testing the limits of discontinuity, in both space and time, which our brains will accept in reading an image. Often included in the imagery is the photographer as voyeur and the material artifacts involved in making the photograph, including a Polaroid image of the finished portrait as a compositional element within the image. This self-referential element further emphasizes the act of perceiving, and in addition attests to the collaborative relationship between the photographer, his subject and the objects in their environments.

This work gives a new meaning to "The Decisive Moment", for the lattice-window view presents a maze of scrambled time and recombinant architecture.

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TAMARA LISCHKA

When I was a child I occasionally found mermaid’s purses - egg cases for sharks and skates which had washed up on the beach. I wanted to open the purses, to find out if the leathery sacks actually contained a baby shark or not, but spent long minutes filled with anxiety about what I would see if I did. Would the fish still be alive? Would it squirm or move? Having destroyed its haven, could I really just stand there and watch the fetus die? Eventually such thoughts eclipsed all curiosity, and so I always put the purse back down on the sand and left it undisturbed.

In the past my work has held its secrets close, literally enclosed in the sculptural spaces created by curled fingers and closing hands... But now the hands are beginning to open, long sequestered thoughts and feelings finally examined and revealed. Fetus, fish, squid—the lifeless bodies of these creatures appear eerily animate, even grotesque out of context. Yet the hands that hold them nurture as much as they expose, fingers curving around the tiny forms, even as they lift them gently up into the light.

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CHRISTOPHER RAUSCHENBERG

My work is always about the simple idea that the "ordinary world" around us is far from ordinary. This is true even in a place as flamboyantly wonderful as Thailand, where the pictures in this show were taken last year.

Ever since its inception, the medium of photography has taught its practitioners that the ordinary world around them was filled with a quiet poetry and haunting magic that was unremarked but far from unremarkable.

The camera looks at the world with a childlike innocence. As children, we never quite knew what was going on and the world was filled with mystery. The knowledge and experience we have accumulated since then acts as a barrier to our simply looking at things. We no longer look for or see the magic in our usual surroundings. In all my photographs, I try to lose that deadening familiarity and recapture the richness and mystery that we once saw. Of course, it’s easier in Thailand, where nothing is familiar and everything is rich and magical.

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SHAWN RECORDS

I photograph in what might be best described as an anecdotal style. My subject matter simply reflects my life. As such, I have a wife, two children (both boys), Saturdays at the zoo, a thirty-year mortgage, and a healthy dose of domestic anxiety. Often, these find a way into my photographs. Even so, I’d hesitate to classify my work as autobiographical.

Photography, for me, is an act of paying attention, responding, and manipulating context. Ultimately, I photograph small things that hint at larger ideas- moments, objects, relationships, gestures; the details of everyday living that, when put into another context, take on weight. This approach has resulted in several different series. These particular photographs come from two different bodies of work, La Playa and the Portland Grid Project.

La Playa, named after my grandparents’ retirement community, is an ongoing project that began as a chronicle of an extended vacation full of family, death, and housekeeping that occurred over the summer of 2001. This was a period of time that followed the death of my father-in-law, saw significant declines in the health of both of my grandfathers, and the summer that my wife became pregnant with our son, Sam.

The Portland Grid Project is a group project formed ten years ago by photographer Christopher Rauschenberg. Once a month, we participating photographers are given the same single section, or grid, of Chris’s 1994 AAA road map and a month to photograph whatever interests us within the boundaries of that grid. A product of this process is the fact that there is no one part of the city that overpowers another... the entire city- the alleyways, the sprawl, the industrial zones; are all represented in a way that gets beyond the small urban core and more accurately reflects the larger organism that a city really is. At the rate of one grid per month and a total of around ninety grids on the map, this is a long-term project with great potential for helping us discover, teach, document, and analyze not only who we are as a city, but who we are as a culture.

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HENRI ROBIDEAU

These seven works are from a larger body of fourteen pieces created in 1996 and titled The Monumental Speck: True Tales of Human Greatness in the Trackless Universe. Half the images are of places in Canada and half from the U.S. The work was produced for one of the last shows at Ann Rosenberg’s Foto-Base Gallery in Vancouver, which closed in 1997. The theme of the work, Human Greatness, is pretty broad, but really boils down to the crazy stuff people make or do becoming photo fodder for my camera.

You’ll notice that I work a lot under the banner of the Pancanadienne Gianthropological Survey and its affiliate, the Department of Ancillary American Studies. Located in my basement, these high tech think tanks operate on the cutting edge of modern culture and are dedicated to the observation of Gianthropological phenomena. Internationally recognized, though hardly noticed by anyone in my neighborhood, they are the nerve center for the latest information on Gianthropology, the science of big. From my base camp in the Frozen North I go out on digs, searching for Giant Things, photographing, collecting data and interviewing witless villagers. Once acquired, the documentary elements are combined into the grand visual representations displayed here.

All this work is analog, from 35mm black and white Tri-X shot with a Leica equipped with 35mm lens. The text is cursive script done in Koh-i-noor black drawing ink with an Osmiroid pen equipped with a number 2 italic nib.

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LAUREL SCHULTZ

These recent photographs are among my darker, moodier pieces; at the same time, they seem to capture the random, perfect, impermanent way of things. Some artist respond to the sublime in nature, but my most intimate and immediate experiences of the natural world involve a sense not of eternity, but the roar of time sweeping through landscapes and lives.

I shoot these pictures with a 4x5 view camera so that I can control the focal plane in the image. Artists like Uta Barth have used focus as a metaphor for attention, and defocus – inattention, but there are some other interesting outcomes of non-standard use of the swings and tilts. The subject can seem miniaturized, a focal pathway can appear in the landscape, and sharpness may suggest an unexpected relationship between objects.

 

 

 

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REECE TERRIS

The primary focus of Terris’ artistic practice examines the way in which ingrained relationships and conditioned responses to constructed space are developed. He is interested in exploring how repetitive patterns in planning and design ultimately become subconscious cues for social conduct.

His works alter the expected experiential qualities of a place through an amplification or shift in the primary function of the original design of a place. Terris’ work is intentionally overt and compels the viewer to question the way in which space is developed and used.

 

 

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KAI YAMADA

I’ve been snapping photos from a young age. I remember being put on a film processing budget when I was in junior high school. It wasn’t that my mom, a poet, didn’t appreciate my artistic efforts; she just didn’t think we needed so many photos of weeds and park benches and other things that caught my eye.

In high school, having viewed Ansel Adams’ spectacular prints in a book, I decided that I wanted to create beautiful images like that. It didn’t take long for me to realize, leaving aside the obvious qualitative differences between a master photographer and a high school student, that my images looked nothing like Ansel Adams’ prints. While his photos were of nature, I was drawn to people and places.

By my early twenties, I had been taking snapshots for many years before I made what I consider to be my first real photograph. The image was of a young woman’s foot, caught mid-step crossing a bridge. There was a feeling when I snapped the shutter of capturing something powerful. This was reinforced when I saw that image appear in the developer tray. It was more than just the object caught on film, but the metaphor, the hint of having something more to say hidden in the grain and texture of the print.

It is an elusive thing, trying to capture or even articulate, what I was able to achieve with that photo taken decades ago on the bridge. Still, the photographs that I have been able to produce since then, in my travels around regions of the US, in South America, Europe and Asia represent this quest for hidden meaning in implied narrative of the image.

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CLAUDE ZERVAS

I grew up in a rural part of Whatcom County and I have been greatly influenced by the physical landscape, the social topology, and the transformation of this region. I am interested in how the idea of place evokes emotion, the way emotion affects memory and how memory in turn affects perception.

The Skagit Series of prints are loosely inspired by 19th century botanical illustrations, especially those of Dr. Robert Thornton’s "Temple of Flora" which where highly melodramatic and botanically inaccurate. The Skagit images are digital prints that have been partially painted over with a gel medium.

The Veneers are high resolution digital facsimiles of wood slices that have been sprayed with an automotive color-shifting urethane paint to create an illusion of depth.

The three Forest animations are genereated by a computer program running in real time (the computers are hidden). A digital image of an area near the Middle Fork of the Nooksack River is transformed using an algorithm that performs a set of very simple rules on pixel neighbors. The algorithm runs for a while and then reverses. Each iteration is slightly different due to stochastic properties of the algorithm.

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