Julie Blackmon
Friday, January 24th, 7:30pm
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco
About Domestic Vacations: The Dutch proverb "a Jan Steen household" originated in the 17th century and is used today to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, helped inspire this body of work. I am the oldest of nine children and now the mother of three. As Steen's personal narratives of family life depicted nearly 400 yrs. ago, the conflation of art and life is an area I have explored in photographing the everyday life of my family and the lives of my sisters and their families at home. These images are both fictional and auto-biographical, and reflect not only our lives today and as children growing up in a large family, but also move beyond the documentary to explore the fantastic elements of our everyday lives, both imagined and real.
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Jennifer Williams: The High Line Effect reviewed in ArtNews
Inspired by the richness and variety of the High Line, and its overall effect on the Chelsea neighborhood and the city itself, Jennifer Williams created a series of collages composed of digital photographs of the area that she manually pieced together. Eschewing traditional frames, she decided to install these works, which vary widely in shape and size, in such a way that they seemed to grow out of the gallery's ceiling, floor, and walls.
In fact, the collages often appeared to tumble to life, like so many angular, sculpted creatures. One of them, called 7000 Oaks to Tenth Avenue Square, was so large that it looked like a dinosaur about to take a stroll, while another, Approaching Hudson Yards (both 2013), hung from the ceiling like a plane caught mid-takeoff. Running through all of the works was the path of the elevated park, like the spines of the various creatures that Williams invented. The buildings almost overwhelm the green foliage in the images, much the same way they do in real life.
But as these works make apparent, amenities like the High Line are inevitably accompanied by increased development and higher rents. Williams's exuberant and attractive collages comment cogently on the ambiguous impact of the High Line.
The gallery also included a set of the artist's unrelated collages. Boxes #2 (2012) is particularly sensual, with layers of brown paper, varying in tone, folded and bent and squeezed together. These works beg viewers to touch them and glide their fingers across the surfaces, giving them an opportunity to sense Williams's emotional states.
—Valerie Gladstone
Fred Stein at The Jewish Museum — In the Press
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Haaretz Israeli News
The wedding present that Lilo and Fred Stein bought themselves was never left unused: The newly married Jewish couple brought the 35mm Leica camera with them when they left Germany in the fall of 1933. They ostensibly were going on their honeymoon, but in fact were fleeing the Nazis only a few months after Hitler came to power. Read the full article here.
Spiegel Online
A photo session? No thanks! In 1946, Albert Einstein turned down a request by photographer Fred Stein to shoot pictures of him at Princeton. But it wasn't long before Einstein relented, agreeing to a meeting that he insisted should last no longer than 10 minutes. It turned into a two-hour encounter during which they swapped jokes, and which produced an image that has been branded into the collective consciousness, that of the physicist in his mid-sixties with his trademark tussled hair and sad, lonely gaze. Read the full article here.
Mary Mattingly: House and Universe reviewed in Art In America
"We're probably doomed as humans if we don't start thinking in a posthuman way," Mary Mattingly posited during a recent "Art:21" documentary. Her grim assessment, a by-product of years spent independently studying the exploitation of workers and natural resources that propels consumption in the world's affluent areas, is accompanied by ambitious experiments in imagining more sustainable means of subsistence. In the highly inventive tradition of Buckminster Fuller, Mattingly has fabricated futuristic "Wearable Homes"—protective suits equipped to guard against extreme temperatures, flooding, insects and bacteria—and mobile geodesic domes. Several such domes were mounted on the "Waterpod," a retrofitted barge that carried the artist and her crew around New York City's harbor for six months in 2009 as they tried to live self sufficiently on the vessel (growing food, recycling rainwater, etc.).
"House and Universe," Mattingly's third solo show with Robert Mann, reflected the artist's environmental concerns in two sculptures and 15 photographs, many of which document her public projects. The photo Flock (2012), for example, features one of her floating structures. Atop a platform, two geodesic domes covered with white tarps and surrounded by containers of plants are engulfed by an expanse of sky and sea. Continent (2012) shows a barge and rafts subsumed in a murky fog; a sharp edge between the rippling waters and the solid background, among other Photoshopped aspects of the image, reveals the barren surroundings as an aesthetic frame. The unmoored vessel thus emerges as both a symbol of vulnerability and a privileged vantage point in these and several other of the show's photographs, which evince a romantic tendency eclipsed by sheer purpose and will in the artist's mobile environments. Yet, if Mattingly's intentions are resolutely political, her photographs nonetheless evoke the spiritual. Take the serene vision of escape in For a Week Without Speaking (2012), a photograph depicting the artist rowing in quietly rippling waters, her bundled possessions atop wooden shafts, in the autumnal glow of a forested bank.
Mattingly's combination of ecological engagement and otherworldly beauty is reminiscent of much Land art, and she knowingly interpolates herself into this tradition with Filling Double Negative (in collaboration with Greg Lindquist), 2013. Michael Heizer's Double Negative (1969), a vast trench on Nevada's Mormon Mesa, is pictured from its depths with a boulder in the foreground wrapped in a blue-green tarp and twine. Heizer's piece functions as an important reference for the show, in its paradoxical use of emptying to achieve scale.
Mattingly advances reduction as a Sisyphean task. In the 52-by-36-by-36-inch sculpture Terrene (2012), a hanging twine-wrapped ball of domestic sundries—purses, bedside lamps, paperback novels and art magazines—the artist has compressed her belongings into a burden. Rather than push this hodgepodge boulder up a hill, she pulls it across a city sidewalk in Pull (2013) and places it on top of a reclined nude male, seen from behind, for Life of Objects (2013). In the urban outdoors, the mass of intimate possessions seems to expose the shame of private accumulation; indoors, on a naked, anonymous man, it becomes a more visceral strain on individualism.
Accompanying these works, Mattingly created a website, own-it.us, that catalogues each of her possessions, tracing their constituent elements to mining and extraction operations around the world. In this way, she elegantly extends her work from the domestic to the global, proving her show's title a political injunction to understand how each house contributes to the making of our universe.
—Kareem Estefan
December 2013
Read the article online here.
David Vestal 1924-2013
David Vestal passed away this week at home in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Born in Menlo Park, California in 1924, Vestal studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago before becoming involved in photography in the late 1940s through the Photo League in New York. Rather than working in photographic essays like many of his New York School contemporaries, Vestal captured singular moments of life in the city through his emotive and atmospheric images—a lone figure passing along a snowy sidewalk, a twilight drive over the George Washington Bridge, or the bustling traffic in Flatiron Square at night.
Vestal received two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships in photography in 1966 and 1973. He wrote extensively for various photography publications, and published two classic books on photographic craft and printing: The Craft of Photography, 1975, and The Art of Black-and-White Enlarging, 1984. A lifelong educator, his illustrious teaching career included positions at Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute, as well as numerous lectures and workshops around the country. His work is included in such notable public collections as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Portrait of David Vestal taken by Len Kowitz, 2004.
Julie Blackmon interviewed by Tcqvar Webcast at Paris Photo
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Mary Mattingly: House and Universe reviewed in ArtNews
Mary Mattingly's personal belongings, lashed together with rope, imagine the fate of society in the wake of environmental destruction. This show, "House and Universe," included two such aggregations: Gyre (2013), a hemisphere of the artist's cast-offs bound to a wagon wheel, and Terrene (2012), which hung from the ceiling like a wrecking ball. The strength of these masses intensified the mood of the 15 photographs situating Mattingly's sculptures in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In Microsphere (2012), three women nestle inside a geodesic cocoon watching children swim in murky water near houseboats. Packing materials labeled "COSCO" (China's international shipping company" dominate the skyline.
In Life of Objects (2013), a ball of detritus rests on top of a naked, fair-skinned boy who bears the weight of human possessions. Other works seemed straightforwardly documentary. Flock (2012) captures one of several floating domiciles designed and inhabited by the artist from 2011 to 2012. Mattingly takes photographs all over the world, but refuses to divulge their locations, adding to our overall sense of disorientation. Alongside Andrea Zittel, Mel Chin, and other utilitarian art activists, she participates in an expanding forum that proposes alternative solutions for living in a society transformed by floods, was, and economic collapse. A Ruin in Reverse (2013), a sarcophagus-shaped bundle tossed into a freshly dug grave, recalls Ana Mendieta's Silvetas.
The poignancy of Mattingly's environments is their vulnerability. They are imperfect solutions that question humanity's chances for survival in a post-consumer age. Gathering together her own belongings, she asks, "Why did I own them? How did they get into my life? And what's my responsibility?" The success of Mattingly's work rests, perhaps, on whether it actually moves us to action.
—Johanna Ruth Epstein
Fred Stein at The Jewish Museum in Berlin
In an Instant: Photographs by Fred Stein
Libeskind Building, Eric F. Ross Gallery
Jewish Museum, Berlin
November 22, 2013 - March 23, 2014
An instant can make the difference—whether in life or in photography. For the photographer Fred Stein, it was those brief moments that determined his life, both personally and professionally. Fred Stein was born in Dresden in 1909, the son of a rabbi. When the Nazis came to power, the committed socialist was forced to give up his job as a lawyer and leave Germany. Under the pretext of taking a honeymoon trip, he escaped to Paris with his wife Lilo in 1933. There he faced the challenge of building a new livelihood from scratch. Inspired by a Leica 35mm camera—Fred and Lilo Stein's wedding gift to each other—Fred Stein chose photography as his new profession. The exhibition is Germany's first comprehensive retrospective of Fred Stein's work. With more than 130 black-and-white photos, it presents street views of Paris and New York along with portraits. Personal documents, original prints, and contact sheets offer further glimpses of the photographer's life and work.
Read the full press release here.
Robert Mann Gallery in L’Oeil de la Photographie
Robert Mann Gallery is featured in French magazine L'Oeil de la Photographie as one of the exhibitors not to miss at Paris Photo 2013. This year's program highlights rare vintage prints by Joe Deal and Aaron Siskind, among others, as well as new work by standout contemporary photographers like Julie Blackmon.
Read the complete article in French and English here.
Mary Mattingly: House and Universe reviewed in Artforum
Flock, 2012, the first of fifteen photographs in Mary Mattingly's exhibition "House and Universe," shows two geodesic domes set atop a raft adrift in the ocean. Like Mattingly's Waterpod Project, 2009, and her current Triple Island, 2013, these domes, part of Flock House Project, 2012, have functioned as temporary, self-sufficient shelters in New York's parks and plazas. Variously outfitted with hydroponic gardens, water-filtration systems, and buoys, they are public-art prototypes for the small-scale floating communities that Mattingly predicts will become our collective dystopian norm should global warming and corporate privatization continue unabated. Thus, the photograph doesn't chronicle the Flock House domes' past installations, but instead stitches them into a projected, distinctly Ballardian future.
As art historian (and Artforum contributor) Eva Díaz has noted, Mattingly is one of several artists who have recently resuscitated the geodesic domes patented and popularized by Buckminster Fuller. This new turn in "dome culture," however, jettisons Fuller's oracular ebullience. The aims of Mattingly's shelters instead come closer to those of Krzysztof Wodiczko's Homeless Vehicle, 1988. Wodiczko's souped-up shopping cart was purportedly purely practical, equipped to satisfy the stated needs of New York's homeless population—a bin for collected aluminum cans, an enclosure for secure sleeping, etc.—through the resemblance it bore to a missile on wheels was hardly accidental. Like Homeless Vehicle, Mattingly's prototypes are seductive warnings: charming as single unites, but foreboding when their proliferation is earnestly contemplated. Whereas Fuller's domes radiated technocratic confidence, Mattingly's betray skepticism toward design solutions that accommodate a deleterious status quo without addressing root causes.
In "House and Universe," Mattingly acted convinced that her imagined future and the present day were converging. Can you blame her? In the context of New York alone, consider the ongoing recovery from Hurricane Sandy, the encampment-as-protest of Occupy Wall Street; or even the trendy ubiquity of sustainable living measures, such as home gardens, solar panels, and dry compost. As if to prepare for imminent catastrophe, Mattingly has been divesting herself of personal possessions by bundling her books, clothes, keepsakes, and electronics into boulder-like clumps bound together by twine. Two such overstuffed amalgams, Terrene, 2012, and Gyre, 2013, were presented here as discrete sculptures; in photographs, others appeared in less pristine settings, such as an unidentified shantytown, suggesting a connection between Mattingly's haphazard constructions and the improvised architectures at the outskirts of cities worldwide.
Before parting with her personal items, Mattingly systematically documented them in photographs and 3-D scans, though this component of her project was nowhere in evidence. Overall, "House and Universe" raised anew the question of how the gallery context condenses and filters practices as holistic as Mattingly's (or, say, Andrea Zittel's). Almost to a fault, the photographs bristle with art-historical references: Their square format and centered compositions loosely follow the conventions of Bernd and Hilla Becher's deadpan typologies; titles allude to Robert Smithson and Titian; one photograph was taken in Nevada from the bottom of Michael Heizer's Double Negative, 1969, and another, of an overburdened rowboat disappearing into mist, borrows wholesale from Caspar David Friedrich, The elegant, elegiac tone of Mattingly's "art" photography seems at odds with the scrappy, madcap mood of her urban interventions. Then again, there is a grim site specificity to Mattingly's exhibiting work in Chelsea, a district badly damaged by Sandy. Furthermore, Gyre points out how even art's discursive apparatus contributes to a culture of overproduction and waste. Tucked behind its twine netting are several bulky periodicals bearing on their back covers the Swiss pastorals and red lettering of Bruno Bischofberger advertisements—unmistakably, old issues of Artforum.