Mathew Pokoik - news

Announcing SIGNS, a group photography exhibition curated by Mathew Pokoik, as part of the Mt. Tremper Arts Festival. Featuring:

-Walker Evans - Tim Davis, Shannon Ebner, Lisa Kereszi, John Lehr, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Zoe Strauss, Brian Ulrich - and Stephen Shore.

July 19 - August 31, 2008

Opening reception and party, July 19 at 8:00, will include a modern dance installation by Jill Sigman/Thinkdance, and the klezmer/punk band Golem at 10:00.

Tickets for the opening are $20. More details about the summer festival will be posted soon, along with information about a series of related photography lectures.

Berlin, Germany, 2007. ©Mathew Pokoik

©The Sartorialist

The Sartorialist, a popular fashion blogger / photographer has a superb show up now at Danziger Projects. To my eye the work touches upon traditional vernacular uses of photography - potentially because of the function these images serve. His story is an interesting one, entering the field of photography through what is now a massively popular fashion blog, he began taking photographs as a descriptive tool to investigate street fashion. In his own words to “simply share photos of people that I saw on the streets of New York that I thought looked great. When I worked in the fashion industry, I always felt that there was a disconnect between what I was selling in the showroom and what I was seeing real people (really cool people) wearing in real life.”

©The Sartorialist

©The Sartorialist

What really perks my interest in this work is that it indirectly points towards a central aspect of photographic vision. The capacity for photographs to describe, describe, and describe. That is the reason for taking and posting these pictures, to look closely at what people are wearing, to describe it clearly. Yet the best photographs go beyond mere description (which is the key point here), and I believe if you study the work of other photographers who have used photography primarily as a descriptive tool, one will see the same pattern. The transformation from the descriptive to the mysterious, from a document to a poem.

©The Sartorialist

©The Sartorialist

Two image makers in particular come to mind when I consider these images. The first is Michael Disfarmer (1884-1959) a professional portrait photographer from Heber Springs Arkansas who took remarkably poignant, simple, and descriptive photographs of those who came to sit for the camera in his portrait studio.

Michael Disfarmer

Michael Disfarmer

Michael Disfarmer

The second image-maker would be the remarkable, amazing, and one of my all time favorites…August Sander (who it would be questionable to apply the label vernacular to, although he certainly utilized the transparency of photographs). Just in case you are not familiar with him, the Getty Museum describes his work as follows:

“Man of the Twentieth Century” was Sander’s monumental, lifelong photographic project to document the people of his native Westerwald, near Cologne. Stating that “[w]e know that people are formed by the light and air, by their inherited traits, and their actions. We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled,” Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life and created a typological catalogue of more than six hundred photographs of the German people.

In creating this tremendous and ambitious typological catalogue, Sander utilized the descriptive ability of the medium. With a consciousness and directness that allowed for the most subtle facts of a person to rise to the surface through the mediums descriptive possibilities ,while additionally exploring the use of typologies in photography. Could we look at The Sartorialist’s photographs as a similiar typology? Maybe not as ambitious as Sander’s complete portrait of a culture, but rather a portrait of those really well dressed denizens of our streets?

August Sander

August Sander

August Sander

August Sander

James Danziger has an interesting description of the process of putting together this show that is worth a read if your curiosity has been perked here. On a last note, I was curious to see if photographs made for the web would hold up in person, and they do. They are well printed, and even better in real life, shadow detail that is lost while viewing on the web, shows up clear and strong in the printed image. Check out the blog, check out the show, and consider the ways the blogosphere has entered our daily lives.

UPDATE: The New York Times has a review today on this show, comparing The Sartorialist to Sander.  I’m happy to say it was published here first!

Martin Puryear, Blue Blood, polychromed pine and red cedar, 66″diameter, 1979.

Today I went to see the MOMA retrospective on the sculptor Martin Puryear. I’ve met Martin twice, he’s a friend of a friend, and while I was not familiar with his work when I first met him, he immediately seemed like a person with something to offer. It might have been how he walks, or talks, a presence and gentle intelligence I immediately noticed. These traits were clear and strong in his work, a gentle slow love of his craft, a master of his materials. While his work has strong abstract qualities, subtle references permeate throughout, such as folk traditions of basking weaving, wooden duck decoys, historical references within titles that would open up possible meanings and pathways, all by way of simple suggestion rather than forced connections. At times I wanted to crawl inside, feel, handle, physically interact with his works (there are Do Not Touch signs everywhere). I’ve rarely experienced sculptures where the smell of wood brought me into my body and memory and physicality. I felt a gentle joy, shed a few tears, and laughed out-loud, at his child-like playfulness.

Martin Puryear, Old Mole, Red Cedar, 1985

At a time when so many sculptors no longer produce their own work, his craftsmanship is remarkable, yet he still has a healthy conceptual basis. Ideas of internal/external, minimal forms, folk-art and high-art convergence, historical allusions, all have a home in these sculptures.

Martin Puryear, CFAO, Painted and unpainted pine and found wheelbarrow, 2006-7

Also worth noting, this was the first time I’ve seen the new MOMA Atrium used well. Generally the space overshadows everything they’ve installed, a few of Puryear’s works had a scale, height, and ambition that made perfect use of this vast space. MOMA has an excellent website for the show complete with photos of the Atrium installation in case you’re out of town. However to really feel the full presence of these works, go see, don’t touch, and smell these gentle, fierce, and complex works.

Martin Puryear, Ladder for Booker T. Washington, 36′ long, 1996.

Untitled (Cowboy), 1989, Richard Prince

With the major Richard Prince show now open at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (which I have not yet had a chance to see). I’ve been reading a large collective of reviews and articles on the artist in a variety of publications. This week’s New Yorker has a short piece on Prince by the insightful Peter Schjeldahl that is hands-down the most …well the most intriguing of these articles. Schjeldahl is not afraid to be critical of this art world giant, yet always in ways that make me ponder Prince’s work and the current trends in art that Prince so well represents. Schjeldahl is everything a critic should be, it would seem from the article that he is not entirly enthusiastic with Prince’s work, yet he clearly recognizes the degree to which Prince is a summation of current trends and with his words does not simply approve or disapprove but questions.

Here’s the opening of Schjeldahl’s article on Prince:

The immense art-world success of Richard Prince, the subject of a large and seductive retrospective at the Guggenheim, depresses me, not that I can gainsay it. If “quintessential artist in a generation” were a job opening, Prince, fifty-eight years old, would be an inevitable hire, having hit no end of avant-gardist sweet spots since the late nineteen-seventies in photography, painting, and sculpture. His contemporaries Cindy Sherman and, off and on, Jeff Koons are better, for stand-alone works of originality, beauty, and significance. But they don’t contest Prince’s chosen, Warholian ground as a magus of contemporary American culture…Prince’s works make him an artist as anthropologist, illuminating folkways by recycling advertising photographs, cartoon and one-liner jokes, soft-core pornography, motorcycle-cult ephemera, pulp-novel covers, “Dukes of Hazzard”-era car parts, celebrity memorabilia, and other demotic flotsam. His bald rip-offs of painting styles from Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and, lately, Willem de Kooning make him an artist as irreverent art critic, razzing exalted reputations. Prince can seem to cover, in an insouciantly corrosive way, the whole topography of the aesthetic in present high and low life; and he is acute enough that a refusal to play along, for the nuanced pleasures that he provides, would be bigoted.

So read the article and more important, go see the show of this seminal American artist, if you’re out of town the Guggenheim has an excellent on-line exhibit here.

My only complaint with Schjeldahl is that in a recent write up about the Rembrandt show at the MET, he said that the show “reconfirm’s Rembrandt’s towering supremacy”. How anyone could say this when Vermeer is hanging nearby on the wall is just beyond my comprehension?

from Domesticated ©Amy Stein

Next Sunday will be the closing of The Interactive Landscape. This is a great time to visit the Catskills if your located in the city. The leaves are approaching peak color, the air is cool and smells like fall, and its your last chance to see this fantastic show!

Over the weekend one of the exhibiting photographers Amy Stein, came up from the city for a visit. We had a relaxing dinner on the porch, and spoke about photography. Then went over to the annual Center for Photography at Woodstock’s benefit auction, where Amy outbid me on a fabulous Alessandra Sanguinetti print from her series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams. All in all a photographically jam-packed evening in the backwaters of Ulster County.

You can see Amy’s point-of-view on her blog here.

Here are two clips from the Q&A discussion this past Sunday night from the opening of The Interactive Landscape. From left to right is myself, Ian Baguskas, Mathew Porter, and Christian Patterson.

In my eyes the conversation did degenerate a bit into questions of photography as art or reality. I was surprised by how much people look at photographs with an implicit trust that a photograph is “real”, even in the present digital age. Images are constructs of our own invention, photographs are deeply subjective, even so-called “straight photographs”. What I felt from the audience was almost a sense of betrayal - a “what do you mean photographs are not real!”. It reminds me a bit of the Science vrs. Religion debate, that certain ideas are so deeply ingrained in us, that even in the light of evidence people cannot allow for their world view to be upset. I suppose this discussion also reinforced for me, how a stronger education in visual thinking is needed in our culture. Are we capable of seeing beyond the surface of photographs so as to have an authentic experience of images?

Update: Susan De George reflects on the Q&A here

The Interactive Landscape will be open at Mt Tremper Arts from 9/2/07 - 10/14/07 in the Catskill Mountains of NY.

Curated by Mathew Pokoik and Featuring the work of Ian Baguskas, Aaron Diskin, Emmet Gowin, John Daido Loori, Daido Moriyama, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Matthew Porter, Susana Raab, Stephen Shore, Amy Stein, and Mark Wyse.

A photographic web preview can be found here.

Curators Statement for The Interactive Landscape

Landscape has always been tied to our deepest desires as a culture. It is the place where our sustenance comes from and the place we return to for respite. It has become a place where wonder can still be found, a place we actively seek to escape from modern day realities, a place of return, a place endowed with a secular sacredness, a modern day pilgrimage site.

In Stephen Shore’s Yosemite we are presented with what appears to be a family contained within an almost sexual and certainly sensual landscape. The way the tip of the beach meets the water is like a gentle caress of skin touching skin, or the shape of a breast. The entire landscape conjures up the female goddess of fertility and nature that has been banished within our Judeo/Christian framework. And within this landscape we have the act of photographing, what appears to be a brother photographing his sibling entering the water. Worlds within worlds – photographs within photographs, it asks the question: what is the act of photography?

©Stephen Shore Yosemite

Imagine the Interactive Landscape as a journey through mythological time. Beginning with the Garden of Eden and onward to temptation and the fall. Could it be that all landscape-based art is a conversation with our original mythos of nature? A conversation with the Garden - with paradise - with temptation and death? Aaron Diskin’s mysteriously dark and beautiful untitled photograph speaks to my eye of Eve in the garden with temptation, or the medieval maiden, sexuality and death. It is one of those rare photographs that is exactly what it is yet also touches upon the mythological, the otherworldly.

In John Daido Loori’s photographs of Mt. Tremper and Morning Light, rather than dealing with Eden we might say he takes up the Buddhist perspective of the non-dual; his photographs are of simply mountains, clouds, snow, trees, light. We are presented with the conundrum that the Fall never happened – it is an invention of our mind. His photographs present an experience of landscape that is not apart from us, not of the other – these photographs are direct / present / accessible. They are the gateway we pass through as we enter the physical space that contains this photographic exhibition.

©Mark Wyse Fishing Hole

Respite / recreation / a oneness with nature is a theme within Mark Wyse’s two images, Fishing Hole and an untitled image from his Surfer’s series. In Fishing Hole we have a scene like Shore’s; we find mountains, water, people, the classic themes of landscape, yet the culvert in the foreground hints at a larger perspective that shades the possible meanings of his photograph with additional layers of complexity and subtly. Ian Baguskas’s Maiden of the Mist IV also presents us with a landscape of extraordinary beauty, the waterfalls, the rainbow, and this seemingly dwarfed ship precariously close to the falls. It hints at an underlining tension and the raw power of nature contained within this tourist based landscape.

©Ian Baguskas Maiden in the Mist IV

At some point in our history, the landscape became an abstract and separate entity, a place to photograph, to visit as a tourist, to photograph in an attempt at claiming it. Or a place to re-create, such as an in-door ski resort in Dubai or a photographic backdrop that allows us to capture the illusion of great expanse in a take-home snapshot, as in Susana Raab’s, C2 Marketing Event, McSoccerfestival. We encounter this again in Christian Patterson’s girl with cellular phone, who sitting within a natural landscape is engaged with capturing its appearance within her digital phone/camera. It asks the question: can photographs separate us from this very landscape we seek for respite?

©Mathew Pokoik Dubai, Indoor Ski Resort

In other instances we seek to protect ourselves from that landscape, to create homes and structures, yet nature has its ways of creeping in. Amy Stein’s photographic re-creations of animal and human encounters, hint at the fierce wildness that we are unable to suppress or control. Or Daido Moriyama’s Stray Dog from the streets of Misawa or the flight of Birds through the old city of Dubai, even in an Urban setting Nature lives and breaths and finds a way to survive, to interact with us.

©Amy Stein Trash Eaters

This show speaks of our modern day conundrum, what is our interaction with landscape? With nature? With our world? We stand on this ground surrounded by the undeniable force and ineffable quality of nature. Yet this ground is the cliff’s edge, and we have -like Matthew Porter’s Car Crash - launched ourselves over the precipice.

©Matthew Porter Crash

The Mt Tremper Arts Party is this Sunday night, which will include the opening reception of the Interactive Landscape along with a dance and physical theater performance and DJ. It looks like we’ll have as many as 30 presenting artists across the mediums, I’m quite happy at how it has shaped up. I’ll be posting more related materials as they become available, curators statement, video from the Q&A, and party snap-shots. Hope to see you this weekend!

Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group ©Mathew Pokoik

A Group Photography show curated by Mathew Pokoik as part of the Mt Tremper Arts Party
Open 9/2-10/14 by appointment, see the MTA website for info.

Black Canyon, looking below near Camp 8, Colorado River, Arizona, 1871 ©Timothy O’Sullivan

Maiden of the Mist ©Ian Baguskas

Fishing Hole ©Mark Wyse

Yosemite ©Stephen Shore

Stockholm, WI, August 2005 (Girl with cellular phone ©Christian Patterson

C2 Marketing Event, McSoccerfestival, Poolesville, MD, 2006 ©Susana Raab

Dubai ©Mathew Pokoik

Golf Course Under Construction ©Emmet Gowin

Surfer ©Mark Wyse

Dubai ©Mathew Pokoik

©Amy Stein

©Amy Stein

Stray Dog ©Daido Moriyama

Crash ©Matthew Porter

Work by John Daido Loori coming soon.

Aaron Diskin prefers that his work not be posted on the internet.

Check back soon for a curators statement and a video from the Q&A!

A part of the 3rd annual Mt Tremper Arts Festival

The Interactive Landscape - A group photography show curated by Mathew Pokoik.

Featuring, Ian Baguskas, Aaron Diskin, Emmet Gowin, John Daido Loori, Daido Moriyama, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Matthew Porter, Susana Raab, Stephen Shore, Amy Stein, and Mark Wyse.

Opening party and Q&A at 8:30pm

Dance Performance at 7:00pm.

More information can be found on the Mt Tremper Arts web site, and will be coming to this blog soon.

Dubai, 2007, Mathew Pokoik