"An Unfinished Woman"

One of the greatest difficulties I find with reviewing art is having to cover work that I don't ardently love. What do you say of someone's work when they're evidently sincere, and committed to a vision, but little connection has been made to my subjective tastes? One approach that I found is to answer that sincerity without snark, and with equal commitment to one's own capacities as a writer. I try to discern without falsely waxing rhapsodic, what the images might have meant to the maker. I'm grateful to Catharine Carter, and her art, for teaching me this.

"In our era of digital cameras, artists like Carter strain to escape that technology’s clinical means of representation. They prefer to transact in allegory, raising questions as opposed to presenting truths. In times wherein our agency is so constrained, where our ability to effect change in our lives and those around us is so thoroughly hindered, to say that the world needs less of this inclination would be churlish. " full text: here

Angela Bacon-Kidwell, "Travelling Dream"

2012 was a year of profound personal dislocation. Amid tumultuous changes, I contrived many unconventional means to continue producing work. I was especially proud of the days spent escaping my hometown’s 110 degree summer in the Walker Art center’s air-conditioned Flat-Pak prefab house with one of the museum’s ipads, composing essays wirelessly in this infrequently-visited, ad hoc office. When assigned to cover Angela Bacon-Kidwell’s work, I knew that it reflected much of the grief and loss that I’d experienced that year. But it also re-affirmed the tenacity with which we must cling to the things that keep us hopeful. It was a pleasure, even under duress, to work with her. From a coming article:

“For centuries, people have created and kept Memento Mori, representations of death as reminders of their mortality. Photography made possible even more literal manners of this art, affording the bereaved a portrait of their loved ones before they passed eternally into memory. In a like way, Angela Bacon-Kidwell is at war with oblivion, although she aspires to retain and manage her emotional relationship to painful memories, and the ineluctable reality that loved ones depart…Her best works have an acquired poignancy, like smoothed stones that arrive on a beach, scoured of their incongruities yet indelibly marked by the agitation that formed them.” full text: here

Greta Pratt, "Taking Liberties"

While spending part of this winter in Richmond, Virginia, I was fortunate to find Candela Gallery which was featuring Greta Pratt's "Taking Liberties" series. The works have remained very much on my mind, even months after first viewing them, life-sized, hung heroically- their faces just slightly above eye-level. Though the show closed before the essay I wrote could be published, I see no reason to not call attention to this fine work:

“It is apparent that underneath so much tactless raiment are strongly individuated people- clearly someone’s mom, daughter, nephew, or son. Rodney Parker’s probably-homemade “pain” tattoo is visible at his wrist, and Christine Sweeney’s doughy hands sport gecko-green manicured nails. Pratt deftly manages to humanize these figures without reducing them to typology. We don’t learn whether one is a recovering addict, or another a battered mother; we’re “told” only that these are people were compelled to cede a degree of dignity for a nominal wage. It’s a trade off nearly most of us- those who remain employed- can deeply empathize with. The fact that these particular people embody “liberty” only makes the realization more acute.” link

Mike Dvorak, "Amish; one God, one family"

Issue 94 of B&W broke a longstanding precedent of not revisiting artists that had previously been featured. I proposed that Mike Dvorak’s work among a particularly stern Amish sect certainly merited a departure, and this was favorably approved. He and I both negotiated a tenuous balance between romanticizing this way of life, and acknowledging its harsher truths. 

"However artfully rendered Dvorak’s Amish series is, contemporary curators, and collectors tend to view documentary photography as having little current merit, or of having passed into history… Photographic art has frequently shown us what is enduring as well as what is imperiled. Given America’s current struggles, would that it had invested even a modest amount in the country’s artistic capital, rather than limiting its vision to bolstering banks and fortifying Wall Street. Fortunately, a few stalwart traditionalists believe that it remains a relevant endeavor to better acquaint us with the experiences of our fellow citizens.” December, 2012 link

Colleen Mullins, B&W Issue 82

I profiled Colleen Mullins, who would soon after win a McKnight Fellowship, in April 2011. Mullins' mother led her to five-star cruise where she found the subjects of her then current work. It was challenging personally to reconcile the artist’s profound sadness over her mother’s recent passing, with the (inebriated) joy in many of her photographs. And yet, I tried: 

“While Mullin’s photographs have apparent parallels with Martin Parr’s depictions of New Brightonites on holiday, or to Larry Fink’s series Social Graces, her characters seem even less self-aware. Bauble-laden, sequined, they were frequently intoxicated and incognizant of more than their own gratification, then flash-frozen by Mullins in various rictuses of frivolity that devolved as hours passed. …there is an awareness of the festive atmosphere’s vacuity, and vast grief over the ultimate hollowness of her now-deceased mother’s pursuit of such insubstantial connections. There exists simultaneously in this body of work an antipathy towards, and an attraction to, its subjects. It is an indictment of their indifference to pain, even as it's an empathetic porttrait of people of a certain caste enjoying themselves. April, 2011 link

Osama Esid, B&W Magazine 2010

For the past three years, B&W Magazine has generously afforded me the privilege of looking intently into images that I, most often, care deeply about. Now working on my seventh contribution, here is an excerpt from my first essay for them, covering fellow ‘dinosaur,’ and a person more immersed in our medium than anyone else that I know, Osama Esid. 

“Despite the superficial resemblance to a 19th century sensibility which fed the Occident what it wanted to see of the Orient, Esid’s body of work is no mere anachronism or a colonial enterprise. It is of its time with all the graffiti, present styles, and detritus intact. In one image among a series of nudes shot in Lisbon, a figure leans against a doorway. Blurred but definitively feminine, she holds (she is) the source of illumination for both her body and the rooms surrounding her. A surge protector on the floor is given the most prominent focus, which could be a subtle symbol for a conduit of energy, or a clever pun.” December 2010 link

Jefferson's Gardens, 64 Magazine

While ostensibly covering a new season in the gardens of Monticello, I was proud that my editors at 64 Magazine included the following critique of Mr. Jefferson. The article’s timing was somewhat exceptional as well, published just a few short months before the infamous events of September, 2001.


“More than a monument to one man’s stunning accomplishments, many life sagas were played out here- those of craftsman, charwomen, and children born as property. Monticello lets us ponder our own deepest needs for solace, and home, and it quietly compels us to examine whether the means we use to acquire these comforts are just.” May, 2001 link