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A Conversation with Todd Hido: An Interview with Todd Hido about his newest book, "Between the Two" (Nazraeli Press)
"Four Galleries, Four Artists", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Michael Berger Gallery has touched all the bases in its current
show, "Four Galleries Four Artists." Paintings,
photographs, prints
and sculptures/models respectively
represent the work of artists whose points of view are as diverse as their
collective media. Unexpectedly, but surely not accidentally, they and the
show are linked together by an underlying mood of introspection/retrospection.
Fresh from a recent
solo show at the same gallery, Hung Liu continues her reflections on Chinese
history and culture in her substantial figural lithographs and aquatints.
Some of these are straightforward printings in black ink; others build on
that basic impresspion and enrich it with color. The images are derived from
historical photographs that depict social archetypes of an earlier China.
The strength of these works derives from the artist's instinct
for the human qualities of the images she has chosen and from the shifting
demands of acknowledgement and association that the layering of materials
and images impose on the viewer.
A kind of layering is also evident in the paintings in oil on
aluminum (listen up, Alcoa!) by Oklahoma artist David
Crismon. Taking as his point of departure a recognized European or American
Old Master painting, Crismon revises and reworks the composition. Sometimes
the procedure is a sort of cut-and-paste; in others there is a variation of
scale or focus. Always, color is remanaged, and the paint surface, which on
a metal support can be of mirror smoothness, is both emphasized and denied
as an image carrier by incised striations.
Crismon likens his appropriations
and his treatment of them to the practice current in some musical circles of
layering new sounds, called "interferences," over existing and often
quite well-known compositions. The assault on the formal integrity of an already
existing work is a recurring stance in contemporary practice; it at once distances
the original, reducing its meaning, and offers the artist a means of expression
that is part commentary, part creation. The original work returns, altered and
revalidated with new intentions.
The three boat models, "Ghost
Ships," by John Taylor, embody quite another take on the past. Carefully
based on photographs of vintage vessels, the models may seem, at first glimpse,
just models. However, the worn or fragmentary condition of their materials
excites attention, and then the ships fall into place in one's awareness as
surprising assemblages constructed of found objects. The ship/object has gradually
materialized under Taylor's hand and eye from humble trash, displaying the
patina and tatter of unmistakable age. It would be interesting to have access
to some kind of day book or journal in which Taylor recorded the time and
circumstances of his scavenging.
Todd Hido's photographs are
widely known through his two books and more immediately through the inclusion
of a good number of them in the current show at the Heinz Architectural Center.
His preferred subjects are nocturnes of the close-in suburb or the modest
residential neighborhood that has seen better days; light industry and commercial
activities seem to lie just around the corner. Although working in San Francisco,
he documents a semi-urban world that is ubiquitous.
But it is more than either
his subject matter or the immediacy of the photographic medium that engages
thought and empathy. Hido chooses to rely on available night lighting, which
requires lengthy exposures and contributes to the sense of suspended time in
his views. The atmosphere is often misty, softening the landscape's harshness
but also taking up the light in dim glowing patches that suggest a truly infernal
setting rather than the doubtless purgatorial reality of these lost spaces.
It is an isolating, threatening world that he sees in these anonymous places;
even cars take on the suggestion of large snuffling creatures lumbering around
the edges of meager, empty yards.
However, almost without exception, each of those very unexceptional
houses shows at least one window lighted from within, from a room screened
from the outside world by curtains or some other means of sealing in the life
there and warding off the lifelessness outside. The lighted window becomes
a beacon, or better, a surrogate hearth promising refuge, safety and human
company, all otherwise absent in a too-familiar yet alien land. (Barry Hannegan is a freelance writer and the former director of historic
design programs for Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation.) |
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