The Prophet Dube
Peter Sutherland
2010

    On small paper flyers, “Prophet Dube” is spelled out in all caps above a number to call for free healing; the phrase “Don’t miss your last chance,” leans in italics underneath. The rest of the images is haunted by this peculiar spiritual undertone doubly offering and warning. This wanning hope colors Sutherland’s images, the arid deserts, wooded mountainous ranges, cold landscapes of weeping ice formations, the middle of nowhere buildings, and tags along with his friends in various locations, shuttling in and out of apartments, accompanying him on the street, riding shotgun in the car, forever looking on with him.

    Sutherland gathers religious iconography and referants with an underlining of criticism. Images of glowing white crosses in a field of black, a desolate building with “Victory Over Darkness” on its protruding signage, accompanying it, is a smaller sign like a footnote a few steps away with the text “Prayer changes things” scribbled onto it, an illustration of a wooden cross wrapped with thorns, a Pagan Bible left on the nightstand, fallen tree branches hung on a telephone wire with its branches spread out in vain, and one after another, incredible majestic landscapes, so grandiose and utopic, yet without the human presence.

    An open trunk door reveals the car’s cargo; a set of subwoofers glaring out, boasting of its power in its bulky stature. To the left of the page, a man works on a cigarette, while holding another one already lit, at the ready, in his right hand. The next spread, two men are pushing a small car, perhaps to get the engine running, they get into the car and a cigarette appears drooping out of the driver’s mouth: a meloncholy tune resonates in this communal, bitterweet melody.

    There is a group of people forming a circle, their arms criss-crossing each other’s backs. The flash falls short and highlights only the backs of the people closest to the camera and the rest recede into the night. Their arms are relaxed and speak of a familiarity, collective gestures of trust. Their backs are hunched towards the center, leaning in, performing a secret ritual that is not religious, but rather evoking a more tangible spirituality. A community built on shared yearning, of shared looking, all the while, healing each other.

- anne

[Peter Sutherland]  

Gravity
Kalle Sanner
Farewell Books
2009

   One of the spreads of Gravity presents a pair of images depicting gestural hands. The palms turn to each other, forming a parenthesis enclosed around the empty gutter of the book. The absence of the white page floods with meaning supported by the fingertips that extend out of the frame.

    Continually, the reader is gently directed, to observe and to take part in imbuing the sparse imagery. Within two pages, the minimal shape of a circle transforms and softens into a weightless orb of light. A radiant circle gently shimmers a spotlight nestled in the valley between someone’s back shoulders. The lights glow, emanating and turning, animated through three images presenting its movements. These images are similar to looking from a telescope pointed out into the night, documenting a star’s to and fro against the blackest black.

    The gaze retreats too, aligned with the photographer’s view, showing us a desk lamp perching over a tabletop with small remants arranged under its light. The adjacent page pairs two images, closing the distance, while three shadowy lines layer over the still life; the likely silhouettes of the metal desk lamp’s neck.

    Each image is carefully placed in dialogue with each other, sometimes mimicking the other’s formal lines and shapes and other times directly appropriating from the other. There is a curious spread of three images and one of the images gives the wider shot of a blank rectangle leaning against a tree trunk. The image to the right is an enlargement of the previous picture cropped into an analytical square frame. These two renderings of the same image give a meaning to the black rectangle sitting above the first image Rather than perceived as a formal shape, the form becomes a darkened mirroring of the two.  

    Overall, the book becomes a series of occurrences of imbuing meaning into bare shapes and objects. The images’ weight is given through the act of reading, looking and connecting one to the other. This interaction between the reader and the book at hand, forms the rare gravity that occurs when something becomes meaningful through observation.

- anne

[Kalle Sanner]
[Farewell]

Untitled
Ryan Lay

    In the library is a publication by Ryan Lay made out of wax and paper held together by thin zig-zagging red and black threads. Turning the pages, is a delicate matter and the reader moves at a slow pace taking care not to distress the book.

    The waxy cover of the book presents a foreground of forest looking out to a desolate sun-baked landscape. There are odd pieces of wax cut out and stitched on throughout the pages. Visible on both sides of the page, the fragmented wax doubly obscure and reveal as stained glass windows do in a holy space. These windows though hold indiscernable views for the most part and become alien remnants from a larger image, perhaps the orange forms are flames of a flickering fire or the split purple wax pieces come from a stormy sky.

    The reader moves through the pages treading softly, observing the alternating short dashes and wide opaque strokes. They appear alongside the waxed elements or rest solitary on the sparse page. By their lonesome and without a window to refer to, the cuts in the paper and the translucent strokes form a mysterious symbolic language for the reader.

    The one wax piece that holds a discernable representation, is the one of a tree, similar to the one on the cover of the publication. The tree removed from the forest, is lit by the opaque strokes, as sunlight would reflect and stream in unto surrounding greenery. Quickly though, a definitional reading is obstructed again by the next page’s top portion, where two pieces of purple hover on the topside. It guides the reader to the back cover page of the book, arriving at the arid landscape that was in the beginning, so distant.

- anne 

[Ryan Lay] 

Black Book
Andrew Laumann
Gottlund Verlag
2010

    Black Book operates as a document casting an unfiltered light upon a community caught between embracing and rejecting social constructs of symbols and frameworks. The publication portrays a community lacking camraderie, brought together through assumptions and worn-down iconography. The possibility of a deeper unity is interrupted again and again by the division of a page, by the portraits of disconnected minds giving into the involuntary, by self-imposed chalkboard truisms and by the labels that rose from the underground to now regarded as sidewalk symbols of anarchism and straight-edge lifestyles.

    The book composes a rise and fall, albeit the rise, of young generations who are wearing the ideologies and lifestyles passed down from their older brothers and sisters, but cannot hold back from questioning their loss of individuality, absence of community, where is their unity? These ideologies that are built around an all or nothing stance, so much so, that any doubts on it, will obstruct the very championed notions. An attitude of indifference surfaces from the unsatisfied critical reflections. Inky fingerprints come and go throughout the book, traces of their naturally unique distinctions. Abstract drawings too are interspersed mimicking the experiments in the darkroom or schizophrenic lines skittering across a chalkboard.

    The roving eye depicts an isolated monument housing an empty pedestal next to a portrait of a topless man in an inbetween act of either pulling his pants up or taking them off. Another spread, shows a photograph of someone wearing track pants forced to the ground, lying on his stomach, getting handcuffed. All juxtaposed next to an inversed image of bars, locking up a sculpted bust, once the representative of the ideal human form. These careful observations and pairings also refer to the notion of observing, one spread depicts hands cradling a film camera with a mounted flash held close to the subject’s body and its pair image is constructed through receding layers of a repeated close-up portrait; the individual wears an indescribable expression of shock.

    In all capital letters, the following words are chalked up, “No Job, No Rent, No Masters”, carrying the utopic idea of rejecting hierarchy to regain one’s individuality through the avoidance of conforming to a Western social system. It is just another way to play the game, for beside the page is a man holding a prophet-esque stick behind a hazy landscape whiting out all context as he stands oddly on the precipice of the paper, free to perhaps walk right off the page. Perhaps that is the answer, to walk right away from all forms of representation, from all labels, no matter who they come from, but it would not do to close an idea so neatly and simply in a one, two, three conclusion. The book more or less ends with the question, so what now?

- anne

[Andrew Laumann]
[Gottlund Verlag] 

Showpaper Issue # 89, 4 of 4 of the CMYK Series is out!

Artwork by Borden Capalino.

About

Consider this scenario: a man living in a bleak post-apocalyptic future wanders into the ruins of a museum, and comes upon a collection of minimalist sculptures. Assuming all memory of art and its history has been lost, what would this future man make of a work by Tony Smith or Donald Judd? Though totally hypothetical, this question is useful because it allows us to de-contextualize and reconsider the minimalist project.

Exploring the implications of this imagined encounter is at the center of my work. I suggest that instead of formal objects devoid of metaphor, the works in question might come across as objects of function or ritual. Using materials such as recycled lumber, plastic tarps, fallen wood, cardboard and general detritus, my work re-examines  minimalism in the context of demise, desperation, and decay.

http://bordencapalino.com