The latest exhibition at Artspace, Line in the
Cloud, features mesmerizing new photographic works by
artist Akihiko Miyoshi, presented by the Arts Council of Lake
Oswego from May 25th through August 2nd, 2024. Showing in
Artspace’s annex gallery are multimedia works by artists Rose
Dickson, Sarah Meadows, Dina No, Julia Stoops, and Joan
Truckenbrod. In a whirl of artistic approaches, material
explorations, and technical experiments, the artists all
explore what is hidden, lost, and revealed.
Miyoshi’s
new photographic works fill the gallery. Upon first glance his
images appear deceivingly ordinary-- a fragment of aggregate
rock or a blurry little tree are not typical focal
points. These tiny, inconspicuous parts of larger photographs
were initially made more than 20 years ago, when the artist
was road tripping as a young photography student, who had just
moved from Japan to the United States. His photographs are not
meant to provide useful, hardened data. On the contrary, they
are elusive, with a sense of potentiality and wonderment
lingering. Miyoshi has commented how the act of photographing
is predatory, using terms like, “load”, “aim”, “shoot” and
“take”. His work evades being captured in response to big tech
mining personal data for their own benefit and our culture’s
accelerated consumption of images.
“The more one looks,
the more perplexing it becomes.” Miyoshi had said in a recent
conversation, alluding to his technique of combining multiple
still images to create what appears to be a three-dimensional
animation. To get technical, this entrancing effect is
achieved through Miyoshi’s practice of layering multiple
digitized 35mm and medium format photographic prints on silk,
floating in resin upon birch wood panels, treated with
retro-reflective pigments. What results from this process are
images that appear almost lenticular. Picture gripping a thick
plastic card with linear ridges that shows a puppy popping his
tongue in and out as you shift the card side to
side. Lenticular images, colloquially known as “flickers”,
“winkies”, or “wiggle pictures”, are a process of interlacing
photographs of an object at slightly different angles to
create a three-dimensional effect. When Miyoshi’s prints are
layered and encased in resin, they become transparent,
revealing slight variations and moire effects. A sense of
depth is further created by the substrate's retro-reflective
treatment, which illuminates the composition, like the hot
glow of a traffic sign at night. These images appear to
emanate from the materials themselves, alive, despite the
inherent material contradictions of being fixed.
This
effect is employed with a phenomenological function– the
viewer’s relationship and positionality to the object changes
the perception of the object. According to
Miyoshi:
It’s not so much about inducing
disorientation as it is about fostering reorientation to
confirm or rediscover something that is lost when an image is
eternally fixed. I envision creating an effect similar to
experiencing the unfixed/alive projections of a camera
obscura, of the world not yet fully an image, encouraging
viewers to rediscover and reconsider their positionality and
potentiality. What I would like to propose here is a different
kind of photographic engagement to the world that recalls
images, and by extension the world, as a source of possibility
and wonderment that is not necessarily for the
“taking”.
Rose Dickson’s The Tower and
Pistil are similarly ineffable. “The paintings are first
made with flashe paint on panels; I then dip them in beeswax
between 8 to 10 times until they become a solid block. The wax
is opaque, so I can no longer see the painting beneath.” With
these works, she has created an exercise in which she must
methodically excavate the surface, carving into beeswax to
instinctively discover an obscured memory of the painting
below. Her images are pushed up against the contoured surface,
resulting in alluring work that resides at the threshold
between inner and outer worlds.
Dina No’s intricate
ceramic tiles reference the traditional Korean quilting
technique of Saeksilnubi, which uses cords made from mulberry
paper. Typically these cords are formed into repeating
concentric lines and, like batting in a quilt, are situated
within, then outlined by hand in careful stitching. No instead
uses finely extruded high grog stoneware clay coils and
asserts a hard inversion of this technique, revealing the
infrastructure that was meant to be hidden.
Linear
curves hover and radiate within the primordial twilights of
artist Julia Stoops’ paintings on paper. Her paint pendulum
oscillates across her basement studio and distributes paint on
paper with mathematical intelligence, in what are called
Lissajous forms. Lissajous forms are a pattern produced by the
intersection of two sinusoidal curves, the axes of which are
at right angles to each other. Anchor points of her digitally
rendered 3-d forms make momentary appearances in her
landscapes. Stoops’ play with wavelengths and other technical
mysteries echo Miyoshi’s and Truckenbrod’s experimental
approaches to making art.
Joan Truckenbrod found her
unique voice in the digital arena in the 1960’s by using
algorithmic equations punched into computer cards, which were
then further enlivened with her spontaneous play within early
plotter drawing programs, like Fortran. Truckenbrod’s forays
into color xerography began while she was a student (and
later, a professor) at the Art Institute of Chicago in the
1970’s. Through boldly schlepping an Apple computer monitor
upside down on a 3M color copy machine, she developed a
process to actually copy and print computer images (onto
heat-transfer materials she overlaid onto various
textiles). Her intuitive facilitation of communications
processes across multiple technologies and material forms is a
substantial part of her creative practice. Prescribed values
of family life and work in the United States are explored and
distorted in Truckenbrod’s work. Layers of multiple selves
emerge and collide like electric storm clouds, and through her
digital artistic manipulations, new identities are
revealed. The works on view in this exhibition make digital
video technologies of the 1980’s tangible– abstract
juxtapositions of images of her and her daughter’s faces are
printed on bridal satin using a light sensitive emulsion, and
a hand digital Jacquard TC2 loom.
Sarah Meadows’
research-laden practice of archiving images of the natural
world is as evident in her work as is her own hand. Her
portfolio contains thousands of digitized scans of her film
photographs of computer screens’ web searches of nature. In
various scales and levels of legibility, one may read seed
packets, buttercups, horticulture and houseplant how-to video
tutorials, beetles, or fruit. In her work, small photographic
details are sensitively cradled, and ultimately, they become
twisted in their presentation. Meadows’ display methods
create resistance against the image. Her process of
re-photographing media softens specificity, further
distancing, yet in turn inviting the viewer to examine the
ways they relate with image culture and their larger
environment as a whole.
Though their approaches are
unique, each artist addresses a challenge that artist Ann
Hamilton described, that is, “to make visible those things
that become invisible to us. How to make an absence present
and experienceable.”