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| "Brown House" by Shari Wilkins |
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| "Winifred's House" by Shari Wilkins |
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| "Ivy House" by Shari Wilikins |
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| "4499R" by Laura Ruth Bidwell |
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| "6564U" by Laura Ruth Bidwell |
By Tom Wachunas
“…
Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation,
abstraction, and intervention… Every photograph has many truths and none.
Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to
be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context…” - Taryn
Simon
“You come to the photograph as an aesthetic
object with no context... Then you step in and read the text and then out again
to revisit the image in a completely different way. I'm interested in that
space between text and image. The piece becomes the negative space between the
two.” - Taryn Simon
EXHIBIT: Art as Journal: Laura Ruth Bidwell and Shari
Wilkins / THROUGH NOVEMBER 4, 2018, at STUDIO M in the Massillon Museum / 121
Lincoln Way East in downtown Massillon / Tuesday through Saturday 9:30am -
5:00pm, Sunday 2:00pm - 5:00pm / Phone: 330-833-4061 /
Please note: I apologize for being so late
with this post on the fascinating inaugural exhibit at Massillon Museum’s
beautiful new STUDIO M Gallery. Last day for viewing this show is Sunday,
November 4.
Of all the myriad
forms that a work of art can be, now more than ever photography remains the
most challenging if not problematic to me. What makes a photograph a work of
art? What distinguishes it from the plethora of photographic images that
seemingly assault our daily lives? What separates it, for example, from all
those terribly ordinary snapshots stuffed into social media? One unfortunate
by-product of the photosaturated culture we’ve created for ourselves is the
sheer ease with which we can sate our gluttonous appetites for the mundane.
Fast-food for the eyes.
Ansel Adams’ dictum
comes to mind: “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” The notion of a photograph
being an intentionally creative act on the part of the photographer is a
prickly proposition, arguably implying that reckoning a photograph as art is
simply a matter of determining how effectively its visual components adhere to
certain aesthetic principles of formalistic excellence. But it’s rarely that simple.
I included the
above quotes from contemporary multimedia artist Taryn Simon because I think
they offer an avenue to appreciating the photojournalistic or documentary
character of the pictures in this exhibit. As discrete two-dimensional images,
their essentially quotidian subjects are captured in a straight-on fashion,
which is to say they’re unembellished by any really fancy special effects. But
as Simon reminds us, embracing context
is key. To that I would add the vital importance of presentation. So read the artist’s statements posted on the wall to
better grasp their motivations and meanings. Therein you learn this about Laura
Ruth Bidwell’s “The Great Tangle” series:
“When
we moved from Peninsula to Cleveland, the one thing I truly grieved for was the
great abundance of forest and tangles surrounding our property and in the
Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Once I started walking around my urban
neighborhood with camera in hand I could see how much lush foliage and tangles
existed among the houses and buildings around me. This show has given me the
opportunity to pair up what I call The Great Tangles from my rural and urban
lives.”
And of her works here, the “Promised Land” series, Shari Wilkins has written: "Shot primarily on miniature instant
film, this project portrays images of homes built in my father's hometown of
Cairo, Illinois… It is a mythological place in my family's collective memory…
After a twenty year absence, I visited Cairo and was struck by the abandoned
town that I visited often as a child. I set out to find my grandmother's home
as my first step in documenting some of the remaining homes, some abandoned, some
not…”
The fronts of every
house in Wilkins’ miniature pictures are seen from enough of a distance so that
no matter how close you come to the actual picture, the details remain slightly
blurred and fuzzy, though still clear enough to show varying degrees of
decrepitude or abandonment. Especially interesting is how the photos are
uniformly presented, all seeming to float under glass on wide-margined matts
framed with very plain (pine?) wood. Like so many preserved museum specimens of
extinct life, or fossils, the pictures have become objects - reliquaries of
urban entropy. There’s something distinctly poetic in how they exude a saddening
narrative about the historic diminishment and shrunken dimensionality of a once
promising place. It’s a story certainly not unique to Cairo, Illinois.
Though not so
overtly mournful in scope, the narrative contained in Laura Ruth Bidwell’s
photos is no less engaging than Wilkins’, and equally well-presented. In the
journey of leaving her home in a richly sylvan environment to live in a more urban
setting, Bidwell tells us how her missing the natural richness surrounding her
former home was relieved by finding ample enough evidence of the same around
her new one. Consequently her unframed photos, most of them capturing various
densities of lush foliate textures, shapes and colors, and each uniformly
mounted on a white birch panel, are presented in pairs, suggesting a
before-and- after scenario. Interestingly, though, the pictures have no titles.
They’re coded only with strange numbers, so we don’t know which home is which.
Her memory of the first beloved locale has become intermingled and ‘tangled’
with her connection to the second.
Whatever anxieties Bidwell may have initially experienced in her moving from
one place to another, her handsome photos represent the discovery of a
comforting kinship between the two.
Returning for a
moment to the idea of photographs as fast food for the eyes: If a more gourmet
cuisine, as it were, is what you seek, be thankful for real art galleries. In
this case, the featured entrees at Studio M are particularly savory.
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