regina mamou unfortunately, it was paradise september … · unfortunately, it was paradise...

Regina Mamou

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise

September 16 - October 29, 2016

Opening Reception:

Friday, September 16, 7-10PM

Fog is: vapor condensed to fine particles of water. It is not, however, to be confused with clouds, which hover inthe upper atmosphere, as fog graces earth’s lower echelons with its presence.

Fog is a murky condition, a state of bewilderment—or, to be thoroughly led astray.

Fog, that fragile solid, is the unnamed narrator of Regina Mamou’s series entitled Unfortunately, It Was Paradise.The photographs in this body of work document landmarks from fallen Edens, historical sites found in theMidwest, that latitude of American wholesomeness and stopping-off point of a progression to westwardindividualism. Apropos to titles such as LDS Temple, Twilight (Icarian Town Plat), each of these emboldenedcommunities was subsequently disbanded for reasons both amicable and not, their idealism, perhaps, aimed alittle too high. Titles such as Lustgarten say it all, that as humans we are born from a longing, a lusting forpleasure, an abstraction that is never universal, and, therefore, can never unify us.

With puritanical composure and lighting, Mamou’s photographs are objects of reverence to the great sublime:nature. Mamou pairs several of the representational photographs with scenes obfuscated by foggyenvironmental conditions (the Fieldwork images), a nod to the dissolution of form as a potential pathway toecstasy. The photographs in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise are altars before which we stand to contemplate thehuman condition and the only certainties in life: death and regeneration—fates in which we are all made equal.The burial ground is, after all, level.

Whether portraying a New Harmonist cemetery in Indiana, a humanist idyll in Illinois, or the guideposts toRichard Meier’s Atheneum (Richard Meier’s Vision for Athene, Night #2), Mamou’s photographs regeneratedormant communities in one last stab at maintaining hope. The sites are reborn as environmental paradises thatappear untouched but for a distant, and brief past. In Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, Mamou photographs thedead and gives us what is living: the vines that twist around rail and fence posts, or the moss that climbs up abrick meeting house, to remind us that life really does go on.

These are contemplative photographs shot at the most contemplative of hours—dusk and dawn. The hours inwhich the quality of light is most pure. The hours in which the strange most often emerges. The hours in whichone takes solitary walks to and from destinations, with a sense of an impending Something lurking behind. Inthese photographs, a real, or latent, fog curls around the crumbling structures, implications of a once-was humanbody, casting a vignette to the dramatic, and very romantic, scene. These are photographs straight from themoors of Wuthering Heights, or the bogs of Frankenstein. One half expects to see a disjointed creature, anAdam assembled from the parts of various corpses that could not be made to cohere, bowing at a river, his headlifting to the sound of a branch breaking at the edge of the woods. But no, here is only nature in all its godliness,devoid of Man, the earth abiding forever.

In an act of historical dredging, or an architectural séance, Mamou steeps her photographs in the hauntingholiness of nature, perhaps the only thing from which we can know true and frightening beauty. Here are tracesof attempted Utopias being swallowed by the earth, the ideals of peace in concert with the chaos of life.

Fog asks of us: integrate, for I will integrate with you anyway.

- Text by Meg�Whiteford

ADDITIONAL PROGRAMMING FOR UNFORTUNATELY, IT WAS PARADISE

Thursday, October 6, 7:30 – 8:30pm Art Talk with Regina Mamou in collaboration with Art Muse Los Angeles RSVP: [email protected]

Monday, October 10, 7:30pm Art + Meditation: A guided meditation with special guest teacher RSVP: [email protected]

Saturday, October 29, 6:30 – 9:30pm Unfortunately, It Was Paradise book release party RSVP: [email protected]

ABOUT REGINA MAMOU Mamou is a Los Angeles based artist. Via mixed media, she creates work that explores the diversity of culturalaesthetics. She has exhibited internationally at the Makan Art Space in Amman, Jordan; Action Field KodraContemporary Art Festival in Thessaloniki, Greece; the Historic Water Tower Gallery in Chicago, Illinois; theElizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York, New York; and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana,among others. Her work has been written about in Artforum.com, Newcity Art, Culturehall, Afterimage,Contemporaneity, and Fabrik. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from theRhode Island School of Design, and was a Fulbright fellow to Jordan.

Image credit: Regina Mamou, St. Francis of Assisi #2, 2012, Digital C-print, 40 x 50 inches

SHOW + TELL PROJECTS is a new pop-up concept that brings together the worlds of contemporary art,design and wellness. We present a distinct collection of art, objects, performances and events produced by LA’semerging and established creative talent. Located at Brunswig Square in downtown LA’s Little Tokyo, theindustrial 4,000 square foot space is home to an art and design concept store and a project space for specialevents and collaborations.

Visit us at 374 E. Second Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 6 PM For more information, contact us at [email protected]

Vol 4, No 1 (2015) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2015.142 http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu

Exhibition Review: Regina Mamou Unfortunately, It Was Paradise

Chicago, IL, City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower October 2013 - January 19, 2014

John Murphy

Abstract A review of Regina Mamou’s solo exhibition, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, held at the City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower (Chicago, IL) from October 11, 2013 to January 19, 2014.

About the Author

John Murphy is a PhD candidate in Art History at Northwestern University. His dissertation investigates the socialist-utopian dimensions of early 20th century American Arts & Crafts communities. He was a disertation fellow at Winterthur Museum in Delaware and is a 2014-2015 ACLS/Luce Fellow in American art. He co-curated The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red Decade,” 1929-1940 (Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL), which travelled to New York University’s Grey Gallery in January 2015.

Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture http://contemporaneity.pitt.edu Vol 4, No 1 (2015) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2015.142

Mist shrouds an open field; the softness suffocates. In Fieldwork (Blue) Regina Mamou stages the paradox of immanence and imminence—God always and everywhere on the verge of appearing: a stifling remoteness, an intimate distance (Fig 1).

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, exhibited late 2013 to early 2014 at Chicago’s City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower, is a haunting series of photographs by Mamou of utopian colonies in the United States. The Historic Water Tower, with its saw-toothed spires and ecclesiastical gothic

atmosphere, proved a congenial setting for photographs of now-defunct utopian experiments. These heterodox communities, founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, stood fenced-off from the fallen world as safe harbors for refugees from sin-glutted cities and Old World religious persecution. Established largely by pietist sects (Shakers, Quakers, Harmonists, etc.) splintered from Protestantism, they drew controversy for their dissident belief systems (a kind of ascetic Christian socialism) that included in some cases equality of the sexes, and the abolition of both private property and the traditional family unit.

Figure 1

Regina Mamou, Fieldwork (Blue), 2012. Digital C-Print, 40 x 50 in. (photo: courtesy of the artist).

Exhibition Review: Regina Mamou Unfortunately, It Was Paradise

October 2013 - January 19, 2014

John Murphy

2 1 5 J o h n M u r p h y


Realizing “utopia” is, of course, epistemologically impossible; the word itself means “nowhere.” This contradiction puts a particular pressure on visual representations of utopian spaces. How can one represent sites that ontologically should not exist? The communities photographed by Mamou share a curious afterlife as historical landmarks, tourist attractions, and perhaps, ironic evidence of utopia’s inevitable failure. They have been consigned to capitalism’s only guaranteed salvation: roadside meccas, monetized monasticism, Utopia, Inc. They are displayed, in all their abject failure to realize heaven-on-earth. But Mamou is not out to “expose,” with a documentarian’s gaze, the hollowness at the heart of the utopian project, revealed by the fallow fields and kitschy gift shops. Utopian desire indicates the insufficiency of current conditions, an estrangement from the historical present. The future is the substantive result of things hoped-for, always (in the present) in the process of becoming.

When moving around the octagonal interior of the Water Tower, encountering Mamou’s large though unassuming photographs (all 40 x 50 or 40 x 32 in.) mounted handsomely against the chalky limestone, one hardly detects a tone of irony. There seems instead an apparitional shivering in the images, a disquieting sense that something lurks beneath the surface; what George Eliot called that “roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Residual aura clings. But can a photograph act as a “medium” to reveal the supernatural? Shooting with a large format monorail camera, Mamou’s photographs suggest spiritual exercises—experiments in contemplative looking. They have their own asceticism, a sort of reticence or wariness about breaching the insistent seclusion of these spaces. Her photographs haunt utopia's outside margins; there are no figures and no interiors. Only the buildings, fences, green swards, and graveyards index the community's ultimate goal of finding divinity in the everyday. The fog-shrouded fields, frostbitten gardens, overgrown vineyards, and severe houses of worship should be familiar, but they seem to occupy some uncanny horizon line where memory, imagination, spirits and specters all cohabit. In Harmonist Cemetery (2012, Digital C-Print) a profusion of green and brown leaves blanket the ground, evoking Whitman's haunting analogy: "the uncut hair of graves."

Philip Johnson's Vision of God (2012, Digital C-Print) invites meditations on theophany, how the divine assumes material form. The non-denominational "roofless church" Johnson designed in 1960, an open park girdled by a brick wall, evokes the Harmonists' spartan spirituality, but also the revival of heterodox sects in the 1960s (Fig. 2). The austerely symmetrical composition focuses on Johnson's cedar-shingled dome, lifting and dipping like a parachute, highlighting the tension between self-contained utopias and the infinite dome of sky. Utopia is not open. The first was an island.

For Mamou, using contemporary architects like Philip Johnson as points-of-entry highlights the accreted quality of the communities—sedimentary layers of human activity built up over centuries; a would-be “static” vision of earthly paradise vulnerable to the vagaries of time, the laws of entropy. Mamou draws attention to how famous architects (invisible yet omnipresent) reinterpret sacred space through their roles as secular gods who shape our experience of the phenomenal world. Richard Meier’s Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana, is visible in Chartres Cathedral (2012, Digital C-Print), a tripartite photograph cut horizontally by the bending, rain-slicked road and the median-grid of a fence (Fig. 3). Meier’s visitors’ center looms in the background as white and distant as a cloud. Gray chokes the upper atmosphere, dissolving the tops of branches and casting a hazy pall. Mamou fence-cuts the composition again in one of the series’ most evocative images, Richard Meier's Vision for Athene, Night #2 (2012, Digital C-Print). Eerie lights artificially illuminate a rectangular slab of grass and a white fence cuts the composition in half, the upper portion swallowed in black. The fences bar access, prevent the crossing of thresholds. Does time find its spatial corollary in these totems of inaccessibility, of sites marked off and enclosed? The past is a foreign land and we have no passport (Fig. 4).

Mamou often shoots at dusk and dawn, an aesthetic choice especially evident in the series of “Fieldwork” photographs in which the atmosphere—fog, clouds, rain—overwhelm

2 1 6 E x h i b i t i o n R e v i e w : R e g i n a M a m o u U n f o r t u n a t e l y , I t W a s P a r a d i s e


the earth and sky, blurring both into an indistinct zone of ethereality, recalling theophany’s recurring theme of “God in the mist” dematerializing the world. When the mist dissolves, hard edges and straight lines reinforce the communities’ asceticism. Ascetic Living (2012, Digital C-Print) is broken into clean horizontals: the grass, the road, the lawn, a two-story house, a bank of trees and blue sky. The white building is window blind. The lawn is freshly mowed. The road hints at travelers, passersby, the curious or indifferent. But the building holds the center, inward-turning, defensive, the purity of its windowless white confrontational. The vertical slash of a shadowed door is a riddle of non-invitation, austere hostility, and promise. As William Blake scrawled in the margins of a book: "I am hid."

Figure 2

Regina Mamou, Phillip Johnson’s Vision of God, 2012. Digital C-Print, 40 x 52 in. (photo: courtesy of the

artist).



Throughout the series Mamou’s position is ambiguous. Is she a tourist? An archaeologist excavating ruins? A naturalist studying an extinct species? Or a pilgrim seeking refuge from the fallen world? Mamou suggests the slippage between those preassigned roles. The religious scruples of the communities would have forbidden photography, in their own time, as a worldly vanity. Yet there is a piety in her photographs, a sense that even the borrowed or secondhand sacred demands an invitational orientation, a willingness to receive “visitations,” as the Shakers called them. The title of the series comes from a collection of poems by Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote: “Of our home we see only the unseen: our mystery.”

Figure 3

Regina Mamou, Chartres Cathedral, 2012. Digital C-Print, 40 x 50 in. (photo: courtesy of the artist).

Seeing the unseen, the mystery—this comes close to the heart of Mamou’s project, I think. It is a project that involves admitting photography’s insistence on the visible, the seen, the material. Unfortunately, It was Paradise finds Mamou resigning herself to what she sees as photography’s clay-footed inability to capture the ineffable, the incorporeal, while straining the medium to suggest the spiritual beyond the mundane. To this end, I suspect, she has added installation elements to her most recent work—rocks, altars, blue lights, spiritualist paraphernalia. These elements are intended, perhaps, to tease out of photographs more than the surface can manage, as if the photograph itself was the surface of a mirror pool over which Mamou stands like a wizard hoping to conjure spirits from invisible depths, or like a paranormal investigator with a battery of detectors, sensors, and UV lights, hoping against hope that a contraption as clunky and mechanical as a camera could be sensitive to the immateriality of memory or spirituality.

2 1 8 E x h i b i t i o n R e v i e w : R e g i n a M a m o u U n f o r t u n a t e l y , I t W a s P a r a d i s e


Mamou’s latest project, Psychometrics (2015), monumentalizes the E-meter, a Scientologist machine for detecting and determining the spiritual state of a subject. In a bright, seductive Digital C-print (75 x 60 in.) Mamou lovingly enlarges and fetishizes an E-meter against a yellow as luminous as any medieval gold ground, its reflection shimmering in the polished surface. The E-meter is like Mamou’s camera: a clunky machine poignantly trying to attune to the unseen spiritual realm.

Figure 4

Regina Mamou, Richard Meier's Vision for Athene, Night #2, 2012. Digital C-Print, 40 x 32 in. (photo:

courtesy of the artist).



Mamou is currently LA-based. Are Scientologists the new Shakers? Is LA the closest thing we have to a utopian experiment? Perhaps on the West Coast she’ll discover the New Age iteration of the radical Shaker faith that discovered the devil in dust, and produced streamlined, lightweight Shaker furniture—high-priced collectibles now (as sleek as the E-meter)—that could be hung on wall pegs the easier to sweep the dirty, demon-ridden floorboards. What is certain is that Mamou will continue to put pressure on a mechanical apparatus to perform alchemical feats of transmutation. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise finds in utopian communities the ideal conditions for this kind of experiment. The communities are haunted by collective memories, untransmittable and inaccessible (another line from Darwish: “There is no place on earth where we haven’t pitched our tent of exile.”) There is belatedness in Mamou's work as in the communities themselves; a sense of coming after, of waiting, watching, not so much in anticipation as in delayed rapture. The Second Coming has happened, we are saved, and yet somehow, unfortunately, we are still here.

6/2/2015 The Boston Globe ePaper Edition - Infringement - 28 May 2015 - Page #51

http://epaper.bostonglobe.com/epaper/services/PrintArticle.ashx?issue=10182015052800000000001001&paper=A3&key=fEVGy3ejF3BMOnjM6mLpFQ==&scale=… 1/1

Postmodern photography at Purdue's Rueff GalleriesWei-Huan Chen, [email protected] 2:29 p.m. EDT October 1, 2014

It's easy to get lost when looking at "Mirrored Stairwell Diptych."

At first, it's just an image of a winding staircase inside a Reno, Nevada casino. It doesn't stay that way verylong. The photograph, a mirror maze of red, purple and blue lights bouncing around in an inescapable loop ofreflections, takes you to a place ungrounded from reality — where, without markers for up or down, you'reunmoored from the earth.

Lines and shapes bend inside a closed circuit. The stairs lead to nowhere. It's an exercise in geometry andaltitude (or lack thereof) not unlike the paintings of M. C. Escher, or, more apt, the visual and spiritual labyrinths

of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's "Imaginary Prisons (http://www.italianways.com/piranesis-imaginary-prisons/)."

Welcome to the topsy-turvy, postmodern dream world of photographer Joe Johnson.

Johnson did not set out to make a big artistic statement. The raison d'être of "The Playing Field," a harrowing photo essay of Reno, is social critique.

It's the second act in a trilogy-of-sorts exposing the highly artificial worlds of three institutions — the megachurch, the casino and the televisionnewsroom: the impenetrable architectures of religion, capitalism and the media put to the lens.

"I don't see my urge as being so distinct from some street photographer's urge to image some fundamental aspect of their civilization," Johnson said.

Yet here we are. Johnson's work is as much about art as it is about social justice. Though his images are untouched analog photographs of real places,he presents reality as an artificial construct.

Figuring out what's real or not doesn't seem to matter anymore — he gives you the unmooring of the earth, your feet lifted off the ground.

Johnson's "The Playing Field" is a critique of reality, or at least a reality. It's art commenting on art, photography commenting on photography. It'spostmodern.

Johnson is one of nine artists in a new show at Purdue's Rueff Galleries, "[re]connect: Postmodern documentary photography," on display through Oct.11.

Still, what does that even mean? Postmodernism is as all-encompassing as it is nebulous. Categorizing postmodernism is like writing scripture foratheists. The thing defies the act.

There are a few agreed-upon characteristics. Postmodern art is self-aware. It's a tearing down of norms. Most important, it's skeptical we can really everagree on anything. It puts the re- in redefine.

Yet Min Kim Park, a world-acclaimed photographer and lecturer on postmodern documentary photography, admits that it's not always a useful term.

"The term is out there. There are people who want to distinguish how we evolve from modernism to postmodernism," Park said. "Those terms are not thatimportant for me. Terming it that way does not begin to reflect this multiplicity and malleability of our identity and society."

(Photo: Photo provided )

“Zummarella,” by Min Kim Park, on display at the Rueff Galleries in Purdue’s Pao Hall. (Photo: Photo provided )

In summer 2013, Park gave a lecture on postmodern documentary photography at the Society of Korean Photography convention in Seoul, South Korea.There, she met two photographers, Dong Jun Lee and Soon-Hwa Oh.

Lee frequently shot in India, where he'd compose unnervingly poetic portraits of rural and urban life. One features shirtless, skinny men diving into themilky froth of a river.

"I prefer ambiguity to concreteness, diversification to oneness, and poetic to narrative expression," he once wrote.

Oh had a fascination with the proliferation of Vietnamese brides migrating to rural southern South Korea, who appear in bright gowns and stand inisolation against the Mekong Delta backdrop in her series, "Quiet Dream."

Using funds from Enhancing Research in the Humanities and the Arts grant at Purdue, Park spent the year organizing the exhibit as well as aninterdisciplinary symposium, which took place Sept. 25 and 26.

Lee and Oh, who both have works up now at the "[re]connect" exhibit, will help Park bring the show to Syo Gallery in South Korea in October and to theADM gallery at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in November.

Along with photographers hailing from Chicago, Baltimore, Massachusetts, Missouri, Philadelphia, Singapore and West Lafayette, "[re]connect" makesthe point that postmodern photography is by nature placeless and timeless, even if individual pieces are rooted in a specific settings.

It's the atmosphere, the underlying philosophy that's the common strand running through these myriad photographs.

The argument goes like this. Photographers, both journalists and artists, have operated under the high-minded notion of capturing truth and reality.

Just read the New York Times or the World Press Photo's guidelines for veracity, or how Walker Evans sought to capture the essence of America throughblack-and-white documentary photography. Notice how "real" Evans' portraits of rural life look. They're gritty and grainy and filled with emotions thatspeak to the human condition, like a still from an Oscar-winning period film.

Yet Robert Atkins, author of "ArtSpeak : A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 to the Present," wrote(http://moca.org/pc/viewArtTerm.php?id=36) that straight photography is just an "aesthetic, no less artificial than any other. The fact that black-and-whitepictures may look more 'truthful' than color prints, for instance, points to just one of straight photography's highly influential conventions."

And see how photojournalists like Damon Winter (http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-tool-to-tell-a-war-story/) and Paul Hansen(http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/213411/world-press-photo-will-investigate-paul-hansens-award-winning-shot/) challenge the idea thatphotographs need to be unfiltered, unmodified. Photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin once followed embedded themselves with theBritish Army and took photos of Afghanistan without a camera. They exposed photographic paper directly to sunlight — the ultimate no-filter statement(http://www.choppedliver.info/the-day-nobody-died/).

“All That Has Ever Happened IsPresent,” by Regina Mamou, ondisplay at the Rueff Galleries inPurdue’s Pao Hall. (Photo: Photo

provided )

The result is not unlike the most abstract piece in "[re]connect," a cameraless photograph by Chicago-based visual artist Regima Mamou titled, "All ThatHas Ever Happened Is Present."

Mamou said it's an exploration into the occult. It's also a statement about what photography is or isn't. She pressed a sunflower onto photographic film,letting the flower chemically alter the film until it resulted in a face-mounted photograph of a luminous orb swathed in blue — how a person might see thesun from the ocean floor.

"If truth doesn't necessarily exist in image-making strategies, what does it mean to document, if the definition ofbeing a documentarian is producing an actual record?" Mamou said. "What does reality mean?"

Good question. It's one that's continually probed through experimental film, documentary photography andcontemporary visual arts, and "[re]connect" is the closest thing to a visual question mark asking, "what are youlooking at?" As any postmodernist would have it, the exhibit is more than just an exhibit.

"There's this crisis of faith in photography," Mamou said. "If there's a difficulty in representing a type of layeredhistory or layered spirituality in a photograph, at least for me the strategy has to go beyond making justphotographs but creating an experience in the gallery that people have to navigate."

If you go

What: "[re]connect: Postmodern documentary photography"

Where: Rueff Galleries, Pao Hall, Purdue University

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday, open Thursdays until 7 p.m. Runs through Oct. 11.

Read or Share this story: http://on.jconline.com/1wYytyg

14 afterimage 41.5

REVIEWS

Distant Images, Local Positions

EFA PROJECT SPACENEW YORK CITYJANUARY 24–MARCH 8, 2014

It is perhaps unsurprising that an artist whose own work continually engages issues of migration, place, surveillance, and geopolitics should curate an exhibition featuring nine artists whose own work reflects similar concerns. In Distant Images, Local Positions, Wafaa Bilal creates a space for an aesthetic dialogue between artists whose work in varied media is shaped by a common concern with the role of geography and landscape as mediating factors in our understanding of a contem-porary culture of surveillance, mass media, and the signifi-cance of place.

On entering the gallery at EFA Project Space, the visitor is immediately confronted with a large, sculptural installation by Haseeb Ahmed and Daniel Baird. Has the World Already Been Made? x5: Bridge (2014) is the fifth iteration of a work that was first created in 2011 and has since been presented in galleries in Europe and the United States using different elements and structures at each venue. The installations share a common use of architectural and other fragments that the artists capture from sites around the world by making casts or molds of these elements. Unlike some earlier versions of the work, Has the World Already Been Made? x5: Bridge piles these forms on top of one another on a makeshift bridge that comes together in the center of the gallery. The viewer must investi-gate closely to identify the original structures from which the work was cast, and this need for scrutiny heightens a sense of dislocation that is appropriate for a work that seeks to investi-gate the intersection of places through what might be described as found traces of their material existence.

The other exclusively sculptural piece in the show, Travis LeRoy Southworth’s The Deep Empty (2014), uses ripped and mashed-up pages from National Geographic magazine in an arrangement that recalls stalactites dripping onto a cave floor and creating amorphous natural forms. As with Has the World

Already Been Made?, the material of the work is not immedi-ately identifiable; once the viewer becomes aware of its origins, however, the piece takes on a metonymic quality as the content of its component parts merges with the overall representation of a specific geologic or geographic feature.

Trevor Paglen and Scott Patrick Wiener both address issues of surveillance in their work (in photography and video, respec-tively) that, while sharing a subject, present very different viewing experiences. In his large-scale photograph Untitled (Reaper Drone) (2010), Paglen captures a miniscule shot of the drone, no more than a pinpoint against a golden sky. The tool of surveillance itself barely visible, the photograph offers a commentary on the ways in which we are constantly and unknowingly watched by powers beyond our sight. In Landscape Acquisition (2012–present), Wiener uses both two-channel video and grainy black-and-white photographs to show not a drone itself, but the views accessible from the aircraft. The video 3 Surveys (2012), which shows the view from cameras

Megaemprendimiento (2010) by Mary Mattingly; courtesy Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts

41.5 afterimage 15

mounted on both top and bottom of an RQ-1 Reaper Drone, presents a disorienting yet compelling combination of sky and forest footage that both draws the viewer in and destabilizes the viewing position in ways that are at once aesthetically pleasing and conceptually troubling.

Another artist whose work intensely probes notions of surveillance is Hasan Elahi. Concordance (2014) is a multichan-nel video installation mounted on one wall of the gallery. The relatively small screens each show what appear to be related fragments of an urban landscape—the closed metal shutters of a storefront, stretches of pavement—yet it is difficult to piece together a coherent whole. Moreover, the images barely register movement, as only the occasional fleeting glimpse of, for example, a plant catching the breeze marks the distinction between still photograph and moving image. After accidentally appearing on an FBI terrorist watch list in 2002, Elahi created Tracking Transience, an online project that tracks and continu-ally publishes his movements and whereabouts. Although

Concordance does not specifically represent Elahi’s location, it is connected to the larger project through its exploration of the state of continual surveillance in our cities, an effort that is ongoing even when there is nothing to see.

Regina Mamou’s installation Proposed Vortex (2013) pro-vides two of the more inscrutable images in the exhibition. Large-scale photos of nondescript wooded landscapes, pho-tographed in fall or winter when the grass is withered and the trees bare, are lit by floodlights using ultraviolet bulbs. The effect is eerie, a feeling that is reinforced upon learning that the landscapes belong to the grounds of a Spiritualist community. The black light reflecting on the surface of the photos reminds the viewer of the ghostly superimposed images that populated nineteenth-century spirit photographs, themselves a medium much favored by early Spiritualist devotees. The hauntingly blank landscapes of Mamou’s photographs are thus potentially populated by spirits beyond our comprehension but in keeping with the history of the places she records.

29°59’23.45”N, 90°25’19.35”W (Norco) (2013) by AnnieLaurie Erickson; courtesy Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts

16 afterimage 41.5

REVIEWS

Two additional artists working in the photographic tradi-tion, though not using traditional photography, round out the exhibit with compelling images that, like Mamou’s, rely for their impact on a type of illusion. In the series Slow Light (2012–present), AnnieLaurie Erickson uses handmade arti-ficial retinas to create photographs that replicate the experi-ence of an afterimage—the latent imagery that remains on our retinas after we look at the sun or a bright object in the dark. While this process itself would be visually striking no matter what the subject of the pictures, the fact that Erickson is photographing sites of oil refineries considered off limits to photographers by government authorities adds a layer of complexity to these visually dense images. As Erickson says of the series, “For me, these images evoke both a presence and an absence. They are points along a continuum between strict representation and subjective abstraction, or between our immediate visual reality and the decaying, remembered imagery that subconsciously shapes our perception.”1

Unlike Erickson, Mary Mattingly uses digital technology to edit her finished photographs in order to create scenes of what Lucy Lippard has described as “disaster tourism.” In three works from her series After Candide (2008–11), Mattingly layers scenes of gawking tourists, themselves equipped with cameras, over photographs of flooded landscapes—the kind of images of natural disaster with which we have all too often been confronted in recent

years. What makes Mattingly’s photographs particularly effective is the way in which they draw the viewer into what seems to be a simple image of tourists, only to then shock us with the realiza-tion that what these travelers are watching and recording is the absolute devastation of homes, lives, and landscape. To the extent that such images may force an uncomfortable recall of the viewer’s own forays into disaster tourism—for example, by visiting the remains of Ground Zero in the days and months after 9/11—the photographs provide a jarring reminder of how contemporary responses to disaster and trauma are shaped by our culture (or cult) of images, and especially the constant consumption of those images through social media and the internet.

Although the works included in Distant Images, Local Positions take very different approaches to the theme of understanding geography and the control that images can exert over it, they share an interest in the ways in which artists can manipulate material, viewpoint, and process to produce work that encourages viewers to consider how landscape and place function in our increasingly watched and recorded world.

SABRINA DETURK, PHD, is associate dean and instructor of art history at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

NOTE 1. AnnieLaurie Erickson, Artist Statement; see http://annielauriee.com/html/slow_light_intro.html.

New Artists Feature, Fall 2013 // Noritaka Minami , marksearch team , Regina Mamou , and Susan Metrican // juried by David Andrew Frey

http://culturehall.com/feature_issues.html?no=105 1/3

Noritaka MinamiFacade I

marksearchWalking the Invisible City



Regina MamouChartres Cathedral

Susan MetricanClosed-eye Theater

History and theater both require a narrative. Both require a stage. But what happens when historybecomes less a posthumously curated flow of events and more actively guided to a point? The workselected for this fall's New Artists Feature brings together four artists that lucidly examine history,exceptions and boundaries. We are honored to present the work of Noritaka Minami, marksearch,Regina Mamou and Susan Metrican.

In his series 1972, Noritaka Minami documents the Nakagin Capsule Tower through photographictechniques. Designed by the architect Kisho Kurokawa, the Tokyo-based building is a rare, almostextinct example of the post-war Japanese architectural movement Metabolism. The structure itselfserves as a time capsule of an era that embraced what now appears to be unachievable ideals duringa time of great economic success. Originally intended as a convenient weekday home near work forsalarymen, some still exist as apartments. Others have a new life as offices, studios or vacant spaceswaiting for their next incarnation. Minami finds a base from Kurokawa's execution of theseconcepts. His images are an iterative exploration of the aging, extremely small identical spaces thatdraw from ongoing relationships with capsule residents.

Bruce Douglas and Sue Mark, the husband and wife team who work together as marksearch, createprojects that negotiate spaces between the public, governmental entities and arts organizations.Their practice finds inspiration from asking questions about a specific location or place. A recent



California-based project, Walking the Invisible City, creates a tour of Oakland's downtown forpedestrians. Through a collection of some 30 markers, the audience is guided from one communityto another. The markers are shaped to echo the Oak tree and provide haiku-like poems about theforgotten people, places and events related to their location. Following the archeological nature ofthe project, each marker was meticulously etched into the sidewalk.

One of several photographic works exploring the town of New Harmony — Regina Mamou'sChartres Cathedral points to the remnants of a historic utopian community in the state of Indiana.The Harmony Society, a group from Germany avoiding religious persecution, cut the original townfrom America's frontier wilderness in the early 1800s. A little over a decade after being founded,Harmony was sold to a wealthy Welch industrialist who had a great interest in experimental socialstructures. The town was quickly reborn as New Harmony. Mamou's Indiana images are a chapterin her recent series Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. For these works she traveled across theMidwest and mid-Atlantic regions of the United States in search of the environmental remains offormer utopian communities that existed before the twentieth century. Each draws from historic ormemorializing architecture as well as the cultivated lands where these villages and towns oncestood.

Oscillating between humor, banality and drama, Susan Metrican's recent works seek a path beyondconstraint. Many, like Closed-eye Theater, rely on the mechanics of painting but actively invadespaces as objects. Painted elements that extend the rectangle relentlessly attempt to convertabstraction. Possibly straying towards anthropomorphism, if allowed. At minimum these artworksbecome potential surrogates, echoing darkly tanned leather, rusted steel, and countless othertangible forms. Most exist on a scale that seeks parity with the viewer. A few are larger, oftenmimicking common architectural elements in scale and subject. Each asks the audience to becomeinvolved, to perform along side the works, as if being called to walk up the stairs of a stage.

David Andrew Frey is a New York-based artist, curator, and technologist. He founded Culturehallin 2008 as a new way for artists to connect with curators, gallerists, collectors, and other artists.David received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2000. He hasalso studied at the Camberwell College of Art in London, the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, TheUniversity of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and the Savannah College of Art and Design. Herecently curated exhibitions in New York of work by Culturehall artists for Ligne Roset, the BigScreen Plaza, and Cindy Rucker Gallery.

Review: Regina Mamou/City Gallery

“Site (Community Vineyard)”

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Utopian communities, which flourished in the United States during the nineteenth century and had a brief revival in the 1960s, aimed at creating a heaven on earth, or at least a more cooperative society than the one being put in place by competitive capitalism. Regina Mamou is fascinated by what has become of those nineteenth-century experiments, taking her camera to their surviving sites, which have been preserved from ruin and memorialized as minor tourist attractions, bringing back shadowy medium-format color photographs unified by an unrelieved somber sensibility. There is not a person to be seen in any of Mamou’s fourteen images; the sites signify a lost past, the vestiges of which have been saved, and are entirely enigmatic unless one knows the back story, to which Mamou gives scant clues in titles such as “Ascetic Living” and “Site (Community Vineyard).” We are purposefully made ignorant of the historical context of images that are purportedly reflections on an American past, leaving us to dwell on Mamou’s sensibility rather than her subjects. Her impressions are straight and clear, yet usually cast in a pall from being shot at night or twilight, or under gray skies or drenched in a fog (sometimes enveloping) during the daytime. Adding to the effect, the shots have been taken during the winter, when trees are denuded, plants are wilted, and the ground is dotted with patches of brown dirt and stubble. The overall effect is mildly chilling and a bit eerie, never uplifting. The feeling that Mamou evokes is the one that overcomes us when we are on the grounds of an old hospital, mental asylum, orphanage or cemetery on a dank day. If we needed to know that utopia is delusive, Mamou does her best to enforce that judgment, showing how high hopes have been brought to ground by the will to preserve a skeleton void of a heart. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 19 at City Gallery, 806 North Michigan.

Regina MamouHISTORIC WATER TOWER GALLERY806 N. Michigan AveOctober 11–January 19Regina Mamou’s latest architectural and landscape photographsdepict bygone attempts to create utopian communities inAmerica. Each work serves as a reminder that utopia literallymeans “no place.” Despite the large scale and clarity of thephotographs, their evasive titles keep many of the depictedhouses, monuments, and terrains teasingly unknown.

Even the compositions of the scenes formally contribute to thismysterious quality; most are angled upward, as in Site

(Community Vineyard) (all works 2012), so that subjects (in thiscase, a barn overgrown with living and dead foliage) are partiallycut out of the frame. Others are shot at night under the glare ofartificial lights or on dreary, unsettlingly shadowless days, suchas Lustgarten, which pictures mostly abandoned planter bedswhose few remaining plants seem to be floating rather thanrooted in the ground. The overall effect is one of approach ratherthan mere frontality. Particularly resonant is Mamou’s image ofthe Harmonist Cemetery, a mass-burial ground withoutheadstones built by nineteenth-century esoteric Christians,situated on Native American burial mounds—simultaneously arich cross-section of American spirituality and one notremembered as such a place at all. The mounds and trees in thephotograph are positioned in the far distance, with an almostexaggerated expanse of flat lawn in the foreground, creating asense of either arriving or departing rather than being at the site itself.

One way to read these studies is intimated in another set of exhibited photographs: three images titled Fieldwork

taken in a fog so thick that only a few blurry hints of waves and trees around the edges make the watery shorecomprehensible. The white fog becomes thickest at the center of each image, recalling divinatory crystal ballsand Romantic landscape paintings. The formalism of overexposure in these images might also provide a generalconceptual entry into the show. Certainly the visions that inspire attempts to create paradises on earth firstappear powerful but they eventually die off in ephemeral flares that leave behind ruins still saturated withpromise.

— Monica Westin

Regina Mamou, Harmonist Cemetery, 2012,C-print, 40 x 32”.

regina mamou unfortunately, it was paradise september … · unfortunately, it was paradise...

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