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From:
Gallery TPW
Panascopic Journal, January 2004,
[www.photobasedart.ca]
"Not at First
Glance: Images by Kathryn Dunlevie"
(this essay accompanies the exhibition)
by Don Snyder
As the saying goes,
we see in terms of our education. We look at the world and see
what we have learned to believe is there. […] And indeed it is
socially useful that we agree on the function of objects.
But, as photographers,
we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your
eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them
grow large as you approach, group and regroup themselves as you
shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge, and sometimes
assert themselves with finality. And that's your picture.
- Aaron Siskind The
Drama of Objects [1]
Aaron Siskind's comments
on seeing, perception and the development of a photographic image
lend much to understanding the photo-montage work of Kathryn Dunlevie.
While Siskind talks about the perceptual process of framing an
image in the viewfinder, rather than assembling it in the studio,
the idea that 'relationships emerge and assert themselves' is
very appropriate to a discussion of the work in Not at First
Glance, Dunlevie's first exhibition in Canada.
Kathryn Dunlevie's
interest in assembled images, and the processes through which
they are generated, started early. By the sixth grade, she was
already cutting fabric for clothing which she designed and made
herself; during high school, she worked extensively with photographs
and bulletin boards for the school newspaper - projects she now
recognizes as her first photographic collages.
Increasingly intrigued
with photography, she began making her own pictures in 1969. Studies
in art history followed, at Rice University in Houston. She spent
her junior year in Europe, primarily in Paris, but she took time
for travel to Italy and Spain, where she furthered her interests
in art and architecture. Returning to complete her degree, she
changed emphasis from art history to studio practice. After graduation,
she studied drawing, design and printmaking at the School of the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and later, took a formal photography
course in Madrid.
In 1982, additional
study in painting (in California, where Dunlevie now lives) represented
a final phase of her transition to working as a professional artist.
Dunlevie also credits her exposure to David Hockney's photographic
work, and an immediate fascination with Hockney's ideas about
photographic representation, as another turning point during that
year. Talking about this experience in relation to her own vision,
she said, "I saw that the image wasn't simply a rendition from
one vantage point, as it was in the Renaissance, or a mapped-out
walk through something, which I learned about from Hockney. I
started making images that were not just a walk through a scene
but a new scene, in which things would emerge that you might not
otherwise see…. Space could be folded-it was a bit like going
through the looking-glass. I could combine the perceived objectivity
of the photograph with the emotional subjectivity of paint, and
create a new pictorial space, which would not be fragmented, but
would shift smoothly from one part of the image to the next."
[2]
Like Hockney, Dunlevie
works in 35mm, using a camera with automatic features. She feels
this gives her freedom to "shoot on the fly," attending to framing
and point of focus while allowing camera and film to record light
and colour. Not satisfied by working with contact sheets or even
4x6 proof prints, Dunlevie edits her processed transparencies
on a light table, trying out combinations from which final images
might be formed. The transparencies are then scanned, and output
as digitally enlarged C-prints; these in turn become raw material
as she explores ways they can be cut and joined. The process of
trimming and re-assembling is continued and refined until a new
image "begins to assert its own logic." Finally, the cut and prepared
enlargements are glued onto wood panels, and coated with clear
acrylic. Dunlevie uses acrylic paints on top of this layer, and
it is through painting that the image composite is finally resolved
and her vision fully realized.
While Dunlevie achieves
her work's characteristic linking together of subjective and objective
space in a number of ways, the element of painting is key to her
process. The 'folding' of space in her images (some of which are
from the aptly titled series, Urban Revisions) is created
largely with paint. The actual mounted photographs are continued
as painted images all around the edges of the support panel or
frame. Certain elements are highlighted, particularly architectural
forms or spatial clues, as they are extended from one part of
the montage to another by simply painting them in. While evident
throughout the exhibition, this technique has particular impact
in Dunlevie's larger works, such as Storm Warning, or
Car Wash, in which linear forms (flotation lines in a swimming
pool, or mechanical elements, gates and scaffolding) are painted
so effectively that the new montage has a compelling unity and
a surprising sense of spatial logic. What we see is no longer
"what we believe is there," but something altogether new. When
asked about influences other than Hockney, Dunlevie promptly credits
both Manet and Man Ray. Particularly in her Paris images, echoes
of each artist can readily be sensed. Manet always emphasized
the edges and outlines of forms in his paintings; and he dealt
with the flatness of the picture plane in a clear, straightforward
manner. Yet the space described in any Manet painting is never
less than surprising -- for all this straightforwardness, a sense
of illusion is always present. One has the feeling that this same
element of hidden surprise in an apparently logical pictorial
space has been adapted to new ends in Dunlevie's work, just as
one notes in her the same love of process and experimentation
that so animated Man Ray.
Two images -- De
La Tour Eiffel and Eiffel Tower Tennis -- effectively
illustrate this, and Dunlevie acknowledges them as seminal in
the development of both her current working method and her approach
to spatial rendering. In each, one looks through and around visually
repeated elements of the tower's iron latticework arches, down
to an altered ground, which has been doubled, reversed and additionally
modified with paint. In Eiffel Tower Tennis, we gaze at
the park below, which has been folded in the middle and is rendered
upside-down in the top half of the image. In De la Tour Eiffel,
we again look down, but at a more complex space, where not every
vantage point is mirrored or echoed, and in which grass areas
are transformed into painted lagoons. The experience is somehow
plausible, but also new. The images give two experiences of perspective,
as would a visit to the structure itself: the monument, though
famed as a fixed object, is mostly space and air. What one remembers
are the experiences of looking. The forms in these prints are
both surprising-in the sense of revealing what one could never
actually see-and inevitable, in terms of the viewer's recognition
of the visual logic with which they were made.
The East River (study)
is another example of straightforwardness, illusion, experimentation
and logic all coexisting in a new image, and if you have ever
driven into Manhattan on an overcast day, you know exactly why.
A great urban panorama presents itself, but the traffic makes
it impossible to look: the closer you get, the less you can see.
Arriving, you have a sense of having glimpsed - and also having
bypassed - something magnificent, but these impressions overlap,
and you cannot recall just one principal feature. All this is
in Dunlevie's image, which represents both a new impression and
a memory at the same time. The river is there, and the skyline
as well, but two elevated highways are spliced together in the
foreground, seamlessly joined by visual logic and by paint. A
fascinating green added to the sky calls up both the memory and
the smell of heavy, still air in a gridlocked city, but the cars
on the highway are clearly in motion, despite their contradictory
and unattainable destinations.
Similar approaches
to image-making animate Parasols/ Sous-sols and Defense
d'Afficher, which display Dunlevie's sense of the graphic
possibilities of the arrested instant. We see life in flux in
the individual photographic components, yet frozen in the final
composite montage. In one image (Défense d'Afficher), there are
soccer players, tourists, walls and graffiti, all overlapped and
layered into a new, constructed moment. In the other (Parasols/
Sous-sols), umbrellas are held by anonymous figures, who are
oblivious to the photographer as they drift in front of huge columns.
Despite their massiveness, these columns appear supported by the
open scaffolding below, through which another perspective is revealed.
Each of these images is held together by structural elements-both
found and created-and brought to life by an acute sense of timing,
rare in this kind of montage, yet no less important for its rarity.
And in each, the combination of photographic and painted image
is what makes the visual relationships "appear, and then assert
themselves with finality."
David Hockney's claims
about photography and painting effectively illustrate not only
Dunlevie's use of paint but also her unique representations of
place and space, which might be interpreted as an intriguing new
variant of analytic cubism:
What's at stake
[…] in this sort of work is the revitalization of depiction. The
great misinterpretation of twentieth century art is the claim
[…] that cubism of necessity led to abstraction […]. But on the
contrary, cubism was about the real world. It was an attempt to
reclaim a territory for figuration, for depiction.
[The cubists] showed
that there were certain aspects of looking - basically the human
reality of perception - that photography couldn't convey, and
that you still needed the painter's hand and eye to convey them
[…].
Art is about correspondences
- making connections with the world and to each other. It's about
love in that sense[…]. We love to study images of the world, and
especially images of people, our fellow creatures. [3]
Looking at Dunlevie's
images over time, one is increasingly impressed by their logic
and clarity, co-existing so comfortably with the elements of surprise
and discovery that she has imbedded in their layering: they represent
momentary phenomena and graphic relationships, yet seem to simultaneously
illuminate and obscure them. In developing a new visual syntax,
Dunlevie has found an extraordinarily effective way to communicate
multiple meanings: we recognize these images, even though we have
never seen these places, or these instants, in quite this way.
- Don Snyder, January, 2004
Notes: 1. Aaron Siskind
quotation from Nathan Lyons, ed. Photographers on Photography.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966, p. 97
2. All comments by
Kathryn Dunlevie are quoted from a conversation with the artist,
December 19, 2003
3. David Hockney quotation
from Cameraworks: David Hockney. New York, NY: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1984, pp. 38-9
The editorial assistance of Kim Simon, Gallery TPW, is gratefully acknowledged.
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