Visual Art Re: The Bounding and Scrambling
posted by February 22 at 13:27 PM
onThe Unpaid Intern already posted about the entertaining—and sometimes scary—photos by John Divola of dogs running alongside cars:
These coarse, smudgy images are offset by the still, crisp images of another show (the opening act) also running at G. Gibson Gallery—Animal Holes by Eirik Johnson.
Divola’s photos the dogs are positive—almost heroic—figures, a blur of action in the middle of a vacant desert. (I’d say something about Dasein but I’m afraid of sounding pretentious.) Johnson’s photos are the exact opposite—quiet, careful consideration of the negative, where all the texture and detail comes from the subject’s surroundings. They are not images of bodies, they’re images of the absence of bodies, but it’s hard not to see them as close-ups of (or metaphors for) the flesh. In this photo, from San Francisco, the grass makes its hole look like a navel:
This hole looks slightly more obscene (blame it on the leaves):
The detail in these big photos is what makes them—you can see every blade of grass, every grain of snow—and their empty centers make Divola’s positive dogs seem wilder, funnier, and even more alive. It’s an excellent pairing.
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Combine the two and you get this.
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