Slog News & Arts

Line Out

Music & Nightlife

« Public Poetry on Capitol Hill | Senators on Drugs »

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Re: The Bounding and Scrambling

posted by on February 22 at 13:27 PM

The Unpaid Intern already posted about the entertaining—and sometimes scary—photos by John Divola of dogs running alongside cars:

divola_50.jpg

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:

Johnson_San Francisco, CA 01.jpg

This hole looks slightly more obscene (blame it on the leaves):

Johnson_Cranbrook, MI 01.jpg

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.

RSS icon Comments

1

Combine the two and you get this.

Posted by jameyb | February 22, 2007 1:49 PM
2

Posted by or this | February 22, 2007 6:03 PM

Comments Closed

In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 14 days old).