FotoFest: Part II

We haven’t quite had enough of FotoFest just yet, so ACP ventured down to Houston again last weekend for some exciting Contemporary U.S. Photography, as well as the Richard Misrach lecture. The weather was lovely, the venues were astounding, the lecture was educational and the city was welcoming.

Our first stop was at 2101 Winter St. to see the highly recommended FotoFest headliner, The Road to Nowhere? curated by Natasha Egan, Associate Director and Curator, Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Egan describes this show as “address(ing) a repertoire of diverse but related themes including politics, surveillance, race, war, and economic insecurity. While the work is oftentimes critical, a quintessentially American optimism is evident.” Egan did a terrific job in selecting artists for this show, which somehow filled the massive complex that is Winter Street Studios: an old furniture factory that now houses 75 studios over its two enormous floors.

Eirik Johnson

While there were over 20 artists in the exhibition, a handful stood out in my mind as having a particularly beautiful sensibility and consistency while addressing the show’s theme. Eirik Johnson’s series Sawdust Mountain is based on the Oregon wilderness and the poverty that plagues this naturally beautiful and visually rich area. Johnson uses a large format camera to make interesting, yet simple compositions of the frontier. His prints are nice and large, enough so that all of the information he records is easily readable. Take a look here to see the entire series and more projects from Eirik Johnson.

An-My Lé

An-My Lé is another photographer whose work stood out from the pack at The Road to Nowhere?. Lé has been featured on Art21 and has shown photographs from her series Small Wars at many esteemed institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography. The aesthetics of her photographs convey the notion of the human footprint within the larger scope of the environment, as the large-scale of her prints often depict warfare as a toy-like game. This image in particular, 29 Palms: Mechanized Assault, looks more like a detailed drawing than a photograph when viewed from any further than a couple of feet. Lé has a unique approach to war documentation and the effect of her images is especially sobering.

Victoria Sambunaris

Victoria Sambunaris is the third artist from this exhibition who really stuck with me, partially because we saw her work again later that day. Sambunaris works with a similar approach as that of An-My Lé, but she points her camera at uninhabited areas to emphasis the landscape. Sambunaris’ scenes are stark and expansive, often featuring an interruption from some organic form. The two images above take the conventional landscape as frequently seen in painting and enlarge them to a scale that we almost can’t recognize. As we try to put ourselves into these images, we begin to understand how transient our worldly significance actually is. We later saw Sambunaris’ work at the MFAH for their FotoFest exhibition Ruptures and Discontinuities. More on that below.

After spending hours on Winter Street, we went back to the Menil to see Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Realist Performance. Ironically, there are no photographs to document our visit, as we didn’t want to get asked to leave in the process of recording the exhibition. However, we can tell you that the exhibit spans all mediums and has a particularly vivid film piece documenting the construction of a large sculpture that was later destroyed as part of the performance. While the prints themselves were merely fast, blurry snapshots serving to record various performances, the show as a whole did a nice job of recreating the Nouveau Realist movement.

The story is pretty similar from the MFAH unfortunately, where cameras are not allowed to open their shutters on the artwork. We arrived early to get a good seat to hear Richard Misrach speak and in the process managed to get a look at the Alice Neel paintings on exhibit in the main gallery. Along the way, we also got a glimpse of a few Frank Stella pieces from the MFAH’s permanent collection, which are casually hung up in a narrow hallway. Apparently, either by mistake or design, not many people knew about Richard Misrach’s lecture, making for an intimate setting inside the MFAH’s pristine theatre. Misrach reviewed work over his career all the way up to his current digital color negatives, showing one beautiful slide after another, all the while tying into the theme of Ruptures and Continuities. One of the interesting events at the MFAH, aside from this lecture of course, was finding the exhibition. Ruptures and Continuities: Photography Made after 1960 from the MFAH Collection, is located through a long underground tunnel, across the street and obscured in one of the hundreds of galleries within the museum, and features almost 200 iconic images from the photographic hall of fame including Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, William Eggleston, Richard Misrach, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol. Also on display was another of Victoria Sambunaris’ landscapes. There is so much incredible work here, most of which is scattered throughout various canonical textbooks on photography and photo history, to view it all in one place is an absolute treat. Meanwhile, outside of the photography exhibit, there are world famous paintings and sculptures, as well as ancient artifacts. There’s really nothing like the MFAH in Austin. But I, for one, was especially tickled just to be in the presence of an original Eggleston print, but there was so much to look at it was difficult to let it all fully sink in. Ruptures and Continuities is up until May 9^th at the Audrey Jones Beck Building and is definitely worthy of a second visit.

All in all, not a bad return visit to the FotoFest Biennial. We sure would like to have included some installation shots from the Menil and MFAH, but if maintaining their incredible collections requires forgoing documentation, then who are we to argue. Please support this amazing, one of a kind festival and treat yourself to an experience, the likes of which may never be rivaled. These museums and galleries are comforting places whose sole purpose is to open their doors to you. So get out there! Carpool, share a room, day trip if you have to, but support FotoFest and support the photographic community, all the while expanding your own knowledge and interests and participating in the larger Arts community.