William Larson, Nic Nicosia, Will Rogan, Hiraki Sawa

Four projected video works from the past decade that are by artists who began as photographers or who utilize photography in their video. These works also have in common a light-hearted humor, a silent or near silent sound track, use of subtle illusion, and a setting in the everyday world of indoor rooms and suburban streets.

Curator's Notes:

This exhibition features the work of three photographers who have turned to video, and one videomaker who borrows from the history of photography to make his work. In addition to the four projected pieces, we are showing prints by or relevant to each photographer. It is hoped that the cumulative effect of all the materials we have gathered will be to give us some insight into the choices made by the artists and how the two art forms complement each other.

Will Rogan takes photographs of chance occurrences that most of us might not notice; we certainly might not calculate the surprise and humor in many of these images were Rogan not there to point them out. An archetypal Rogan image is that from a 2001 series titled Public Sculpture: an open car door, a bicycle, and the side of a bus all unfortunately attempting to occupy the same space. Rogan offers up his discoveries as moments of visual poetry or unplanned public art. In the picture here, two ducks’ necks form circular drawings with their reflections in the water. The Chinese moon bridge—in which a round semicircular bridge creates a perfect circle with its reflection in the water—is the work’s precedent; nature in this case is imitating art. In his video Rogan uses the opportunity that freedom from time restraints offers to play with the appearance of miraculous events in mundane circumstances. The odd discoveries that we see in his street photographs are intentionally created in the video. Humor follows.

The 19th century San Francisco photographer Eadward Muybridge created the world’s first motion studies of animals and humans by setting up studio experiments with dozens of tripwires tied to cameras along a prescribed path. Hiraki Sawa pays homage to this work by incorporating parts of Muybridge’s images into his video. That is, Sawa shows us an everyday kitchen scene and then depicts the toasters and cutlery getting up and relocating around the room, animated by the legs of Muybridge’s models. The inanimate are afforded the ability to walk by those long-dead. It’s a kind of zombie movie, sweeter and funnier than most.

William Larson’s photography is self-reflexive, that is, it inquires into the nature of photography itself, about the way photography and time interact, or the role of images in our culture. He has a notable series (Figure in Motion, 1967-70) that depicts one model’s body smeared across the print in an abstracted manner that brings time into play in still photography. The photograph that we have included relates directly to the mechanical nature of projection, how films are made up of a light source and sequences of single images, and the way that illusion can break down. In his video, Larson uses tableaux vivants to walk the line between video and still imagery. His powerful domestic images of quotidian life—stepping out of the shower, touching a lover, holding a newborn in the lap—are exquisitely organized and bring out the pathos of the everyday. Tableaux vivants were 19th century stage and photographic forms of unmoving, often nude, actors portraying historic scenes. Larson pays homage to the form with his occasional nudity, but more to the point he is exercising the total control of his images that a photographer has, while allowing the slightest chance elements to intrude on his ordered universe. When a curtain suddenly shifts in the breeze, or an infant kicks, the act takes on a heightened dramatic power, isolated against utter stillness, like a slash of color across a monochrome canvas.

Nic Nicosia also emerged from the era when photographers were examining the nature of their craft. Nicosia’s earliest photographs in the 80s were tableaux vivants and other homages to theatrical traditions: one body of work is titled The Cast. It can get quite confusing: while the original European tableaux were designed to be recreations of paintings, Nicosia made still photographs to look like tableaux, and movie stills. The process is pushed a step further when his actual movie, Middletown, a simple automobile drive through a suburban community, slowly reveals itself to be a journey through theatricalized space. It’s a fiction of suburbia in which mundane street activity is revealed to be choreographed action, actors pretending to be pedestrians. The passage of time changes the meaning of the experience of the work and what appears originally to be banal passes into the realm of the fanciful and illusory.

Still Moving presents a conversation among eight art objects, four photographs and four dvds. The freedoms that video affords the artist are displayed but so are the mutual interests in wonder, in humor and in the potential of the everyday world to provide us with both. Surrendering to illusion is the currency for the price of admission.

Will Larson The Mechanical Gaze