Evans shows the south as part of the rest of America, falling behind itself and failing in the everyday struggle against entropy. By Owen Campbell, ASX, April 2015 There is in McNair Evans Confessions for a Son a sense that time passes slow and lonely, a stillness manifest in an image of a hound weighted […]
USA. Hampton, Virginia. 1962. © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos “Look, I’m kind of an explorer. I’m entering a world and it takes time.” A Magnum photographer, Bruce Davidson has been renowned since the late fifties for his photographs of gangs in Brooklyn, and subsequent projects including New York’s East 100th street, circus performers, civil rights marchers […]
Mirage swings between the dynamic of a lover’s intimate photographs and those of a lonely stalker. By Owen Campbell, ASX, March 2015 The standard, reflexive way of referring to Mirage (2013), White and Vinegar (2012), and Dazai (2014) would be “three books by the photographer Daido Moriyama, as well as a story by Osamu […]
The theme is a twine of two strands: the uncanny connection of human bodies and questionable distinction of humanity from nature. By Owen Campbell, ASX, March 2015 The fifth floor gallery space of Capricious 88, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is large and airy, with south-facing windows facilitating bright sunlight even on overcast days. […]
@ The Estate of Dash Snow and Courtesy DAP Art shouldn’t be a product of the art world, but a product of the world world. By Owen Campbell I told my friend I was reading Glenn O’Brien’s intro essay to Dash Snow’s I Love You, Stupid. He said he always thought Dash Snow was […]
Kiki Pays Debt, Room 123, Travelers Motel, Modesto, CA, 2013 © Katy Grannan, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco The Nine is a place, like the doldrums of the ocean, where people who find themselves lost and left behind spend their days and nights. By Owen Campbell, ASX, March 2015 California’s central valley is […]
“Well, I got in trouble for putting naked photos on the Internet when I was seventeen.” Alexis Penney, Sore, 2014 “Well, I got in trouble for putting naked photos on the Internet when I was seventeen,” Alexis Penney told me, when I asked how long he’d been taking photos. Penney, who told me she […]
Nucelear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, Cherenkov Radiation, Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy, Southeastern Washington State, 2005/2007 @ Taryn Simon and courtesy Gagosian Gallery “Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain; the refusal to lie about what one knows and […]
@ Ed Templeton These are the moments when the planets are aligned, when the eyes of the passer-by meet the camera and when metaphor slides into reality. By Owen Campbell, ASX, February 2015 There’s a signature expression in an Ed Templeton photograph; it’s not something that he gravitates to, rather, it’s something that occurs […]
The images present a bloodless eroticism, uncanny, simultaneously sexual and absented of desire. By Owen Campbell, ASX, January 2015 Tanlines, tape, rope, water, milk, Callis shows the way things push against the body and how the body pushes back, contracts, evades. Elements like water and shade subsume the human body; rope, as it presses […]
XZc7w, 2011 @ Doug Rickard Horrorcore, a sort of contemporary American gothic, with all the inherent inversion of values. INTERNET GOTHIC and Transcendentalism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction By Owen Campbell, ASX, January 2015 In the preface of National Anthem Doug Rickard quotes Walt Whitman; in the coda he quotes Woodie Guthrie. […]
…a sensation of watching time pass on earth while suspended in the aether… By Owen Campbell, ASX, January 2015 There is, in viewing, East of the Sun, West of the Moon a sensation of watching time pass on earth while suspended in the aether, immune from time and all earthly elements. East of the Sun, […]