SAN FRANCISCO — In get to encounter the passage of time, we must freeze it in put. This is the delicate paradox at the coronary heart of Thought of Interactions, a group present of black-and-white photography at Casemore Kirkeby in San Francisco. The 5 artists bundled use a vary of methods to activate area and time within the static picture as a suggests of interrogating the medium’s potential to collapse both into a singular, suspended minute.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is John Divola’s “ENSO: 36 Appropriate-handed Gestures” (2018), a grid of 36 gelatin prints of images created in the deserted housing tract at an Air Power base in Southern California. Divola has altered the deteriorating space by painting circles on the partitions all over distinct information within just every image frame (stains, bullet holes, h2o harm). By highlighting factors of the ruin, Divola reveals specifically how images preserve.
Steve Kahn, who also shot in dilapidated interiors — notably just one condominium complex in Los Angeles through the mid-70s — approached the issue of photographic entrapment in different ways, staging spaces which typically appear inescapable. “Running” (1976/2016) is a cinematic, triptych pigment print, in which a determine is viewed dashing toward a doorway, showing up to go ahead in every body. Clever cropping gives the piece its heightened feeling of motion, the figure’s entrance conclude minimize off by the edges in two photos and then by the doorway in the third. It becomes tricky not to see each individual body as a doorway in and of itself to be entered or escaped, each picture a minute of time held hostage.
Artist duo Raymond Meeks and Adrianna Ault experiment most didactically with the medium’s energy to seize time. In the seven-print collection Wintertime Farm Auction (2019), the two memorialize the titular function by photographing farm tools tossed in the air. The pics seize the essence of permitting go: the uncertainty and fundamental dread of what will come next.
Tarah Douglas’s collection of pigment prints, Untitled (no 1-15) (2020), alternates frames involving two figures — one particular roaming a hilly landscape in search of something, the other kneeling on a seashore, doing what appears like a series of rituals with a variety of objects, these types of as bouquets, a ebook, and a pair of binoculars aimed again at the viewer. Here, Douglas reveals how images, much too, is a ritual of looking, a history of looking for and at something, a assortment of times manufactured with a broad-cast internet.
There is something anxious about pictures. Whatever the unique visible matter of a photo, its implicit issue is usually the passage of time alone a photo’s presence suggests the worry of its absence, the artist’s panic of time slipping absent. The works in Viewed as Interactions strain this tension, just about every artist selecting visual topics elucidating the transience that images defy. The thought that a person could steal a moment of time usually feels a little transgressive to me. But that’s just one of the good pleasures I take from on the lookout at images — watching another person attempt the difficult.
Regarded as Interactions is on check out at Casemore Kirkeby gallery (1275 Minnesota Avenue, San Francisco, California) via May 28. The exhibition was arranged by the gallery.