BRATTLEBORO — BMAC presents a juried photography exhibit annually, but Mara Williams, chief curator of the Brattleboro Art Museum (BMAC), hoped to make this year's show different.
Although she felt that the 2016 exhibition was very good and assembled many wonderful individual pieces, she didn't think it hung together that well as a whole.
“In order to be more cohesive, this year we were searching for works that are great photographs which employ mixed media,” she says.
Williams will lead a tour of the museum's latest photography exhibit, Open Call NXNE 2017, which features 51 works by photographers and video artists.
The exhibit features works selected by juror Bernard Yenelouis, assistant director at L. Parker Stephenson Photographs, a New York–based gallery that specializes in avant-garde and classic photographs of the 20th century.
Open Call NXNE 2017 displays the work of artists from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont in a range of media: inkjet and gelatin silver prints, cyanotypes, dye sublimation printing on fabric, video installation, digital animation, and leporello books.
Out of 120 artists, Yenelouis chose 24 artists to be represented in Open Call NXNE 2017.
“Open Call NXNE 2017 is an exhibit limited to photo and video-lens-based art,” explains Yenelouis. “All the pieces in the show are hybrid works to some degree.”
In a statement accompanying the exhibit, Yenelouis writes, “The intensely varied and thoughtful practices I saw are evidence that art practices are an important and challenging way to address the instability and flux of our current world.”
“I hope that the generosity of what I saw is in evidence in my selection,” he adds.
A 'conscious continuum'
Yenelouis is a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and writer whose own work addresses “issues of landscape and urbanism,” his biography notes.
His work has been shown in many galleries in New York City, and he has received fellowships from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has taught at the International Center of Photography and the Pratt Institute.
Yenelouis did not choose the photographs for Open Call NXNE 2017 solely on the basis of their imagery. Rather, he also explored how they deal with issues of history, both personal and historical.
“These are photographs that have outside references, both to the past and the future,” he says.
Nonetheless, Yenelouis does not want to give the impression that Open Call NXNE 2017 is a solemn show.
“The works are on a conscious continuum with references to all forms of expression,” he says. “There is much here that is playful and subversive.”
Describing the artists and their works in the exhibit's materials, he says the show's scope and diversity can be seen in the works included, such as:
• The cyanotypes of Tom Fels, which “use one of the first printing emulsions of the 19th century to generate images that move through plant forms toward abstraction.”
• The botanical specimens of Elizabeth Panzer, “which reference the palette of 1940s garden books through an optical transparency that brings us back to the present day.”
• Jill Burks's hand-wrought glass screen covering an iPad running a digital animation, “which contrasts the materiality of our electronic devices with the abstraction of the virtual world to which they grant access.”
• Both Sevi Akarcay's video and Kelly Goff's video installation, which respectively “explore issues surrounding the individual's relationship with the wider world he or she inhabits, raising questions of identity, location, and worldview.”
In Open Call NXNE 2017, Yenelouis was particularly thrilled by the inclusion of women and queer artists.
“Their work shows how they engage with materiality on issues of identity, desire, and politics,” he says. “Their photographs explore relations to one's life in society.”
What Yenelouis calls “queer” is more a philosophical statement of being an outsider than strictly a sexual identity, though some pieces in the show do address issues of sexual gender identity.
“Recently there was in New York City an exhibition of queer art that deliberately did not deal with the body,” he explains.
“You may ask: how can you be queer without the body?” Yenelouis says. “There are a lot of ways.”
As one example, he offers the photograph by Meredith Miller “of the crumpling paper that remained from books after they had been restored.”
“That's a queer work of art for me,” he says.
Moving away from complacency, cutting through banality
Yenelouis claims photos that interest him the most are those that reveal something “hard to view.”
“I mean that in the broadest sense,” Yenelouis says. “We too often tend to live our lives without thinking deeply, which leads to a consensual vision and trite images.”
Yenelouis feels that a photographer's art should pull away from that complacency.
“These are images that should have been thought about and interrogated,” he continues.
“The mission of the artist in photography is to raise the ante on how we view reality,” Yenelouis says. “We now live in a world where photographs are everywhere, so it is a great challenge to cut through the proliferation and banality of images.”
But that does not necessarily mean “easy” viewing.
Yenelouis writes, “The mental trajectory toward opacity that André Breton describes at the onset of his Surrealist book Nadja reminds me of the act of looking at photographs: What is wrought from a rationalist technology somehow leads us to a state of feeling unmoored and adrift in a cloud of difference and unknowing.”
“That which is recognizable breaks down, or becomes strange, or transforms altogether,” he says.
Yenelouis curated Open Call NXNE 2017 from his home in New York, and hopes to come up to BMAC when Williams gives her tour so that he can see the show in person, as well as Brattleboro itself, about which he has heard so many nice things.
“As yet, I have never visited Brattleboro,” he says. “I have spent much time in Vermont, however. I have good friends in Stowe. But I only have been in Brattleboro passing through.”