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FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
JOHN CHIARA/VON LINTEL GALLERY WHAT A VIEW: John Chiara’s “Echo Lake at Meyers Grade” presents an abject panorama that is the antithesis of classic landscape photography. Portrait of the artist as an old landscape by Jessica Dawson
baltimore — For someone like me — someone juiced by art rich with paradox, psychic turbulence and, of course, feminist anything — art about art is a tough sell. With this bias in mind, it’s un-
likely I’d latch onto the work of John Chiara, let alone with such a firm hold. His photographs are as much about the history of his chosen medi- um as anything else. But the San Francisco-based Chiara — the cen- terpiece of a smart group show, “You & Me Living Today / Vol. 2 / The Land” at Gallery Four — transcends references to photographic process and history, creating work that’s sub- stantial as well as beautiful. I won’t pussyfoot: One Chiara dominates the rest on view here. It’s the epic, four-part “Echo Lake at Meyers Grade.” The piece isn’t easy. As when stepping outside on a bright day, it’ll take time for your eyes to adjust to its grandeur. Made up of four prints (their widths vary from five feet to 61
⁄2
The images themselves are blanched and strange, as if they were printed on expired paper and han- dled by clumsy photo students. There’s a pink-green milkiness to one image, a blue-gray tone to its neighbor, some saturated blues and deep browns adjacent, and then a more blanched one at the end. And then there’s the panoramic
nonevent these images depict. It’s wintertime and we’re on a desolate road near Lake Tahoe. A rusting steel barrier crumples alongside a route that hasn’t seen traffic in years. Snow fell, but that was days ago. Now dirt and ice intermingle; the white stuff has browned and dead- ness dominates. Chiara moved his camera a few degrees in each frame so he can fully capture this pathetic piece of earth. In style and subject, “Echo Lake at
feet)
hung a few inches from one another, the piece presents an abject pano- rama. Each picture is printed on the same roll of large-scale photo paper; you can see the jagged scissor lines where Chiara cut them apart.
Meyers Grade” is the antithesis of classic landscape photography. Tim- othy H. O’Sullivan’s documents of mountains and valleys? Nope. Ansel Adams’s studied moonrises over ex- panses of gorgeousness? Not at all. But it’s clear that Chiara knows this stuff — you can sense his ambitions here.
But let’s be honest: “Echo Lake at
Meyers Grade” flirts with ugly. And this calculated homeliness — the ba- nal subject matter and intentional
oddities of printing — risks coming off as an easy rebellion against the grand history of landscape photog- raphy. Easy, that is, until we learn how
they’re made. Turns out that Chiara photo-
graphed these scenes using a mas- sively scaled camera obscura that he constructed himself. The size of a small room with a lens embedded in one of its walls, the black box sits on a flatbed trailer that the artist drives from scene to scene. To make pic- tures, he enters the light-tight box and sets up massive pieces of photo paper. Then he exits by sweating through a 20-foot-long plastic duct and begins the exposure. On his Web site, you can see a video of Chiara crawling out of his camera like a calf being birthed. In an era of point-and-click digital photos, Chiara turns imagemaking back into a struggle. And in this age of mechanical re-
production, Chiara opts out, too. There is no negative; these images happen when light hits photo paper, and they can’t be duplicated. Chiara uses the time it takes to expose the paper (anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour) to dodge and burn, but that doesn’t offer a lot of room for ma- nipulation. Later he develops the prints by rolling them around inside
massive, capped-off tubes (made for sewer pipes) that he fills with dark- room chemicals. What I love about Chiara’s work — and this one spectacular piece in particular — is how it reads (or ap- pears to read) as a portrait of John Chiara. Part slacker ironist, part old school landscapist and many parts mad scientist, this guy is . . . well — considering I just spent most of my column talking about him — I’d say he’s pretty spectacular. To the rest of the artists in “You &
Me Living Today / Vol. 2 / The Land,” my apologies for getting caught up in Chiara’s pictures. Christine Bailey, I’m intrigued by
your two hypnotic videos made in- side the Web-based program Second Life. Jacqueline Schlossman, I en- joyed a few of your color photo- graphs, the ones of once-pristine golf courses being taken back by the very nature they sought to tame. And you, James Rieck! Those wry paintings done in monochromatic grisaille (except that one of the chain saw, which I didn’t love so much) are pretty spot-on. One of my favorites is your sensual portrait of a Weber grill that seems touched by the hand of Jeff Koons (this because it exudes sensuality and consumerism in the same breath). I’m also partisan to “Pathfinder,”
your 14-foot-wide canvas that takes as its subject an ad for a Nissan SUV. In the ad (I found a similar picture on the company’s Web site), the vehi- cle fords a rushing stream with the majesty of Excalibur rising from the mists.
But in your oil-on-canvas version, you shifted the horizon line way, way up, filling your frame with the rush- ing stream and just a hint of the SUV above. What a difference that subtle shift
makes. The car’s bottom hovers like an ominous spacecraft, casting a physical and psychological shadow. Our eyes keep pressing upward, ask- ing for more information. But you deny us! Mr. Rieck (James? Jim?), you’ve made one of the most manipulative paintings I’ve ever seen. Nice work.
style@washpost.com
Dawson is a freelance writer.
You & Me Living Today / Vol. 2. / The Land
at Gallery Four, 405 W. Franklin St.,
Baltimore, Saturdays noon-5 p.m. and by appointment, to Aug. 28.
www.galleryfour.net.
NAMES & FACES
Lohan judge drops out Looking for Los Angeles’ least popular
hangout? Try any courtroom occupied by Lindsay Lohan. In July her lawyer, Shawn Chapman Holley, quit the case. Now the judge, Marsha Revel, has excused herself from the proceedings, too. This time it’s not Lohan’s fault, though. The judge stepped down following complaints that she participated in an improper discussion regarding where the 24-year-starlet would attend rehab. Revel “was having calls and discussions with people on the case, and we were not present,” explained Jane Robison of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. The case will now be turned over to Judge Elden Fox, although there are no new court hearings scheduled. Lohan is serving a 90-day stint in a drug and alcohol treatment program at the University of California-Los Angeles after doing 13 days behind bars for violating her probation in a pair of drunken-driving cases.
Odd couple The unlikely courtship of Snooki and John McCain continues. This time the Arizona senator is upping the ante. “I kind of think she might be too good-looking to go to jail,” McCain said Wednesday on KMLE radio in Phoenix, commenting on the reality TV star’s recent disorderly conduct arrest. Earlier this summer the senator and
the “Jersey Shore” luminary griped via Twitter about the tanning tax — a 10-percent surcharge on the use of ultraviolet tanning beds — that took effect in June. In July, Snooki kicked it up a notch. “To be honest with you, the only reason why I voted for your father was because he was really cute,” she told the politician’s daughter, Meghan McCain, during a Daily Beast interview.
Police blotter Mary Delgado, winner of Season 6 of
“The Bachelor,” is in dutch with the law. She was pulled over early Thursday morning in Tampa for driving under the influence, People reports. It’s not the
BOOK WORLD
AWW! Snooki picked John McCain for his looks. Now he’s showing his support.
ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
SWEET!Kevin Jonas and his wife got a taste of fame at Georgetown Cupcake.
first time she’s been in a legal scrape — the DUI comes two years after she was arrested for assaulting Byron Velick, her beau from the 2004 ABC show. The couple called it quits last year.
End Notes Spotted: Kevin Jonas, of Jonas Brothers fame, and his wife, Danielle, at Georgetown Cupcake. The couple stopped in on Wednesday to pick up a special order of two dozen assorted cupcakes. As a lagniappe, the proprietors also whipped up a few custom-made JoBros-logo-sporting treats. He’s in town for a gig at Jiffy Lube Live. — Aaron Leitko, from staff, wire and web reports
booze and killed off so many of the men in their lives that it developed into a ce- lebrity circus. There was Kitty Malm, whom journalists of the day called “the Tiger Girl”; Sabella Nitti, a forlorn Italian immigrant who was scorned at first by the newspaper-reading public but then underwent a makeover of sorts and turned into a femme fatale; and a few others who took bad behavior to an ex- treme. But in particular there were two murderous ladies: One was Beulah An- nan, beautiful but dumb as a plank, who shot her drunken-bum boyfriend while her long-suffering husband was working at a laundry; the other was Belva Gaertn- er, glamorous but not nearly so beauti- ful, who shot her young lover in her car and left him there. Both Annan and Gaertner were tried for murder. The evidence against them was overwhelming, but because juries in Chicago at that time were made up only of men who considered pretty women in- capable of murder, both were acquitted. These crimes perpetrated by women
were mostly reported on by women, which was unusual at the time. There was Genevieve Forbes of the Daily Trib- une; Ione Quinby of the Evening Post; Sonia Lee of the America; and a relative newcomer, Maurine Watkins, recently hired by the Tribune, who had been edu- cated in American drama and Christian theology. She had been advised by an academic mentor to go out into the real world and find out what made America tick. She took that advice and found her- self in the middle of the unfolding stories of the murderesses being held that sum- mer in Chicago’s Cook County Jail. Wat- kins learned to be a hardboiled news- paper reporter, immersed herself in a cornucopia of gory, perversely comic sto- ries of bloodshed, then returned to Yale
The lethal ladies of ‘Chicago’ O
by Carolyn See
nce upon a time in Chicago, in the summer of 1924, too many women drank too much bad Prohibition
Drama School and wrote a satiric work that turned out to be “Chicago.” That production inspired glowing re-
views by Rupert Hughes and Brooks At- kinson, which inspired a movie in 1927, which gave rise to another Watkins play, which got a mixed review from literary pundit Edmund Wilson, which may or may not have given rise to Chicago juries who had women on them. Then, in 1975, all this brought forth a “musical adaptation, con- ceived and directed by ground-breaking choreogra- pher Bob Fosse . . . starring stage legends Gwen Verdon as Roxie [Annan] and Chita Rivera as Velma [Gaertner ]”; and “twenty years later, the musical returned to the Great White Way, with Fosse’s for- mer lover and protégée Ann Reinking as Roxie. Newly rel- evant again, thanks to the O.J. Simpson and Amy Fisher trials, [‘Chicago’] took the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival.”
But we know that wasn’t the end of it because in 2002 another movie opened — a musical this time, made from the Broadway adaptation, and right now, even though the planet is rife with mur- ders of every kind, author Douglas Perry takes us back to those two depressing murders yet again. Playwright Watkins used Roxie, Perry writes, as “the moron triumphant, counting on her fellow morons — on the newspaper staffs, on the jury, every- where in this twisted new America — to save her.” And it seems more or less true that Beulah Annan was little more than a sub-literate moron, used up and spit out by a long list of lowlifes. Perry makes cru- el fun of her, and he can’t get enough of her semi-naked bosom, her “breasts like crashed dirigibles.” Like an obsessively thrifty housewife, he makes hash out of
THE GIRLS OF MURDER CITY Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers who
what used to be meatloaf, which used to be hamburger, which might have origi- nally been an authentic piece of roast beef, but he serves up this 86-year-old material as if only yesterday it were a cow in the slaughter house, as if Annan and Gaertner and the other girls of Mur- deresses’s Row were still primping for their photos and preparing for inter- views. What is the higher theme here? That American men are fools for pretty women? What a news- flash that is! That Prohibition was probably not a good idea, if for no other reason than that the quality of available alcohol messed with the pub- lic’s health and minds? That newspaper people can be — perhaps especially in their coverage of crime — imma- ture at best, cretinous at worst? Are we supposed to be shocked by this? Somewhere, on about
Inspired ‘Chicago’ By Douglas Perry Viking. 304 pp. $25.95
page 129, reading the ghoul- ish account of the life and death of Wanda Stopa, who killed a man and then herself for “love” in the summer of 1924, I got the strong feeling that I was wasting my time and that the author was wasting his, too. As any po-
liceman from these very pages might say when trying to disperse a hysterical crowd: “Get along, get along. There’s nothing new for you to see here.”
bookworld@washpost.com
See regularly reviews books for The Post.
Sunday in Outlook Jessica Stern’s memoir of terror. The science and comedy of packing for Mars. Havana’s sugar king. The fountain of youth in a pill. And a Taliban prisoner lives to tell the tale.
DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau
CUL DE SAC by Richard Thompson
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