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Artistic flea market
(by Dickson Beall - June 10, 2009)
Last September the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, headquartered at Oak Knoll Park in Clayton, opened the Brentwood Gallery to feature the work of guild photographers, illustrators and painters. Jim Trotter is both participant and organizer of the current photography exhibit.
Well-known for his own photography of familiar St. Louis landmarks, Trotter seems not so much director and curator at this new gallery as he is the pastor to a flock. In his congregation there are about 45 members that Trotter calls “repeat offenders” — photographers with their hands folded around their cameras, who actually exhibit, rather than just talk about, their works.
Rather than curating or selecting the works for display, Trotter, like a pastor wanting to give everyone a voice, has allowed each artist to bring in half a dozen works or so. When the gallery wall space is gone, it’s gone. However, democracy doesn’t work well in art.
A jury, curator or curatorial group needs to dictate a theme, perspective or organizational structure that will raise questions and offer new insights. Lacking a disciplined curatorial approach, an art exhibition can appear little more than a flea market. Not that a flea market can’t be fun — the pleasure of uncovering a small dusty treasure can bring a tingle to the blood and can kick-start hard-core endorphins into high gear.
In the mass of images some appeal to the purely animalistic brain cells — the viewer may linger a bit longer than is proper in front of airbrushed photos influenced by a Marilyn Monroe calendar — while others feature those high-brow MFA thesis-inspired explanations of artistic intentions.
Somewhere between those two extremes lie this artistic flea market’s real treasures — examining that unique place where day-after-tomorrow possibilities of digital photography became out-dated yesterday is where this exhibition has real interest and merit.
Whether current works prove to be lasting images is probably less important than the fact that anyone with access to a camera (even a cell phone camera), a computer and a little skill learned from a Photoshop for Dummies book can create awesome images with current technology.
Artists need only add imagination. Right now, in the race between imagination and technology, technology is winning. If it can be imagined, it can be created with today’s technology.
Anyone mousing around in Photoshop will appreciate the opportunity this exhibit provides to see what other photographers are doing with opacity sliders, those all-important layers and those tricky filters.
Trotter goes for sharp focus and panoramic images. He wraps a 13-foot-long 360-degree panorama of all four walls of his large commercial studio around the corner of one of the rooms in this exhibition. Tacked on the walls in a devil-may-care way, this photograph of the photographs on Trotter’s studio walls demonstrates his focus on technology.
Because technology is clearly the featured artist in this exhibition. Paul L. Discher shows his knock-off of Richard Avedon’s famous nude (featuring a fat snake slithering over a beautifully airbrushed model). OK, I paused a little too long over this image. Discher’s horses layered over a landscape barely got my notice.
I liked Nancy Donnell’s “Boats at Sunset” and “Roses for Debbie” for making do with less technology and resulting in more as image. The same can be said for Mark Braun’s “Blue Window” and “Green Door with Dog.”
Other strong images worthy of mention include David Groen’s “Reverence,” in which what could be the faces of a father and daughter are captured in a moment that beautifully reflects the title.
Groen, an engineer at Boeing and obviously familiar with sophisticated Photoshop tools, turned his photograph of St. Francis Xavier College Church into a pen and ink image and added only a subtle wash of color.
Most of the effects on display are easily achieved in Photoshop. Today’s panorama tools would make our grandfathers, who made those super wide cityscape pictures, drool over the simple ways of creating awesome-looking images. There are a few gizmos that can go on the tripod, but a photographer with a steady hand can pan around a scene and get good material for stitching together. Add basic skill with Photoshop and the process is complete.
When does all of this incredible technology become art? When the eye of the artist is opened. Some of the photographs at the Brentwood Gallery accomplish this, making it a worthwhile visit, especially for those looking towards technology to achieve an imaginative image. We’ve come a long way from the darkroom days of developer, fixer and burning in an image — and all without that awful smell of the fixer.
• St. Louis Artists’ Guild: Photography Section is currently on display at the Brentwood Gallery, 2119 S. Brentwood Blvd. The gallery is open from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturdays.
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