May 20, 2013 Armchair Critic: Talking Fabric Photography With John Pearson By Richard Lidinsky More often than not, conceptual photography is dispassionate. Landscape photography is ubiquitous to the point of invisibility. These are the prejudices of the interlocutor, but John Pearson’s Immediate Horizon, an exhibition of “soft photographs” at Weekend*, flies in the face of preconception. Technically, the eight works on view are recent, large-scale, landscape cyanotypes* on fabric, but the term “soft photograph” soothes me so. Per the press release:

“Pearson works outdoors on the ground making 1:1 indexical photographic prints during midday sunlight. In these photographs . . . the horizon, removed from the composition, becomes the topographic support and source for construction of the images.”

Partial translation: The artist uses the ancient photographic method of direct transfer, creating what is known as a “photogram,” an image made without a camera, to produce an arresting, modern-Western visual spectacle. As wall objects, the draped prints on fabric reveal clues about their origin, but looking at them conjures the cinematic framing of nature: deep-space telescopy, backlit jellyfish moving in water, or geologic mapping on a continental scale.

One print would fit easily with its siblings, except that it has been printed on white woven fabric with red stripes. This diversion serves several purposes, not least as a self-conscious signpost that the dialectics of art history have little use for fractals* and such cosmic silliness, even when we want to see such things. Or you may see it as an oblique homage to this* or this*.

But these photographs breathe life, perhaps because they are made with the simplest of ingredients: air, rock, dirt, sunlight, fabric, and yes, a few chemical ingredients. Knowing Pearson a bit, I’m certain that he “leaves no trace” at the site of production, which happens to be somewhere near the hottest place on earth*. Call it some clever variation on “farm-to-table” photography if you must, but I hope you won’t.

L.A. Currents: Photograms, eh?

John Pearson: My first photograms were the result of wanting to use the ground as a camera. I wanted to load my film into the ground and make an exposure. Ultimately, this resulted in long strips of 35 mm negatives weighted under dirt and rocks and then exposed to light. I then used the developed negs to make enlarged black-and-white prints. I guess those were my first landscape photograms.

Photograms at the turn of the [20th] century were considered pure photography because there was no mediation with a lens or negatives. “Pure” because [a photogram] was an immediate indexical record and also because it

Immediate Horizon Installation View Photo by John Pearson

was so much about light. They are also a common assignment in beginning photo classes, often yielding lackluster, boring results. And often never revisited after that introduction.

LAC: Are you jabbing at the academic establishment or did you enjoy being a student?

Pearson: Those technical courses might have had slow spots, but they were essential. I build on that knowledge. It’s a foundation that facilitates my explorations. Not all roads lead to polished commercial photographs. In regards to being a student I enjoyed the community, the discussions, and the darkroom in school. One of my teachers at CalArts, Judy Fiskin, made a video about her transition from working with photography to video. In it she talks about a sense of wonder evoked by early photographers like William Henry Fox Talbot. I think it’s that wonder, that capacity of the photograph, which keeps me engaged and curious.

LAC: You worked outdoors for years in your Griffith Park studio, but chose to make these works in the Death Valley area. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Pearson: Initially I was making cyanotypes in Griffith Park in the Bronson Caves area, which is an old quarry. When I thought about landscapes and where I want to spend time I realized that Death Valley, a place that has always fascinated me, would be ideal. For me this seemed to change the project because that landscape is so much more barren and isolated. It was [during] that time I spent in Death Valley, swallowed up by the scale of the desert and the mountains, that I became aware of being on the horizon at the meeting of the sky and ground. It was also a different way to experience the desert, rather than photographing panoramas or sunsets.

LAC: Using direct sunlight as the light source for your production is an appealing approach. After all of this time under the sun, can you reflect a bit on why you decided to do things this way and where you think it will lead you?

Pearson: Photography is so submissive to sunlight. And vision is fueled by sunlight — looking out over the ocean or down the street. Vision takes you outside of your body, and depending on how much credence you give to vision as a means of knowing or understanding something, it becomes problematic. The photograph creates distance -- you look AT something -- and I’m thinking of ways to convey presence or record experience to counteract that. So I feel that I am at odds with the role of sunlight in photography. With all of that said, I think these new cyanotypes revel in sunlight while abandoning the photographic apparatus. The prints are so basic and elemental. It is sunlight rendering rock and dirt. I’ve made decisions along the way to create photos that just operate differently than what we have to look at in the paper or at galleries. I don’t know where it will

John Pearson, Zabriskie Point, 2013 (detail)

lead me. I feel like simple choices of materials or methods can have wonderful consequences that generate ideas.

LAC: When did the possibilities of 1:1 landscape cyanotypes first appeal to you?

Pearson: I have worked in Griffith Park for many years, not because I’m some kind of naturalist but because it was a space that was open, free, semi-private, familiar, and put me right in the midst of the southern California landscape. I could explore my surroundings and try out different ways of representing that space and the light.

I’ve always enjoyed . . . being involved at every step of the [photographic] process. Cyanotypes seemed like a solution to make a photogram of a huge palm frond without having access to a darkroom and having no interest in being a customer at a photo lab. And I liked the tactility of working with fabric. These photos don’t prioritize vision over the other senses — there is no rigorous composition, no precious handling, spotting, mounting, etc. Instead the prints serve as a record in such a tangible way of my time in a specific place and the materials used. They feel like real photographs with a connection to their making, perhaps the way handling a polaroid photograph has a different effect than looking at a framed ten-foot wide print.

John Pearson, Untitled, 2013 (detail)

LAC: The exhibition is titled Immediate Horizon, which evokes the sun, earth, and landscape tradition. Why this title?

Pearson: I feel as though the print laying outside on the ground during exposure is marking right where the sky and the ground meet. The print records the light of the sun in a deep blue, as though picturing the sky, and the craggy forms convey the details of the ground in that area. What’s not readily apparent is that the topography of that plot of ground also dictates the forms and how the light exposes the fabric. I also feel like these photographs record not what I saw but more what I handled. The forms on the prints are rocks, gravel, and dirt from the surrounding area that I have tossed or placed on top of the print. So I felt as though I was operating at the horizon.

LAC: What are some of the practical challenges of exposing the cyanotypes?

Pearson: The challenges are the cumbersome nature of lugging around large pieces of fabric concealed from light. The exposures are long, often up to an hour, so it is a commitment to a location when I decide to make a print. And often I scramble a bit to start off the exposure. But I enjoy this more than the alternative, which could be lugging a large-format camera into a location, with a loupe to check focus, a tripod to keep the camera from moving, and a light meter to gauge exposure — followed by trips to the lab for processing. I am not striving for some grand orchestration or virtuosity. I feel like the compositions of these prints have more in

common with shoveling snow.

LAC: I enjoy your work because there is a streak of primitivism in it. Do you consciously engage this element or do you consider rocks and twigs contemporary objects?

Pearson: Primitive! Perhaps what you see as primitive is my attempt to strip the photograph down to some basic elemental role: Light records rock. At the same time, these prints are not reductive compositions like the plant specimen of an early William Henry Fox Talbot or Anna Atkins photogram — instead there is an abundance of subject matter that suggests more about the location and situation when I was making them — a particular but negligible plot of ground in this vast space at high noon.

http://www.lacurrents.com *hyperlinks: Weekend www.weekendspace.org Weekend Gallery cyanotypes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanotype Wikipedia fractals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal Wikipedia this http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78805 Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55 this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hammons_flag.jpg David Hammons, African-American Flag, 1990 the hottest place on earth http://www.nps.gov/deva/index.htm National Park Service: Death Valley

May 16, 2013

Dear John,

Your show, Immediate Horizon, at Weekend is quite wonderful. The cyanotype photograms are like flags, and like paintings, and like curtains – curtains over doorways, perhaps. Remember the movement in 1970s painting that was called Support/Surfaces? Do you find in that work something that speaks of the earth, and maybe about landscape? Those artists’ impulse to let material find its own resting place, to allow a surface to be its own support seems so base to me, so not related to the glorification of a stretcher and frame; without pretense, I think, and thus grounded. (Maybe those 1970s paintings seem gritty to me because the catalogue that I have has only black and white pictures.)

Some of your photos look like slices out of the sky – and if this were true, their bodies would be fluttering in the very material out of which you snatched them: air. Light is carried through/on air, isn’t it? And light is the essence of your photography, right? I mean this not in the way of ”Well, duh, Geoff – everything related to visual art depends on light” rather I mean that your photographs document the effects of light – the movement of light over time, the way in which light outlines and splashes around objects. Many of the brilliant white areas have weight, even, and this is a new way for me to think of light that I really appreciate.

Thinking again of landscape, and of light, there is a specificity to the time and place that light hits the earth, isn’t there? Each moment and each site is unique. You have always been aware of this, place is always important in your work – whether it be a cave in Griffith Park, a patch of garden at your house, or a corner of one of Pam’s paintings. These new photographs, in their directness and simplicity, seem to exalt your love of the earth – not by recording a place, but by allowing place to impose on your making. You suggest landscape, John, rather then tell me about it, and this is the true generosity of the artist.

These are very dynamic photographs, too. Of course since I watched you at work, I can picture you running around the landscape, picking up rocks and pinecones, laying out the silk and covering it with a heavy light block, tossing and placing the rocks, folding and turning the fabric over the time of exposure. All of this is grand and comical and earnest, and I am grateful that I got to watch; but what is really exciting for me is to stand before the work, and then to look from one to another, and to recognize the effects of movement in the visual information. Again, I will use the word “weight” to describe the way motion is embedded in

your photographs. For things so light as air, your silk banners with their azure and their bleu celeste have gravity, they have the presence of mass though they are surface only.

Like everything I love in art, your photos pay back my looking.

Fondly, and with respect, I am yours,

Geoff

Published on May 16, 2013 by Geoff Tuck.

http://notesonlooking.com/2013/05/john-pearson-at-weekend/

WEEKEND WARRIORS May 14, 2013, 8:30 am At the shared edge of Hollywood and Los Feliz, across from La Luz de Jesus Gallery / Wacko / Soap Plant, down a block from Cheetah’s gentlemen’s club, and next door to a tattoo place, lies the residence of artists Jay Erker and John Mills. The front room of their place is also Weekend, described on their website as “a new artist-run space dedicated to showing the work of under-represented and emerging contemporary artists in Los Angeles and beyond.” Since Erker and Mills opened Weekend in 2011, it has become one of the defining outposts of Los Angeles’ thriving community of artist-run and alternative spaces, with a string of acclaimed and engaging exhibitions, including of their own work. The niche that Weekend and other alternative spaces fill in the contemporary art scene of LA is surmised in their words – “There is a tremendous amount of excellent work out there that falls through the cracks of the commercial art world and we like to think we provide a way for some of that work to be seen. We hope that in the end spaces like ours can provide a launching pad for artists' careers, helping them along the path to success.”

Erker and Mills met during undergrad at the University of Florida in the 90′s. After earning MFAs from CalArts and CCAC respectively, the immediate landscape of the LA artist-run scene was well under their radar. After returning in 2010, however, they found a thriving community of like-minded spaces, and Weekend was born. With Mills being a painter, and Erker developing a body of 2D photo based work, exhibitions of artists engaging in painterly practices have found a place in Weekend’s program. A look at their past exhibitions finds solo exhibitions of painters Carlson Hatton, Tim Forcum, and Scott Greenwalt, as well as the all painting group show Hot Paint, featuring Heather Brown, Amy Feldman, Emily Noelle Lambert, Molly Larkey, Allison Miller, and Mary Addison Hackett. On the state of painting in LA, Erker and Mills concede, “LA has not traditionally been known as a center for painting but that distinction seems to be changing, with more painters feeling comfortable working here.” Weekend’s hopes of exposing these artists to a wider audience has met with some success, with mentions and reviews from beyond the LA press. Similar to other artist-run outfits, the audience for Weekend’s shows is comprised mainly of other artists, and is reflective of their awareness as a part of a larger community: “Mostly, we work with artists that don’t have representation… Mixing it up adds to the conversation and allows artists to expand their community.” The artist-to-artist approach is evident in Weekend’s exhibition history; in addition to having served as platforms for Erker and Mill’s practice themselves, exhibiting artists have returned to guest curate shows on occasion. Odd Ghosts and Unlikely Dancers, a two-person exhibition featuring Phyllis Green and Bessie Kunath, was organized by artist Michelle Carla Handel, the featured artist in Weekend’s second exhibition.

As practicing artists, the directors of Weekend maintain bodies of work that reflect modes of inquiry relevant to Los Angeles’ history with pictures and picture-making. Erker’s last solo exhibition at Weekend found the processed, industrialized images of beauty and glamour turned psychologically inside-out; the hollow nothing of these superficial advertisements is now the blank canvas Erker de-faces. Some are now mashed up with the material language of painting, picture-making’s original descendent, as in Twin A and Twin B, where the application of white, impasto paint stick to the image of a model’s face suggests Georges Franju’s French horror classic Eyes Without A Face. Both the works and the film are meditations on feminine beauty, and the absurd

contradictions therein. John Mill’s abstract paintings offer a series of contradictory formal descriptors: disciplined, yet loose; austere, but colorful; chaotic but bound. Self-sustaining worlds of marks, strokes, scribbles, smears, and dabs maintain delicate, formal ecosystems that have a meandering relationship to their square edges. Declarative animated compositions lie upon naked white canvases, shades of early Kandinsky by way of Gorky, and reminiscent of some of Josh Smith and Lesley Vance’s kung-fu.

Weekend’s current exhibition features the flowing, abstract cyanotypes of Los Angeles based artist John Pearson. The formal wordplay of describing the works as landscapes provides a change in perspective that makes the viewer the figure in the ground of the installed pieces. In Pearson’s work the syntax of painting’s precocious younger sibling photography makes for more playfulness of pictorial language. Created by exposing to sunlight and dodging with rocks, we are left with an image of a landscape attempting to describe itself with less reliance on the artist's hand – a landscape in its own words, as it were. Pearson is also part of artist group and former Chinatown space WPA, another curatorial initiative put into motion by artists in LA. The shared network here in LA between these outfits creates the connecting threads between many of the artists involved.

The grass-roots curatorial endeavors in Los Angeles of artists like Jay Erker and John Mills provide avenues for projects and works that are selected from the eye and sensibilities of artists themselves. Weekend’s model has found fertile ground in Los Angeles, where multi-use spaces are utilized by social media savvy artists to pro-actively engage in the contemporary art dialog without regard to commercial viability or institutional legitimacy. Whether it be an artist’s apartment, studio, garage, pop-up storefront, or industrial space, at Weekend and across the LA metroplex, engaging contemporary painting is always a Facebook invite away.

- Jason Ramos, Los Angeles Contributor

Weekend is located at 4634 Hollywood Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90027. They are open Sat and Sun 11 am to 6 pm and by appointment.

—

Jay Erker is an MFA graduate of California Institute of the Arts. She has been included in various group exhibitions in Los Angeles, NY and San Francisco and is co- director at Weekend.

John Mills is an MFA graduate of California College of Arts and Crafts. He has been included in solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles and beyond, and is co-director at Weekend.

John Pearson received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited widely in the United States including garages, non-profits, artist collectives, museums, and commercial galleries in Los Angeles along with solo exhibitions in New York; Saint Petersburg, Russia; and a recent two-person exhibit with Emily Newman at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jason Ramos is an artist, curator, and writer based in Los Angeles. He earned an MFA in painting from Cal State Fullerton in 2007. He is the director of RAID Projects and current assistant curator of the Torrance Art Museum. His artwork has been included in numerous exhibitions in Los Angeles and beyond. http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/weekend-warriors/

June 22, 2007

Julian Pozzi and John Pearson at Jeff Bailey Gallery I've been a little distracted with the aftermath of the drama inside City Council Chambers on Wednesday evening, so I haven't had much time for some art posts I've wanted to do. The reverb continues even now [more on that eventually], so this and other entries may for a while be more brief than I would prefer. But they will be no less enthusiastic. I was really taken recently with the videos Jeff Bailey is showing in his gallery's office space, and I think they really deserve a larger exposure. The artist is John Pearson, and the small show of videos and photographs was curated by Julian Pozzi, the artist whose beautiful paintings on paper are being shown in the main space. It's a wonderful idea for any gallery, and an especially happy one in this case. There is much sweetness and some humor in these short videos, but for all that they are more than sophisticated enough at managing the not-so-simple effect of child-like, wide-eyed wonder, of looking at the world for the very first time. In addition to his work as a painter, Pozzi is the organizer for Youth and Anti-Youth, which is presenting John Pearson's work at the gallery. The gallery describes the group as "a nomadic curatorial enterprise begun in Brooklyn in 1997". Images of Pozzi's own paintings can be found on the Jeff Bailey web site, but the work really has to be experienced in person. Jeff Bailey Gallery New York, NY http://jameswagner.com/2007/06/julian_pozzi_an_1.html

March 30, 2001 Art Reviews New Work Sandroni Rey Gallery Los Angeles, CA Five With Promise: Sandroni Rey Gallery's current exhibition of new work by five of its regular artists has the air of an impromptu dinner party that, by whatever collusion of benevolent celestial forces, becomes an unexpected treat for everyone involved. The guests all seem to get along and the works, while significantly varied in medium and subject matter, mingle happily. Although the exhibition was not conceived with an overarching theme in mind, its tasteful juxtaposition of works elicits some pleasant surprises. In two free-standing sculptures and a wall piece, the artist team Castaneda/Reiman uses common construction materials such as plywood, drywall, carpet padding and plastic skylights to create surprisingly refined works reminiscent of Pacific Coast landscapes, with watery shades of blue and green and crisp horizontal lines. Two sculptures by Lynn Aldrich also use common materials but add a decidedly more festive spin. One is a table made from stacked sheets of colorful corrugated plastic and the other is a behind-the-scenes apparatus that periodically spews confetti-like silver starts from a small hole in the wall. Photographs by John Pearson and Soo Kim offer a nice textural balance to the sculptural works while also inadvertently echoing several of their themes, such as landscape and furniture. A subtly hilarious work by Pearson combines several photographs of armchairs and couches abandoned on different city curbs; each is lying on its side but photographed as though it were upright, which tweaks the rest of the photograph's world by 45 or 90 degrees and creates a delicious sort of pictorial confusion. In a lovely series of city and landscape photographs, Soo Kim presents a refined study in color -- yellow and green particularly -- that instills the exhibition with a mellow tone. In all, the exhibition is a pleasant, late-winter treat--a casual showcase for good work that will probably keep the viewer watching for these artists in the future. Holly Myers

November 1999

John Pearson, Marker, 1999 Type C Photograph Kirsten Berkeley and John Pearson by Diane Calder Decades before the media spread the dirt on Monica's blue dress, Lewis Morely's photograph of a nude Christine Keeler astride a Jacobson Butterfly chair raised the circulation of London tabloids. The scandalous ‘60s affair involving the lush, sensuous Keeler brought down British cabinet members as Morely's eye for form elevated a working class woman to the status of an icon. Kirsten Berkeley, a recent graduate of Goldsmiths College in London, constructs sculptures that play the roles of partners at a party where characters like Christine Keeler, Bill and "that woman" might be guests. The artist, who remembers once having had great sex on a kitchen chair, incorporates mundane objects like bottles with sections of a bent ply Jacobson chair to form a painted rainbow group of assemblages. The history of color's path to sensuality is longer than the yellow brick road that lead Dorothy out of the grey realities of Kansas. It has been fingered as a cosmetic cover that can excite the emotions and an apt symbol for character types or stages of life. Artist/critic Peter Plagens once confessed to longing to capture in paint the seductive colors featured in his wife's fashion magazines. Berkeley flicked through tons of magazine pictures, grouping and editing images for clues to casting her characters and intuiting details of their lives, ranging from their apparel and posture to the kinds of objects they would possess. "If a woman had great blue shoes, how would she cross her legs on a chair?" Berkeley excels in the construction of meaning through the cunning juxtaposition of color and

form. She gives Freudian associations a glossy new shine that posits life in a sensationalist society driven towards instant gratification by consuming passions. Go to her party and introduce yourself to her eight archetypal characters. The virile young man is the guy with the bright green leek, and the white virgin is the one with the stoppered bottle and a soft towel suggesting the kind of manipulation needed to open it. More than the gallery's courtyard separates Berkeley's work from John Pearson's. Each artist deals differently with subject matter, color, manipulation of materials and methods of display. Pearson shares Berkeley's interest in place and the body, but his use of the body conveys movement into a place that becomes a catalyst for ideas that subsequently define the experience of being there. In his project, entitled Green Eyes, Pearson makes evening treks from his apartment to a hillside site that becomes, by extension, his studio. The video and photographs in which Pearson marks his heightened sense of vision, his sense of belonging, and the fluidity of space and light as time passes, have an unpolished, spontaneous quality that is singularly appropriate for conveying their message. He isn't documenting or making a spectacle of a place, or even setting up structures (à la James Turrell or Uta Barth) that would give his environment or work a particular look. Photographs including those of hands become markers of change as the artist's eyes and the lens of his camera adjust to the fading light. Leonardo da Vinci reportedly darkened his surroundings in order to dilate the pupils of his eyes and raise his powers of observation. Pearson notes, "When the light changes, you have to change with it.". Critic Claudine Ise understood that Pearson's photos, ". . .ask deceptively simple questions about the complicated ways in which we perceive the world around us." Pearson's questions function like kóans or riddles given to students of Zen to help them realize a breakthrough. The kóan, "gateless gate," is especially applicable to Pearson's work. The artist's sense of humor, subject matter and disposition of the work make it seem approachable or gateless. At the same time, the work can be difficult to enter unless the viewer is willing to shatter pre-existing ideas about the nature and functions of photography. Sandroni Rey Gallery, Venice, CA

October 16, 1998 Art Reviews John Pearson Übermain Los Angeles, CA Elusive Moments: It's virtually impossible to take in John Pearson's remarkable color photographs with one passing glance; if you don't look at his enigmatic images a second and even a third time, you're likely to miss the point entirely. Pearson's conceptually based photographs at Ubermain have a casual and exploratory feel. They ask deceptively simple questions about the complicated ways in which we perceive the world around us. We're given fleeting glimpses of transitory processes and cyclical movements, like the thin rivulets of hot sauce that, like bloody tears, drip slowly down a man's cheeks, or the undulating patterns that appear and recede as the frothy lip of the ocean's tide licks away at the shore. Pearson cut out captioned photographs of celebrities, sports figures, war zones and crime victims from several years' worth of newspapers, arranged them on a hardwood surface and photographed the resulting compositions. An entire room has been wallpapered with these photocollages, offering a punning commentary on the current frenzy for "wall-to-wall" news coverage. Another series of photographs charts the path of a nearly invisible cluster of soap bubbles as they drift lazily through an open window and across a room. Elsewhere, bleary suitcases wheel drunkenly around a revolving baggage-claim carousel. Images like these would be almost dreamlike, if they weren't so downright ordinary. Then again, the ordinary world has always provided us with the base materials for our dreams. Like soap bubbles (and dreams), Pearson's images elude our touch; we're left to marvel at the clarity with which he perceives the transient nature of his surroundings. Claudine Isé