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SIGNS ALONG THE WAY Masha Oguinskaia  Pam Mendelsohn Photography August 20 - September 23, 2005 |
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| MASHA OGUINSKAIA email: omasha@gmail.com Artist Statement: I grew up in a big city, Moscow, and then lived in and traveled to cities big and small most of my life. I consider the urban environment my natural habitat. All of us practiced city people develop a way to routinely screen out some or most of our surroundings since urban life can be too visually overwhelming to pay attention to every detail, be it the people in the streets or the streets themselves. We move through our visual reality without actually seeing most of it. Some images are capable of breaking through the "autopilot" however, and demand to be photographed; sometimes just having a camera makes me see reality differently, with images framing themselves as I look around, wanting to be captured and shared. Most photographs in this show were taken in San Francisco, California and in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In both cities, I find the tradition of irreverent artistic expression that one urban dweller might use to communicate with another. These expressions stand out from the crowd and speak directly to whomever happens to discover them. Some signs were generated by accident but they seem to follow the same visual logic as the rest of the scene. The fact that the photographs from such divergent cultures thousands of miles apart seem to form a rather coherent series speaks to the reality of urban existence that is shared by all of us, no matter what continent we live on. Two of the photos were taken at Albany Bulb, a place where bushes and art seem to grow as they please. A former city dump, it's been a perfect place for many anonymous artists to play with found objects. The results can be rather startling for the audience and irresistible to a photographer. The name of one of the photos, Belka and Strelka, deserves an explanation. When the old Soviet Union started launching the first Sputniks into space the manned flight was preceded by a dozen "dogged" flights. Belka and Strelka went up in Sputnik 5 in August of 1960 and were the first living animals to survive the experience. I remember the photos in the Soviet history books of one of the dogs looking through the glass hatch of the space capsule, taken right before she was sent into orbit. Interestingly enough, the dogs in my photo are the same breed as the Russian space pioneers. PAM MENDELSON website: www.pamslens.com email: pamwiltravel@yahoo.com Artist Statement: Hemingway called life "a moveable feast." For as long as I can remember, I have taken great delight in the process of getting from point A to point B in my travels, visual feasting all along the way. Being En Route is a wonderful destination, an opportunity to view what we, humans, are capable of creating in this constructed environment of ours. I am especially interested in unusual juxtapositions i.e., Signs Along The Way. What relationships between humans and the world around them cause us to stop and stare? What convergences help to steer us toward a synthesis of various visuals, resulting in an "aha!" moment? What causes seemingly unrelated visual information to transform into more than the sum of its parts? This exhibit, Signs Along The Way, includes some of the moments when the freeze frame prompted me to think about far more than what I was actually viewing. Freedom Writer, for example, shows a graffiti wall in Montreal. My eye rests on the drawing of a punk who is busy drawing his own shadow. In the shadow, his punk haircut transforms to the Statue of Liberty crown. It looks like he is erasing the shadow, the part of himself that feels free. Sweet Land of….. is a photograph of another Statue of Liberty. This "liberty" statue is posed as a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, her skirt blowing up all around her. The statue presides over casino machines where money is won and lost. The photographs in this exhibit were made between 1992 and 2005. They cover a lot of ground: cities in the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Malta, England, and Spain. Most of the images include words and a human or two. Other interests of mine, for exploration with my camera, are body image icons and what I call Still Lives: how loved ones wish to remember the departed by the types of gravestones they choose. I also love the extraordinary tradition photographs are able to provide. For example, there is a photographic series of my daughter, Bekah, now 30, posed annually in or near water. A series is a great way to measure the passage of time. My primary mode of expression until the early 1990's was writing (Happier By Degrees: A College Reentry Guide, E.P. Dutton, 10 Speed Press and Degrees of Success, Peterson's). I eased into photography with as much support as is humanly possible from Peter Palmquist, the photohistorian who was killed by a hit and run driver in 2003. He was my life partner of 25 years. He was definitely helping from beyond the humanly possible with this show. My daughter, Rebekah, a photographer and photohistorian, also contributed greatly as did numerous friends. I divide my time between Arcata and Emeryville. |