Grant Ernhart photography

My good friend Darcy Bartoletti will be part of what looks to be an interesting group show in Los Angeles this coming September. The Carl Berg gallery will have the group show “New Wave” on view from September 6 - October 4, 2008. I saw that San Francisco artist Michelle Blade will also be taking part in this show. Not only does she makes some pretty great paintings she has a really amusing and often times inspiring blog called Eternal Summer check it out, see what she did today.

I wish I could see all of Darcy’s work put on display in the gallery. I will be curious to hear how he decides to install them. As I flipped through the files of his new work that he sent me for this post I really felt that it was as if i was looking through his journal. It was not that each drawing was a clear entry by which Darcy chronicled his daily happenings, but there were themes in the collection of drawings that seemed to me as if he was struggling to understand his position to certain things. Through looking at his work I began to think about spirituality, sex, boredom, loneliness and a desire to connect… to understand his place in the greater picture. Maybe that is really what I am trying to get at. In the collection of 40+ drawings that he sent me I really felt a desire to evolve, a desire to understand, while at the same time also acknowledging one’s desires and temptations. It is this struggle to conquer our “demons” and move forward that defines much of the experience of being alive. In his new work Darcy has put a bit of his own experience with the sacred and the profane out there for the rest of us to mull over. He his not preaching by any means, he is just saying he is only human in a very sincere way.

This is my dad and today is his birthday! I am one of the lucky people who can say that as a child and even as a teenager my parents and I really had a very little amount of animosity. I remember my parents as very supportive and encouraging people in my life. As I would come home and declare at various stages in my life that I was going to be a biathlete, then a Rolfer and then a photographer my parents did not even once shut me down. They were inquistive about these things and I felt that they trusted my judgement and my knowledge of who I was and what I valued. This trust and ever present love are probably two of the biggest factors that have helped me become the happy confident adult I am most days. So thank you Dad and Mom(even though it is just Dad’s birthday today). Thanks for being great!

And if anyone besides my parents actually reads my blog and if you were lucky enough to have parents that were even half as loving, involved and supportive as mine are,  then call them up today and thank them.

And Dad, I hope you have a great day, I’ll call you later.

The other day I was trying to get a print sent off for an up-coming show. That simple task turned into a really long ordeal but ultimately I finished the job. As I was paying the employee who had been helping me for the last 40 minutes or so said, “Hey you want a quik-pick? It is up to $95 million.” So just on a whim I said yeah why not.  I picked up my lucky ticket last Friday afternoon and have not been able to bring myself to see if I am the newest California millionaire yet. 

It has just been pretty satisfying to see that little ticket lying there on my desk and thinking about all the possibilities that it holds. I have been having a lot of fun deciding how I would spend my millions. I know that I would seriously reconsider going back to work rubbing other people’s backs(not that I even dislike my job… but I mean come on), I would give my girlfriend her trip around the world, pay off the school loans that my friends and I racked up while becoming educated about all things photographic, fund a few people’s projects, allow my parents to retire etc. etc. etc.

I am going to enjoy one more day of imaginative philanthropy. Checking my ticket will have to wait until tomorrow, because today I am off… to work.

I met Thomas Macker while in Chesterhill, Ohio during my residency with Harold Arts. Thomas was great because he seemed to be up for pretty much anything, including driving around the windy roads near the farm and enjoying the summer night while looking for interesting things to photograph. It was interesting to go out with him because whenever we saw anyone near the road he would stop and go out to ask them if he could make their picture without hesitation. Meanwhile I sat in the car having mixed feelings, partly I wished I was the one who went out to ask to make their picture and partly I really felt that I was not interested in them at all. While I did take quite a few pictures of my fellow residents at Harold it was still difficult for me to ask complete strangers and somehow whenever I tried I was turned down. I guess I feel like I probably approach portraits like I do landscapes, which means I have some sort of feeling about the scene or situation that creates in me a desire to photograph and perhaps with people I just take too long to decide whether I want to take a picture or not. So, it was interesting to go out with Thomas and see his sort of unrelenting approach to portraiture, where nearly everyone he came across was a potential sitter.  Anyhow, Thomas is a great guy and really down to earth. I had a fantastic time talking with him on the front porch about girlfriends, photography and life in general. I see on his website that a lot of the work he made during the residency is in the project called With God, All Things are Possible go and have a look and also check out his series on Gardeners and Housekeepers.

I will have a photograph in the Texas Photographic Society’s 17th National Competition. Lisa Sutcliffe, a photography curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acted as juror for this large call for entries. The show will open on September 4 at the Dougherty Art Center in Austin, Texas after which it will move to the Center for Contemporary Art in Abilene, Texas. I am happy to report that my good friend Ryan J. Kellman also had a photograph from his recent work in Albania accepeted into the show as well. For a complete list of accepted works and artists names click here.

The San Francisco gallery Marx & Zavattero has an interesting exhibition up right now. The exhibition Let Us Now Praise San Francisco was co-curated by Robert Mailer Anderson, the show throws together new photography by Sean McFarland, Gregory Halpern and Whitney Hubbs and new works of fiction by local SF writers Victor Martinez, Peter Plate and Michelle Tea. 

According to the gallery’s press-release:

The groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – written by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans – told the story of poor white sharecropper families in the Depression-era American South, and provides inspiration for this exhibit’s premise. The prose and photographs, completed and shot in late May and early June 2008, aim to chronicle an extremely timely and distinct artistic view of San Francisco ranging from its gloomy urban underbelly to its quiet, startling beauty. This atypical exhibition, merging contemporary urban literature and photography in a gallery setting, promises to provide images and stories, both real and imagined, of a San Francisco stripped bare and awkward in all its tragic and sublime contradictions.

I think it is a novel idea, and the combination of the photography and snippets of the short stories together on the gallery wall creates a lingering effect. If you have time, go and check it out it will remain up until August 18th.

I recently stumbled across an older interview between Stopsmiling magazine and Wilco’s frontman Jeff Tweedy. I found some of the things that Tweedy was saying about creating music and the lack of control he has over the way it is received by the world at large to be interesting.

STOPSMILING:Now that Uncle Tupelo/No Depression mythology of your first band has really come to pass, do labels scare you? The way people typecast music? Does being typecast worry you a little bit - as a human being and a songwriter?
Jeff Tweedy: Not at all. I think one of the healthiest things I ever learned out of all of this is that you don’t have any control over what the world makes of what you do. It’s something that you can’t help but think about. I think you’re lying if you say you don’t think about it - what your hopes are about, how people perceive what you do. But the more energy you spend trying to control that, the more you’re diminishing your energy for the parts you can control. You can control how much you enjoy it, how much you’re present for the process, how much you grow, how much you enjoy what you’re doing. All those things you can control or have some elements of control over. But you have zero control over what other people think about it. It’s impossible. It works in really great ways. I believe in that connection in a beautiful way. A lot of times, the world makes something much more rich and beautiful out of it than you could have ever intended, especially in rock music. Think of what the world has made of Elvis Presley compared to what his intentions might have been. You can turn everything off to the point where you can put something really honest and beautiful and powerful on tape and give it to another person - one consciousness at a time. They find enough of themselves in it to pour themselves into it: that’s what the song “The Late Greats” is about on the new record(A Ghost is Born). Everybody talks about it as this literal interpretation of the radio - an element of that is definitely there, but it’s kind of about when you’re listening to a record, where a song is not just being sung. It’s a piece of plastic. It’s being sung inside the listener. It’s an internal process. It might even be more than 50 percent of the equation. To me, it’s probably more important than the side of it that the artist provides. That consciousness is going to try and find that somewhere - whether you made it anything or not. They need to find some way to feel more human. I don’t know how I got this far off on a tangent.

Well, there is a lot to mull over. I think I connect with this idea of “letting go” to some degree, because as I was graduating from SFAI I was so concerned about where meaning resided in my work that it became debilitating. I did not want to take any step without fully “understanding” it first. Currently, I acknowledge that meaning exists in my work, but I also feel that it is futile to try and control it like I once wanted too. I think now it is most important to make something that I really feel and after that the world will understand my work as each person is able to connect with it.

With that said I am going to once again give it back to Jeff Tweedy and Wilco and for anyone who is interested at having a listen to the track he mentioned in his interview, The Late Greats just click the link below.

The Late Greats(Live); Wilco

Unfortunately, while I was away in Ohio a show opened in San Francisco which includes some of my work. I have four pieces in “18 Months: A Survey of Bay Area Photography”, which was a juried show organized by Photo Alliance and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

The exhibition highlights the work of 22 San Francisco Bay Area photographers, the artists in the show are Victor J. Blue, Andres Carnalla, Noah Beil, Alex Fradkin, Hiroyo Kaneko, Michael Maggid, Vanessa Marsh, Sean McFarland, Julia Nelson-Gal, Elizabeth Pedinotti, Mimi Plumb, Kaycie Roberts, Joshua Smith, Susan Lynn Smith, Naomi Rae Vanderkindren, Serena Wellen, David L. Wilson, Jason Winshell, Sabrina Wong, Bijan Yashar, and Jim Zook.

More information can be found on the exhibition page of the San Francisco Arts Commission website as well as fellow exhibitor, Noah Beil’s blog. In addition to a small post of my work, Noah has also put up some snaps of the opening night, which looked well attended.

The show will be up until the 19th of September, so if you are in town go and have a look.

 I am excited to announce that I will be pretty much unreachable from the 13th until the 21st of July. I am heading off to Chesterhill, Ohio, to participate in the second week of the Harold Arts residency program. Harold Arts is primarily run by artists from the Chicago area but somehow they have a connection to the Jeffer’s Tree Farm in Chesterhill and as you can see by the map above the tree farm is in the middle of nowhere! In fact the staff at Harold suggests arriving before it turns dark as the roads to get to the camp are mostly unmarked. 

I am really looking forward to this week for many reasons. However one of the biggest attractions for me besides the opportunity to have a nice block of time to make new work will be the chance to hang out and talk with many new artists. The residency is intersting in that a variety of artists(Greg Stimac, Maggie Haas, Natalia Duncan, Eunice Yi and many more) working in a variety of media have been invited as well as many musicians, so I am hoping for some impromptu concerts under the stars!

 Wish me luck as I have set for my goal during this week to focus on portraiture. If you know my work you will understand that this is a new step. It is something that I have been wanting to try for a while, but when it comes to making it happen in the real world I still am a bit reluctant. It is hard for me to walk up to someone and ask to make their portrait. I am hoping that my captive group of sitters at Harlod(ie. the other residents) will allow me some time to experiment.

I am sorry.

I apologize to anyone who makes any attempt to regularly read this blog. My posting has been pretty dismal at best. I have not provided you with much of a reason to come back… so, if by chance more people than my parents read this thank - you.

With that said, I want to give you some reason to visit. I am going to commit to posting at least one new entry every week and I am also going to change the opening image on my Home page every month. I have quite a few balls in the air right now and I want to show some of the things that are in the works and share some ideas as stuff develops.

So don’t abandon ship. Come back. Things are going to get more interesting.

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