Grant Ernhart photography

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.

Amy Elkins, photographer and coordinator of the blogspot wanderlustagraphy has used one of my images on her site. It was part of a nice little triptych about snow and wintery weather. I wanted to say thanks Amy and suggest people to go and check out the collective project if they haven’t already.

I like what Whitney writes about her project Nothing Happens in June:”This project is a study that is both autobiographical and documentary. I want to describe with pictures what it is that connects us all; the loves, the sadness, the happiness, and the fears; the vulnerability and the resilience that make us human.”In her statement that she submitted for the Center Photography Competition last year, she goes on to say that she is creating a “map of [her] world” and I find that interesting. I think about much of my work in similar terms.

If you happen to be in the Bay Area this week and find you have a spare minute or two stop by the Worth Ryder gallery at UC Berkeley. I am in this show which was partly put together by Equal Access, a student group at SFAI that tries to promote diversity among the SFAI community. The image on the poster is the image I have in the show.

I found this in the street:

and it made me think of some landscapes by Anselm Kiefer.

One of the main differences of course being that my street kiefer is the size of a receipt and his actual paintings are monumental. Another difference being that while mine was made by a car tire, he intentionally includes materials like clay, lead, gold leaf, plants and seeds. Still I think Kiefer might smile at the little scrap I found.

I like Kiefer’s work quite a bit. I like how the work feels raw and immediate and the materials, while being simple come together in a way that renders them changed. In his work Kiefer deals with the relationship between heaven and earth often working symbolically. I also enjoy the visceral experience I have when I look at his work.

Dropping Ryan off at the airport the other day got me thinking about my first trips to Europe and I would be lying if said I was not a bit envious. It also made me think of something I wrote for a friend’s burgeoning magazine a while back:

FAMILIAR: adj. Often encountered or seen

I remember one of the first times that I flew to Europe. At some point towards the end of the flight I shifted in my seat and leaned my forehead onto the small plastic window and looked straight down. I was heading to Germany and as I gazed below me the European continent moved lazily past. The brownish-green land continuously slipped by and after a time I realized that somewhere down there, were people. The spell had been broken, and I felt that I was moving over thousands of lives. I found myself daydreaming about all of these invisible inhabitants. I was trying to imagine how they lived and what they were doing at that very moment, as if I were some anthropologist who had just stumbled upon a lost tribe. I don’t know how long I was caught up in this endeavor but, I vividly remember that all of a sudden, as if miraculously I knew what they were doing. They were waking up, eating breakfast, making love, laughing, fighting, going to work, telling jokes and wanting to be understood. It was at that moment when my notions of foreignness faded.

Two days ago I drove my good friend Ryan Kellman to the San Francisco airport. Ryan is heading to Tirana, Albania on a Fulbright scholarship. He will be living there for ten to twelve months all the while photographing the city and his experiences. And I imagine that there will be some interesting times, according to the BBC:

Currently, the city suffers from the problems of overpopulation, such as waste management, lack of running water and electricity as well as extremely high levels of pollution from the 300,000 cars moving around the city. The problem is exacerbated by an aging infrastructure. Despite the problems, Tirana has also experienced a very rapid growth in the construction of new buildings, especially in the suburbs, where many of the new neighbourhoods do not yet have street names.

Congrats and Good Luck Ryan!

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