July 17 - August 30, 2008

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT EXHIBITIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE LAST 500 YEARS EVEN THOUGH PHOTOGRAPHY HAS ONLY BEEN AROUND FOR 180...You see, the stretching of the truth has already begun. Lawrimore Project is pleased to announce its second one-person exhibition with Seattle artist, Isaac Layman. “Photographs from Inside a Whale,” is an exacting, meditative body of new large-scale photographs and photographic installations that serves as a portrait of the artist as a young, reluctant photographer. “Exacting” because Layman’s constructed images ask a lot of the viewer. “Meditative” in that the work rewards patient and diligent looking with art historical, conceptual and existential payoffs. “Reluctant” in that, although trained in (and clearly in love with) the medium, Layman continually questions what a photograph is, how it is made, and what it ultimately means. Taking the double-meaning phrase, “I wouldn’t wish my life on others” as his starting point and shot entirely in the artist’s own home, the individual subjects—Layman’s kitchen sink, his stereo cabinet, his workbench, his stove, a doorway, a wall—are massively ordinary. Re-viewed and seen as a whole in its installation context, the work is a comprehensive study of the being of an individual as represented by the objects that surround them, further begs the question of the being of all beings, all the while interrogating the history of photography and the politics of looking and seeing.

LAYMAN OWES YOU THE TRUTH IN PHOTOGRAPHY AND HE WON’T GIVE IT TO YOU.

Take for example Medicine Cabinet (2008), a larger than life (73.5 x 59 inches) representation of that ubiquitous architectural element in nearly everyone’s home. Using a digital back on a traditional 4 x 5 camera that records one line 1 pixel wide by 8,000 pixels high and then moves to the right to record the next line, the whole process taking twenty minutes for each exposure (think: a long-exposure panoramic), Layman took three photographs of the cabinet using three different depths of focus. Combining the exposures digitally and removing the minutely out-of-focus portions leaves as true a depiction of this subject as possible. But it is very far from the truth. It is somehow better than reality. It is like a Renaissance painting where the perspective and focus of the image is correct, but it is not how the eye would ever be able to see the real scene. Within the very shallow three inches of depth of the cabinet there is no breakdown of the image. Your eye cannot go wrong. You see things the way you would not normally be able to. The experience Layman provides changes your habits of looking and it heightens your awareness of seeing. And this is just the beginning of what the photograph provides to the thoughtful viewer. In this single image Layman conjures: the process of the very first photographs; plumage and mating rituals; narcissism; quotidian existence; consumerism; the Minimalist grid; Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticist compositions; Pop Art’s serialism and celebration of the banal; the ‘invention’ of Renaissance perspectivism; Humanism; the still-life tradition in art, especially the American trompe l'oeil painters, Harnett and Peto; medicine as “pharmakon” (both “poison” and “cure”) as metaphor for photography; the artist as shaman; not to mention the fact that “health” as implied by the contents of the cabinet is etymologically tied to the word “art” in that they both mean “to make whole.”

WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT ALWAYS WHAT YOU GET WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT ALWAYS WHAT YOU GET

Other works in the exhibition are similarly loaded with associations and vacillate with truths and falsehoods. Stereo (2008) pays tribute to the invention of stereoscopic imagery and Cezanne’s brand of proto-Cubism (the one image is made of 45 views seamlessly stitched together), while also bringing metaphors of artistic and technological obsolescence. Asleep 4.5 Minutes (2008), at first glance, appears as though it is just a simple self-portrait of a sleeping subject in the tradition of Warhol, Goya, Caravaggio, Vermeer, et al. Using the same technology as in Medicine Cabinet, when the photograph first began its exposure Layman was not in the composition at all. While the camera was scanning he placed himself in the frame and promptly fell asleep. The only clue to this pristinely focused, time-lapsed image (one would normally assume the resulting photograph would be quite blurry) are the precisely rendered, scalloped pocket edges on his shirt recording each rise and fall of the artist’s chest as he was breathing. The power of Middleman (2008), a dead-pan meditation on the role of the artist as image producer, lies in the strong foreshortened line created between the artist’s pointing fingers that gradually move from blurry to sharply focused as they approach the empty frame hanging on the wall. Pool Table (2007), which takes the photograph off the wall to present the object in its usual orientation and original scale, combines references to the action paintings of Pollock and the stain paintings of Frankenthaler and Louis with notions of masculine recreation and rumpus room escapism. Similarly, Tools(2008) presents symbols of typical masculine escapist activities, though here Layman conflates these ideas with issues of the female gaze and women’s roles with its obvious compositional relationship to Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882).

YOU'VE BEEN FRAMED

“Framing,” with all of its philosophical baggage and implications, is a theme that runs throughout the exhibition. We see it at work in the photographs discussed above (the “frame” around the Pool Table, for example), but especially in works like Sink (2008), Stove (2008), Three Drawers (2008), Ice Cube Tray (2008), and Sink With Lettuce (2008). Again, these are easy subjects at first, but require prolonged looking for full appreciation. The sinks are particularly rewarding as one discovers the complicated compositions Layman has constructed. They aren’t simply dirty dishes thrown into the water. Each element was chosen and precisely placed by the artist until the desired composition was achieved. Its as if the eye is on a leash being led from one element to the next with the utmost discipline and cadence. Beyond all that, Layman applies the metaphor of the frame to the title of the exhibition, constantly revealing the inside of “whales”—framing his own life, framing the politics of constructed images, and framing the tropes of photography. Layman sums all this up nicely in Picture Framing Glass (2008), perhaps the simplest work in the show but, as one would expect from what we’ve established above, also one of the more complicated. If we’ve spoken about Layman’s nod to major modern art movements, we can safely say that this piece is most definitely his Minimalist tribute. The image, a piece of glass leaning against a grey wall, recalls the “lean” pieces of Serra and broaches the theories of Michael Fried in “Art and Objecthood”. Layman further complicates the issue by using the glass that is the subject of the image to actually frame the photograph. Similar to Kosuth’s conceptual acrobatics, here we have both the object (the actual glass) and its objecthood (the representation of the glass), conflated, vacillating between truth and falsehood en abyme. It is either, neither and both all at once. You see, with Layman, it’s all in how you choose to frame it.

A 20-page, full-color catalog of the exhibition with an essay by art historian Kenneth Allan is available.  View | Inquire

Read reviews:

Seattle Weekly

The Stranger Podcast

Seattle P.I. Review

Daily Serving

That's A Negative

Wrongdistance

Matthew Langley

Wickedshift

Tyler Green

More about the artist’s work