ISAAC LAYMAN - 110%

Lawrimore Project is pleased to announce its third one-person exhibition with Seattle artist Isaac Layman.  110% finds the artist continuing to push the limits of how a photographic image is constructed while still concentrating on a narrow band of subjects drawn from his immediate domestic surroundings. 110% is both a fictive figure of effort on the part of the artist and a tongue-in-cheek imperative of what these seemingly benign scenes can offer to the diligent viewer.    Building on his last exhibition that saw Layman pitting quotidian objects against major traditions in photography and painting, this new body of work presses those connections even further.  Although the discussions of some historical touchstones for this work found below offer a glimpse at what is at stake in this new body of work, they are just some of the first jumping off points for the work.

Layman is ostensibly a still life photographer, but his interest in a particular strain of multiple-perspective painted still lifes practiced by Cezanne, Morandi and Matisse is evident in works like Cabinet (2009) and Dishes (2009).  Taking these painters’ strategies to almost absurd ends, these two works are composed of literally hundreds of views of the given scene.  Works like Oven (2010) and Fireplace (2010), on the other hand, play off the Renaissance tradition of a single vanishing point perspective best exemplified in The Last Supper.  As if working his way through the history of this type of perspective, Oven pays homage to more modern and complicated versions of this compositional strategy from Joseph Stella to Julie Mehretu.  Installed in the Black Box Theatre space of the gallery, Oven, with its reflective white ‘screen’ (an artifact of the lighting) and its forced perspective, is also a sly nod to the long-exposure photographs of movie theatres by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Fireplace is a pivotal piece in the exhibition in that it marks a turn to a more rigorous investigation of non-objective painting through what might be called non-non-objective photography.  Fireplace is many things at once: akin to Malevich’s Suprematist works; an homage to Alber’s Homage to a Square; employing the ‘push/pull’ and framing strategies of a Rothko; and, with its dark soot stains, paying tribute to the brooding works of Clyfford Still.  Even so, the realism of Fireplace—the truest depiction of the subject possible—stands in heightened contrast to these artists’ works and imperatives.  Unlike Aaron Siskind who pioneered non-objective photography through artful cropping, Layman provides an opportunity for reading it as an abstraction by presenting the object simply as it is. 

Other works in the exhibition push this real/abstract dialectic even further. Take for example, 6 Glasses (2010).  Loosely based on Pollock’s Lucifer (1947) and Mark Tobey’s “white writing” works, this photograph of shards of glass (his six favorite glasses selected from Cabinet) reads at first as an all-over abstraction with no single fixed perspective.  Again, dozens of images of the subject have been taken from numerous angles to create this piece, similar to Pollock moving around his canvas as he worked.  Hemmed in with darkened corners and a margin similar to those found in the compositions of Pollock, Rothko, Tobey, et al, this piece, as well as its counterpart, 110% (2010), also recall Morris Graves’ forays into “white writing” while still simply, humbly being a pile of perfectly rendered broken glass.

Blackout (2010) is Layman’s most obvious reference to Minimalist painting.  Here, the canvas is replaced by the blackout cloth he uses to keep out unwanted light in his studio when executing other photographs, while the window casing serves as both the ‘easel’ and the frame for the ‘painting’ itself.   The piece recalls Ad Reinhardt as well as contemporaries like Tauba Auerbach or even the Mylar works of Anselm Reyle.  Because the composition is formatted similarly to a small Polaroid with its weighted white bottom section, Layman has also produced Small Blackout (2010) as a one-to-one scale homage to that legacy within photography. 

Dryer (2010), 4 Lb. Strawberries (2010) and Hot Dog Wrapper (2010) also tap into the Minimalist strain in art, but with a decidedly West Coast “Finish Fetish” imperative.  Dryer at first looks like a classic Robert Mangold, but its overwhelmingly glossy surface, free of imperfections, ties it more to the work of Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman or John McCraken. 4 Lb. Strawberries could easily be read as an all-over abstraction, but its studied, scuffed plastic surface recalls the history and legacy of encaustic painting as well.  Hot Dog Wrapper is all about surface as well, but its serial form recalls Minimalist strategies, while its celebration of cast away consumerism also provides a bridge to Pop Art.

Layman explores where Pop Art meets Post-Painterly Abstraction in Otter Pops 1-8 (2010), a new series of unique photographs acting as an exhibition of paintings.  Installed in the gallery’s White Cube in the spirit of the Rothko Chapel or a traditional painting show, the work eschews the dark, existentialism of Rothko for a celebration of pure color more reminiscent of Gene Davis, the stained works of Morris Louis from the Veil series or the color studies and “zips” of Ellsworth Kelly all packaged with the requisite nod to the shiny plastic elements in works by James Rosenquist or Jeff Koons and the serial, ‘pick-a-color’ production mode of Warhol.  The gesture of taking these hand-held summer treats meant to appease his children and blowing them up to painting scale (roughly the height of the artist) is made all the more personal by the fact that the frost depicted on each was generated by the breath of the artist.

BIOGRAPHY

Isaac Layman (b. 1977) has had an active career since first showing with Lawrimore Project in 2007.  In 2008, the Seattle Art Museum awarded Layman the Betty Bowen Award and featured his work in a year-long solo exhibition.  Within the region he has been included in group exhibitions at the Tacoma Art Museum, The Henry Art Gallery as part of the Monsen Collection of Photography, the Archer Gallery at Clark College, Vancouver, and in Portland at Elizabeth Leach Gallery.  Layman has also shown in New Zealand, Rome, Miami, and New York as his practice continues to expand beyond the Northwest.  His work is in numerous private and public collections as well as the permanent collections of The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston.  Layman has lectured about his work and taken part in panel discussions about photography in Seattle, Tacoma, Vancouver, Bellingham, Portland, Boston and New York.  Recently, Sylvia Wolf, former Curator of Photography at The Whitney Museum of American Art and current Director of The Henry Art Gallery included Layman’s work in The Digital Eye - Photograpic Art in the Electronic Age (2010, Prestel Publishing).  Layman received his BFA in Photography from the University of Washington in 2002.  He currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

A NOTE ABOUT THE PROCESS

Layman digitally assembles multiple photographs of a given subject to create a single hyper-real image.  By combining differing viewpoints and focal depths into one often-seamless image he is able to exercise more image making decisions than a single photograph affords.  He can apply focus selectively instead of unilaterally and include multiple viewpoints, freeing the work from the camera’s fixed single point perspective. Layman uses a computer and digital scanning back attached to a traditional 4x5 camera for the majority of his work.  While it can generate a high-resolution image of uncompromising precision, what is more useful for the artist is the time-consuming nature of the scanning technique, where each scan may take up to 16 minutes (and for a piece like Cabinet, which comprises more than 200 scans, results in over 50 hours of sitting quietly in front of the scene since any movement shakes the camera and disturbs the image).  As Layman states, “there is a forced reflective period where I sit with the image and the process and try to figure out what I’m seeing.  If I’m sitting with something for 16 minutes and get bored, I bail on the project or change something about the image.  The image has to be something I can wonder about over time.  Photography easily captures haphazard elements.  During the image-capture process I have plenty of time to discover those elements and make decisions about the minutia inside the image and choose or reject those things.  It’s not comfortable, but I see the cumbersome part of the process as the most significant consequence regarding the tools that I use.”

Another consequence of this practice is the impact on his family.  He only works within his home and because of this, he dramatically disrupts their lives. For instance, the shooting of Cabinet completely took over their kitchen for nearly a month.  Studio lights, camera, stands, computer and extension cords rendered the kitchen unusable.  As he works around his house, he returns one room to normal functioning before moving on to take over another space, yet the whole building is complicit in and impacted by his studio practice—in order to eliminate vibration, anyone in the house during active scanning is asked to sit, sleep, or leave.  As Layman explains, “when making work, there’s not room to half-engage because it’s costing me: my family can’t be here, I’m spending a lot of our time and money for my art.  Is the work going to be worth that cost?  I would like the work to equal that cost and I see that cost as steep.  That said, this is about my personal process.  The piece is the piece and not the evidence of all these other things. The piece is not about the kitchen and our disruption of life.  Those things are just useful to me.”  6 Glasses is a good example of this commitment, as the glasses on their own, intact, did not adequately describe the multiple viewpoints garnered by seeing and handling them over the years.  Again from Layman: “To get all the reflections, all the information about them that I wanted, I had to smash them.  The thing I wanted to consider and present about them necessitated their destruction.”

ISAAC LAYMAN – 110%

July 1 – August 14, 2010

Lawrimore Project

831 Airport Way South

Seattle, Washington 98134

t: 206.501.1231

A PRINTABLE PDF CATALOG OF THE EXHIBITION IS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

Simply email: scott@lawrimoreproject.com

This exhibition was sponsored in part thanks to generous grants from 4Culture and the City of Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs