Coat Hanger, 2003

...Layman subtly alters or arranges everyday objects for the sake of photography. It’s his insistence on the subtlety of his intervention and the gorgeous way he executes each image that keeps you coming back. Coat Hanger for instance, is an austerely beautiful formal portrait. Is the hanger hanging? Is it lying down? The questions fade the longer you allow yourself to be seduced by the thick, round lines in the landscape of white.

-Jen Graves

White T-Shirt, 2004

For White T-Shirt...Layman drew dark lines on a folded T-shirt. He made a spotless white T-shirt look like one of van Gogh’s boots: used, rustic, loved, lovable. At the same time, all of those charming cartoonish marks are obviously fake, and the shirt is no longer a shirt, but a drawing on one part of the shirt. So now it’s a photograph of a drawing on a sculpture, an homage to and a critique of each one of those disciplines.

-Jen Graves

Tools, 2008

In Tools, a plethora of bottles of alcohol are arranged on a sturdy, butcher-block workbench beneath a neat row of hand tools hanging on the wall of what looks like a basement workshop.  Lit from overhead at night, as one can judge from the window above the table, the photograph has a kind of intimacy redolent of the special function that a workshop possesses in the psychological economy of the stereotypical household.  The workshop, particularly for a man, offers an escape from the domestic demands that emanate from the home, because down in the basement, or out in the shop or the shed, the world can be reduced to less complicated essentials: the pursuit of a hobby, preferably one that involves the pleasure of working with one’s hands.  Layman appears to be addressing this theme here, but he undercuts the sense of accomplishment and pride that comes with a “job well done” by filling the table with bottles of booze instead of some half-finished piece of home furniture.  This is both a workshop and a bar, it seems, and the critical note sounded by this crowded row of liquor in the shallow, horizontal composition calls to mind Edouard Manet’s famous painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère from 1882.  While there is no resigned-looking barmaid, nor reflections of a gentleman customer amid the frenzied atmosphere of the Parisian theater pictured here, the way the bottom of Layman’s composition is defined by the length of the workbench perpendicular to our point of view, with its line of spirits arrayed before us, is clearly reminiscent of Manet’s painting.  The mirror that dominates that 19th-century interrogation of middle-class leisure and consumer spectacle, however, has been reduced to a dirty, basement window above a workbench—still a night scene, but one that uses different means to reflect on the emptiness of (male) fantasy and escapism.

-Excerpt from catalog essay by Ken Allan

Stereo, 2008

In Stereo old and new media come together in a literal and metaphorical way.  The tube amplifier in the center of this photograph is, of course, an outmoded technology, now coveted by audiophiles, that represents the era before the transistor, the computer chip and the drive toward miniaturization and portability that came with them.  The massive cabinet surely brings to mind the days when the stereo was a solid piece of home furniture, but Layman depicts the back of this container of wires, switches and speakers in a way that allows him to make a sly reference to the history of photography as well.  The symmetry of the composition, and the print’s large size, force us to look left and right, back and forth between the two speakers in the lower corners of the cabinet.  In doing so, we might notice that we can see both sides of the vertical interior walls of the speaker boxes, illogically allowing us two different perspectival views of a single piece of plywood.  This anomaly of multiple perspectives so close to the stereo speakers—the new technological feature of this circa-1960s record player—nicely alludes to the doubling of the image in the 19th century medium of stereoscopic photography.  Wildly popular after their introduction at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exposition in London, these photographs consist of two images of the same subject taken from slightly different perspectives mounted on a single card which, when looked at through a special viewer, produces the convincing illusion of spatial depth and three-dimensional volume.  Within this one photograph then, Layman ranges over a long history of technological innovation from the digital photographic process he employs in his work (a scanning back camera paired with image-editing software), through the stereo tube amplifier to the early photographic invention of “stereocards” and the stereoscope viewer.  This use of multiple images and the overlapping and layering of different views and depths of focus of a single subject demonstrate the way an emerging medium often pays homage to the outmoded forms that marked its beginnings.

–Excerpt from catalog essay by Ken Allan