There are those pieces of writing that you are so grateful exist. I remember my excitement the first time I read this conversation between Kaja Silverman and George Baker; the excitement in now knowing that someone out there is conceiving of the world and our experience in these terms, terms that resonate so clearly.
Here is a small excerpt from Primal Siblings published in ArtForum a couple years back:
Kaja Silverman An analogy is a relationship of greater or lesser similarity between two or more ontologically equal terms—a corresponding with, rather than a corresponding to. Everything relates to everything else in this way, because analogy is the structure of Being. These analogies are also untranscendable, and they house a saving power. However, because we are constantly refusing to acknowledge the resemblances that connect us to certain people or groups of people, we are almost always psychically estranged from the totality to which we belong. This refusal has disastrous consequences both for them and for us.
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George Baker Your whole notion of the author as a receiver is implicitly photographic. But conversely, you seem to be asserting that photography itself is a model of subjectivity, that it is a mode of being. These two things are indistinguishable.
Kaja Silverman For the first two decades of its existence, photography was an ontological calling card; it showed its viewers that Being is a gift from elsewhere and that resemblance is its enabling condition. Maybe photography's obsolescence as an industrial medium will permit it to function this way again. Then we will hear a few of the rhymes that make up the great poem of Being—and perhaps even add some of our own.
It can be found in full here.
I am currently working toward a solo exhibition the end of July. The exhibition, And, will be at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles and will include photographs from two bodies of work; Soft Mirrors and Included Middle. As the exhibition title suggests, the space of the photograph is continually proposed in these series as a means of conjunction, a conjoining or combining of images. Images are paired off or layered on top of one another, two-ness and separation giving way to a questioning of the notion of relationality itself, its logical procedures and ontological implications.
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Katrina Umber, Soft Mirror (playersblueorange), 2013
Katrina Umber, Soft Mirror (eggsanddiceyellow), 2013
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Katrina Umber, Soft Mirror (ultramarinefallengiant), 2013
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Katrina Umber, Soft Mirror (palm), 2013
Soft Mirrors are unique prints; chromogenic prints are soaked, the emulsion and original photographic image is etched away layer by layer, making and unmaking the image/object simultaneously.
The photographs comprising Included Middle are shot with a split-frame camera which exposes two individual unique frames in the space of a standard 35mm negative. They are real time and space juxtapositions that point simultaneously to my movement in the world and the films movement within the camera, the time within the frames and what passes between.
Katrina Umber, Included Middle.
Katrina Umber, Included Middle.
Katrina Umber, Included Middle.
Katrina Umber, Included Middle.
