“Source Material” of Colorado Photographic Arts Center to revise the past – Illinoisnewstoday.com

“Source Material” is the kind of art exhibition I expected and wanted in the late coronavirus pandemic.

We promise to do everything we expect from an art show, such as introducing strange talents, delving into current trends, seeking deeper understanding from viewers, and providing quality entertainment. The newly opened offering at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center brings together eight artists from the United States, Canada and France, each with their own ideas about what a photo is, how to create it, and what it contains. ..

But it’s still an intimate, often very personal collection of objects that arrives when we are all looking inward. It gracefully connects with our protracted need to collectively heal and recover from the emotional stress imposed on us. The worries that have come to define this global health crisis are repeated over and over again.

The theme: care. Joint care, family care, self-care. All artists seem to be trying to heal old wounds and long-standing mistakes in order to make things better.

New York-based Humble Arts Foundation curators Jon Feinstein and Roula Seikaly have chosen artists to use the objects they find as “source material.” They somehow receive items they encounter in the attic, archives, trash cans, thrift shops, etc. and use them as an intellectual foundation for larger ideas, providing a “second life” like Feinstein. I explained that in an interview last week.

There are as many ways as show artists could see digitally prior to the opening.

For example, Aaron Turner’s “Black Alchemy” series begins with photographs from his own family collection, but with images of people known in African-American history, such as Frederick Douglass and Drooking. Create collages that mix and mash up together past and present.

“He doesn’t just promote these people, he only regains them from a long dead history,” Saikaly said. “He is also trying to understand who they are, through which he seeks to further deepen his own life and his experience as a black man living in this country in the 21st century. “

How does reflecting the way icons like Douglas are seen and considered today challenge and enhance his own perspective of the contemporary artist himself? Obviously, it’s a personal journey for Turner, who only provides us with clues to this work, but the final product is timeless. “Reducing that space between the mid-19th and 21st centuries is what makes photography elegant,” Feinstein said.

Much of the work here goes on over time, often taking into account the aura of redemption and the trauma of the past. Jody W. Poorwill’s “Gentle” series adds multiple effects to kindergarten photographic portraits, acknowledging the times when they (a synonym for Poorwill’s preferred) had a hard time seeing in their own words. The images resurrected and conducted in Poorwill’s adult life certainly show that the artist has found a way to self-expression.

In the series “Her Story,” Birthe Piontek begins with vintage photographs of her mother and grandmother, tearing them apart, overlaying them, and re-shooting them to explore the woman’s struggle against memory loss due to Alzheimer’s disease. The finished object recognizes the depth and difficulty of memory, while respecting memory and validity.

Many of the jobs have had positive spins in the past, at least creating hope for the future.

It sets the objects in this show apart from much of the art that depends on the objects found. Of course, artists have long used old media as inspiration for new works, but often challenge cynicalism, contempt for history, or current thinking.

The curator here was looking for something different. “Found photography and proper photography are often done without ominous intent, but there’s a kind of ghost around it,” Feinstein said. “This rethinks it through the lens of care.”

He revisited the show’s keyword “care,” which seems appropriate. Work can go to the extreme in that regard, sometimes with wide strokes. Pacifico Silano’s “Cowboys Don’t Shoot Straight (Like they Used To)” is based on images borrowed from gay pornography in the 1980s, leaving the spirit and presence of people who have left the heyday of the AIDS epidemic and are probably forgotten. Is being revived.

You may also find it surprisingly gentle with little effort. Alayna Pernell begins the process of the “Our Mothers’ Gardens” series with portraits of vintage photographs of black women, probably taken in the mid-20th century. Parnell pulled them from various archives where the subject was anonymously forgotten.