dayoutlast

dayoutlast is a record of my direct engagement with mostly contemporary art, mostly Los Angelean.

As this blog has evolved since its 2010 inception, so has my perspective. What I once perceived as central within the investigation was what was central, literally, within the photographic frame that I shared here. While still an important consideration, such thinking has also given way to more peripheral considerations, ones also accompanied occasionally by text (written manifestation of thought) and the oscillations between them. What's missing here are larger unknowns surrounding issues of presentation and representation; the amount of time and space it actually takes to accomplish such first-hand observations; and the quandaries between documentation and interpretation.

Despite my attempt to communicate here with image and text what is essential in some respect about the artwork, neither representation should ever be considered a substitution for the primary viewing experience. Of course, occasionally there are exceptions.

Most of the time, these posts are merely remnants---residual fragments---from my last day out.

--Justin Lowman

Sunday, March 26, 2017

"Building" Organized by Rakish Light @ Valentines

An evening that explored building—interior, exterior, and psychological—with a performance by Corey Fogel followed by screenings of 16mm color prints of Kate Brown's Atlanta Central Library (2017, 10 min) and Michael Snow's Back and Forth (1969, 52 min).

The event was organized by Rakish Light (Deirdre O"Dwyer and Brian O'Connell) at Valentine's project space.

"No Parking Hare"

This was a fun evening of sound and light- moving pictures- with one of my all-time favorite Looney Tunes episodes playing beforehand as witty prelude, starring Bugs Bunny (somewhat of a childhood hero/mentor). Titled "No Parking Hare," it not only sparked my intrigue as child, it also pops into my mind from time to time, now with a completely different perspectives including the fact that I live very near what I imagine to be its real-world model. A tale of civic folly and stubbornness, it's a farce that illustrates as one possibility how concrete solutions may actually reinforce the very thing one attempts to remove.

Photo appears courtesy of Rakish Light Press

Corey Fogel

Subsequently, Corey Fogel's audio tooling and noodling of a pair of printing presses, Kate Brown's filmic meditations on concrete architecture, and Michael Snow's incessant, dynamic camera movements in one dimension all point to a continuum about dynamics and stasis, movements between two axes that never quite resolve (a good thing I presume). How each work builds something abstract (rather than concrete) seemed to be the main point of these three or four forays into embracing the fleeting, the ephemeral, even media and its record.