BY STEVE BISSON
Christophe Guye Galerie is pleased to announce the group exhibition ‘Urban Spirit’ featuring the art of Stephen Gill, Will Steacy, Beat Streuli, Sascha Weidner and Michael Wolf. These artists study the ‘location’ and the ‘human’ in different ways. Depending on the degree of presence or absence of ‘places’ or ‘humans’ in their photographs, they create a suspense which stimulates the viewer to narrate his or her own story. Although the works offer suggestions, these stories are ultimately created in the viewer’s imagination based on his or her own cultural and social background.
«’Urban Spirit’ connotes a commitment to an open mind, promises of cultural diversity and opportunities for optimal individual/collective development in urban areas. Each city is distinguished by its unique character and its very own flair. Cities are able to influence our identity, not least by means of the architecture generated through their histories. People may be proud of their cities or in a love-‐hate relationship with them, but nonetheless still attracted to urban lifestyles. As diverse as the city appears to its inhabitants, so are the impressions it leaves behind. Since the expressionists like Otto Dix, Otto Pankok, Ludwig Meidner or Max Beckmann, for whom the metropolis was a central motif, the theme of the city has been taken up again and again under the changing socio-political conditions of art. The art discourse of the last decade was increasingly based on the premise that the city can be understood as a socio-network of actions and interactions among its inhabitants. The city may act as a venue and theme of artistic actions and interventions, while it is at the same time itself a performed event constantly being performed anew.
The exhibition Urban Spirit shows five internationally active artists working with the subject of the city. With a sometimes ironic, sometimes critical eye, they record in addition to cityscapes not only the city’s transitions, facades and details, but also the city’s people and advertising. Different approaches and views concretise in the photographs. Depending on the degree of absence or presence of places or people, the photographs create a tension that stimulates the viewer to think of her own story for the image. Although the works hint at the stories they might aim to tell, the viewer forms her own in her imagination, informed by her own cultural and social background.
© Michael Wolf, Transparent City #12, 2007
Such an effect is realised by Stephen Gill, especially in works connected to his home, the London borough of Hackney. He draws on and documents aspects of everyday life, often relying on austere and reduced compositions. As no one has done before, Michael Wolf records in breath-‐taking images the specifically visual aspects of one of the most densely populated cities of the world. Without roads, sky, or horizon, space flattens into an impervious abstraction of urban expansion. Wolf’s disorienting vantage point gives the viewer the feeling that the building might extend to infinity – a feeling that perhaps really corresponds to the spatial perception of the inhabitants of megacities. In contrast, Will Steacy documents life in the harsh urban areas of America that are in economic decline. In Sascha Weidner’s photographs,the visible urban reality is translated and condensed into enigmatic images. Depending on the context, these images create new narratives. Working with the motif of the crowd – one known to art since the 19th century – is Beat Streuli, who has dived with his camera into the pedestrian flows of western cities for more than a decade. Zoomed-in on with a telephoto lens are close-ups of irritating intimacy – illuminations of the universality of human activity in the contemporary metropolis.» [Dominique von Burg]
Stephen Gill (*1971, UK)
Stephen Gill likes to test the limits that photography imposes on him. As a conceptual artist – and also a bit of a sociologist and poet – he experiments with various unusual methods such as burying photos (Buried), creating lavish collages with flowers and seeds (Hackney Flowers) and placing objects in the camera so that they leave their traces on the film, causing confusion about the scale of the images (Talking to Ants). His aim is to encourage the spirit of the place to become trapped in the emulsion like amber, creating a series of surreal interventions in the photographs. He physically inserts bits and pieces of detritus inside the camera body before photographing his local surroundings. Streets, housing estates, markets and canals provide the backdrop for images embedded with various forms of plant life, insects, plastic and even tiny fragments of broken glass from a car headlight. Objects thus appear simultaneously both behind and in front of the camera lens, creating curious juxtapositions between surface and reality. As a result, flatness counters depth to disorient our perception of different pictorial planes. What we get is a multi-‐layered and heightened sense of place, form and texture that works to harness not just what the area looks like, but also how it feels.
© Stephen Gill, Untitled, from the series Talking to Ants, 2009-2012
Beat Streuli (*1957, Switzerland)
The lone person in the big city crowd has been a central theme of modern art since Poe and Baudelaire. For more than a decade, the eye of Beat Streuli’s camera has been diving into the streams of passers-by in western metropolises. Streuli photographs from the distance with a telephoto lens, but his portraits of contemporaries, picked out from the anonymous streams of pedestrians, have nothing surreptitious or voyeuristic about them. The people are highlighted, but not laid bare, for the distance is reciprocal. The photographer’s distance and discretion match the strange, dreamy alertness with which pedestrians in big cities walk past one another. They size one another up fleetingly, but the short duration of the glances – however intense they may be – permits no indiscretion. As in Streuli’s works, everyone is very briefly skimmed-‐over many times by the glances of many people, but nobody feels or behaves as if he or she is under scrutiny.
Will Steacy (*1980, USA)
Will Steacy’s best-known project Down these Mean Streets is a socially-‐conscious series of photographs depicting life in rough urban areas. The series examines fear and the abandonment of America’s inner cities. Photographing only at night with a large format view camera, Steacy works in a set routine by walking between the airport and central business district of each city he photographs. America has turned its back on cities; years of neglect have left these cities with limited resources to repair themselves. Neighbourhoods crumble with no local economy, public education systems barely meet requirements and low-‐income housing is a nightmare as violence and drugs reign, making survival a number-‐one priority. America is at a crossroads as it struggles to escape the wrath of the Great Recession, laying off teachers and firefighters at an alarming rate in order to balance city budgets, still at war and searching for its place in a changing global economy. By addressing the loss and despair that prevails in the urban communities, Gill’s aim is to reveal a modern portrait of the American inner city, as problems and issues cannot be solved if they are not first identified. The city glows, strangely beautiful but vaguely threatening, as a picture of urbanity and its attendant vices – it is not a forgiving portrait. His work has been compared to that of Barney Kulock and Paul Graham.
© Will Steacy, Purse, San Francisco, from the series “Down These Mean Streets”, 2010
Sascha Weidner (*1976, Germany)
Sascha Weidner’s works are evidence of a radically subjective view of the world and the single human in its environment. At first glance, the photographs taken with a medium format camera show people acting within harmless landscapes. Often, the site of the incident is not closely defined; in the close‐up, only a small part of the surroundings is shown to the viewer. The camera’s gaze is direct and documents in detail what is depicted. The ruthlessly-‐used close view does not answer the questions that confront the viewer. Why is the man in the branches of a tree? Is he looking for closeness or shelter? Why is he hiding? Looking at Sascha Weidner’s photographs, the feeling of suspense arises. The subtly used and diffuse light primarily supports this feeling. This establishes a tension that is not resolved until the end. The “hidden” makes ascha Weidner’s photographs poetic and above all melancholy. The emotional closeness of these works put Sascha Weidner’s motifs and methods in line with those of photographers such as Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans and Ryan McGinley.
© Sascha Weidner, fragmente II, 2013
Michael Wolf (*1954, Germany
Michael Wolf is known for his large-format architectural photos of Chicago and primarily of Hong Kong, where he has lived for more than 15 years. His series Backdoor is a surprising and at times shocking visual journey through the narrow streets and urban wastelands of one of the most densely populated corners of the world. Wolf captures the lives and living conditions of his neighbours through the traces they leave on the city’s dense architecture and dark back alleys. He explores the idiosyncratic ways that Hong Kong’s residents adapt to their environment and improvise within their urban locale. It’s a humanistic tribute to the ingenuity of city-dwellers. Big cities can sometimes seem like immense visual abstractions. The jam-packed juxtapositions of diverse styles of architecture — all compressed into dense overlapping vertical spaces — can be seen as things of rare, man-made beauty. These soaring glass-walled environments also invite a sometimes perverse delight in voyeurism. Michael Wolf’s series The Transparent City captures both of these aspects nearly perfectly in his recent photographic study of downtown Chicago. Wolf positions himself on rooftops or in the windows of opposite buildings to achieve the most amazing vantage points for each scene. He waits for perfect light at the time of day when twilight and interior light render the building walls nearly invisible.