Julie Blackmon at The Hood Museum of Art

Art Notes: Photographs Balance Childhood Innocence and Darker Narrative Possibilities

By EmmaJean Holley And Nicola Smith
Valley News Staff Writers

The filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, best known for his psychological thrillers, felt it was important to distinguish between the suspenseful and the merely surprising.

Surprise, he said, is when a bomb goes off without the audience knowing it’s coming: “Prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene of no special consequence.” Suspense, on the other hand, is when “the bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there.”

But the photographer Julie Blackmon, whose exhibit on the theme of “The Everyday Fantastic” opens at the Hood Downtown on Friday, complicates Hitchcock’s black-and-white conception of these narrative devices. Not only does Blackmon’s work create suspense in scenes that Hitchcock might write off as “absolutely ordinary,” but this suspense also hinges on the element of surprise that the great filmmaker seemed to hold in disdain. The seemingly mundane props in Blackmon’s scenes — houses, storefronts, children’s toys — are of “no special consequence,” until, unexpectedly, they are.

In other words, her photographs depict such apparent ordinariness that to realize they are suspenseful comes as a surprise.

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Mike Mandel: Good 70s Reviewed in Artforum

Mike Mandel

ROBERT MANN GALLERY
525 West 26th Street, Floor 2
May 11–June 30

By Juliana Halpert

The shared blunders of Richard Nixon and our current leader are obvious, but there’s one stark difference between the two presidents: Nixon, who loved classical music and reportedly wanted to throw liberals a bone during the Vietnam War, demonstrated strong support for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1971, its budget was doubled. By the end of the decade, the number of working artists in the country had increased by 81 percent.

“Good ’70s” is a fitting name, then, for this exhibition of Mike Mandel’s work, all from projects made over the course of that decade. It was a productive period for the artist—the recipient of several NEA fellowships—and his images reflect the protean identity of photography at the time. At a glance, the twenty-one black-and-white snapshots of barbershops, airports, shop fronts, and other public spaces appear commonplace—until you spot Mandel himself, lurking in the periphery or grinning goofily next to his subjects. Are they self-portraits? Sure. But they lack the genre’s forced introspection, and they cheekily eschew street photography’s air of detachment as well.

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Julie Blackmon in Adobe Create Magazine

Disrupting Domesticity: Julie Blackmon's Irreverent Take on Small-town Family Life

By Dan Cowles

Julie Blackmon’s slightly skewed images of family life in the American Midwest—often populated by minimally supervised children in potentially hazardous yet comical situations—speak to the constant low-level anxiety familiar to pretty much any parent living in our modern times.

The overwhelm of being alive, being a mother, being pulled in a million different directions, and seeing danger everywhere informs Blackmon’s work. “You have all these little people that you’re responsible for, these lives to direct and manage,” she says. “You can just find yourself in some vortex of anxiety. Unless you do find the mythic or the beauty in it, and the humor in it…you might as well hang it up, because that's what it's all about.”

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Richard Misrach Featured in Pasatiempo

Long division: 'Border Cantos'

By Paul Weideman

In photographer Richard Misrach’s 13 years of taking pictures along the United States-Mexico border, he has seen all kinds of landscapes and fences and detritus. “The artifacts you see have a lot of different explanations,” he said by phone from his home in California’s Berkeley Hills. “Basically people have walked a long way from Central America and Mexico, and their clothes are filthy, and they often dump them after they’re across the border, because they bring fresh clothes with them. Also the Border Patrol has been known to make people dump whatever they have when they find them. You see backpacks and tennis shoes, religious icons and Bibles, and all kinds of things strewn along the border.”

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Mike Mandel Interviewed by Photoworks

Interview: Mike Mandel

By Photoworks

Photoworks: Hi Mike, thanks for taking the time to talk to us before your opening at SFMOMA. Can you tell us more about Good 70s? How did the exhibition idea come about?

Mike Mandel: Good 70s, the exhibition, is based on the boxed set of books and other printed matter that comprise Good 70s, the 2015 publication produced by D.A.P. and J & L. Books. The show is a way to take projects out of the confines of the original container (book, poster, packs of trading cards) and enable the curator, Sandra Phillips, and I to extend the presentation of the work on the wall, in vitrines and in other new ways. 

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Holly Andres' upcoming group exhibit at Radius Gallery

Photographer Holly Andres Takes a Turn to the Political at Radius Gallery

By Erika Fredrickson

Holly Andres makes photographs that evoke the simmering terror of a Hitchcock film mixed with the precariousness of adolescent awakening. Her exhibit at the Missoula Art Museum last year, for instance, included several narrative pieces riffing on young girls discovering locked rooms and boxes, suitcases and a hornets nest, all rendered in the rich colors and suspenseful staging of a Nancy Drew cover.

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Mike Mandel Featured By The Guardian

Human traffic: photos of people in their cars are a window to a lost world

By Sean O'Hagan

In the early 70s, Mike Mandel would walk from his house in north Hollywood to the busy intersection of Victory Boulevard and Coldwater Canyon, where he would stand on the pavement and point his camera at the cars waiting at the traffic lights. “I liked the idea that I would stand in one place every day and the pictures could come to me,” he says.

Back then, way before digital cameras, surveillance and smartphones, people were more relaxed about a stranger on a street with a camera. “I was using a wide-angled lens and had to get in really close, because I wanted a reaction. Some guys flipped me the finger, but more often people would just smile back or pull a face. They just thought it was kind of funny.”

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PEOPLE IN CARS FEATURED IN T:THE NEW YORK STYLE MAGAZINE

"The Photographer Who Captured People Driving in Los Angeles"
By Hattie Crisell

"I wanted to do something that would have a little humor to it, and maybe a little riskiness,” the photographer Mike Mandel says. His new book, “People in Cars” out next month, does just that: It’s a collection of snapshots he took in 1970s California as a 19-year-old kid. “I grew up in Los Angeles and all of my experience of being in L.A. was about going from one place to the other by car,” he recalls. He saw the automobile as an American icon and a home in itself, where people would spend hours of their time. Walking to an intersection half a block from his house, he began to take candid photographs of drivers."

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BLOUIN ARTINFO features Rankaitis Exhibition

Robert Mann Gallery in New York is hosting an exhibition “Grey Matters” by artist Susan Rankaitis through May 6, 2017.

The exhibition presents the most recent works by American multimedia artist Susan Rankaitis (b. 1949, Cambridge, Massachusetts), continuing with the artist’s ongoing exploration of artistic and scientific processes. Working in painting, photography and drawing, Rankaitis’s work is rooted in the unconventional. Derived from Rankaitis’s most recent fascination with the concept of interoception, the works in this exhibition incorporate unique images that fuse the histories of experimental photography and abstract painting, creating an artistic visual representation of scientific ideas. Attempting to illustrate the obscure internal sense of interoception or any such intangible internal event, the artist engages the use of mixed media, to conjure up imageries that are both cerebral and emotionally evocative. 

To view the feature click here. 

Rankaitis Featured by Paris Photo

We are happy to share the news that our current exhibition, Susan Rankaitis: Grey Matters, has been featured by Paris Photo. To see the feature click here.