Tuesday, August 11, 2015

the artist as a lonely hunter


If the photography exhibit “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” currently on view at Fraenkel Gallery, in San Francisco, is about loneliness, it is about loneliness as an innate human condition—one that gives us both the room and the reason to create. Some of the pieces in the exhibit seem to speak to solitude as we might normally think of it: a photo by Matthew Connors shows an old man in a white T-shirt and khaki shorts—it could be somebody’s grandpa—looking tiny and starkly alone as he stands on an empty sidewalk, accompanied only by the shadow of someone standing outside the frame. In other pictures, loneliness looks more like idiosyncrasy: a voluptuously curved gourd on a floral tablecloth, photographed by Heather Rasmussen, could be an expression of the individual mind’s unpredictable sallies against the world’s neatly printed expectations. In a photo by David Alekhuogie, the bright-yellow cover of the Roy Ayers album “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” glows in the midst of the cold steel of a science lab, like a private but persistent preoccupation.
The exhibition’s curator, the photographer Katy Grannan, is known for her own stark and sometimes disconcerting portraits. She said that she hoped, through this show, to explore the itchy and obsessive side of the artistic process. “Making art is born of necessity and it’s an ongoing process—responding to the world and continuously moving forward, occasionally hitting on something then plodding ahead,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Each artist has a very particular way of seeing and responding to the world, and that was the thing that interested me most—the pathos, the discomfort, the circling around and around again.”
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” is on view at the Fraenkel Gallery through August 22nd.





 
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