Friday, October 14, 2011
Visual Arts Preview: Instant Gratification at Jennifer Schwartz
Posted by Wyatt Williams @wyatt_williams on Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 9:00 AM
This weekend Jennifer Schwartz Gallery will open Instant Gratification, a group exhibition that poses the questions, "Why has instant film been able to survive in the digital age? What is it about the material that captures people's imagination and interest?" The nine photographers included in the exhibition use instant film in vastly different ways: Magnus Stark creates spare abstractions, Chloe Aftel captures fashionably washed-out scenes, and so forth.
Creative Loafing caught up Mikael Kennedy, whose warm, intimate Polaroids are included in the exhibition, to ask him what draws him to working with instant film, even after Polaroid has given up producing it. Kennedy wrote back with some thoughts about the medium and shared a few images of his work. Check those out after the jump.
Mikael Kennedy:
"My obsession with Polaroid began entirely accidentally. I found a Polaroid SX70 Camera in a thrift store somewhere in Massachusetts in 1999. I thought it looked like a cool camera, I've always liked old things, once I figured out how to use it and how to customize a pack of Polaroid 600 film to work with the camera this all began. Fast forward to 12 years later and I am sitting here with thousands of Polaroids filling my studio, boxes and boxes, filing cabinets full of them, each one entirely unique, each one a moment in my life when I was made to stop and saw something that I wanted to capture.
Sometimes I talk about them like specimens of a life, there is something very scientific about the little white border framing the image. Like I am collecting samples of a life to justify it's existence in the end. Over the past few years as I have been asked to reflect on what this all means, I have had more time to think about the significance of a Polaroid. A lot of these images were shot on Polaroid 779 film which was used by police and insurance companies as evidence. The Polaroid was considered a "True" form of photography, it couldn't lie, there was no zoom lens, no digital manipulation. What you were looking at was considered to be exactly what happened. That says a lot for an image in a day and age of digital photography where every image is suspect.
People also have an immediate personal and nostalgic connection to Polaroids, regardless of what the pictures of. Polaroids some how have made their way into our collective consciousness with a sense of familiarity. It is an easily approachable medium, something most people at one point or another have held in their hand or taken one themselves.
In all of my exhibitions I show the original Polaroid to continue that intimacy, the images are small so folks have to get close to see it, they are drawn into the picture. One of the reasons I keep the frame on the polaroid in my scans is because I want people to also be reminded that they are no only looking at a photograph or an image but also an object. A physical thing you can hold in your hands. So much of our world is mass produced, I like the fact that there are no editions with these prints, just the one image on the wall in front of you."
- MIKAEL KENNEDY
Instant Gratification, featuring work by Chloe Aftel, Sol Allen, David Walter Banks, Kendrick Brinson, Amber Fouts, Grant Hamilton, Mikael Kennedy, John Reuter, and Magnus Stark, opens at Jennifer Schwartz Gallery on Sat., Oct. 15 with a reception beginning at 7 pm. More details at Jennifer Schwartz.
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