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Sarah Bowen Gallery opens the fall season with an exhibit of photographs and projections titled “It Takes One to Know One” by Manitowoc, Wisconsin artists John Shimon and Julie Lindemann. As a collaborative team, their work elegantly captures the flavor of the landscape and the quiet, melancholy realities of American rural and small town life. Their highly stylized photographs simultaneously evaluate and elevate their subjects as portraits of obscure Midwestern denizens, unnervingly comfortable with their small town identity, are rendered in inappropriately substantial platinum.
As photographers, the artists establish a subjective historical view; they become involved in situations, and respond to them. Their early captivation with Depression-era FSA photos, Edward Steichen’s masterful gum prints, anonymous snapshots, and Robert Frank—who gave them the impulse to photograph everything in their path—has led them to a “new timelessness” in contemporary imagery and themes. Prints from large-format negatives rendered in gum-bichromate and platinum-palladium will be shown with tintypes, film shorts and full-color inkjet prints. The installation outlines the artists’ exploitation of and preoccupation with process to unfold an anomalous narrative, swollen with experience. Shimon and Lindemann met as art students in 1981, with Midwestern punk as an early influence and connection. By 1985 they were borrowing one another’s camera and shooting all over their native Wisconsin, so aligned in sensibility that there was confusion as to whom had taken which photos. Following their interest in forgotten American phenomenon, they conducted a decade-long project of collecting and chronicling aluminum Christmas trees found at estate sales and thrift stores. A book of their related color photographs—Season’s Gleamings (Melcher Media, 2004), which staged the trees outside of the living rooms that were once their natural habitat—sparked appearances on CBS Sunday Morning and in the New York Times and other national media outlets. Their work has been exhibited at the International Center for Photography in New York and The Art Institute of Chicago. They are Assistant Professors of Art at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Their self-published catalog Observations Are Not Knowledge will accompany the exhibit.
sarah bowen gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday, 12 – 6 pm and by appointment. The gallery is located at 210 North Sixth Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, 11211. Directions: L Train to Bedford Avenue stop, take Driggs exit, walk one block south to Sixth Street, and then ½ block East. The gallery is located between Driggs and Roebling on the right hand side.
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