Tijerina explores photography, Jon’s house

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Cary Tijerina sat cross-legged on the corner of a large table upstairs at the Oswald Gallery. He had cleared a small space for himself in the midst of about 30 or so photographs of piles of stuff from his friend Jon Stuart’s house. They were still exerting a force over him like a puppeteer.

He had been ambling around the room, kneeling, squatting, standing up, crossing his arms, uncrossing them and talking about his photographs. He put his hand to his forehead and apologized for talking so much. I didn’t mind.
Finally he climbed on the table.

 “In a lot of ways this show was envisioned as a conceptual art project … more than an art show,” he said.

Artists get excited like this over fresh ideas, about ruminations that are not over and perhaps never will be resolved. Had Tijerina been showing me his crisply lit, soulful portraits I’d seen before, our conversations would have been less interesting. But why just take photos of a friend’s oft-cluttered house?
“Because he gave me the show,” Tijerina said.

And cronyism is just one of the many elements of the “world of photography” that Tijerina is exploring, so Stuart’s house seemed a good place to start. It also contains an interesting person who keeps stacks of books, crates of equipment, cases of wine, printers, and bags of film sitting next to cream cheese and a glass of brandy in the fridge.

Tijerina would go to Stuart’s house, shoot and develop it in his darkroom on  Stuart’s sometimes expired paper and still-good chemicals. As the show evolved, Tijerina was drawn to shoot in black and white and to explore the differences between digital and hand-made printing.

“What makes that hand-made print worth $400 more than this one that came from the printer downstairs?” Tijerina asked. “The show is more about asking questions than about the photos.”

What is so valuable about that “organic” process that seems more direct, more analogous to human impulse, when the same and even better “quality of image” is attainable with digital printmaking?

Some of Tijerina’s stronger images were printed with an office printer on Oswald Gallery letterhead. Other prints – some handmade – are not of the “quality” that Tijerina said he would normally put in a show, he said, but after seeing show after show of perfectly self-assure bodies of work that have hung in the interesting, asymmetrical Artspace Loft Gallery, he couldn’t help but do something a little more experimental and thought-provoking. 

Now he is afraid the show might contain some images that are, in his words, bad, which might explain the power they exerted over him as he showed them.
The photos will be pinned to the wall in clusters by a group of people, representing a blustery process – relatively speaking, many shots took hours to create, and the body of work has taken about six months – that created the images.

The aesthetic of the photos could be compared to a variety of styles: a print that would hang on the wall of a chic gallery in L.A.; a photo that might appear in an esoteric magazine about famous artists’ lives; something a high-schooler might get an A on in his photography class, and a polaroid you would find on the wall of a Brooklyn hipster’s home who had just returned from his friend’s mom’s mansion in West Palm Beach.

Understanding what issues Tijerina is exploring – commercialism, image quality, ownership and reproduceability – certainly help the viewer engage with the prints. But the eclectic styles make the overall aesthetic (Cary will be glad to know) quite good, despite having a few images whose “quality” is usually not found in galleries.
What is art if you can’t enjoy it, anyway?

An opening reception for Tijerina’s photos will be held at 5:30 p.m. Friday in the Artspace Loft Gallery at the Center for the Arts. PJH

‘Aspens at Jon’s’ photo by Cary Tijerina.


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Tijerina explores photography, Jon’s house | Planet JH News Article: Arts Beat

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