Banner artwork: Daily Bromides 8/16-9/14/07 by Richard Barlow, this quarter's featured artist at the unique exhibition series, "Space I44," presented by mnartists.org in conjunction with the Minneapolis Central Library. (Reprinted and cropped for access+ENGAGE with permission)
About the artist: Richard Barlow was born in 1971 in Harlow, England, and moved to the Twin Cities in 1977. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992 and an MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2005. His paintings and digitally designed multiples have been exhibited both locally and nationally. He currently works as an adjunct professor of visual art at College of Visual Arts and St. Cloud State and spends his summers as an instructor at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. Rich is also a musician, playing in the Pins and Barlow/Petersen/Wivinus; he also writes and records theatrical soundtracks for Flaneur Productions. Rich is co-artistic director of Flaneur, who are proud to present the fifth annual Heliotrope music festival on May 15, 16 and 17 at the Ritz Theater.
About the Bromides series, the artist writes: "I am interested in how images and objects become invested with meaning, and in how that process is always reliant on contingencies - of culture, medium, history and display - and how fleeting those meanings can be. As part of this investigation, I have become interested in the history of landscape painting. Though inherently meaningless, the natural world is again and again imbued with meaning in visual art. It is treated as a repository of emotion, emblem of nation, and expression of spirituality, inscribed with myth and history and controlled through our gaze. Initially I produced landscape based work that was created programmatically or through accident and abstraction. I was fascinated by how many people seem to want these to be real places and, even more importantly, want to believe these places must be important to me or have a narrative source. I have become interested in playing with this idea, painting images of places that are unknown to me and to attempt, through the rhetoric of painting, to produce apparently meaningful images. To approach these ideas in a new way I have recently begun appropriating the landscape imagery in my work from other artists’ paintings and photographs. This both introduces another arbitrary aspect and makes it possible to engage directly with the history of landscape representation. I am currently working on two bodies of work that came out of this investigation: Bromides, a series of images all derived from a single photo by Fox Talbot, and Covers, a series derived from landscape imagery found on album covers. Both series deal with the ways landscape is used to produce meaning, and the ways in which we consume landscape imagery.
In my Bromides series I have created versions of Talbot’s Reflected Trees in oil paint, watercolor and silver leaf. On the one hand, working from this photograph is a critique of the supposedly expressive nature of a landscape painting. However, I am more interested in the double inversion that happens here. Talbot's photos themselves attempted to mimic the "painterly" styles of his day, and are thus strongly picturesque and romantic. This ensured that they were more likely to be treated as "art." So, in a sense, I am appropriating an appropriation, much as the silver negative process makes a picture from a picture. Also, by transforming this photograph into paintings and drawings, I interrogate this idea of making an image more "art-like" by changing the medium of its depiction. Are hand painted images in any way more powerful than photographs? Does reproduction, mechanical or otherwise, affect the reception of an image?"
You can see Richard Barlow's Daily Bromides on display at "Space 144" in the Minneapolis Central Library through June 2.