SILENT SCREAMS & DISTENDED GAZES
If it were possible to file a restraining order against art referencing the pandemic, I would obtain such a document and stiff-arm it – like a white-knuckled crucifix at an exorcism – at every concert venue, art gallery, or flatscreen I encounter. I don’t want to see this ongoing horror show reflected back to me in clever ways. Not while this country attempts to refashion itself as some kind of Stepford-slash-Jonestown mashup, anyway.
So, please join me as I raise this coupe, brimming with drain cleaner, in toasting Collin J. Rae – for exposing me as a hypocrite with his extraordinary Pandemic Portraits Vol. I, and here again with Vol. II.
To my eyes, the reference to the pandemic here only need take us as far as pinning the art-making to a timeline. The eeriness, the sensuality, the grotesquerie – these elements that slither and shatter out of each image – these are not limited to the misfortunes of the past few years. The silent screams and distended gazes in some pictures certainly parallel the rage and disorientation that seem so prevalent in our joint isolation, but because we are all masters of collective amnesia, that rage and disorientation will inevitably evaporate as the years progress.
The bluster and distress and beauty of these images will not.
One reason I find myself lingering longer than usual amongst these pages is my fascination with the technique. More specifically, the tactile, analog nature of the technique. Bending light through weathered, or broken, or scalloped, or spiderwebbed, or streaked glass conjures up for me the filmic sleights-of-hand surfacing at the dawn of the 20th century. It makes the encounter somehow more intimate, knowing that the photographer is pinching the device between his fingers, finding that perfect, obscene augmentation of an iris or unsettling stretch of a lip. I think it is evidence of care, even sympathy or camaraderie. This is the place where detonating fury and retreating melancholy will be not simply tolerated, but idolized…or eulogized, as the case may be.
But there is humor here, too, and burlesque, body horror, sci-fi, and psycho killers. If you enter from the photographer’s POV, you might experience that compassion I just mentioned. If you’re looking over his shoulder, perhaps you’ll be provoked by shock or seduction or bewilderment. Or you might find yourself in synchronicity with the human looking back at you…looking back at you.
Maybe you’ll have a moment, like I did, where you remember that sometimes it’s enough just to make something and think about it.
– Doyle Armbrust
©2022 Collin J. Rae
©2022 Collin J. Rae
©2022 Collin J. Rae