In the few years since his graduation from the University of Washington in 2003, Isaac Layman has become the undisputed leader of Seattle artists making photographs about photography.
In certain circles, this would be a nonstatement. (All photographs are about photography.) In other circles, it would be an insult. (Does everything have to be post/modernist?) In still other circles, it would be praise. (Even after all these years, people continue to look through photographs at what's in them rather than at photographs, and work like Layman's helps correct this mass distortion, which can lead viewers to believe much bigger and more dangerous lies.)
But let's back up. What is it like just being in the room with these photographs? Well, they are mostly very big, but some are small. They show a level of detail across the visual field that would be impossible for the naked eye to apprehend, because these single, smooth, super-detailed images are actually seamless conglomerations of hundreds of images of the same thing, each segment shot close-up, piled together to provide more information than any hungry eye could ever want, or that any brain could ever quite make sense of—which means each final work has a subtly strange feeling while you're looking at it.
The works are, unequivocally, impressive. Their subjects are, unequivocally, unimpressive: an oven interior, frozen strawberries in a package, an empty fireplace, glasses in a cupboard, a doorknob and a keyhole, a piece of black plastic taped over a studio door in order to keep out extraneous light. Layman shoots only inside his house. (He's called himself an anti–National Geographic photographer.)
And people want these images. They fly off the walls like nothing else in Seattle contemporary art. Layman's new show at Lawrimore Project (his second major showing there, the last in 2008), 110%, was almost sold out before it opened. Not only that, but Layman's works are admired by curators and art historians; his last show inspired an essay by contemporary art historian Ken Allan, and a work in this show has already been featured in The Digital Eye, a new Prestel book that provides an overview of digital photography, by Sylvia Wolf, former photography curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and now director of Seattle's Henry Art Gallery. Given that Layman's body of work stands out as philosophically committed, intelligently well-made, and pleasurable, it's time for a look at the ways the images differ among themselves, and to consider which ones are exceptionally interesting.
Layman is clever, and this has its short sides, namely, self-satisfaction and artiness. A few of his works fold too neatly into the pages of art history: A roomful of giant photographs of packets of Otter Pops is, well, too pop. They're perfectly enjoyable as a right-in-your-freezer subversion of a color-field painting chapel by Rothko, and they're ingeniously installed, ringing the gallery's white cube room beneath a rectangular fluorescent light amid track spotlights—the flat coloring of the fluorescent, oddly, making the room feel skylit. But this neat operation is not the full extent of what Layman can do.
There is a darker, almost morbid, and therefore interesting, side to 110%. Hot Dog Wrapper is the inverse of the Otter Pops series. It pictures a six-foot-tall, dirty, emptied hot dog package that looks like it might have been picked up and set under this perfectly clean and clear lens from one of those meth-cooking Northwest backwoods-backyards depicted in Eli Hansen's recent show at Lawrimore Project, We Used to Get So High. If you hung Hot Dog Wrapper across from an Otter Pop, you'd notice immediately that one is limp, the other erect.
Meanwhile, the two most affecting images in 110% are holes. Fireplace, which is basically life-size and hangs across from the real fireplace in the back room of the gallery, pictures a charred brick opening (with an eerie, mutilated hole in the floor) that becomes pure black void at the top, as if the chimney were a suckhole and you its next victim (unless you were unlucky enough to fall down that other hole). In the next room over—the black-box room of the gallery, which is dark except for the light on the single artwork on the wall—there's Oven. It seems fair to say that this is Layman's most powerful work to date. It's a portrait of the maw of an open oven. The back wall of the oven shows as much detail as the front edges, bringing the back right up to the front—and on that back wall is a white, glowing, rectangular reflection. This oven is a mirrored tunnel similar to the great void of the fireplace. The camera that should appear in the reflection is absent—the viewer, you, are erased, and this oven has become its own godless universe. It brings to mind Lee Friedlander's '60s photographs of TVs glaring back aggressively at the camera, as well as Hiroshi Sugimoto's transcendental photographs capturing entire movies as a single white rectangular blur (by leaving the shutter open the entire running time). Oven is menacing, transcendent, and killer sexy all at the same time. I'd hang it above my anything.
The show is rife with moments of connection between photographs, and its circulatory system is connected to the story of Northwest art, too, in fresh ways. Take the eponymous 110%. Glass is a recurrent theme here and regionally (see Dale Chihuly, Josiah McElheny, the brothers Hansen and Oscar Tuazon), and Layman uses it prominently in four photographs that culminate in 110%.
First is an image of a cupboard with mugs and glasses. Second, Layman takes his six favorite glasses from the cupboard and replicates them digitally into towering, super-reflective stacks, creating a glass world inside that same cupboard. Third, those six glasses are seen smashed, forming a huge abstract landscape (white writing by Northwest "mystics" Mark Tobey and Morris Graves comes to mind, along with Pollock). And fourth is 110%, the earthiest, dirtiest, and least clear—in all senses of the word—of the glass portraits. 110% is several orders smaller than the other glass photographs (12 by 16 inches as opposed to 5 to 7 feet to a side), and it looks like a picture of a sink after a party, full of ice and leftovers swept off kitchen counters. But on closer inspection this is apparently broken glass, not ice. The top edge of this pile is cropped out, and the bottom seems to form a spout, almost as if instead of a sink this were a thought bubble, or a lower male torso cut off just above the genitals.
4 Lb. Strawberries is what it says it is. The portrait of a frozen package of the sweet fruits is verified by the label and bar code right in the middle of the picture. But somehow this straightforward depiction of a simple food has transformed into a murky, purple field of fruit-roadkill, a frozen pond implicated in a murder with all kinds of weather on its surface. Layman can be one hell of a showman, but his greatest trick is amplifying the wondrous, disturbing static between thinking and seeing.
