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Indepth Arts News:
"Time Traced: Rodney Graham and Vera Lutter"
1999-10-14 until 2000-06-18
Dia Center for the Arts
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
Like the camera obscura, the pinhole camera proved an influential precursor to that most
sophisticated of mechanical tools, the modern multilens camera. At a time when it, in
turn, is being challenged by newer reproductive technologies, more rudimentary modes of
image making are, paradoxically, once again becoming highly fertile. TIME TRACED will
introduce recent works by Canadian artist Rodney Graham, and German Vera Lutter, which
draw on such pioneering techniques to construct vividly arresting representations.
Born in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 1960, Vera Lutter is best known for monumental
black-and-white photographs of cityscapes. Her unique silver gelatin prints are negatives
made by transforming a room into a pinhole camera obscura chamber. Directly exposed, often
over many hours, onto photosensitive paper, these vistas appear as solarized images, their
ethereal platinum tones imbuing the scenes with a haunting melancholy. From an early
concentration on the Manhattan skyline, Lutter has turned lately to more industrial sites,
including a dry dock, a zeppelin factory, an airport runway, a marina and a deserted
warehouse.
Born in 1949 in Vancouver where he still lives and works, Rodney Graham has over the last
twenty years created a highly charged, yet richly varied, body of work that ranges from
photography, film, video, and music to sculpture. A number of works made over the course
of his career probe the status and identity of the photographic medium. Based on an
eighteenth-century carriage and destined for an outdoor site, Camera Obscura Mobile (1996)
offers viewers the opportunity to encounter a live camera obscura. By contrast, Graham's
Millennial Project for an Urban Plaza (1986) wittily offers a miniature prototype for a
structure that would provide an observation point for a proto-cinematic witness to the
growth of an oak tree to maturity.
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