John Monteith
Artlog’s space in Williamsburg is hosting a series of exhibitions curated by Helen Labzda. Our inaugural exhibition showcases Brooklyn-based artist John Monteith, who uses photographic negatives of architecture as the basis for his paintings on layered drafting film. In our interview, Monteith describes this work as a response to the city and the history of modernism.
Could you describe the process for these pieces? Your use of photography and painting?
My work begins as a photograph. These snapshots are taken as I walk through the city in which I live (New York) and those I travel to. I convert the positive image into a negative, which becomes the source for my paintings. I think of the negative as a container of representational information that has yet to be deciphered. In this form I’m asked to try to make sense of the image from partial information; spatially distorted and abstracted. I’m given hints as to what this image might be as light and shadow are inverted and space flattened in a way that perceptively complicates understanding.
How did you start working with transparencies? Is this related to your photographs built up from transparent layers?
Materially, I move between drawing, painting and photography. All three are utilized equally in my work. I make paintings that look like drawings, and photographs that look like paintings. Created on drafting film; a drawing material used by architects, my paintings are schematic depictions of city squares, high rises, airports, interstitial places of passage, and architectural spaces.
I began working with transparency in 2005. At that time I was a photorealist figurative painter. I stopped painting for three years to develop a series of line drawings of layered figures in motion created from sequential photographs. I felt this capturing of movement and gesture was more true to how we move through moments than a represented stillness. In 2008, I returned to painting, working on a translucent material that allowed for the layering that had been important to me in my drawings. From there I came full circle back to photography, capturing inhabited rooms, books, and figures. Through a similar time based sequential method, layering one hundred images, my photographs are deceptively soft as they waiver and glow.
How important is variability in the possible installations of the pieces?
I like to make work that not only relies on the relationship between one piece and the next, but one that also changes in response to the space it occupies.
How are these pieces related to your previous work with architectural structures? Why has your interest shifted to more abstract shadows and traces of architecture?
The physicality of the work has changed, but I wouldn’t say that my interests have shifted. I remain interested in the evolving nature of the city, an urban palimpsest that considers memory and history as vital to the understanding of the developing city. There isn’t a single street corner in the city that I can return to from one day to the next and have it be identical. For those of us that remember Times Square as it was, we are unable to see it truly as it is now. Our knowledge of Times Square at present is formed from a hybrid between what we remember and what it has become.
I’m still working in the same way, taking an image of the city, rendering it on two layers that when overlapped make a third uncanny space from a multiple of two. In the case of the new work I’m looking more intimately at spaces, doorways, stairwells, places of passage; in-between spaces.
What attracts you to mid-century modernism? And why return to it at this moment?
At this time in American history, modernism was used as a political tool to discredit the social realism of the art produced in Communist countries, shifting the art world away from Europe to the United States, creating a nationalist art that extolled unfettered liberty. Modernism was encouraged as a re-examination of existence, with the goal of finding that which was holding back progress.
I’ve chosen to focus on the years from 1955 to 1975 as the period of time that marked the height of the modernist thought and the beginning of its decline, a philosophy that privileged the future over the past. With the rise of Reagan and the Right the past began to be romanticized using nostalgia and the mythology of “a simpler time” as tools to promote traditional values. This rise has since marked the end of many of the gains of national progressive social movements and currently has fueled the attack on many of the institutions and social organizations born out of these movements.
Are you trying to capture an experience of the city? What kind of experience?
The experience I’m trying to capture and relate is one that takes into consideration the overwhelming nature of the information we process while accumulating new experiences, constantly reframing our model of the city and how we live in it. My work lies in a space between; a space that allows for the contemplation of potential and invites the viewer to participate in making discoveries and connections.
