Charming Voltage Electrophotographic Works By Kerry Laitala:

This body of work resides at the direct intersection between science and superstition, belief and manifestation. The materials range from vintage letter-press blocks to Mexican “Milagros” that are often left at churches and other places of worship. These objects, in the shape of hearts, legs, and kneeling forms, become talismans that help people with ailments, and desires that need to be met. A milagro representing an ailing heart might be left at a shrine to mend an aching heart. The work also takes into consideration Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I am interested in the way that “Objecthood”, and the aura of “Objecthood” has a market-place significance as opposed to time-based works that I have made over the past 25 years that have at their core an exploration of ephemeral experience. Similar to past works I have made with moving image, these photographs explore the projection of meaning onto inanimate objects. I am interested in the ways that the phenomenology of the process imprints a shimmery image made without a camera. The film is exposed by the build-up of ions that create a corona discharge on the surface of conductive objects. I take 4x5” format film, and using a generator of electricity, charge the atmosphere around these objects with ions that cause the film to be exposed.

I have made photograms, or as I call them Cinegrams making images directly onto photo sensitive film in the past using a flashlight to expose the film. The shadowgraphic trace of objects are left on the emulsion of the film. For this body of work the light that is generated comes directly from electricity and it is the corona discharge that creates the photographic impression.

I studied film and photography at Massachusetts College of Art and obtained my masters degree at SFAI in 1997. My website is: www.kerrylaitala.net

My work fuses the decisive moment of Cartier-Bresson with the formal compositional elegance of Di Giovanni and the imaginative sensibility of Goya. The result is imagery that holds the tension between dynamism and meticulous construction in perfect balance. To heighten the sense of magical realism in some images, I make miniature paintings on glass and composite them into the photographs. Other compositing techniques layer delicately tensioned new realities over the original image.

Rich Van Gogh, owner of Liberty Fine Art Gallery in Reno, NV said, "William starts with a beautifully seen moment, but he doesn't stop there. He uses color in such a masterful way that the images seem to glow with their own inner light and luminous atmosphere. The resulting effect is emotionally evocative and stunningly mesmerizing. I've never seen anything like it before."

Arion Press matches the finest contemporary art with the finest literature, past and present, in books that are beautifully designed and produced. Founded by Andrew Hoyem in 1974, the Arion Press publishes deluxe, limited-edition books, many of them printed by letterpress, illustrated by prominent artists, and some accompanied by separate editions of original prints. Since 2001, Arion Press has been a cultural tenant at the Presidio, the National Park in San Francisco, where it shares a handsome industrial building with its second division, M & H Type—the oldest and largest type foundry in the United States, serving the font and typesetting needs of letterpress printers around the world—as well as its nonprofit adjunct, the Grabhorn Institute.

IN DIFFERENT LIGHT

I have been obsessed with photography since I was 12.  My challenge back then was, as it still is now, to present a perspective of our world that is just different enough for the viewer to take notice.  In our everyday lives we often gain insight into a problem that had been confounding us simply by taking a different approach, or if we are lucky enough, see the answer through another person's eyes.  In reality that answer had been there all along, waiting for us to discover.  Similarly, a scene that is considered mundane may become interesting under different conditions.  Those conditions could be anything - time of day, angle of view, the mindset of the viewer, the mood of the photographer.

So it is with these images that I welcome you to see our world in a different light.

My days of losing words

I have had chronic migraine since June 2008. Without medication, the pain makes me lose the ability to speak; with medication, I have side effects that cause me to forget words. For My Days of Losing Words, I created color photographs that act as synthetic memories of my lost words and this time of being inarticulate and in pain. The one-word titles refer to words that got lost in a netherworld between pain and sanity. The self-portraits remain (inarticulately) untitled.

I never stop shooting. I carried a list of words that I’ve lost over time, and when I saw something that jogged my memory of a word, I shot it and crossed the word off. Early on in the illness, I was stuck either in my house or in medical spaces for months on end, so I started shooting words there. This early work consists mainly of three types of images: domestic still lifes; documentary images of medical spaces; and self-portraits at home and in medical spaces.

For a long time, I thought my headache was as good as it was going to get—constant, low-grade pain. Thanks to a medical breakthrough, I now finally have days without pain. This has meant the inclusion of new work that shows how my life has improved. Natural light, once rare in my photos, began to creep in and take over the images at the end of the series. The tunnel vision of my earlier photographs gave way to space, light, and, eventually, the vast expanse of a new horizon.

City College of San Francisco offers a wide variety of classes at two sites in the city. For Open Studios we are highlighting our Fort Mason Center facility. We offer affordable Credit, Continuing Education and Older Adult classes during the day, evenings, Saturdays and online - all taught by practicing Bay Area artists. Classes include sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, painting, watercolor, drawing and art history. Please come by during Open Studios to see our facilities, meet our students and instructors and get information about joining us!

Ink Drawing/Painting: Drawing with an eye-dropper and sumi-e ink, l aim to reproduce, not so much the reality, rather it’s sentiment or felt nature, which in Japanese can be called Kokoro mochi — the moving spirit. The uncontrollability of the eyedropper impels me to work swiftly and from an inner connection. This means I discover later which pieces may have captured the animating spirit. It also means I throw away a lot.

  I also find myself going back to the initial drawing to tease out with a brush and wash what narrative may be found in the impression of some pieces. The wash tends to flood the scene with an atmosphere and begins to tie together disparate parts of a drawing. The development of this process is leads me to follow what narrative may be found in layering drawings with wash in a larger context. Exploration of what may be found in a drawing, what might happen there, what story is being told that I cannot know yet, this is what interests me and keeps me in the process.