Downtown #6. Denver, Colorado, 2013
Write her name down. If haven’t already heard of this young woman (she’s only 36), you soon will. (And it is pronounced SHUTS, not SHOOTS.)
No, she is not a photographer–she is primarily a painter. But, as I have said before, much of what we learn from the other visual arts can directly influence how we approach the creative process with our own photography.
Dana’s work is currently at the Denver Art Museum, but only through this Sunday, January 13th. If you don’t get a chance to see that exhibition, then follow her career and, when the opportunity arises, hoist your artistic hiney perpendicular and get yourself to the next one. If she doesn’t provoke a reaction from you, you must be an unfeeling, unseeing box of rocks. (For a quick fix, just Google “Dana Schutz images,” although you won’t really get the full impact of seeing the huge versions in real life.)
Dana’s work with color is obviously spectactular and unusual, but it is her wild imagination behind the artworks that really got me to thinking about how many of us (read: me)–in our attempts at “artistic” photography–work within what are really very, very narrow, self-imposed limits. The big lesson for us photographers? Well, start thinking way outside the sandbox! Indeed, Dana Schutz shows us what happens when an artist refuses to play inside the fixed boundaries of the chainlink playground fence, and the result is a feast for the eyes and mind. What might be the effect on our art if each of us did the same with our photography?
A lot of her inspiration seems to come from her habit of always wondering “what if…”. What if people could eat themselves, then regenerate their own organs? What if you could depict in a painting what it feels like to sneeze? What if a person tried to do three completely contradictory things (like swimming, smoking and crying) all at once? What if one were tasked with painting the last man on Earth? What if a person were gravity-phobic? And so on.
She answers these questions with her paintings and the results are humorous, loud, direct, ghastly, complex, odd, and surprising.
If you can’t get to the Denver Art Museum this week but are still interested in seeing Dana and her work, try this great video (1 hr 21 min duration) of her speaking at the Boston University School of Visual Arts lecture series:
You might also like
Leave a reply