DIVA

This is a quick and dirty post before I lose the tenuous Internet connection I have, and I promise to return later to insert some of Smith's artwork, but for those of you who just can't wait, here's the full interview with Jonathan Smith to which I referred in this week's visual arts section:

Remains of the Days: The Q&A with Jonathan Smith

Boy howdy, did I run out of room in the paper this week. It was a toss-up: More interview or an image of photographer Jonathan Smith’s work? I went with the image, thinking that you devoted readers of the blog would come here to find out more about Smith (who works as a preparator at the J-Schnitz) and his work. And you did. Good for you! An excerpt is running in the paper this week, but here’s the full (if slightly edited) version of my Q&A with photographer Jonathan Smith, whose “Thrown Before” show is up at DIVA through Aug. 30.

Suzi Steffen: So, Jonathan, I assume you have an MFA …
Jonathan Smith: From the UO in fine art photography. I came to school here in 2000. I’d been doing photography before that as an amateur. I wouldn’t call it fine art photography, but it was a hobby of mine. I came with a BA in philosophy, so when I applied to the grad program [in art], they said I needed to get my BA in art first. I did that and then went directly to the MFA program. So, art school for five years!

Do you think your BA in philosophy affects your photography?
I know it does. The concepts and the theories behind fine art are very philosophical. You study the theories in the MFA program, and I picked up on those pretty well.

How did you get interested in remains?
Two objects started the whole thing. One was a seed pod, a magnolia seed pod, that I started taking picturs of because it was a really interesting form. But it didn’t really start until we were on a hike with a bunch of friends, and someone found a deer skull. Not only is it an interesting object, but bones specifically are so close to what we are, and to see a bone photographed somehow speaks to us in a way that we understand the implications of what it means to see a skull. Something has died; something has passed on; this remains. We can easily make a jump from a deer to our own mortality.
I read a quote somewhere, and I’m paraphrasing — people were talking about Shakespeare and Yorick’s skull [in Hamlet], and some artist said, “Who am I to discount the power of a skull?”

So that’s kind of what it comes down to. These bones and these skulls and these decaying objects speak to us of our own mortality.

Even the pine cone that the squirrels stripped?
Yes. These things were once alive and are now dead and decaying. By photographing them, I’ve been able to stop the decay, kind of halt their passage into nothingness and hold them for a much longer time than the object would last.

I’m kind of clueless about photography, but I like the borders of the photos. They seem mechanical. Can you explain your process?
OK. I shot these with Polaroid type 55, a 4x5 Polaroid film. Most Polaroid films, you take the picture, peel it apart and create the image, but with this you also get the negative, which has this border around it. The paper and the developer and all of those things in one little package, and it creates those messy edges around [the negative]. So type 55 is kind of a very artsy film. You don’t have to leave the borders in, but I like to leave them in because it speaks to this fact that it’s not the real object, that it’s a photograph referring to its object.
I leave the film frame, in the eggs as well even though it’s 35 mm film, because it says this is a photogarph, an image of something else. Unfortuantely, Polaroid type 55 film will never be around again. On eBay, people are selling it for four times its original price, like $200 for 20 sheets.

How do you come up with your rather mysterious numerical titles?
it’s basically an organizational thing. It’s sheet number and frame number. I have over 1,000 negatives, so I keep track of them by sheet number and frame number, so a lot of them are 01 and 02 because with the big ones, there are only two negatives per sheet, but it’s also a museum archival type of number and it’s used in sciences as a way of coding things. The number says these objects were logged, catalogued, into a directory or organization — so there’s documentary and forensic organization going on there too.

And the reason your photos are so large?
The reason I printed them that large is because I thought they needed to be that large. Drawing on my experience at the musuem, I looked at the gallery space and knew what would fit there.
I ended up scanning the negatives and printing them. It’s really handy because printing that large takes a really long time traditionally, and it requires a huge enlarger, and there’s only one in town. People do contact prints with 4x5 images, but I thought for this show, bigger was better.

Possibly an annoying question, but which ones do you like the best?
The newest one is the eggs, which was kind of a happy accident. The egg image, one of those single images is kind of my iconic images. I had a strip of these, and I went to scan just one frame. I had taken five exposures, and there were all five frames on the computer screen, and the egg was fading from view. I thought, wow! So the egg image is kind of my favorite image right now. It almost didn’t make it into the show because of a framing mistake, but I was determined, and I ended up hanging it like an hour before the opening.

What kind of reaction have you gotten to your first large-scale show in town (outside of the UO)?
From opening night, people seemed to like it. One person offered to buy some, and I need to follow up with him.

Oh yeah, that’s something I meant to ask you about. Your pricing seems so … I mean, I could buy one. I think it’s low.
A couple of considerations went into it. It’s Eugene, you know. And I’m not really known. I’m kind of a no-name, in some ways. I did price them so that any one that sold would bring somewhat of a profit. They weren’t that expensive to produce. I thought it was a fair price for production costs versus name recognition. It’s a tricky business, pricing your own art, but I’d love to think that somebody had one in their house somewhere. I had a show in Seattle, and someone bought one, and it’s nice to think that someone in Seattle has one of my prints hanging on their wall.

Is this show going to push you to do more?
I know it is. I do see that this is the final show for this project, this object-based thing. I’m starting to find myself in a little bit of a rut, and I think this is the best manifestation of that kind of project. It’s time to let it transform itself into something like the photograph of the egg, a multiple series of photographs. It’s time to get past the Polaroid 55 stuff, which has been going for four years. I think I’ve been known as the Bone Collector or the Skull Guy among my friends.
I have photographs of a mouse carcass that I found, and it’s beyond this bone issue, it’s fur, a little more gruesome, and I’m not sure I want to get into that, but it’s a little bit closer to home, closer to the bone, if you’ll excuse the expression.

Why make the photographs so beautiful?
Art has to be beautiful in order to be viewable. I don’t necessarily agree with art that shocks. There has to be an element of beauty to it to be appreciable. I think even some of the most controversial art out there, like [Andres Serrano’s] Piss Christ, is beautiful in the end. So I think even a very gruesome project can be viewed in a beautiful way, but it makes it easier to approach and easier to get to the message behind it. It’s like sugarcoating in a way — it goes down a little easier, but the fact is that it goes down.

Supposed to show at 7 pm Sunday, March 16. Too bad, I was looking forward to this one ... but that's not stopping me from renting it.

Great poster, by the way.