Homage to a Circle: Tammy Rae Carland, Marsha Cottrell, Zoe Leonard & Davina Semo

Presented by Anthony Meier Fine Arts & Jessica Silverman Gallery at 1969 California Street

17 November - 15 December 2020

In a collaborative spirit, Anthony Meier Fine Arts will host a joint exhibition with Jessica Silverman titled Homage to a Circle, an exhibition that explores spinning, ringing, orbiting, enclosing, ruminating, and revolving. More than a formal exploration, the show is a social and psychological journey that leads to unexpected terrains. Zoe Leonard’s photographs of sidewalks punctuated by chewed gum connect foot and mouth with an abstract wasteland. Tammy Rae Carland’s Discograms, made directly on photographic paper with the light refracted from a disco ball, suggest the spacious bliss of a magical night on the dance floor. Marsha Cottrell harnesses the tool of a laser printer as one would a paintbrush, running mulberry paper through the printer multiple times to create unique images of spectral suns. Finally, Davina Semo’s cast-bronze “Bells” beckon and unite communities, ring the time, and strike for freedom.  

ZOE LEONARD

“For me, photography is intrinsically about observation. It's about being present in and having a certain perspective on, the world around me. It's not so much about creating, or my imagination—as drawing, for instance, maybe. It's more about responding.” 

- Zoe Leonard

A photographer whose subject has historically been the urban world, Leonard has long documented the human experience via built landscape, gentrification and refuse.

Leonard's series of sun photographs, direct images of the sun in the sky, engage perception that is not tangible. Breaking the cardinal rules of both vision and photography – don’t look directly at the sun, don’t photograph directly into the sun – Leonard records the glare and flare on the lens, the grainy spotting on the film.  Depicting what cannot be seen, Leonard’s sun photographs explore sight through ephemeral feel, beyond optical fact.

Zoe Leonard’s work includes sculpture and installation, much of it politically driven, but she is primarily a photographer who discards technical questions in favor of a more experiential approach to images and media. She is also concerned with how something materializes as an image, such that its materiality and framing are as important as its content. 

TAMMY RAE CARLAND

Carland's minimal photographs track the traces that people leave behind and the capacity for objects to encapsulate certain feelings.

Discograms are exposures that Carland made by placing a disco ball under a darkroom enlarger and letting the light refract onto photo paper, capturing the pattern you'd see on a nightclub wall. The discograms refer to a time when Carland would frequent discos, even as a punk, because that was one of the few spaces where queer people could fully exist. 

"I was really into this idea of the performance of dancing in a gay bar and being seen and sometimes going by yourself but being alone together," said Carland. "[Disco balls] became kind of these memorials to people that died in a way — like trying to create a trace of them."

MARSHA COTTRELL

Marsha Cottrell’s monochrome abstractions transcend the quotidian office computer and printer used in their making. In playful exchange with her chosen medium, the artist nudges mathematically defined lines and shapes grabbed from the software’s tool palette across the field of the screen, registering the intangible information in multiple passes of carbon-based toner using a laser printer as one might a paintbrush. 

There is no corresponding digital file for each unique image; instead the paper is the canvas onto which each decision is materially preserved. Translucent layers of ultra-fine dust are fused with heat and pressure, interacting with the subtle coarse texture of each handmade sheet to create rich, tactile surfaces. Cottrell’s inventive process embraces—and runs in opposition to—an analytical working environment originally designed to speed productivity and increase volume of output. Schematic vector information gives way to space and light, resuscitating the corporeal.

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Cottrell's unique, large-format platinum prints utilize an early photographic process that involves hand coating a sheet of paper with a platinum-palladium solution and exposing it, along with a negative, to sunlight. As with the laser printer work, the medium and process permits a kind of merging of elements that appear to be in opposition. Here, concentric circles define the structure for a digital (camera-less) negative, interpreted in an exposure to ultraviolet light by the luminous tones of the metal-infused paper. It’s a tie-in to the laser printer technology—where a laser beam records information on a light-sensitive drum—and a conceptual nod to and blending of 19th-century technology with the digital age.

Cottrell’s emphasis on the role of the body (she is quick to point out that printer toner is carbon-based) is underscored by a work, in which she imprinted her hands on two sheets of paper covered in toner. She stopped the printer midway through its process, after the toner had been applied, but before it had been heat-fused to the paper. This bold assertion of the artist’s body and authorial agency is an undercurrent in Cottrell’s practice. She makes ingenious use of technology, but at cross-purposes, for example, by running carefully selected handmade paper through a printer numerous times in order to build up compositions layer by layer. Speed and efficiency are precisely not the point. But, significantly, she does not take a proverbial bat to her plastic and metal collaborators. Hers is not a project of undermining, but of exploring.

DAVINA SEMO 

Semo’s ongoing series of cast-bronze “Bells,” have clappers attached to thick powder-coated chains that can be held and rung. Bells beckon and unite communities, ring the time, strike for freedom, signal an alarm, and announce an arrival. Semo’s bells are multi-gendered – concave forms impregnated by clappers, but also convex phallic shapes suggestive of missiles. 

"I’m interested in the bells creating a call to attention and call to action, a space for people to come together and alone to think about primal core issues, like time, nature, climate change, togetherness, beauty. I am interested in the personal relationship one can have with a bell, through activating it, and through the body resonating with the sound."

- Davina Semo

Semo's small-scale polished bronze wall works came out of studio discoveries made while the artist was working on other sculptures. 

"The polished surfaces are interesting to me for the way in which they distort and warp a viewer’s reflection. This wild reflection feels consistent to me with our experience living amidst anxieties large and small —daily and personal challenges and joys set against a backdrop of the world waking up to climate change, animal extinctions, food and resource insecurity, poverty, violence and so on."

-Davina Semo