For the first time the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, with the collaboration of diChroma photography (Madrid) and courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery (New York), presents the exhibition “Unseen” by Jessica Lange, the American actress and photographer.
Jessica Lange was granted a scholarship from the University of Minnesota to study photography in 1967, but the vicissitudes of student life led her to Spain and Paris where she chose to put dramatic arts before practical photography. It was then that she embarked on her acting career, playing leading parts in iconic movies and winning two Academy Awards for Best Actress for her roles in Tootsie, in 1983, and Blue Sky, in 1995.
Not until later, at the beginning of the nineties (when Sam Shepard gave her a Leica M6), did Jessica Lange take up her photographic exploits again.
Her images are captured on her travels and wanderings – her lens has roamed through countries such as the USA, France, Finland and Italy, although she has a particular soft spot for Mexico, as she herself puts it, “for its lights and wonderful nights”.
The collection, bringing together 141 photographs (including 12 contact sheets) taken over the last 20 years, is arranged into two series: “Things I see” and “Mexican Suites”.
This exhibition, produced by diChroma photography and commissioned by Anne Morin, will take place at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow from 13th of March 2014. Jessica Lange will be present on the opening day.
Unseen
Things I see
-“What are these pictures, I ask?
-Oh, things I see.”
“Things I see”, she replies, like a litany, a leitmotif, a kind of humming that follows an interjection, spinning around on its own, no need to be pushed along.
Jessica Lange’s photographs don’t need to be crammed with useless sentences.
“Point and line to plane” are the quintessential elements of her visual writing, her lexis and syntax reduced to temporary concordance, elemental equations expressing the imperceptible.
If Kandinsky asserted that the point was the most concise form of time and the line its continuity, then these unfolding images standing at barely a hundredth of a second depend on nothing but the “decisive moment”, on their “decisive moment”, with no concessions, with no regrets. Poetry is something that cannot be hunted, you have to let it come otherwise it takes leave, plays hide and seek and mocks you by changing direction. It is, therefore, this fraction, this blind inflection while you’re waiting, that is immersed in the image.
Russia, Finland, Minnesota, Italy and New York are nothing more than pre-texts that proclaim and promulgate before the image. They are there, before her eyes, with little regard to longitude and latitude, month or year, just stating what is in its permanence.
Jessica Lange’s images are unpretentious hurdles that bring the movement of life into focus, as in the words of Stieglitz, ineluctable, “Art is what takes note of life, and life, or its meaning, is found everywhere”. Over the course of her wanderings Jessica has encountered life, here, there and everywhere, in its simplicity and the everyday, in its blindness.
Like the young girl and her face from another time, looking up into the sky as if tracing an invisible line to another place, taking us back to a kind of trilogy, a kind of trinity.
Or like the inside of the chapel bathed in the sort of pale light found in Nordic countries, permeated by a dense silence broken in that moment by the discreet presence of a solitary individual sat in the background. It has echoes of the Johannes Vermeer’s Girl reading a letter (1657).
Or also like the two boys hanging from a barrier, balancing themselves like musical notes humming and singing on a music score. It’s all there in the balance of blacks and whites.
Mexico on Scene
And then suddenly the image is immersed in black, the grain explodes and the lines fade, the screen’s fabric tightens.
Mexico, let the show begin!
Jessica Lange enters the scene, furtive, delicate, discreet, she is present throughout the story she is telling, body to body with reality, and that’s what it’s all about, nothing else. The body.
She is still not there waiting, nor is she in the distance, she stands in continuity, like a narration, like a film.
To begin with, she draws and demarcates the spaces she moves in – she places herself in them but keeps her distance, primarily separating herself because she strives for the solitude she veils herself in, separating herself from the looks that aren’t exchanged, that are broken in mirrors, hidden behind a sheet of rain or the glances of lovers, lost souls or drunks that tell a story with their eyes.
Jessica Lange does not lurk in the shadows, in what is invisible, she is right there, in the unseen.
And, like space enclosed within itself, like time, like light as well.
Mexico comes to life at twilight, in the half-light, entre chien et loup, in this lapse of time when reality levels out under a dazzling white light, getting its breath back, rejoicing.
Lovers find one another again before the Church of Santo Domingo, the dances in the Zócalo square endlessly swirl to the trumpets and tabors, the circus announces its shows.
Night time, bodies are confused, they become entangled, throw themselves around, or abandon one another like choreographies led by an invisible hand. She is the one that orchestrates them, her own movements summoning her providence, bringing forth the image. Jessica Lange reveals what escapes and makes the surface of the night, the light of the shadows, rise up like a painter, shaping them into her own model.
The depth of the blacks, the whites that crack like a whip in the air, the voluptuous, sensual and floating materials, the smell of nightfall, the din of popular music. More than a series of stills, Mexican Suites is a journey through Jessica Lange’s diary of impressions.
Anne Morin
“I find photography a most mysterious process – capturing that moment in time and space, elusive and fleeting, and crystallizing it. You have made a photograph. It is its own thing now. “
Jessica Lange
A black box is placed unceremoniously upon a table. In a room away is the faint din of familial laughter. The archival box contains some fifty photographs culled from over a decade of work and hard travel. Raising the lid I am struck by an image of a girl dressed in communion white, pivoting in the night. Her face is obscured, in darkness, but the folds of her frock and the flounces of her cuffed socks seem to generate a light of their own.
A shot of a carnival worker follows. The operator of a Tilt-A-Whirl, he is caught in motion, an eternal ferryman against the backdrop of a tattooed diorama.
Successive images shot in Tulum, a dusty little town in the Yucatan. A similar scent of drama, like stills from a film suggesting mystery without malice.
An androgynous innocent in a makeshift halo and jockey shorts emerges from the shadows flanked by a bicycle.
A woman reaches to adjust the strap of black high heels. We do not see her face but respond to the power and sensuality of a single feminine gesture.
I seek the artist busying herself in the kitchen.
I stand in the doorway watching her.
What are these pictures, I ask?
Oh, things I see.
A chain of clouds in the Minnesota sky echoest he boxcars stretching past mounds of shale disguised as summer snow.
A child in a park, her head hidden by a balloon. Her little hands outstrech in surprise.
A dog in double shadow seems to seek his bearings.
A boy ascends the stairs of the Mormon Center in Salt Lake City, dwarfed by a panoramic mural of the sky.
Stills from the film of the eye of Jessica Lange.
Her lenscape is her travel. The Yucatan, Italy, Africa, Scandinavia, Montana, Minnesota, Nova Scotia, Scotland, Russia, Utah, Alabama, California, Romania, and the Midwest.
Her camera is a M6. She likes low lights fast film. Moonlight. Lamplight. Available light.
The crystalline February light of Minnesota. And the Northen light in the dead winter when things are suspended and the sun is low coming into a slant.
She was born in Cloquet, Minnesota, a sparsely populated city known for its tight-lipped yet communal spririt, home to the only gas station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Of Finnish descent, she is empathetic and independent. She has no fear of extremes. In her blood is the midnight sun..
As an actress she has been captured by the same light she is drawn to. She has a unique understanding of how drama can be suggested by the light alone. She has studied movement, mime; is able to move with stealth inside situations, discreetely, so that the photograph does not even know she’s there.
A young couple lies in the grass next to a sign: Cherry Chill. The warmth of summer on faces and limbs. It is modern and yet evokes the atmosphere of the late fifties. Of Picnic and Splendor in the Grass, Labor Day weekends when children play red rover and teenagers ache to steal away.
Innocence and longing in the Minnesota state fair.
A young man with closed eyes incandescent with joy.
Diaphanous dress and paper crown. Skin beneath silk. Unselfconscious desire on a dance floor.
How did you get that?
They were so absorbed.
He couldn’t keep his hands off her, she says.
The artist loves her subjects, and speaks of each with wonder.
Her blond son and granddaughter flushed in silent radiance.
There is often an element of curiosity in her process. The excitement to see what the camera picks up and what the camera lets go.
In her heat the disembodied head of a dog peers from a roof like a gargoyle. Electrical lines intersect a partially blown sky, with a faint imprint of cloud. Yet Christmas lights trailing the side of the wall are remarkably detailed. The points of the ears and teeth of the do gare sharp.
There is something about the light in Mexico, she says
The sun so overwhelming that everything seems to stop.
On a recent trip to EthiOpia she took a photograph of the villagers uniting fort he opening ceremony of their first well. The sky bleeds light into white contrasting with the bright blackness of the communal gathering.
There is something about the light in Africa, she says.
Then suddendly smiles.
I guess there is something about light.
Patti Smith
