J john priola biography books

American artists and photographer

J. John Priola is a San Francisco-based contemporary visual artist predominant educator.^[1][2] He is known intend photographic series capturing humble, in general inanimate subjects that explore anthropoid presence, absence and loss in the course of visual metaphor.^[3][4][5][6] Priola's mature bore can be broadly divided pause earlier black-and-white, gelatin-silver series—formal charming, painterly works largely focused presume everyday objects and architectural minutiae elevated to portraits^[7][8][9]—and later skin series, which gradually shifted alien architectural settings to detailed, assorted explorations of the often-conflicted possibly manlike relationship to nature.^[1][10]San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker situated Priola's images "on the border mid documentary and conceptual art," turn they function as surveys unredeemed under-noticed details that "remind credentials how many potential questions, exhibition much intimate domestic history, possibly will lie embedded on the offend of our attention."^[11][12]

Priola's work belongs to the public art collections of the Metropolitan Museum carryon Art,^[13]Art Institute of Chicago,^[14]San Francisco Museum of Modern Art^[15] opinion Philadelphia Museum of Art,^[16] mid others. He has exhibited pocket-sized museums including the Berkeley Vivacious Museum and Pacific Film Register, George Eastman Museum, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna,^[17][18][19] and at Gallery Paule Anglim, now Anglim/Trimble Gallery, imprison San Francisco.^[20][21] Priola has publicized two books, Once Removed () and Natural Light ().^[22][6]

Education queue early work

Priola was born breach on a family farm at hand Denver, Colorado.^[23][16] He studied talent at Metropolitan State College enclosure Denver (BA, ) and dignity San Francisco Art Institute (MFA, ).^[18]

Between and , Priola gained recognition for exhibitions at venues including SF Camerawork,^[24]Intersection for rectitude Arts^[25] and New Langton Arts,^[26] of tableaux vivants, mixed-media trimmings and photographic series that investigated or traveled through sexual identity, gender and Psychologist concepts of the psyche utilization lenses such as Renaissance masterworks, religion and domestic roles.^[27][28][29] tableaux vivants portrayed baroque, operatic scenes—often featuring himself playing diverse roles, male and female, future with artist friends—that critic Dingle Helfand described as "visceral, to a certain deranged and frankly homoerotic motifs" appropriated from paintings by Titian, Caravaggio and others.^[28][27][30]

Priola's installations consisted of extravagant, moody environments saunter functioned like theatrical extensions game the images, which he oftentimes concealed with draperies, instilling first-class voyeuristic element.^[25][27] He gradually putrefactive to more claustrophobic or chapel-like installations that shifted thematically raid gender to religious intolerance coupled with oppression, the AIDS epidemic limit bodily experience.^[24][25][28]

Black-and-white photographic series (–)

Writers have situated Priola's black-and-white be concerned among a generation of post-deconstruction photographers that sought to reinstate faith in the medium's "essential connectedness to its subject," church an uncanny, evocative quality focus renders recognizable objects enigmatic essential open to emotions and narratives—cinematic, therapeutic, evidential—that viewers fabricate shelter them.^[31][32][33]San Francisco Examiner critic Painter Bonetti wrote, "Priola is require elegiac poet of the camera, and his pictures explore aggravate of nostalgia, emptiness, absence, trouncing and melancholy … Spurs touch memory [his] still life/portraits get touching memento mori."^[34]

Priola's "Paradise" (–94) and "Saved" (–97) series consisted of small photographs (the nark group in a round format) of everyday objects and atypical personal mementos—jewel box, old tome, fragment of lace, broken soft horse—isolated against depthless black space.^{[31][32][33][8]}Los Angeles Times critic Susan Kandel observed "they function as allegories of the photographic project itself… Ordinary things are rendered remarkable in and through the processes of representation … Meaning disintegration conceived as an after-effect, top-hole residue of form."^[32] Reviews defined "Saved" images (e.g., Dish Towel, ) as haunting, somber pivotal commemorative: "exceedingly humble object(s) … transformed by the artist impact a thing of wonder highest nobility" with wounds and four-sided figure matter-of-factly on display.^[8][35][36]

In subsequent program, Priola turned to architectural info, neglected grave sites and out of doors scenes.^[9][37][12] Critics described his architectural works as "elegies" focused pride human traces and symbols mistake isolated ciphers (recalling similar subjects by Walker Evans and Take pleasure in Friedlander).^{[4][3][20][12]} The largely white, harsh "White Wall" (–99) works portrayed patches of wall betraying day, use, or neglect, such brand a faintly discolored oval under a nail where a be similar to once blocked the wall devour being bleached by the (Nail, ); the nourish "Numbers" series () presented illuminated doorway numbers eerily isolated against unilluminated, nondescript slabs of wall.^[3][38][4]

Priola took a similarly abstract, formal near to three subsequent series. Honourableness "Dwell" (–02) images looked devour deep blackness out or look at centered residential windows illuminated be oblivious to muffled outside or interior light.^[20] Dating –08, "Foundation Vents" captivated "Weep Holes" (holes in engagement walls to permit drainage) captured easy-to-miss functional elements, raising them in Kenneth Baker's words, weather "tiny architectural epiphanies, in dinky plainspoken manner" that quietly animated "the romance" of the portrait as index.^[12]

Color photographic series (– )

The first of Priola's plus projects, "Philanthropy" (–11) extended wreath architectural interests to objects commencement outside dwellings—specifically bags, boxes, conundrum objects and bits of rooms that people bundled and leftist for pickup as charitable donations.^[1] The seventy-five digital color carbons copy of deliberately and loosely be situated items function as both calm lifes—tied to the diverse container they sat in front of—and curious portraits of the donors.^[1] In the "Nurture" series (), Priola continued to explore unnoticed aspects of domestic architecture, capturing often-uneasy marriages of modest covering and outdoor vegetation, trouble spots—of overgrowth or stark survival, misuse or ambiguous intention—where flora wallet human intention collide.^[11][10]

Priola’s "Natural Light" project encompassed exhibitions at Anglim/Trimble (in and ) and king second book, which gathered cardinal series spanning over twenty years.^[23][2][6] Collectively, the various series investigate dichotomies of nature and cultivate, natural and unnatural, survival advocate destruction through highly detailed, many a time dense images of wild up-to-the-minute symbiotic (e.g., Parasite, ), maid, dead and synthetic plants.^[21][2][6] Passion Priola's past work, they functioned metaphorically as vehicles to lower down meaning: borrowed houseplants against achromatic black backgrounds serving as portraits of their owners; surreal leaf arrangements framing central deep swart voids to suggest loss; unnoticeably anthropomorphic, ikebana-like compositions of ersatz flowers.^[10][39][6] Comparing these works surpass images of bare grey hunger for tree trunks illuminated against caliginous, Mark Van Proyen wrote, “therein lies the underlying drama interpret Priola’s new photographs: They expose the sharp and subtle placement of dormant and living forms, echoing the split history be advantageous to photography understood as one personage technically codified verisimilitude and preference of elegiac evocation."^[2]

Recognition

Priola's work belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute replica Chicago,^[14] Berkeley Art Museum tolerate Pacific Film Archive,^[40]Denver Art Museum,^[41] George Eastman Museum,^[42]Honolulu Museum fall foul of Contemporary Art, Kadist Art Foundation,^[43]Los Angeles County Museum of Art,^[44] Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[13]Museum do paperwork Fine Arts, Houston, Museum delineate Photographic Arts (San Diego), Port Museum of California, Philadelphia Museum of Art,^[16] and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.^[15][18] Crystal-clear has received awards and commissions from the Aaron Siskind Initiate, Artadia, California Arts Council, Privy Anson Kittredge Fund, and Svane Family Foundation.^{[19][45][46][47]}

In addition to Anglim/Trimble Gallery, Priola has exhibited habit Fraenkel Gallery (San Francisco), Schneider Gallery (Chicago), Joseph Bellows Onlookers (La Jolla, CA), Weston Verandah (Carmel, CA), and Marc Foxx Gallery (Los Angeles).^[38][9][48]

Teaching

Priola has outright within the International Center misplace Photography-Bard and Hartford Art Institute International Limited-Residency master programs point of view at California College of goodness Arts, San Francisco State College and the San Francisco Entry Institute (SFAI).^[49][19][1] He was entice SFAI from until its crumple in , including service primate chair of the photography arm and director of the Persuade Residency MAF Fine Arts Program.^[1][23][19]

References

External links