Temporary Contemporary

 
Temporary Contemporary was initiated in 1996 and consists of four solo exhibitions each year. Each show features innovative, influential and thought-provoking works by artists who are either from or currently living in the southeastern United States. Previous artists have included William Eggleston, Roe Ethridge, Kojo Griffin, Kerry James Marshall, and Robert Ryman.

In 2005, Cheekwood joined a prestigious community on the national contemporary art front by receiving a major grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for its pioneering work.

June 26 - September 12

Known for creating images that explore the complex relationship between nature and photography, Rothman’s photographs convey a precise and subtle sense of light, space and scale, immersing the viewer in their space while encouraging them to slow down and pay closer attention to the actual experience of seeing.

“The landscape for me is a place of presence - a perceptual field that anchors a sense of basic existence,” said Rothman. “For the exhibition at Cheekwood, I will be creating images that retain a direct connection to what is being photographed, while presenting a unique experience of looking and perceiving.”

Inspired by Cheekwood’s beautiful landscape, Rothman will create a site-specific installation that responds to the Temporary Contemporary gallery itself, the natural surroundings, and the experience of the museum and the gardens through the seasons. The project will create an experiential sense of place that asks viewers – what can be known through direct perceptual experience — what does it mean to be in this place at this moment?

Aaron Rothman’s photographs, video and installations explore perceptual experience of space in both natural and built environments. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and Gitterman Gallery in New York. He currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona and works for the Phoenix Urban Research Laboratory at the Arizona State University School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture.

Exhibition organized by Claire Schneider, Independent Curator.

Claire Schneider: When you think about taking a photograph, Aaron, what’s going through your head as you approach your work?

Aaron Rothman: In general terms, I want to use photography and use my art making to create a greater sense of awareness. An awareness of being aware. I guess how that works in the process of me making photographs is the less I try to think about what I want to do, the better. If I walk around with my camera framing things in my mind, I just end up making make horrible pictures. If I’m thinking about making a photograph and trying to consciously envision how something will look as a photograph, I tend to not do very well. I have to be open to the process of seeing where I am. And usually I find that the best pictures I make are when a certain spot will attract me, a certain kind of sense of space, or sense of place. Not defined by what it looks like visually, but just how it feels to be in a certain place. It’s a real vague sensation, something that makes me want to stop and set up the tripod and set up the camera and just be in a place. And then I start looking around and I start, with the camera, figuring out what fits in that frame of the photograph. It’s a sense of being engaged and being in that space, and being aware of the basic process of looking. Without thinking about what it’s going to be in the end, or what it’s going to mean, or any of that. 

Then after the photograph is made, I take a while. I have to look at stuff, I have to print up proofs and look at them for a long time. I have a process of proofing where I’ll print pretty much everything that I shoot that looks like it has any potential; I’ll print it up as an 8x10 photograph. Then after I live with those for a while, I’ll print those up bigger on a 16x20 so I can get a sense what the space of the photograph is going to look like if it’s enlarged more than that. I live with those for a long time and I have to figure out which of those pictures really holds it’s own, and which of those really creates an experience in itself. 

And then it gets further complicated thinking about how to put pictures together. And that can be in an exhibition, that’s what I prefer, rather than a portfolio or book. I like to think about how the photographs interact with each other in a physical space. So if you’re looking at a picture in an exhibition you’re aware of that picture you’re looking at right in front of you, but you’re also aware of the picture that’s next to that picture. And in a different way, you’re aware of the picture that’s on the wall behind you. I’m interested in creating a constellation of experiences, and putting different types of images together. And not just photographs, but also, you know, photographs and video and whatever else might happen.

CS: This process of being aware also extends to the viewers experience of the photograph itself. You want to give the viewer the process of awareness more than an image. As you have said, you want them “to enter the photograph and wander around.”

AR: Yes, I don’t want the images to point in any particular direction too much. I don’t want them to be making a statement about anything in a very direct way, or even necessarily setting up a direct way that you have to experience the photographs visually. I want the photographs to immerse the viewer in their space. And sometimes that space can be very realistic, and be this completely apparently real window onto the world. And sometimes it’s a completely and obviously manipulated space, where I’ve digitally gone in and changed the image around so it’s a space that’s very different from the real world. But either way, I want the photographs to create a visual space for the viewer to enter. Like being in the world, like being in the natural world. As when you’re walking in a forest, it doesn’t mean anything. What it means is whatever it means through your process of perceiving it, and that’s what I’m interested in in the end, is that process of how we understand being in the world on a very basic level.

CS: So much of how we experience the world is constructed. We have messages about how we should see a place, and often photographs reinforce that. There’s a long history of this.

AR: We look at images that have constructed messages and meanings and I wanted to figure out what the experience is before that. How do you experience something without that filter? How do you experience something directly? With the acknowledgment that there is no direct experience, our minds and our perceptions are always changing.

CS: Is this, in part, how you came to make reverse prints? How did you decide to make images by reversing the tonal qualities?

AR: It’s some playing around I was doing, and just thinking about how the photograph is this transformative process and wanting to play with that. My background isn’t just in photography, it’s in drawing and printmaking, in the physicality of an image. The objectness of an image is important to me. I started to play around with it in mind to make it more drawing-like. Also as a photographer, just spending time in the dark room looking at negatives, there’s something really magical about looking at a negative and having what was light transformed into matter in a very literal sense. What was light in the world is now this particle residue on your film.

CS: You’ve lived in Phoenix for a good amount of time and you’ve taken a lot of pictures there. But you’ve also spent some time in Memphis and you’ve taken these pictures here in Nashville, which is a very different landscape than the West. How do the very different conditions affect your work? In part you learned to look in the West and now you’re coming back to an Eastern landscape.

AR: It’s different being in a different kind of place with a different kind of space. It certainly creates a different quality of experience. In the West, especially the Southwest, there’s just this absolute vastness and this kind of blankness, which I find really compelling. The South, of course, it’s this completely immersive green. I grew up in the Midwest outside of Chicago. I grew up being used to green, maybe not quite as intense as the South, but pretty intense. So it’s not totally foreign to me, and I really love that. And then I lived in the West for a long time, and when we moved to Memphis I felt pretty claustrophobic because I couldn’t see more than slivers of the sky. So, through the photographs, I have to take into account what the experience of a place is like and present that in the way that I experience it.

CS: This lends into your Cheekwood installation. How would you describe your experience of the place, here, during your couple of visits? What do you think you’ve captured from taking your pictures?

AR: I was really paying attention to the quality of light. In the winter that grayness, and then when I went back recently in the spring it was overcast, so it was gray in a different way. The overcast sky adds to that lushness, and adds to that immersive sense of green. I was also thinking about my own memories and my own experiences, mostly from growing up outside of Chicago. There was an arboretum near my house that that I went to a lot all through my childhood. It reminded me of Cheekwood, some of the trails here. I was connecting back to my own memories of being in a similar kind of space.

CS: With light such a key element in your work, how does taking a photograph with Eastern versus Western light differ?

AR: It depends on the day, too, certainly. I think the moisture in the air has a huge effect on what light is, so the humidity compared to the Southwest is different. The Southwestern light is clear and bright and harsh and kind of purer in a way. Whereas the Southern light, it’s more enveloping. There’s more atmosphere. The light is kind of closer. The light is something that touches everything gently. Instead of being this kind of unknown force.

CS: Which connects to your interest in the known and the unknown. How can you even make what seems so simple, like the space you’re standing in right now, seem a little bit unknown, possibly.

AR: I think there’s a deep mystery to being alive, right? So if you are really sit back and notice yourself being in the world, I think there’s a deep mystery to that. And you notice the things around you in this world and what you can perceive, but there’s also a sense that there’s maybe something else beyond that. I don’t know what that is. There’s certainly different levels of experience beyond the kind of perceptual experience, different ways of knowing. There’s emotional experience, psychological experience, spiritual experience. I don’t want to define this in any of those particular directions, but I’m interested in that line between… at the meeting point of what we can know and what we can’t know, the known and the unknown.

CS: I wanted to touch on beauty for a moment. It’s a loaded term in the art world generally now, as something you don’t always want to achieve, because art is much bigger than this; it can so easily become a cliché. But at the same time the world can be beautiful and how can we take different kinds of pictures of beauty?

AR: Let me start by saying I am interested in beauty, in making pictures that create an experience of beauty, or an experience akin to that. But I’m interested in creating a unique and individual experience. I think the trepidation about beauty is formed when beauty is thought of as being defined from the outside. If it’s qualities that you can list, then that’s not very interesting. But if it’s about an experience where all your senses and your emotion and your being is engaged in a visual experience…that’s what beauty is about. So something that’s not traditionally beautiful that can create an experience of beauty. It’s a state of awareness, it’s not a quality of a thing.

CS: What makes one of your pieces, one you feel like it’s right, one that you edit in?

AR: It sits right on the page. It creates a pictorial space that you can inhabit. And that may be a space that seems like a real space in the world, or maybe a completely manipulated and unreal and fabricated space, but it’s something you can just enter. It usually makes me want to be silent. A good photograph for me will take words away. Take away the desire for words, and leave one of wanting to be in that photograph and experience. And create just a greater awareness of what’s around me.