A conversation with artists Erin O’Keefe and Katja Mater on the occasion of the exhibition Measured Perspectives, curated by Paulius Petraitis for the Riga Photography Biennial 2022, Riga Art Space, April 22 – June 12, 2022. Exhibition architect: Pauls Rietums.
David Ashley Kerr: Erin, your work reminds me of a kind of glitch in the camera obscura. I say this not to claim that it is imperfect, but rather, because of the way painting and drawing shifted in the era of the camera obscura and magic lantern – this shift is where I position your work somehow. Representations at that time were peaking out of a yearning toward hyperrealism in the new scientific age, well before influencer painters started painting photo-like paintings in this century, or Gerhard Richter began projecting photographs onto canvas and rendering them to blurred, surreal traces of their original subject matter. Original painted realism in its purest form was rooted in a utilitarian desire to document, because it was the available technology of the time in which to do so. The Western Renaissance brought with it the meticulous documentation of colonial conquest, aristocrats, estates, scientific instruments, figures and objects captured in “real life” detail, with the artist’s hand still visible, of course, but removed from their own will by way of this particular objective instrument that changed their way of seeing.
Erin O’Keefe. View from the exhibition Measured Perspectives. Riga Photography Biennial 2022. Pho-to by Madara Gritāne.
Erin O’Keefe: David, sure, so my work attempts to deal with the kind of uncertainty and misreading that is possible in a photograph while using the language of painting. I think that a photograph carries the memory of its making in a different and more potent way than painting. In renaissance painting, the device of the frame creates a kind of strange space-time bridge between the world of the painting and the viewer, which I wanted to emulate in these works. I really love that whatever happened in front of that lens – whatever was the real condition, is gone forever, and we are left with this “wrong” thing trapped in the amber of the image. The familiar, tactile, imperfect aspect of the objects pushes against this uncertainty.
DAK: Speaking of uncertainty, John Berger once said: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”[1] What I see in a lot of art today is (or comes to represent) a preoccupation with the glitch, something I see as symptomatic of the post digital turn, the maturation of a generation raised on modem or “dial-up” internet, loading speeds, and later – finite stories and timelines that manifest as literal fragments of space-time, to borrow your term. So, to return to your work, where shadows and forms emerge from where we deem they perhaps should not; perspective is given an unequal set of conditions that do not meet our immediate expectations, our generally accepted “ways of seeing”. These are the principles of surrealism, as Berger notes as well, and which maybe explains my earlier reference to a “glitch” in what should operate on our termed mechanical principles, and that of representation and perspective. What else can you tell me about your approach Erin?
Erin O’Keefe, Katja Mater. View from the exhibition Measured Perspectives. Riga Photography Bien-nial 2022. Photo by Madara Gritāne.
EO: The work in Riga is from two bodies of work – there are 4 images from a series I made during the first lockdown in NYC, when I could not get to my studio. These use a frame (cut from cardboard and painted) to add another perceptual layer to the pieces. The very crude believability of these frames – somehow, one’s eye wants to obey the terms they stake out, even if they are clearly wrong. There is also a kind of trompe l’oeil reversal in these pieces – where three dimensional things act flat. As you mention, Surrealism is also a reference – and metaphysical paintings. I would say generally that I am interested in engaging with the language of painting – and subverting it.
DAK: Thank you Erin. Speaking of subversion, Katja, in your 16 mm film Threefold you present the viewer with a series of frames in which you perform a painterly depiction of a golden spiral.[2] There is a kind of crude precision at play here, or rather, the playful reduction of presupposed elements of precision, given to us by your placement of the lens-based frame, and our yearning for logarithmic symmetry, chronology and coherent time that the self-similarity of the golden spiral somehow evokes for us, despite its fallibility. This work for me is somehow reminiscent of a Fluxus performance where a set of guidelines or instructions are met, yet slowly subverted. Does this seem like a valid comparison?
Katja Mater, Threefold, 2018 digitalized 16 mm film, sound, 11’43’’ 3 tracks in a 0’30’’ interval
Katja Mater: What is important to say about this work is that it is three times the same film brought into a golden spiral ratio while using a 30 seconds interval between the three frames. Thereby the film creates a new present moment by resonating between its own past, present and future which is providing this surreal time experience. What you feel as guidelines or instructions are indeed a well-planned work but with a lot of space for chance and error.
What we see is not identical with what happens in front of our eyes, your subconscious brain is looking for you. I am very much inviting this yearning or desire you mention, a stare by the brain revealing comforting patterns of greater logic.
DAK: I recall how some young children will intuitively pinch a digital screen in a vain attempt at interaction, or even more so how there is a popular Instagram filter that mirrors people’s faces for making selfies that “enhance” their facial proportions through symmetry – do you both think about these common contemporary forms of mis-perception at all?
Katja Mater. View from the exhibition Measured Perspectives. Riga Photography Biennial 2022. Pho-to by Madara Gritāne.
EO: I do think about these things – and certainly they are part of a larger cultural trend. We are at such an interesting moment – a kind of kaleidoscopic reality I guess. We see it playing out in politics in very disturbing ways. I do think that there is some more positive potential there though – as far as ideas about the future. The openness to other possibilities and modes of involvement that your question points to feels very optimistic to me – that rather than accepting any kind of received wisdom about the world, perhaps our posture now allows for other ways of thinking about things – which I think is the root of creativity and invention.
KM: I am very much concerned with perception, misperception, ways of seeing and thinking about seeing, and how we relate to images in the world. While my making is mostly concerned with the analogue glitches of photography and film as non-transparent media; By creating hybrids between these different optical media, installation and performance I am interested in documenting something that often is positioned beyond our human ability to see, revealing a different or alternative (experience of) reality through capturing the areas where optical media hardly behave like the human eye.
Katja Mater. View from the exhibition Measured Perspectives. Riga Photography Biennial 2022. Pho-to by Madara Gritāne.
DAK: Speaking of “glitches”, I personally get a kick out of painterly depictions of prizewinning livestock from the 1800’s, where the beasts have been so exaggerated and the proportions so hilariously out of kilter; often rectangular, elongated bodies and small heads with sometimes bemused or “come hither” expressions – these were the Instagram filters and Photoshop plugins of the 19th Century! I titled our conversation I see something you don’t see – it is the literal translation of the Latvian iteration of a children’s game I know as I spy with my little eye or Eye spy in the anglophile world. This game is apparently one of the first games that most children learn to play, at least in the West, where one child sees something, and hints at its name for the other children to guess what they see. To give something a name is to manifest it into being, while much of art seeks to forget the name of the object represented – to reduce “known” things to metaphor, emotion and symbolic value. So this title I thought served as a quiet reference to the fluid and subjective nature of perception that both your works seem to oscillate between – juxtaposed of course with the ambivalence of a fixed viewpoint i.e. the lens, camera, and the frame. I see something you don’t see, it begins with the letter C – A Cow standing in a field is equally many other things, and by many other names, yet what is perhaps undeniable is that we see it standing there at that moment in time.
To return to your work Katja, the series Dear Sides that features in Measured Perspectives plays on our inherent bias toward a didactic, symbolic meaning and interpretation of both words and text. We are encouraged to engage with these words – words that exist somewhere between idiom and lyricism, in a kind of performative wordplay around two alternative artworks, as one. Additionally, the perpendicular installation of these works to the “white cube” wall break both conventional modes of representation – and those of “traditional” gallery presentation. I also can’t help but think of everyday tropes of “post-production”, such as edited/subverted graffiti or toilet wall scribbles that alter the meaning of the text for the worse – or better, and also of the way memes are regurgitated, repurposed and remixed over and over again in the online ether. What influenced you to create these particular works?
KM: Duality and multiple sides of one thing are returning themes in my work. The series of text-images are edited during the making while this process is registered on two multiple exposed negatives, one of the two prints is horizontally flipped and are placed back to back. How access to information edits meaning is informed here by my dyslexia, and comes from a need and habit of putting things in a visual order and processing language and tasks in a non-linear way. Not work your way from left to right or top to bottom but approach the world in a more visual way, taking in words as shapes from all angles.
Katja Mater, Erin O’Keefe. View from the exhibition Measured Perspectives. Riga Photography Bien-nial 2022. Photo by Madara Gritāne.
DAK: In our post digital present, where we often scan screens daily for “self-contained” imagery, that is, for viral imagery that marks out or signifies certain events, cultivating our sense of time and memory, these simple yet quietly definitive works challenge our accepted ways of seeing in a broader way, but allude perhaps in turn to our simplified visual language of the extreme present. I think both of you share a preoccupation with mapping and testing the limits of our visual perception, would you agree Erin?
EO: Yes – I absolutely agree. I think the awareness that our perception is pretty much always being mediated – by all manner of things, and thinking critically about the unreliability of that situation is what I’m after. We can get to a point where the authenticity of any situation becomes impossible to decipher – so then there is an impulse to just surrender and choose the most appealing or useful rendition. Painting does this openly – it’s the nature of the medium, which for me is why it feels like such a potent source of inspiration. But photography is so much more slippery and its potential as a language feels limitless.
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The Riga Photography Biennial is an international contemporary art event, focusing on the analysis of visual culture and artistic representation. The term ‘photography’ in the title of the biennial is used as an all-embracing concept encompassing a mixed range of artistic image-making practices that have continued to transform the lexicon of contemporary art in the 21st century.
[1] Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books: London
[2] A golden spiral is a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor is φ, the golden ratio. It is “Self Similar”, meaning the shape is infinitely repeated when magnified. Two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities.It is also known as the divine proportion, and is used in its rectangular form as the “Rule of Thirds”.
