When I asked an addict what she got out of heroin, she said, “a shot of sainthood.” I thought of her when looking at Isaac Layman’s photographs at Lawrimore Project, the addict who has my face and sounds like I do on phone, sober now a long time and younger than I am but wrecked, always more wrecked.
Inside a drugged stupor, grace can deliver a hallucinated clarity. It’s only the world in Isaac Layman’s large prints, common as dirt, but his delivery has the force of revelation. Were you Saul, these photos would knock you off your horse.
Because everything he shoots is too real to be real, the exhibit’s title is, 110 Percent.
From Flannery O’Conner’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find:
His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children !” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
Without his glasses, The Misfit’s eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking. “Take her off and thow her where you thown the others,” he said, picking up the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg.
“She was a talker, wasn’t she?” Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
The moment that the grandmother is a good woman is the moment when the drug settles into the bloodstream and clears the mind, the moment when God speaks in the wilderness: the moment of transfixed understanding.
Working digitally, Layman combines layers of long exposures to get the same image stuck in a crater of a deepening visual repetition. It’s something like the idea of a rose is a rose, only simultaneously, as if everyone in a crowded room suddenly said “rose.” Everybody would say it a little differently.
Below, Layman’s kitchen cabinet. He doesn’t own that many glasses.The photo is a long scan of the image, many exposures digitally stitched
together, like a quilt.
Max Beckmann said he didn’t need to abstract things, because “each object is unreal
enough already.” Or, for Layman, too real.
More praise for Lawrimore Project: Curator Dan Cameron was in town for a lecture recently and took a day to look around with artists Gretchen Bennett and Joey Veltkamp.
Cameron’s Seattle report here. Below, what he had to say about LP:
Owned by Scott Lawrimore, a former Kucera protégé, the gallery is probably the most visually stunning commercial art space in the US, outstripping any comparable venue in either Chelsea or Culver City. The space is huge, and, more importantly, has been broken up by the Seattle firm Lead Pencil Studios into a cluster of rooms, each of which has an extremely precise character. Tall ceilings and indirect natural light are balanced by a renovation that leaves just enough of the original building’s quirks intact so that walking into Lawrimore feels like stepping into every artist’s ideal vision of an art gallery.
Lawrimore opened just in time for the recession. It’s still here, but this year is his financial best. He’s in the biz for the long haul, although his “visually stunning” venue is not. His lease is up next Halloween, his wife’s birthday. Anyone who bets on him signing another in that space will lose money. Layman closes on Aug. 14. Lawrimore has yet to schedule a show to follow it. If you want to see the place that beats the competition in Chelsea or Culver City, go now.
Such a stunning show!
Anne Mathern also played tour guide for Dan.