Michael Rainey

Artist Statement

I propose an exhibit to be titled: Photographs - Prints - Words. I propose to select work from over a significant period of time but that is all related. There is a lot more to be said about each unique series, but this applies to the entire body of work:

I find consistency and cohesiveness in concept, not subject matter. While I am trained as a photographer, I work like a printmaker. But instead of editioning like a printmaker I work in series, where each piece is unique, but also each piece is related to others in the series by formal strategies and concepts. My portfolio over the years looks like a painter's in that I'll have 5-6 pieces that are visually, and process related. And then another group of 10 that take something from what I learned in the previous grouping and approach it differently. I have been working on the same project for a number of years.... how photography intersects with what we believe about the world and ourselves and how language is a necessary component in that process.

I dislike categorizing my work as experimental photography since I am interested first in issues like how photographs intersect with our beliefs about the nature of the world and our lives. While I typically confound expectations surrounding traditional photographic form, that is an exploration of how photographs mean, not what do they look like.

I work with personal documents and cultural knowledge and memory and constantly try to find a formal language that might serve us up a more truthful version of reality than traditional camera images do. When I first started making the complex, montage work, it was because during a very difficult two or three years of my life, I had sold all my camera equipment and had only some snapshots from that part of my life, most often made with my daughter's Instamatic or a borrowed polaroid camera. When I got back to working again, and reacquired a camera and a darkroom, It made no sense to me to skip over what I had learned or come to believe during those years. While I picked up on creating the kinds of images I had been making before that hardship, it felt false not to consider the fuzzy snapshots and the things I had come to believe both about photography and about life. I was rereading Walden at the time, and it was a revelation. I had first read it in my late teens or maybe when I was twenty, but now I was ready for it. The Van Dyke prints always included a passage by Thoreau, a passage from the Stanley Cavell's The Senses of Walden, and a somewhat folksy anecdote by me. The texts in the VanDyke prints and IRIS prints are a three-way conversation between Thoreau, American philosopher Stanley Cavell and me.


Those visually complex pieces are similar to bulletin boards that draws from personal memory and snippets of culture and history, yet each piece is built within a tensioned space of critical theory. The work might also be described as a series of visual anthologies, and they allow for multiple voices. One can also think of them as if I were a frustrated filmmaker (true), and in a way I have taken many short film snippets, some from memory (both internal and photographic), and some referencing other people's thoughts that I have found compelling or perhaps tried to make my own, and have made multiple rough cuts, with no concern for realistic duration or flow, similar to the original meaning of montage in the tradition of Soviet filmmaking. In semantics, the technique is similar to meronomy, and it forces the disparate pieces into a unified whole plane with an abundance of meanings, like a short story or film that is never about one thing.

The whole that these pieces come to be, are held together by utilizing traditional composition and design strategies (I used to teach graphic design). However, I usually make no effort to 'fool the eye' because I want it obvious that I have forced these elements together, so that the viewer is not allowed to make easy assumptions. I recently read a statistic that in a museum setting, typical viewers only pause in front of each artwork for approximate 8 seconds. I try to give enough visual cohesion to get the viewer to give at least the 8 second minimum, but enough enticing details to draw them farther in. For instance, the delicate and ethereal Thermofax pieces I made early on, with their pixilated images, work differently at different viewing distances. They allow the recognition of a whole from a distance, but the subject breaks down into parts as one gets close and you really get it how history disappears into technological bits. Just as meaning changes as one is either close or distant, photographs change meaning as we get further away in time from the original instant. The Van Dyke pieces that came next took that lesson and completed the idea by forcing the viewer to get close to examine the words I began including with that series.

By presenting photographs as collaged, physical objects with notes and text, all the complex pieces contradict the normal photographic ideal of singular form and meaning. Instead, the work is about reconstructing and reinventing the world, sometimes trying to set it right. The pieces build new context for photographs I have already made or occasionally plucked from family history. While the parings may yield multiple narratives, the narratives are not open ended. In the simplest explanation I can think of, they are presented as a more truthful kind of photographic realism than we are used to. Photography usually reinforces what we think we already know about the world. In these pieces I am saying we have learned to comport the singular photographic image to the idea of the real, but the real is much more complex and it is often contradictory and made of many parts.

I have not stopped making the complex, layered work but lately I have wanted to know if a ?bare bones? version could be made to work and I've recently started a series I have called 'True Photographs.' These pieces are presented with both photos and text organized on a grid, which we associate with specificity and clarity. But they purposefully prevent the viewer from arriving at an 'aha!' or a way to 'yes, that makes sense.' I choose from images I have made over the years and spend a lot of time trying different pairings to see what may be implied by a particular pairing. I think of them as 'chronologies' because they each posit that the photographs are indeed related but in, or through, time, rather than in a single moment or similar subject matter or events.

Each of these pieces offers specific and easily understood images, but I change the meaning or rather I cut the photos loose from their first reading, and with the text suggest they are something else, and then when you say 'Okay, let me try that meaning on' I change it again, and in the end, you are unsure what is true.

The 'True Photographs?' bear some resemblance to story boards. If we want to think of them like that, the text does seem to make them like a still film, if there can be such a thing. They give a strangely calming and contemplative feeling. They are specific yet simultaneously mysterious. They let you have an experience which is subtly theatrical. What should be straightforward and clear becomes slippery, however it is never taxing or threatening. Text in each piece suggest the images should be read in the context of something larger, something that evolves, and changes. I let the photographs, each wanting to have their own singular form and significance, exist in that theatrical manner, floating freely such that the viewer's experience is required to complete the piece.