Catalog Essay: "Get on the Bus"

Exhibition Catalog Essay:
GET ON THE BUS
Gordon Stettinius’s “Naked Pilgrim”
1708 Gallery
April 2007

To look at the photographs in Gordon Stettinius's exhibition "Naked Pilgrim," is to feel as if you have wandered on the back lot of a movie studio. Too-large or too-small replicas of familiar objects slump, recontextualized and wearily out of place. Beside them are vaguely recognizable figures whose often-beautiful expressions suggest bygone days. What he creates for us with these photographs is another kind of film, a haunting and sometimes humorous road trip documentary that leads us to the invisible intersection between agelessness and exhaustion, beauty and grotesqueness, performance and ritual.

Often, it is ritualism and mythology that make “Naked Pilgrim” so arresting. "Wig Store," for example, shows a plywood cutout of a passé, bouffant hairstyle hovering over the door of a non-descript retail building. Its architecture unconsciously recalls Federico Zuccari’s famous late 16th century Roman palazzo portal, a door that resembles the groaning jaws of a grotesque face. If Zuccari's Dante-esque entryway implies visceral transformation and wild Mannerist embellishment, "Wig Store" suggests its opposite. Instead of being consumed by an insatiable satyr, we await our impending arrival in a stark shopping den -- and our entry into the quasi-drugged, hypnogic state in which it is best savored. We metaphorically prepare to enter the empty thoughts of a cartoon woman, whose face has been replaced by a monitor-like glass door. We feel our minds and eyes begin to shut down; meanwhile, the sound of the Muzak grows more distinct.

The color-drenched "Snake Girl" is similarly allusive. The smiling female face atop a snake body reminds us of other snake-women, most notably the one in Masolino's "Temptation of Adam and Eve.” Both share a sort of collage aesthetic, a "spare parts" construction that does not bother to finish seams or blend edges. Stettinius’s photograph also cannily plays with notions of realism inherent in the photographic medium. At first, "Snake Girl" looks as if it might have been created in Photoshop. We conclude that it was not and chuckle at its unsophisticated, state fair setting, which evokes more than anything else a miniature golf course. But just as we compliment our discernment of what is authentic and what is not, we are stopped short. We remember that what we are looking at is not reality either, but a photograph, an expert illusion of the real.

Stettinius possesses the sensitivity to light and form that characterizes the most gifted of photographers. Foamhenge, the now-defunct Natural Bridge, Virginia attraction where tourists could view industrial-foam replicas of Stonehenge, is a quirky and appealing subject in and of itself. In photographing it against a cinematically moody, cloud-washed sky and sparsely sweeping grasses, however, Stettinius adds notes of beauty, sadness, and complexity. In so doing, he takes something that could be all-too-easily interpreted simply as American roadside kitsch and reimagines it as a series of multi-layered, nesting, archetypal landscapes. With similar artistry, "Roma," photographed in the courtyard of a Roman museum, uses an assertive shaft of light to emphasize the mix of textures on a variety of fragmented stone forms, old and new. The colossal, disembodied hand in the center dominates the composition as it appears both to bask in - and be created by - a light that, like the hand itself, seems at once holy and artificial.

Down-at-the-heels roadside attractions are a captivating subject, and one that is very easy to do badly. Their unstylish innocence is too often met with smirking belittlement or superficial discussion. Gordon Stettinius, by contrast, approaches his subjects with compassion and a sharp eye for formal aesthetics. The close proximity and upward-angle of "Reindeer" allows us to see stock holiday figures in a new way, and we are surprised to discover classical equestrian overtones in their erect posture and stoic faces. The poetic juxtaposition of a natural hedge and the stenciled purple palm that adorns an exterior wall of a dingy motel in "Purple Palms" is presented as if the painted frond has sprung surrealistically from the live bushes. The effect is enchanted and visually stirring, as if we have happened upon a gargantuan orchid or Night-blooming Cereus.

In the end, these images offer the search for the sublime in the vernacular as a sort of contemporary pilgrimage, one that requires us to strip ourselves of jaded sophistication and cynicism. Thus, it is a naked pilgrimage, and one of the few we have left. It seems therefore fitting that one of the iconic pictures in "Naked Pilgrim" is "Holy Land USA." In this silvery black-and-white photograph, a broken-looking white bus proclaims its destination in black letters, even as a handmade sign in the windshield reads, "Do not enter." But Gordon Stettinius’s evocative, disquieting, and brutally sincere vistas insistently whisper, "Get on the bus." We do, and our pilgrimage begins. When it ends, we are back where we started, only different: naked, watchful, and reverent.

Rebecca E. Jones
February 2007