The IU School of Art + Design began its spring lecture series with the work of a photographer who deals with traditional themes in an unconventional way.
Elijah Gowin, son of photographer Emmet Gowin, lectured a full hall of students and faculty Friday in the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts. The artist spoke about his work and the progress he has made as a photographer since he first began photographing.
“I definitely wanted to talk about the title of the talk, ‘Faith, Doubt, and Photographs,’ and I certainly I wanted to talk about my own faith and doubt spiritually and how spiritualism comes within my artwork but also about the doubt and the faith we put within photography,” Gowin said.
Gowin’s work deals in part with landscapes, how he builds them through his photographs and plays with the landscape through his own artistic perspective.
During the lecture, Gowin displayed some of his photographs, some of which played with vibrant blue hues and fireflies and others with cut-and-pasted figures from old photographs, repurposed and placed into scenes.
“Often when we think of landscape as synonymous with nature, people are outside of the equation,” Gowin said. “But in J.B. Jackson’s ‘Discovering the Vernacular Landscape,’ he says ‘landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land.’”
As a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, Gowin said the above passage was always on his mind when he was constructing his own landscapes within photographs.
As part of one of his series, Gowin repurposed photos of baptisms happening in large bodies of water and later people jumping and superimposed the figures on new scenes.
“The colors are all kind of wonky, and they have sort of this dreamlike color,” Gowin said. “How I started to work, giving voice to all the digital tools available, is I would take a snapshot like this and eliminate what I wanted to, add what I wanted to and come up with this dream color.”
Gowin said he will soon travel with his father to Malaysia to continue a series of photographs of fireflies, which are slowly disappearing as a species.
Gowin started photographing for “The Last Firefly” around his home this summer, with snapshots of his children that include fireflies as well as larger portraits of the flies.
“It has some of the ideas of landscape and ritual and family that I’ve had before, but it adds a little bit of science,” Gowin said.
Fellow artist and IU photography professor Osamu James Nakagawa said he was impressed with the turnout on Inauguration Day.
“I know today is a very important day for the United States, so thank you for skipping that and coming over,” Nakagawa said.
Gowin has work represented at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography and many others. He has also won awards such as the 2008 John S. Guggenheim Fellowship.
Nakagawa, also a friend of Gowin’s, said he has done collaborative shows with Gowin before and he, Elijah and Emmet Gowan, and Nakagawa’s uncle will be opening a group show in the Grunwald Gallery this fall.
“He’s going to be back in October, and I’m going to bring some family from Tokyo, too, so it’s going to be like one big family party,” Nakagawa said.
