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Events and Exhibits
Emory Visual Arts Gallery
Joel Leivick: In the Garden
October 1-November 20, 2009
Artist's Statement
Exhibition Text by Jason Francisco, Curator
Images from the Exhibition
Spider Web, 2006; archival pigment print
I want a picture to say everything—to be complete in its design and its content. Photography confronts with a given—you don’t invent what you photograph, though it helps to love what you are looking at. While traveling recently in Italy my most significant realization was that the Italian countryside isn’t really all that different from my own backyard—and by extension, my own backyard is not so distinct from the view just out my front door. I found myself liberated from subject matter in a way that I had been imagining for 30 years. There is no real distinction between making and finding in photography; to find outside is already to have found within. Easy to say, I suppose, but difficult to put into practice. My point is that ideas of form must arise from the photographer’s imagination and experience. A photograph’s success depends entirely on my own ability choose the spot where I can allow “the lens to cut like an especially sharp knife into the light and draw out a radiant fact,” as one of my own teachers, Tod Papageorge, once said.
Joel Leivick
Exhibition Text by Jason Francisco, Curator
"We speak of carrying and we speak of being carried, of leading and being led, of seeing and being seen, of that which is beloved and that which loves. In all such cases, is there not a difference that is easy enough to understand? And tell me——aren’t carried things in a state of carrying only because they are carried? And isn’t the same true of what is led and what is seen? A thing, you see, is not seen because it is visible, but conversely, it is visible because it is seen."
—Plato, Euthyphro
Garden Mirror, 2005; archival pigment print
Joel Leivick’s new body of work, In the Garden, contemplates gardens and nature, and the morphology of what it means to know beauty, in pictures made in many locations over more than two decades. While a number of the photographs describe gardens in functional senses——places of purposive cultivation, planted for food and nourishment, rest and ornament——just as many describe untended and half-tended landscapes, and details of sites reclaimed for unconfessed purposes. He offers us views that are, in equal abundances, vast and minute, precise and searching, generous and terse. Often he combines antithetical discoveries in combinations: the wild and the domesticated, the verdant and the bare, the pastoral and the civic, the pacific and the turbulent. In effect, Leivick’s pictures are prompts toward many orders of garden, in varying registers of formation. Highly empirical in approach, each observation is at the same time suffused with a kind of indwelling suggestiveness, as if a small purchase on a wish: that the visible (within and without) will linger and bloom in the mind, will lure and delight in cycles of recognition, and will wither well over time. Each picture proclaims at once a disinterested, resident truth, and a parable told in the form of an encounter——as in the koan-like directive once put to Leivick by his teacher, Tod Papageorge: “the lens should cut like an especially sharp knife into the light and draw out a radiant fact.”
Leivick’s eye is not on paradise——not on the fantasy of a world apart, a purified world, or a world-to-come. Rather his eye is on the slightly (but convincingly) edenic traces already in our midst——a tree whose branches grow only in the direction of the wilderness beyond its fence, a sunspilled yard that yields figs and umbral wonders beside a bedroom window, a relentless scrapyard replete with deliquescent branchings, a pendant bouquet of dried flowers in a thrown-open greenhouse, a school of broken vessels keeping the company of a fungal mirror whose reflectiveness makes the brokenness just a bit more complete, if not repaired. A garden, in Leivick’s conception, is a vast and admissive elegance, a potentiality around us that is ultimately greater and perhaps more tender than what can be made into images. To find a garden, Leivick suggests, is (at its simplest and most urgent) to receive our minds and hearts in the form of a plenitude, much as deep observation is an awareness that comes to dwell within us as a release from the limitations of our own preconceptions. The garden that matters, Leivick shows us, is a name for an experience of beauty with an independence inside of us, not aligned with utopic or sentimental affirmations, but duly visible because well seen.
Jason Francisco
Visual Arts Department, Emory University
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Last updated: October 14, 2009