I've always been wary of throwing away old photographs. There's something distinctly unsettling, even blasphemous, about casting off those images, as if by doing so I'll erase the past. Fortunately, Lisa Kokin is not as superstitious as I am. The Richmond-based artist, best known for her inventive artist's books and booklike pieces, is drawn to the discarded photo albums and aged, sepia-toned photographs that fill flea markets and garage sales. In "Relative Obscurity," her new exhibit at the Catharine Clark Gallery, Kokin recycles found snapshots from the 1940s through the 1960s, remaking them into thought-provoking sculptures that vary in size from miniature collages to massive installations. "I am intrigued with other people's photographic recording of their lives," she explains to Maria Porges in an essay in the show's catalog. "It should be illegal to own them, yet since they are up for sale, it might as well be me who buys them."
Lisa Kokin's idea of unity in Trophy is held together by nothing
more than a few strands of string -- and her uncompromising vision.
Details
Catharine Clark Gallery, 49 Geary (at
Kearny), Second Floor, S.F.
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In her latest work, Kokin constructs new narratives from the old photos, cutting, sewing, and patching together disparate images, in some ways returning to them a history (if a false one) that time had taken away. "Veiled in the relative obscurity conferred by uniforms and period hairstyles, the function and meaning of these images can be lost over time," Porges writes. As with Kokin's previous and ongoing projects, in which she juxtaposed text and phrases from incongruous sources -- Fortune magazines, sex manuals, religious volumes -- in this series she creates pieces that reflect her ideas. Steve Woodall, education director at the San Francisco Center for the Book and curator of shows that have included Kokin's work, describes her as a "relentless scavenger who takes the most common objects and [unifies them] with a transformative vision." It's not enough, Woodall says, simply to piece together random material; Kokin is also a masterful storyteller whose talent lies in her "penetrating X-ray vision that finds something to say in an original way."
No matter the form Kokin's art takes, the common thread is her distinctly humorous point of view -- one that is not devoid of opinion. Her handcrafted narratives poke fun at serious themes like gender, religion, identity, and sexuality. In 1963, Kokin has sewn pictures of African-American students together using black string, leaving strands dangling like tufts of hair. According to Porges, the fringe "allude[s] to things left undone (loose ends) or perhaps, to things unravelling, being taken apart." Trophy links cut-out images of individuals in a circle like so many paper dolls. In Best Wishes, an extensive, weblike wall piece made of stuffed photos stitched together, Kokin creates a fresh network of people, making a community out of strangers. Nathan Larramendy, Catharine Clark Gallery's assistant director, says Kokin's work is especially timely because it reflects "how we are all interconnected and all the same even though our identity may be different." Kokin, it seems, has us all sewn up.
