Robert STIVERS: Remembered Reveries

Robert Stivers

Remembered Reveries January 14–February 27, 2021 MODERNISM Inc. | San Francisco

Legs and Curtain, 2020, unique gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 inches Cover: Detail of Portrait of Na, 2019, unique archival pigment print with encaustic, 24 x 20 inches

Robert Stivers Remembered Reveries

January 14–February 27, 2021

MODERNISM Inc. | 724 Ellis Street | San Francisco, CA 94109

Dancer in Repose, 2017, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches

Remembered Reveries

A picture must not be devised but perceived. Shut your corporeal eye, so that you see first your picture with your spiritual eye. Then bring to light that which you saw in darkness, that it may reflect on others from the outside to the inside.

—Caspar David Friedrich

For Robert Stivers, the subject that he chooses to photograph is only the beginning of his creative journey. The choices of pose, scale, viewpoint, tonality, and focus, followed by his labored darkroom manipulation of the image, are as extensive as if he were painting on a blank canvas to achieve his ends. The observable world before his lens are thus transformed into Stivers’s personal figments of his imagination.

Unlike painters and sculptors whose works exhibit a recognizable style, photographs often do not immediately signal their creators. However, it is uncanny how images by great photographers like Irving Penn and Richard Avedon can immediately be differentiated. Their photographs have a recognizable “signature” of style. So it is with Robert Stivers. His unique and very personal photographic vision is unmistakable and a tribute to his originality.

On seeing Stivers’s photographs, it might not come as a surprise that his earlier artistic career was as a professional dancer. The human figure is the predominant focus of his lens. Being aware from experience of the physical possibilities and limitations of the human body, Stivers challenges his models into a dizzying array of poses from sublime gracefulness to dramatic and alarming contortions. He is also keenly aware of the creative possibilities of isolating his camera on eyes, hands and feet for dramatic effect.

Lips, 2020, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches Right: Profile of Rose (with distress), archival pigment print, edition: 15 image: 24 x 20 inches / sheet: 30 x 24 inches

Beyond the human form, Stivers is apt to focus his attention on anything that captures his imagination from clouds, waves, typewriter keys, or even a hive of bees. What is always present, however, is Stivers’s concentration on the subject at hand without superfluous detail or a cluttering of distracting details. The singularity of subject allows the viewer a clarity of contemplation.

Through skillful manipulation of the image and use of subtle tonal hues from rich bronze to cool silver to deep charcoal, Stivers creates a prevailing atmosphere of drama in his work. In a few, he even appears to scratch or abrade the surface as if it has been printed from some ancient and discarded negative after decades of neglect.

The reaction to his photographs draws a wide range of observations. Some see parallels to 19th cen-

Clouds, 2007, archival pigment print, AP, 24 x 20 inches Right: Woman in Water #1 (after Delaroche), 2001 archival pigment print, edition: 15, 20 x 24 inches

tury Symbolist painting, others to Cinema Noir of the 1940s, while still others to European New Wave films of the 1960s. Stivers is unafraid to look to the old masters for inspiration. An observant eye will notice that several of his photographs are based on passages of paintings and drawings by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Paul Delaroche, Georges Seurat, and John Singer Sargent. Romantic overtures in his work is the prevailing tendency, yet a few find an air of dread and foreboding in the shadowy moodiness of his compositions.

After Sargent, 2017, unique gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 inches Right: Hand, next to body, 2019, unique gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 inches

Stivers’s atmospherically layered imagery triggers half remembered flashes of memory. Charles Fisher observed, “Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.” Robert Stivers creates moody dreamscapes that refrain from the factual nature of photography but instead, present visual doors that open up to our unconscious.

Robert Flynn Johnson Curator Emeritus Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco January 2021

Palm Trees, 2019-2020, unique gelatin silver prints, 24 x 20 inches each

After Ingres, 2000, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 20 x 24 inches

Portrait of NYW, 2015, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches

Clouds - Balloon, 2015, unique gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 inches

Palm, 2019, unique gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 inches

Road Shot (Salton Sea), 2020, archival pigment print, edition: 15 image: 23 3/4 x 19 3/4 / sheet: 26 1/4 x 22 1/4 inches

Hands with graphic, 2020, archival pigment print, edition: 15 image: 21 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches / sheet: 23 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches

Eyes, 2020, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches

Dancer (llb), 2017, unique gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 inches

Portrait of YW, variant with eye, 2018, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches

Tent, 2019, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches

Bees, 2005, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches

Ocean, 2007, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches

Portrait of Dancer/Ballerina, 2011, unique gelatin siler print, 24 x 20 inches

Portrait of H, c. 2005/2020, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches

Portrait of N, 2012, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches

Portrait of M, variant, 2013, archival pigment print, edition: 15, 24 x 20 inches

Nude on Bed, c. 2007/2019, unique gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 inches

Dancer XIV, 2006, archival pigment print, AP, 20 x 24 inches

Portrait of L (hands on face), 2020, unique archival pigment print with encaustic, 24 x 20 inches

Portrait of Na, 2019, unique archival pigment print with encaustic, 24 x 20 inches

Man on Beach, 2018, unique gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 inches

Lauren, 2014, type C digital print (fuji crystal archive); AP, 24 x 20 inches