Blinking & Tapestries

blinking & Tapestries

P h o t o g r a p h s, S k e t c h e s & La b o r i o u s T h i n g s b y L i n h Ly

Sketches: Unfinished Tapestries for small and grand architectures

Snowy Scandals

Walking Cloud

An initial look at the Tapestry series by Calgary based artist Linh Ly, one might think of an attempt to expand the limits of a medium by bringing in the characteristics of another. For example, Frank Stella’s work circa 1985 could be described as “sculptural paintings” in that they include compositional elements that project into physical space. Another example is the assertion that recent photography acts as a painting, specifically in the case of certain large format works that emphasize color and composition, creating “painterly effects”. Linh Ly’s tapestries are physical objects made up of stitched together photos with a discerning sense of color. Nonetheless, I’ll avoid trying to coin the term for a new photo-sculptural category of artwork or getting into discussing how an artwork adheres to or strays from its medium’s specificity, because (re)defining formal boundaries is not the work’s raison-d’etre. Like many of her contemporaries, Ly flows naturally through these boundaries to cull and combine formal qualities from a variety of media. It is no surprise that our involvement with the work as “formal hybrid” dissipates not long after the initial encounter, as we focus on looking on a unique but seamless whole.

To elucidate some of the underpinning ideas, it is useful to back-track to a body of photography that came before blinking and Tapestries. I first became familiar with Linh Ly’s work through her project entitled The Spaces Between Us. For this project, Ly documented a variety of Canadian cities: Halifax, Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary.

Instead of photographing typical subject matter such as landmarks, iconic places that might clue us in on where we/she might be, Ly focused on spaces in between. The photos of alleyways, side-streets, cropped houses, and construction sites were familiar without ever being rooted in the identity of a place. This point of view is effective in conveying a metaphor for belonging, but The Spaces Between Us cannot be left at that (especially in light of her recent production). A constant for Spaces, either in book form or in a gallery showing, is that the photos never existed alone.

Within the framework of a series, the photos take us along an idling path of indeterminacy coming across brief instances of recognition, yet never sure if we should say hi. The project becomes a way of indexing a series of moments in the author’s day perhaps.

For this blinking and Tapestries catalogue format, Ly gives us the opportunity to deconstruct her method of working by including photos, the elements that make up the tapestry individually. As in Spaces, the photographs convey the sense of a flaneur with her nomadic gaze. The main distinction between the two projects, is the artist no longer limits herself to specific places. She moves from Vietnamese restaurants to images from a trip to New York, to landscapes throughout the seasons. Viewing the photographs together in a catalogue, we can read them as a reflection of the manifold visual narratives that make up her experiences. Ly’s approach to subject matter and interest in the series is somewhat reminiscent of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, whose diverse “snapshot style” photos are rarely shown individually. The groupings engage us in a sophisticated polyphonic world.

We are asked see many disconnected subjects and places in a cluster with no attempt to make the parts disappear. As Tillmans does, Ly takes up this allembracing relationship towards what she shoots, nothing is systematically excluded in order to suit a specific statement. In fact, Ly’s statement might be better formulated as a question: can subjectivity surface out of the flood of images and genuine visual complexity we are mixed up in everyday? The answer lies with the artist ability to make her subjectivity the focal point. It would seem that is why term “snapshot” is appropriate. The expression comes from the idea of an everyday context. It implies quick glances, fleeting moments and a personal or point of view.

The latter element can be a photo’s main quality and, when present in each photo, is the constant that can harmonize the most eclectic body of work.

A further way to shed light on Ly’s approach could be through a quote by David Markson, a contemporary experimental fiction writer who created in his novel Vanishing Point by stringing together his shoeboxes filled with collected notecards, each inscribed with his thoughts, famous quotes, notable facts. Markson writes about his process: “how can I tell what I think until I see what I say?” Within this quote there is the implication that our inner thoughts exist outside of ourselves and they are arrived at through a process of recognition. This way of understanding process is echoed in Ly’s visual world where her compositions seem to have been encountered and recognized rather than pre-planned.

Ly distinguishes herself from other photographers though, by committing an extra stage before the completion of the work. As in David Markson’s novel, the collected pieces are recomposed in relation to each other and assembled within a new whole therefore creating new layers of meaning. Likewise in Ly’s tapestries, there are both non-incidental and accidental relationships between the snapshots presented.

Because the photos are physically hand-stitched together, a repetitive meticulous and time-consuming process, in so doing, the viewer is encouraged to think about the artist’s hand and the implication conscious labor.

In blinking and Tapestries, Linh Ly’s evocative and unique use of photography opens up a wealth of readings for viewers. The work is firmly rooted in her contemporary sensibility.

David Ross

Wish Mountain

She pr Minute of pos explor differe the cre I have tapest The Wisdom of the Many: The Photo Tapestries of Linh Ly Linh Ly walks through a field. All around she sees dead tall grass flattened by the snow that vanished with the last chinook. Brown and broken leaves blown from the now barren trees to the left and behind her crunch with each step she makes. When she looks up she takes in a vast clear blue winter sky with only a few cirrus clouds scraping the western horizon. Hydro lines cut across her vision as she enters a sandy gully. To her right, a couple are walking their dog. When it sees her, it runs over, sniffs, and then turns back to its masters.

Can one encapsulate this experience within a single image, in a “decisive moment�? Or is each experience composed of hundreds of fragments strung together? Ly grapples with this dilemma in her vast photo tapestry work Wish Mountain. It is composed of more than a thousand separate photographic images.

She weaves them onto a large canvas sheet that covers an entire wall. I stand before the final composition and it fills my field of vision with fragments, threads of a single larger visual experience.

Ly's tapestries emerge out of this exploration with the physical and fragmentary, as well as from the memory of standing in front of an Arabic tapestry in a museum years before. The tapestry was over a hundred feet long and couldn't be taken in at a single glance. She had to explore it from within. Her eyes traveled from one section to the next, from one thread to another.

Ly's early tapestries are based on encounters with landscapes. Wish Mountain has the most conventional composition: photos of blue sky, punctuated by thin clouds and hydro lines, are placed above those of the brown, winter ground of dead grass, leaves and dirt. But unlike David Hockney's photo collages of the 1980s, it does not embrace a cubist description of space. Ly is moving through the landscape, not focusing on a single area from different angles and distances. Hockney looks back to the paintings of Cezanne and Picasso for his inspiration. Ly uses photography to explore the more contemporary experience of film and video.

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She produced a number of short videos while working on the photo tapestries. In three Twenty Minute Videos, Ly investigates similar themes concerning the exploration of space and the variety of possible viewpoints. She uses the sequencing of images in both the videos and tapestries to explore pattern, rhythm, and flow within the visual experience. However, there is a significant difference when I view the videos and the tapestries. When I look at a moving image in film or video the creator controls the sequencing and duration of those images. When I look at still photographs I have an opportunity, as the viewer, to control the order and duration of my gaze. I see in Ly's photo tapestries all the frames of a film spread before me at once.

If I were to examine the contact sheets of any photographer from the twentieth century, they would confirm that more than a single shot of an experience was often taken. However, in the past, a process of selection occurred before a final image was chosen from the variations. The rest were rarely printed. The rise of digital cameras over the last decade has radically affected how photographic art is created. Each image is less expensive to capture and is, therefore, less precious. This has opened a floodgate of image accumulation.

A new language of photographic representation is emerging: it combines a move away from Henri Cartier-Bresson's “decisive moment� with the embracing of many viewpoints within each work. Ly's tapestries are part of this zeitgeist. No single image in her compositions stands for the others. Each is combined with the next to create a whole that acknowledges the multifaceted that is, filmic experience of moving through space.

In a more recent tapestry, Schelling Points, Ly is in New York City. She walks into the vast hall of Grand Central Station. It glows autumnal as the crowds twist and swirl around her. Later, on a subway platform, breakdancers perform to the beat of a boom-box rap. Finally, she wanders through Central Park, exploring Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installation project The Gates. Saffron sheets flutter and wave like fiery tendrils over the snow-covered ground and through the dark winter-dead trees.

Ly was reading James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds while constructing Schelling Points. In his book Surowiecki asserts that the many are smarter than the few. Can this notion about the power of democratic choice be applied to photography? I believe this is what Ly is exploring in her photo tapestries. Moving away from the select photograph that represents the others and encompassing all the images, she seeks a new order: one that is inclusive, not exclusive.

David Donald

Schelling Points

Seeing Between the Image What is photography? To describe the action of photography, one speaks in terms of “capturing” an image and “shooting” a picture verbs that seem predatory and aggressive. Yet, is photography like hunting? Like killing? Is that 19th century saying true? That whatever art touches, dies? By freezing time, stopping it, does photography kill the thing it is describing? Jean Baudrillard suggests that the photograph signals loss because “the moment of the photograph, which is immediately past and gone, irreversible and hence always nostalgic.” (1) How then can photography truly capture our experience of the world?

Photography has often been described by two approaches: archival photography and picture-making.

The former is more direct, operating as visual evidence of an object or an experience. The latter is a more artistic endeavour, often borrowing from the conventions of painting. Somewhere in between these two approaches is the more instinctual “snapshot aesthetic.” In this case, the composition of the photograph is based on Henri Cartier-Bresson's “the decisive moment” introduced in the 50's. Responding as it does to the indeterminacy of the everyday world, it seems a more candid reportage of the human condition and therefore, more authentic.

For Ly, the snapshot is her way of “truthfully” responding to the world, to convey its anthropology, its social and spatial dimensions. Yet, it is apparent that Ly believes that as a photographer, she cannot describe anything outside of photography. Truth and meaning is elusive. Rather, she uses photography “to reaffirm this active act of 'looking' both by serializing the images and by giving each image the attention of labour.” With this approach, Ly becomes both observer and subject, straddling between the image and the act of looking as subject. Instead of merely confirming the external world, Ly attempts to understand how we see it.

In 2004, David Hockney declared that photography is a dying art because digital manipulation is increasingly pushing it closer to drawing and painting. He suggests that the digitally enhanced photograph as a final product is far removed from the original source image. According to Hockney: “You've no need to believe a photograph made after a certain date because it won't be made the way Cartier-Bresson made his. We know he didn't crop them - he was the master of truthful photography.”(2) So what do we make of Ly's recent work, which embraces the street photographer's approach but which, in the end product is comprised of digital c-prints, arranged and hand-sewn onto canvas like a tapestry?

Ly refers to her process as a “hybridized photographic language.” She uses photographs as “raw materials” and likens the process to painting. As a result, the final image is both whole and fragment. It is almost like pointillism in reverse; the closer we are the easier it is to see the images and when we back away, we see a matrix of dots. But even as we get close, we find that the photographs are folded in half and thus the images are partially concealed. Evidently, it is not important to see the whole image; rather, it is important to notice them as fragments, as connections to an image.

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The title of this series, blinking and Tapestries, asserts an inability to absorb all of the visual data before us and that our experiences consist of fragments we have “stitched” together in our minds. According to a recent study by University of London researchers, blinking temporarily blocks brain activity so that “[d]uring a blink, there is no visual input and no light, but we do not consciously recognise ever ything has momentarily gone dark.” (3) This explains why people do not notice that they are blinking and that our view of the world seems continuous. By using photography in this way, Ly exposes the way we actually “see” the world and undermines previous accounts of truthful photography.

By employing a grid, Ly has created an arbitrar y system that the images belong to, further distancing us from truthfulness. Perhaps, suggesting that we impose signification, form and reality onto the photographs. Yet, the sequence she applies is spontaneous and creates an overall abstract pattern that refuses representational form. In this way, Ly resists imposing meaning. While all of the composite images are similar in subject matter, the typology they represent in each tapestry appears unable to confirm anything factual or relational.

Made up of thousands of photographs, these tapestries only verify a sense of labour and time the time it takes to photograph the thousands of pictures of one subject, the time to arrange them onto canvas, to sew, the time it takes to view them the time it seems to document the ever ythingness of the world. Time is further conceptualized by serializing the images as though it were a film projection, showing us a succession of images all at once. Unlike an event which has already transpired and is gone, the scene unfolds before our ver y eyes.

I am reminded of an inter view I read with Henri Cartier-Bresson by art critic Michael Kimmelman as they explored the Louvre.

Cartier-Bresson spends an hour looking at just one painting, The Ray by Jean-Baptiste Chardin, going over the details, the composition, the narrative, the geometr y but not as a way of understanding the painting but rather so that he may “feel” the painting. (4) This is ironic, coming from someone who is famous for the instantaneity of his photographs. Similarly, Ly's time commitment seems connected to a more emotional attachment to her experience of the world, a “labour of love.”

To feel the work is both emotional and physical. The tapestries seem tactile, visceral; you want to reach out and touch them, play with them, unfurl them to reveal the undersides. The sense of touch makes the visual experience tangible and demonstrates the various ways in which we see or do not see. blinking and Tapestries suggests that photography cannot truthfully capture our ever yday world but by showing us the world as fragments, it can help us understand how we construct and interpret it. Here, the photograph signals not the loss of the moment but the retrieval of the moments in between.

Quyen Hoang

1. Jean Baudrillard, “Photography, or Light-Writing: Literalness of the Image,” in Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner (Lo

ndon: Verso, 2001), 140.

2.Jonathan Jones and Gerard Seenan, “The Death of Photography,” The Guardian, 4 March 2004. This article can be read at

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1161535,00.html>

3. “Blink and you really do 'miss it',” BBC News, 25 July 2005. This article can be read at

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4714067.stm>

4. Michael Kimmelman, Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere (New York: The Mod

ern Librar y, 1999), p.139-140.

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CONTRIBUTORS: DAVID DONALD is a photo-based artist living in Toronto.

QUYEN HOANG is Art Curator at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. She holds a BA in History, a BFA in Painting and an MFA in Art History.

DAVID ROSS is an artist and curator living in Kelowna, BC. He graduated

with an MFA from the Chicago Institute.

LINH LY makes photographs and lives in Calgary. blinking & Tapestries is her second book project. Other works may be viewed on her website: www.thehomeopage.com/linhly Many thanks to Brent Watson, Quyen Hoang, David Donald, David Ross and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for their kind support this year.

LINH LY BLINKING & TAPESTRIES PHOTOGRAPHY & DESIGN: Linh Ly PRINTING: McAra ISBN 0-9733074-1-2 Copyright 2006 Linh Ly photography