Jim Haynes: Disaster and its Opposite
Jim Haynes : Disaster and its Opposite
Electric Works • 130 8th Street • San Francisco, California
January 13 – Feburary 17
Opening January 13, 6 – 8 pm
Artist Reception: Friday, January 13, 6-8 PM
Electric Works is pleased to welcome back visual and sound artist Jim Haynes to the Project Space. Haynes creates almost-abstract images via a unique photographic and rust process. The resulting images feel like half-remembered dreams of the American landscape. Haynes is also branching out in new directions with this show: color photography is making its first appearance in his work at the gallery. This body of work not only contrasts nicely with the almost-black and white nature of his earlier work, but also reveals Haynes as a sensitive and subtle creator of photographic images, no matter the medium.
Jim Haynes lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Exploratorium (San Francisco), Westspace (Melbourne, Australia), Diapason (New York), Jack Straw Productions (Seattle), Works (San Jose), Eyedrum (Atlanta), The Fugitive Art Center (Nashville), and Varnish (San Francisco). He writes about sound art, noise culture, minimalism, and general music experimentation for The Wire, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Metro Pulse, The Sound Projector, and Chunklet.
For Disaster and its Opposite, Jim Haynes pushes the photographic content toward two opposing extremes, with corroded photographs on one trajectory and richly hued color photography on the other. Haynes has worked with chemically distressed photography for close to twenty years, investigating the boundaries between the man-made and the natural. In this body of work, the content of the corroded photographs is specifically of sites of disaster and destruction, including several arson and demolition sites. It should be noted that the images from aftermath of the Merapi Volcano explosion from 2010 were taken by Matt Shoemaker and used with permission. The color photographs represent an abstracted opposite of the crumbled architecture of the corroded black & white images. The vibrant blues, reds, and greens of these color field images were augmented through optical printing errors and the unpredictability of a plastic lens camera. All of the visual elements are in turn augmented by a subtle sound design from modified shortwave radio reception and crackled noise through aestheticized but decidedly lo-fidelity speaker constructions.
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Tags: Chunklet, Disaster and its Opposite, Electric Works, Exploratorium, Eyedrum, Fugitive Art Center, Jack Straw Productions, Jim Haynes, San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF MoMA, Sound Projector, The Wire, Westspace