Justine Reyes - Where I'm calling from - Krowswork

is pleased to present

Where I'm Calling From
 

featuring videos by Dale Hoyt, Jan Peacock,
Anna Shteynshleyger, and Regina Clarkinia
and photography by Justine Reyes

Reception for the artists, Friday, November 5th, 5-9
exhibition on view October 29th-November 27th

"I won't raise my voice. Not even if she starts something. She'll ask me where I'm calling from, and I'll have to tell her. I won't say anything about New Year's resolutions. There's no way to make a joke out of this."                    -Raymond Carver, "Where I'm Calling From"

"Where I'm calling from" until relatively recently was a static notion; the phone you were using was stationary, and more often than not you were phoning from home to someone else in their home. Now, the cell phone's mobility, and our general mobility as a society, has shifted that reality and the question of where you are calling from becomes more literal, just as it obscures the surety of notions of "home." Each of the video works in this exhibition employs the phone as the potent, elliptical tool that it is and explores its simultaneous relationship to both place and placelessness, home and distance from home. The photography by Reyes makes palpable the honest yearning of place through her revelatory portraits of her mother and uncle in their home and in hotel rooms in various locales from her series "Home, Away From Home."

www.krowswork.com/calling.html

Justine Reyes

Although only one of Reyes's photographs in this exhibition features an actual telephone, her body of work is very much responding to Carver's essential conundrum in the story, whose last lines are cited above: how to answer someone about where you are, when really the question is who you are. For Reyes, it is evident based on her moving portraits of her mother and uncle, that this question goes far beyond the physical. But by photographing her relatives at home and not at home, she provides a visual control group to discern what about the ephemeral nature of a cherished life can be held on to. Reyes lives and works in New York.

Dale Hoyt

In Dale Hoyt's iconic 1981 video Who Shot MM, a friendly yet almost frantic voice makes repeated calls to operators in various Southern states asking for a number in Houston. A pulsing map of Texas visually reminds the viewer of the recurring rebuffs he receives, with each operator plainly stating the state she is answering from as a way of establishing that it is not the connection in Texas he is seeking. Hoyt chose Texas in part because this video was made in the summer of Who Shot J.R.?, the cliffhanger of the TV show "Dallas" that left America waiting for its conclusion in the next season. Hoyt instead used the stand-in initials of MM-for Marshall McLuhan. Perhaps not coincidentally, both this video and Jan Peacock's below were made in 1981, the year before E.T. came out, whose famous line was "E.T. phone home." This video was featured in the important exhibition California Video at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Hoyt lives and works in San Francisco.

Jan Peacock

Jan Peacock's News from the In-Between (Dream Poems of the Irretrievable Past) is also from 1981 and presents an exploratory narrative of home, and attempts to describe what the distance between two places really represents. Using economical visual storytelling, Peacock uses the telephone as a metaphor for place. And place, in turn, represents the silent, passive reception of information--a lost time of necessary listening--information that must be processed in order for come to terms with a true sense of being at home with one's self, even in the in-between that our society demands. Jan Peacock lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Anna Shteynshleyger

Anna Shteynshleyger surreptitiously recorded her divorced parents' conversations over the course of many years. In Conversation she presents a dialogue between them, in which they seem to express their continued affection for one another. Using the ping-pong aspect of telephone conversations to her advantage, emphasizing balance and even-handedness; in this space-a telephone conversation-reality can be synthesized. Shteynshleyger lives and works in Chicago.

Regina Clarkinia

Regina Clarkinia's Hello, Hunter capitalizes on the theatrical, elliptical potential of hearing and seeing one side of a telephone conversation. The second, silent voice is only known to the woman on the phone. Clarkinia is mixing the phone with video to provide a one-woman video-play that is comic, subtle, and moving. Clarkinia, in some way, provides the answer to the impasse that the other videos suggest; her way is simple and known to children everywhere: imagination is the key to always being home. Clarkinia lives and works in Oakland.

480 23rd Street - side entrance
Oakland, CA 94612
www.krowswork.com
jasmine@krowswork.com
510-229-7035