Artist Roulette #3 - Josh Sinn, Nathanael Read, Stefan Klamt
Today’s installment of Artist Roulette includes Josh Sinn, Nathanael Reed and Stefan Klamt. These folks all make quite different work from each other, and one of whom I’ve been familiar with the work of for a handful of years now.
Josh Sinn
https://joshsinn.com/
BIO: Josh Sinn is a Maryland-based photographer and educator who received his BFA in Photography at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is currently a candidate at the University of Hartford’s Limited Residency Photo MFA program.
It must be said that Josh’s instagram handle is a marvel - cadillacranchdressing. What a fantastic username to snag.
We’ll be looking at Josh’s in-progress MFA work for Hartford. This work centers around his relationship with Baltimore, MD with a very personal perspective to build a portrait of the city as he has come to know it.
After Josh’s family moved to MD, his mother passed away from cancer, leaving him and his father to find their place in the area. Josh had begun to take photos of his friends in the city, leading him to creating this body of work.
The photos are an intimate look at this city that’s often misunderstood. I can attest that my friends who have spent time in Baltimore do thoroughly enjoy the city despite its flaws (but isn’t that every city?). The focus in many of these photos is the people in them, creating compositions that flow into each other. They’re introspective while not too telling, they allow the viewer enough information to piece together a narrative that even if that narrative isn’t about Baltimore, there is enough to see this is a project about relationships with people and a city. When I look at these, it reminds me about my relationship with Chicago, even having never lived there, the intimacy and love for a city can be felt even when not a resident (I mean, I went to Chicago two or three times a month before moving East).
Josh will be exhibiting his MFA work at Hartford in August this year. Keep an eye out for when they officially announce the shows dates and see how this work has progressed.
Nathanael Read
http://nathanaelread.net/
BIO: Nathanael Read is a printmaker, quilter, collage artist, and animator originally from Salt Lake City, UT. He received his BFA from the University of Utah and received his MFA from the University of Connecticut. His work has been exhibited at Finch Lane Gallery, Springville Museum of Art in Utah, South Cobb Art Alliance in Georgia, the Hartnett Museum at the University of Richmond in Virginia, The Wurks in Rhode Island, the Mattatuck Museum, the Dye & Bleach House Community Gallery, and the William Benton Museum of Art in Connecticut.
I’ll be looking at multiple pieces from Nathanael’s recent work. His statement focuses on his interests in westward expansion, the symbol and myth of the gunfighter and their “ability to take control of life to solve my problems and society’s ills by sheer force of will.” His work explores these themes with patterns, symbols and sometimes comedic representations of symbols from the American West.
I find myself most interested in Nathanael’s etchings, the drawing-like aesthetic that this process allows. The textures offered in his work bring to mind the dryness of the West, especially seen in the Colorado River Compact pieces. The show change, things out of our control in this representation of one of the most significant bodies of water in the country.
In his textile works, he often works in grids, piecing together fabrics, cyanotypes and screenprints to make the larger whole. his “Destruction Quilt” includes domestic patterns, images of gunfighters , texts and American symbolism. It’s an almost too-cozy look at the American West.
I’ve always loved textile works, especially those that utilize patterns and grids in the way Nathanael does. The motifs of the gunfighter, jackalope and American symbolism among these domestic substrates is fascinating to me and keeps me interested in the work.
Stefan Klamt
https://stefanklamt.com/
BIO (Abridged, full bio on his site): Stefan Klamt was born in 1974 and lives in Hamburg, Germany. In his visually clear pictures he explores his personal environment after these very changes and shows, sometimes only recognisable at second glance, the signals of a world in upheaval.
I’ve known of Stefan’s work for a while, I think the first time I saw his work was in my own curated zine Nothing is Interesting and Everything is Normal in 2019, a zine that looked at mundane photography as matter-of-fact, unapologetic normalcy.
For today, I looked at his series Sylt, about the northernmost island of Germany. The island is close enough to the mainland to be somewhat accessible, but also far enough out into the North Sea where erosion and land loss is a great concern, Stefan’s work on this island highlights this changing landscape, creating a vast view of a small island.
Many of these photos are wide shots, which when looking at Stefan’s other works, its a bit uncommon. Stefan has often gone for mid and close-up shots of his subjects but the wide views of Sylt make this work stand out more in his portfolio. For a fairly small island, these images create a vast portrait of this changing landscape.
There is an amount of traditional mindset in some of these photographs, utilizing very clean composition and attention to light. In a work like this that is so focused on the land, I feel that is one of the best things to do, call to mind photo history with a contemporary eye. Some of these photographs remind me of Cape Cod, with vast expanses of dunes and sea grass, but northern Germany being a much different climate to the bay of Cape Cod, it’s going to have some stark differences (also being on a different continent, but I’m not a geologist or meteorologist, so that side of things I’m less knowledgeable about. I just take pictures).
The work feels to be much like that zine I put together — very matter-of-fact in what this landscape is presently. Stefan finished this work in 2020 and has since continued with his focus on mundane scenery in Germany where he focuses on “the poetry of the everyday.”
Thanks for reading, I hope you all find some art that you enjoy through these. Things are getting busy over here with plenty of new work being made that I hope to share soon. See you in the next one.