Julie Blackmon’s Stock Tank, 2012, archival pigment print. Image courtesy of G. Gibson Gallery.
Contemporary photographer Julie Blackmon invokes the domestic disarray of a seventeenth-century Dutch genre painter in her current Seattle exhibition Undertow – New Photographs. Littered with household objects and often showing the everyday dramas of children, Blackmon’s photographs are indeed worthy successors to Jan Steen’s paintings. Yet they are much more than moralizing tales. The photos both capture and reimagine Blackmon’s Missouri family life and the lives of her sisters and their children. Real life and fantasy converge and comingle here in absorbing, unsettling ways.
Julie Blackmon’s Hair, 2013, archival pigment print. Image courtesy of G. Gibson Gallery.
Beyond Steen, I see other quotations from the history of art. There’s surrealist Giorgio de Chirico’s running girl from his 1914 Mystery and Melancholy of a Street echoed in Blackmon’s 2012 Homegrown Food. And are those the fabulous flaxen locks of Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith making an appearance in Blackmon’s Hair?
The strangeness, stillness, and citations of Blackmon’s painterly photos will pull you right in.
Undertow is up at the G. Gibson Gallery through July 13.