WHEN THINGS GO MISSING
When things go missing, we believe we can’t see them. We perceive absence as lack. We go searching in familiar corners of rooms and worn out stretches of memory. We alert loved ones, we launch search parties, we plan to be better at not forgetting. Yet where are these items during our fretful searches? Could it be that any object or person or feeling is never more present than during agonizing moments of absence? With careful concentration and renewed awareness can we actually translate absence into presence?
The imagery in Joel Whitaker’s exhibition When Things Go Missing (WTGM) suggests that such translation may be possible. He transports the viewer beyond stories and facts reliant on presence. He invites us to places that favor the poetic over the literal, yet also depict the literal and physical spaces that linger beyond, behind and around the poetic. His works are a gentle command to look, an urgent reminder to see the tenuous boundaries among space (territories others delineate), place (locations we inhabit, love, manipulate or overlook) and objects both lost and found (after all, “matter is neither created nor destroyed,” right?).
WTGM: spaces between, is a poignantly disorienting collection of imagery seeming to range in genre and intention. A pile of concrete blocks framed by shrubbery suggests a moment casually encountered and captured. A discarded car door hints at digital manipulation through uncanny color shifts. An eerie, black and white landscape of white-capped, middle-class homes evokes the anywhere/ everywhere of misplaced American dreams. Other imagery displays curious, photographic artifacts in studio. Yet what are these things? How do they relate to the artist’s carefully forged system of objects and its possibly chaotic network of relationships? How do we reconcile images bearing the sheen of alternative photographic processes with the curious placement of archival materials? What does an abandoned trailer have to do with a kitschy, oddly-hung oil painting, or a plastic bunch of grapes have to say to a silent construction dozer? The beauty is that no Grand Narrative exists. There is no heavy hand, no guiding theme, no artful technique that creates an inherent hierarchy between or among these photographs. After all, photographs are often themselves just objects in search of meaning. Our expectations guide our encounters, and Whitaker’s imagery doesn’t deliver what we might expect.
WTGM: in memoriam, is a series that particularly plays with our expectations for either sentiment or significance within traditions of still life or found photography. At first encounter, these colorful oral bouquets cast out to unkempt landscapes of wild suburbia may suggest a contemporary stab at the sublime. They may also mislead the viewer into over-determined conversations on sustainability— discussions that privilege the overt image over the covert experience of its making. The truth is that process was as much at play as product in these photographic meditations on life and loss. After the passing of both of his parents, Whitaker tracked and documented the fates of carefully arranged funeral bouquets as they were carried away from interment sites by the whims of natural forces. Yes, the resulting images may address the temporal nature of existence, but, perhaps more importantly, they remind us to examine the periphery. They urge us to see life and its loss in mundane objects, unforeseen shifts of wind and the gradual movement of an unpredictable planet.
Whitaker’s sub-series WTGM: shovels, transports us back to sturdier territory. This collection of photographs offers up exactly what it promises: multiple views of a common symbol of toil and labor planted, face down, in austere landscapes. The tool seemingly masquerades as a sculpture, an earthwork, a performance artist with an audience of one. Yet don’t go looking for hidden significance. As Whitaker states “ The shovel is our literal connection. Here, there is nothing metaphorical. Just a tool we use to dig a hole.” But let’s not solely rely on the narrator in this case. It’s difficult not to imagine the artist and his implements (camera and shovel) traversing the landscape, surveying the available scenarios, and finally sowing the semiotic seeds that inevitably sprout into metaphors. In the domain of shovels, I boldly assert that we, the viewers, get to grapple with this serial signifier and its potential moments of meaning. Yet no matter how deep we may dig our interpretive holes, the artist’s intention rings calmly and forcefully in our meaning-seeking minds: a shovel is just a tool.
Returning to a more ephemeral space, Whitaker offers the collection WTGM: dirt and air. This is where our ability to see what is missing can finally be honed and put to use. These haunting, low-key black and white images of overlooked nature tamper with traditional notions of the Sublime. The poetry of sticks and leaves and sky is caught through a lens that suggests both the contemporary aesthetics of surveillance and the historical language of pictorial beauty. Certain images even evoke the other-worldly surface of the moon, taking us to fantastical spaces or historic events that Whitaker eschews by reminding us that, in the end, all is just dirt and air.
Yet light is also necessarily at the photographer’s disposal, and light may remain the only necessity “when things go missing.” Somewhere among absence, presence, poetry and fact, Whitaker’s work guides the viewer to uncanny moments of unexpected reflection. Think twice and relax the next time something appears to be lost. It might not be missing. Joel Whitaker reminds us that loss may just be an opportunity to gain a sense of sight.
— Glenna Jennings
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
DEPARTMENT OF ART AND DESIGN UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON