Reunion
New Works by Gallery Artists

Phil Nesmith
My Baghdad: Photographs

January 12 – February 17, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 12, 6-8PM

Projection screening of Paul D. Miller’s New York is Now : Saturday, January 26, 4-6PM

Reunion
New Works by Gallery Artists

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to present Reunion, a group exhibition of new works by gallery artists to introduce the 2008 season. Artists include Teo González, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Lori Esposito, Melissa Ichiuji, Akemi Maegawa, Joseph McSpadden, Ryan Pierce, Izel Vargas, and Oliver Vernon. Opening reception: Saturday, January 12, 6-8PM.

The gallery will present a projection screening of Paul D. Miller’s New York is Now on Saturday, January 26, 4-6PM; the video will also be presented continuously throughout the exhibition on a flat panel monitor.

Ryan Pierce, Taiga Feast, 2007, acrylic on canvas (detail)	Melissa Ichiuiji, Tutu Girl, 2007, fabric, nylon, hair, mixed materials	Joseph McSpadden, Winterlick, 2007, oil and medium on canvas (detail)
Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Film still from New York is Now, 2007, C-print	Akemi Maegawa, Soldiers, 2007, toy soldiers, felt, stitching (detail)	Oliver Vernon, Lift, 2007, ink and acrylic on linen (detail)

Phil Nesmith
My Baghdad: Photographs

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Phil Nesmith’s first solo exhibition, My Baghdad, a series of photographs shot in Baghdad and produced on glass plates using a dry plate ambrotype process. A set of editioned C-print enlargements from the glass plates will accompany the unique images in the exhibition. Opening reception with the artist, Saturday, January 12, 6-8PM.

Contemporary photographers have frequently recovered earlier photographic processes to reinterpret image making and familiar genres of photography. Chuck Close’s daguerreotype portraits, Sally Mann’s wet plate collodion images, and Adam Fuss’s combined daguerreotype and photogram images have become part of the visual language of photography today.

Photographic images made with daguerreotype and other glass plate photographic processes are inextricably connected to American Civil War photographs and to the look and feel of these images in our cultural memory. For his series of photographs shot in Iraq, Phil Nesmith has recovered the dryplate ambrotype, an earlier process also used during the Civil War, which is made through a positive exposure on a hand-poured silver emulsion on glass plates. His black glass ambrotypes provide a compelling new context for representing photographs taken in Baghdad during the current war in Iraq. Phil Nesmith's new series of images are at once haunting, personal, and reflect back on our cultural memory of images in wartime.

About the Artist
Phil Nesmith studied photography at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography, and now lives and works in Washington, DC. His portfolio of images from Iraq was selected for Camera Arts, Nov-Dec., 2007 (view in pdf).

Phil Nesmith, Baghdad Ghost (Wedding Dress), 2007, dryplate ambrotype (sandarac varnished silver emulsion on black glass).	Phil Nesmith, Soldier, 2007, dryplate ambrotype (sandarac varnished silver emulsion on black glass).

Phil Nesmith
Artist’s Statement for My Baghdad

In 2003, soon after the fall of Baghdad, I began a year long stint in Iraq. The novelty of the experience wore off soon after arrival, and my days in Baghdad seemed to repeat themselves, like a film looped to play continuously, returning to the start the moment after it ends. The repetition created routine, the routine normalizing what would otherwise be extraordinary.

This normative process was one that I was both aware of and oblivious to, and was one that I realized was itself a repetition of what my father had gone through as a soldier in Vietnam. I started to become conscious that the daily existence of the soldiers around me, while surrounded by different, new technologies and capabilities, still maintained a surprising similarity to the life of soldiers on the battlefield in Vietnam or anywhere, going back centuries. The routine of life in a war zone this week would be recognized by soldiers from World War II, from the Spanish American War, or from the American Civil War.

Since returning from Iraq I have sought to find a way to evoke this sense of historical telescoping and the echoes of social memory in my work. I became interested in early photographic processes, and saw within them a way of creating a visceral connection between the contemporary and the historic, utilizing an old process to capture a new conflict. These images also blur the boundaries of photographic processes as well by mixing the cutting edge digital technology used to capture the image and a combination of nineteenth century techniques to bring the image to life.