Pandemic Portraits Volume 2 (by Collin J Rae) / July 8, 2022 by Doyle Armbrust

SILENT SCREAMS & DISTENDED GAZES

If it were possible to file a restraining order against art referencing the pandemic, I would obtain such a document and stiff-arm it – like a white-knuckled crucifix at an exorcism – at every concert venue, art gallery, or flatscreen I encounter. I don’t want to see this ongoing horror show reflected back to me in clever ways. Not while this country attempts to refashion itself as some kind of Stepford-slash-Jonestown mashup, anyway.

So, please join me as I raise this coupe, brimming with drain cleaner, in toasting Collin J. Rae – for exposing me as a hypocrite with his extraordinary Pandemic Portraits Vol. I, and here again with Vol. II.

To my eyes, the reference to the pandemic here only need take us as far as pinning the art-making to a timeline. The eeriness, the sensuality, the grotesquerie – these elements that slither and shatter out of each image – these are not limited to the misfortunes of the past few years. The silent screams and distended gazes in some pictures certainly parallel the rage and disorientation that seem so prevalent in our joint isolation, but because we are all masters of collective amnesia, that rage and disorientation will inevitably evaporate as the years progress.

The bluster and distress and beauty of these images will not.

One reason I find myself lingering longer than usual amongst these pages is my fascination with the technique. More specifically, the tactile, analog nature of the technique. Bending light through weathered, or broken, or scalloped, or spiderwebbed, or streaked glass conjures up for me the filmic sleights-of-hand surfacing at the dawn of the 20th century. It makes the encounter somehow more intimate, knowing that the photographer is pinching the device between his fingers, finding that perfect, obscene augmentation of an iris or unsettling stretch of a lip. I think it is evidence of care, even sympathy or camaraderie. This is the place where detonating fury and retreating melancholy will be not simply tolerated, but idolized…or eulogized, as the case may be.

But there is humor here, too, and burlesque, body horror, sci-fi, and psycho killers. If you enter from the photographer’s POV, you might experience that compassion I just mentioned. If you’re looking over his shoulder, perhaps you’ll be provoked by shock or seduction or bewilderment. Or you might find yourself in synchronicity with the human looking back at you…looking back at you.

Maybe you’ll have a moment, like I did, where you remember that sometimes it’s enough just to make something and think about it.

– Doyle Armbrust

Buy Pandemic Portraits Vol 2

Chicago School of Violinmaking: 2016 Commencement Address / August 20, 2016 by Doyle Armbrust

I think about the zombie apocalypse more than the average human being. The other members of Spektral Quartet like to give me a hard time about the copious contents of my backpack – military-grade multi-tool, collapsible titanium chopsticks, a copy of the US Constitution – I literally have backups for my backups. They laugh now, but they know whose door they'll be banging down when the undead swarm Chicago.

So its probably no surprise that when I enter a hotel room, the first thing I do is locate a perch for my viola – something off the floor because the water pipes will surely burst and flood the room; somewhere outside the spray arc of the fire sprinklers, which will no doubt spontaneously flick on; someplace where I can, in a blind panic, grab the handle of my case as I escape my burning room, narrowly dodging the rotors of the helicopter that has crashed in through my window.

What Will I Find? (by Marc Perlish) / February 8, 2016 by Doyle Armbrust

Bookman’s Alley Lament

Tracking earthward across the hand-painted sign, droplets of rain diverge and reassemble at the lower border before staining the planks beneath a mottled russet. Just a few steps to the west, then north into the alley within the alley, the white coffee-cupped pedestrians are left behind, the strains of commercial radio escaping the pharmacy now evaporated. Scalloped edges of a weathered awning flutter above old French doors painted black, momentarily animating the print, “Bookman’s Alley.” Upon entry, the man seated behind the desk slowly looks up to point and say, “Please leave your wet umbrella there.”

Is it a desk? Perhaps it is only a menagerie of hardcovers, a literary-architectural feat in the shape of a desk. Impossible to say from this angle, as the octogenarian with the white, Carl Sandburg coiffure is himself buried beneath four or five editions. Roger’s smile reaches up toward the pencil perched behind an ear. To the young, it reads, “You are welcome here. Go explore.” To the collectors, the academics, the introverted, the voracious and the inquisitive, it is the threshold into a literary labyrinth. Like C.S. Lewis’ bewitched wardrobe, it appears to be without terminus, with room opening onto room opening onto room. The palpable magic of this place lies not in the volume of volumes, though, but in the curios and mementos tucked into the shop’s innumerable nooks and alcoves.