November | December 2003 - Boston Photography Focus

Northeast Exposure
Vaughn Sills and Pelle Cass
November 21-December 19, 2003
Beginning with this gallery presentation of
work by Vaughn Sills and Pelle Cass, the PRC
is proud to launch a new exhibition series—
Northeast Exposure. This new program showcases
new works and new directions by mid-career
and emerging regionally-tied photographers.
Interspersed between the popular themed shows
for which the PRC has become known, the
month-long solo, duo, or small group offerings
allow the PRC to spotlight the depth and wealth
of talent in New England. Sill’s contribution
is from her latest series, “Beyond Words,”
on which she has been working during her
summer breaks from teaching. Over half
of the pieces displayed are the results of her
most recent sojourn at her family’s cottage
in Prince Edward Island. Cass’s work has all
been completed in the last year, after an over
10-year hiatus from photography.
For the past 10 years, Sills has been an Assistant
Professor of Photography at Simons College. Born
in Quebec, this Cambridge-based photographer
and former English major earned a MFA from
Rhode Island School of Design. Sills is perhaps
best known for her project “One Family,” in which
she documented four generations of a rural
Georgian family, over a period of 20 years.
Her work is included in the DeCordova
Museum, Harvard University’s Carpenter
Center for the Arts, and Polaroid Collections.
Created in her studio using settings that recall
miniature stages, this new work features natural
objects from her surroundings—a squirrel’s
skeleton, a shell, a moth—along with her family’s
1932 Oxford English dictionary open to the
corresponding word or expression. Although
digitally printed from 4 x 5 Polaroid film, the
lush Iris prints are not altered; the hovering
dream-like still lifes are set against a sea of black
velvet and held in place by a bevy of bric-a-brac.
Cass studied photography at the University
of New Mexico, Minneapolis College of Art,
and School of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. From 1978 to 1990, he was very active
in the regional scene. Represented by the Stux
Gallery and Frank Marino Gallery, Cass was
featured in numerous solo shows, such as at
the Fogg Art Museum’s Print Room, and group
shows, including a George Eastman House
traveling exhibition “The Photographer’s Hand.”
His earlier still-life work is found in the Fogg
Art Museum, Addison Gallery of Art, and
Polaroid Collections. In 1991, due in part
to the needs of a growing family, Cass stopped
photographing to return to school, earning
a BA in Art History from the University of
Massachusetts, Boston, and eventually pursuing
a career in publishing. Cass resumed photographing
in September 2002. Influenced by his
own writing and his work at textbook publisher
Bedford/St. Martin’s, Cass utilizes printed materials
to create collages and assemblages, which
he then photographs using a medium format
or 4 x 5 view camera.
Today, an overriding theme of collecting and
categorizing seems to pervade the zeitgeist.
If almost to make up for image and information
overload, artists ingest a plethora of icons, and
become hunter-gatherers, neatly, or not so
neatly, placing objects into cubbyholes. The
buzzword of “archive” informs many exhibitions
and art historical texts. Indeed, photography
has been at the forefront of this discussion
given its unique indexical role as well as its
various functions and applications. For example,
August Sander’s systematic documentation of
types of people and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s
anthologies of architectural forms have seen
renewed scholarly interest. Likewise, related
topics such as unique museums and specific
collections have been the subject of numerous
photography projects and exhibitions. Both
Cass and Sills tackle large concepts such as
beauty, order, language, and meaning, but
do so in very individual ways. This essay will
briefly contrast Sills and Cass’s working style
and their methodology in order to broach
some of these larger issues.
Sills and Cass’s choice of titles for their series
speak to their interests. Sills’s phrase “Beyond
Words” speaks to the inability of labels to
describe and capture the essence of any object
and its constellation of attributes. Sills’s series
is also very personal; she remembers thumbing
through this very dictionary as a child, crossreferencing
words and concepts, and the wonder
and awe with which she beheld her natural
discoveries. Admittedly, if Cass were to title
this selection of works, it would be the essence
of the George Santayana handwritten quote
he so beautifully deconstructed to then reconstruct:
“Everything in nature is lyrical in its
ideal essence, tragic in its fate and comic in its
existence.” Similar to museum or archeological
photographers, Sills and Cass’s chosen objects
(or reproductions thereof) are photographed,
often isolated, and presented for study. Both
artists concentrate on variants of the quotidian:
Sills, the natural, and Cass, the manmade.
Each photographer’s work hearkens back to
earlier styles and genres in histories of photography
and art. Sills’s work lies in the still life
Opposite page: Pelle Cass, Every headline in the Boston Globe,
12/12/02, 2003, Gelatin silver print, 15 x 15 inches, Courtesy
the artist.
Above: Vaughn Sills, Moth, 2002, Singer Edition Iris print from
Polaroid Type 55 negative, 25 x 20 inches, Courtesy the artist .
tradition and references the concept of “vanitas.”
Known for their mastery of this genre, Dutch
renaissance painters introduced “vanitas”
or fleetingness of life into their compositions
via an errant fly, a decomposing piece of fruit,
or skull. Sills’s skeletons and out of their element
entities also remind us that still-life in
French, “nature morte,” literally means “dead
nature.” Sill’s minimalist approach also recalls
early photographic experiments. The simple
arrangements and single-hued aesthetics are
akin to the photograms of lace and leaves
of William Henry Fox Talbot and the cyanotypes
of sealife by Anna Atkins. (Interestingly,
many of photography’s first practitioners had a
close connection to botany and other natural
sciences.) Cass himself willfully acknowledges
a debt to German early-twentieth century collage
artist Kurt Schwitters’s concept of “Merz.”
Coined from the word “commerce,” Merz
referred to both the materials—cut and torn
paper and scraps of rubbish—and the subject—
a sly critique on consumer culture. Like Merz
and later installation and performance photography,
Cass’s work slides between the sculptural
and the conceptual—the end result becoming
an entirely new artistic entity.
In creating their compositions, both Sills and
Cass operate with specific intellectual conceits
in mind. Cass’s titles reveal his procedure:
Every headline in the Boston Globe, 12/12/02;
Sweaters (J. Crew catalogue); Pictures and
Mirrors (Crate and Barrel catalogue). To Cass,
nothing is immune from being dissected and
regurgitated: advertising circulars, water bottle
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