Susan Mikula, ‘master at the sucker punch,’ at Lawson Gallery
June 17, 2015 by Jessica Zack
After spending more than two years immersed in the willfully destructive subculture of the American demolition derby, which she documented in her previous work “Thrill Show” and “Anyone Can Enter,” photographer Susan Mikula was eager to “tell a smaller tale, one infused with the magic of just a few objects.”
In “Photo Book,” (sic) Mikula’s recently completed series of psychologically enigmatic pigment prints, she sets antique toy figurines — a girl, a house, a rabbit — in haunting, dreamlike compositions. Mikula’s large-scale images, shot on Polaroid film, employ her trademark soft focus and knack for using tricks of scale to powerfully suggestive effect. Highlights from the new series are on view this week through July 18 at George Lawson Gallery on lower Potrero Hill.
“I’m sure I was thinking of my own childhood and how much I was deeply affected by children’s literature,” Mikula, 57, said by phone from her home in western Massachusetts, where she lives with her longtime partner, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
“I wanted to tell a children’s tale my way, with pictures, but in the same way that children’s books always have something vaguely magical and a child at the center,” says Mikula. “In this case the child is a little girl, and she has the power.”
Gallerist George Lawson, who has given Mikula four prior solo exhibitions, says, “I have a painting-centered program, but Susan’s artistry is so phenomenal, with emotion and narrative subtext that creeps up on you, that I keep coming back to it. She is a master at the sucker punch.”
A devotee of the spontaneous and unpredictable qualities of Polaroid film (which ceased production in 2009), Mikula acquires out-of-date instant film on eBay and by hunting yard sales and junk stores, often shooting on her beloved SX-70 Polaroid camera (last manufactured in 2007).
Mikula preconceives her images’ overall look and scale, shooting economically and with an eye to predicting the color range of expired film based on its precise vintage.
“Colors drop out from old film, and red is the first to go,” says Mikula. To achieve the saturated rose tints in “Photo Book,” (sic) she “had to use Polaroid stock from between 2007 and 2009.” She uses only natural light, shooting “at a very particular time in the midafternoon to get the most red out of the daylight, like squeezing the color out of a sponge.”
Mikula describes “Photo Book” (sic) as “having an implied narrative, using common childhood ideas that hold incredible power — an unmoored house, the sleight-of-hand quality of a rabbit in our growing-up stories. But what I hope happens is that if people look long enough, some narrative emerges that strikes you for yourself. There are probably 10 in there that come to mind for me, but what is yours?”
— Jessica Zack
Susan Mikula: Four Photographs: Picture Book: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Through July 18. Opening reception: 5:30-7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 20. George Lawson Gallery, 315 Potrero Ave., S.F. (415) 703-4400. www.georgelawsongallery.com.
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