by Renny Pritikin
In the 1980s, several artists persuaded viewers to move their bodies—and thus their eyes—through space. Barbara Kruger made a brief foray into lenticular photography, pairing images that flipped back and forth as you passed before them. The experimental filmmaker Michael Snow tried his hand at holographic imagery, which revealed a 360-degree still image if you walked past it. Bay Area artist Michael Koehle’s suite of 13 pigment prints, titled Meteors, uses 21st-century technology to create lens-free objects that offer different views of foggy hills, cloudbanks and other airborne phenomena when seen from various vantages.
In meteorology, the term meteor applies not just to space rocks falling through the sky but also to smoke, clouds, fog, rainbows, halos, and even smog. As such, Meteors is full of drama, whether a gigantic plume of smoke or a Turneresque fogscape. Koehle, however, isn’t merely documenting the weather. He wants to inspire in viewers the same wonder he experiences when encountering the firmament.
To do that, he instructs his computer to analyze and slice his photographs—often taken by drones–into long, thin slivers, numbering in the hundreds. He prints those paper sections out with laser cuts, the edges rough and uneven. The slices follow the curving color and shape of formations in the image. He then recreates the original photograph by gluing an edge of these slices to a board one after another,
overlapping, leaving the jagged edges free. The result is a three-dimensional image that leaves viewers shaking their heads in bafflement. Seen straight on, the results are almost exact reproductions of the original, except that we perceive an ephemeral, almost disturbing three-dimensionality. Seen from the left, the topographic nature of these brush-like constructions is emphatically ragged; from the right, they appear flattened, receding into abstraction.
Koehle belongs to that familiar local hybrid culture of artist-scientist, a group that includes Jim Campbell, Scott Snibbe, Camille Utterback and the late Alan Rath. Koehle has an MFA from Mills, and an MS in biomechanical engineering from UC Davis. He’s been showing his art in local alternative spaces for a decade, during which time he also received two patents for surgical instruments. In an email, he cited his Mills teachers Katherine Sherwood, Hung Liu and Squeak Carnwath—all painters—as influences, but also contemporaries who use tech to make art objects or experiences, such as Noa Kaplan, Neal Mendoza, and Behnaz Fahiri. He added, “I would like to be part of that [Campbell/Utterback] lineage. Where I see myself deviating [is that] I want to have a physical artifact at the other end. I don’t want to think of it as image manipulation or turning an image into something else, but a different way of reproducing an image. Not a faithful reproduction, to be sure, but I hope it reveals something more about the subject than a photo would.”
Koehle addresses the poetry found at the limits of our vision’s capacity. Three photographs grouped together depict the way that mist plays with light; a barely perceivable rainbow permeates the air in Fog Over Pines, and in Sea Ranch I and II, a circle of light reflects the sun. Throughout the show, our eye must filter out the lines formed by the hundreds of paper edges that make up the image. That kind of unconscious editing is basic to how sight allows us to go through the world, not seeing what the brain perceives as unimportant.
Koehle does not instruct the computer to make cuts with rigid mathematical uniformity. This is especially true in the central work in the show, Meteors Over Oakland. At around 4 ½ x 7 feet, it is more than twice the size of most of everything else in the show. It’s hard to imagine that an artist can find a new way to represent clouds, but there’s an unmistakable aching beauty in how Koehle’s massive cumulus forms fade from white at the top to grey at the bottom. That transformation is echoed by the sky’s transition from navy blue at the higher elevation to powder blue closer to Earth. That movement is repeated by the faint vertical lines that almost fall like rain, formed by the constructed character of the print. All that verticality ends suddenly as it collides with the horizon, which Koehle minimized. In this piece, as in several others, the artist chooses to depict “noise,” parts of the image that the computer can’t render successfully, as feathery slips of paper that mysteriously extend off the surface of the work.
Koehle belongs to that subgroup of artists willing to put in hundreds of hours of meticulous, tedious work to arrive at a perfect manifestation of their vision. Hand in hand with that detailed thoroughness, he identifies specific sources of his photographs: West Oakland, the 880 freeway, the Embarcadero. His Meteors are leaves from open book pages splayed on the wall, sagas about nature sidestepping the need for words.
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Michael Koehle: “Meteors” @ Jack Fischer Gallery through April 27, 2024.
About the author: Renny Pritikin was the chief curator at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from 2014 to 2018. Before that, he was the director of the Richard Nelson Gallery at UC Davis and the founding chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts beginning in 1992. For 11 years, he was also a senior adjunct professor at California College of the Arts, where he taught in the graduate program in Curatorial Practice. Pritikin has given lecture tours in museums in Japan as a guest of the State Department, in New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar, and visited Israel as a Koret Israel Prize winner. The Prelinger Library published his most recent book of poems, Westerns and Dramas, in 2020. He is the United States correspondent for Umbigo magazine in Lisbon, Portugal and the author of a recently published memoir, At Third and Mission: A Life Among Artists.
