carroll and sons / justin kimball

ON VIEW JULY 2 - SEPTEMBER 6, 2014

JUSTIN KIMBALL WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES

CARROLL AND SONS450 HARRISON AVENUE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02118PHONE: 617-482-2477 FACSIMILE: [email protected]

Installation view 1

Justin Kimball: Where We Find Ourselves

Installation view 2

Justin Kimball: Where We Find Ourselves

Warren Dunes, Michigan2003C-print40 x 30”Edition of 5


Kern River, California2000C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5

Greenfield, Massachusetts2003C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5


Orange, Massachusetts1996C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5

Smithfield, Rhode Island1998C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5


Deep Hole, New Hampshire2002C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5

Little Pigeon River, Tennessee2003C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5


Old Orchard Beach, Maine2003C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5

Warren Falls, Vermont2002C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5


Cumberland, Rhode Island1997C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5

Greenfield River, Massachusetts2002C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5


Mill River, Massachusetts1997C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5

Mohawk Trail, Massachusetts1997C-print30 x 40”Edition of 5

Dream vacations

By Cate McQuaid | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT AUGUST 05, 2014

Vacations have a mythic quality. Routine gives way to new experiences. Rest and play flood all those corners of life made arid by work. Two artists with shows up now explore time away, and a third creates a kind of mini-va-cation on the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza.

Photographer Justin Kimball revisited many of the campgrounds and waterways he went to as a youth, when his family piled into a van for summer trips. His color photos at Carroll and Sons depict people in bathing suits, in and near the water.

The people often appear out of place. They immerse themselves, they prepare to dive in; they wade, and avail themselves of nature’s curative powers. In “Little Pigeon River, Tennessee,” a man reclines in rushing whitewa-ter near the base of a waterfall in what looks like complete surrender. Yet he must be holding himself there; if he completely surrendered, would the water not carry him off?

It’s this tension in Kimball’s photos that captivates: A desire to be one with nature collides with its sheer im-possibility. “Old Orchard Beach, Maine” depicts a pudgy man and a girl carrying a pail, knee-deep in water among the barnacle-clad pylons beneath a pier. Beyond them, swimmers frolic in the surf, but these two stare downward, almost grim. Are there rocks underfoot? Are they keeping an eye out for mussels? The water swirls around them, heedless of their drama.

A girl in a gully at the center of “Warren Dunes, Michigan” comes the closest to being one with nature. The gully runs with mud. She has positioned herself as if in a chute, and mud covers her body. A muddy boy stands above her, as two cleaner boys look on prudishly from the side. She may be playing — a boy below shows us she’s not far from the water — but she looks like a young teen with a reckless sense of abandon.

While Kimball’s photos convey nostalgia for humble summers spent by the water, they also demonstrate how longing and disconnection are part of nostalgia’s cargo.

Justin Kimball: Where We Find OurselvesCarroll And Sons, Boston

From intimate close-up views to wide verdant vistas, the 13 large photographs by Justin Kimball on view at Carroll and Sons through August 23 present a variety of respites from the summer heat. Culled from Kimball’s larger project, Where We Find Ourselves (1996-2004), a broader survey of Americans taking their leisure, this exhibition concentrates on swimmers and the arcadian pleasures of swimming holes.

Kimball travels across the country photographing in secluded places beyond civilization and man-made chlori-nated pools. His subjects are caught in a range of ecstatic poses, their eyes tightly shut in trance-like moments or their bodies floating in shimmering pools of light. Sometimes a hint of danger is suggested: In one photo-graph, a young man in Orange, MA (1996), contemplates a leap from a paved overpass into the dark blue waters below. Kimball places him between the road and the wilderness, implying his jump is like an escape from one world to another. In Cumberland, Rhode Island (1997), we gaze through a vast leafy wooded area that looks out across a pond, where a group of tiny figures cluster around a board jutting out over the still water, their bodies mirrored below. The scene is charged with the anticipation of one boy standing at the end of the board, looking down into the water and preparing to meet his double.

Kimball chooses moments poised between risk and release to celebrate the larger transformations happening at these swimming holes. With trust and concentration, a father and daughter navigate the unpredictable surf beneath an array of barnacle-encrusted dock pilings in Old Orchard Beach, Maine (2003). They bravely make their way through, hand-in-hand, one step at a time.

— By Edie Bresler 07/21/2014

JUSTIN KIMBALL AT CARROLL AND SONSby Sam Nickerson

When photographer Justin Kimball was a child, his family did what countless other American families did during the twentieth century; they hopped into a van and drove around the country, joining the crowds at Na-tional parks and beaches, watering holes and other sites of leisure and recreation designated to the general public.

Over the years, Kimball revisited many of these locations for his collection Where We Find Ourselves, but each time, the experience was much different than his memories. Kimball’s lens captured environments less halcyon and people less care-free, but at the same time, still filled with enough points of view to be prototypically Amer-ican.

According to Kimball, he had stumbled across the “imperfect American relationship with the landscape.”

“I worked hard to present something ubiquitous, a broader range of who we are in relation to each other and to place,” Kimball said to me during a conversation at the show’s opening at Carroll and Sons in Boston’s South End.

The show’s thirteen photographs – all taken between 1996 and 2003 and printed to 30” x 40” using traditional chemicals – are a small sampling of a larger body of work, collected in a book of the same name. A timely exhi-bition, ten of the thirteen photographs were taken in New England during what appears to be summertime, and nearly all of the prints feature water in some way, whether it is a river bank, public beach, or rope swing.

Over the course of American history, settlers, migrants, and citizens have done just what Kimball’s family did; they left their homes to roam the countryside, often documenting the journey. For some, it was a matter of man-ifest destiny, for others, the landscape provided an opportunity for healing or religious experience, and for so many, it was a chance to escape – which is perhaps why the theme of water as a source of cleansing and purity features so prominently in the show and throughout the tradition of American landscape art.

Yet, the bodies of water Kimball and his subjects sought out were not necessarily untouched, idyllic streams. “Greenfield River, MA” (2002) contains a class statement. In the photograph, children stand on the cement sid-ing of what appears to be a man-made redirection of the river. Only one girl faces the camera as she leans along the edge of the brownish water. She may not be able to afford a true escape from daily life, as it is clearly insert-ed in what could be one of the few sites of leisure she has access to, and her expression is not one of relaxation or investment in the scene around her.

Kimball, who said he spent a lot of time studying paintings ahead of building this portfolio, fits into this tra-dition in part because he looked to it for inspiration. His inclusion of individuals into the environment recalls the Hudson River school of landscape painting, where the encroachment of people, seen through domesticated animals, hay bales, and human figures among the wild, is both foreboding and a sign of peaceful coexistence. Today, the American landscape is almost never untouched by humankind, and an understanding of place is driv-en by a discussion of its inhabitants.

Kimball also said he looked to the work of Thomas Eakins, who painted the scantily-clad figures of those re-laxing in public greens and rivers around Philadelphia during the nineteenth century. It’s not far-fetched to see in the bathing-suited individuals in Kimball’s “Deep Hole , NH” (2002) and “Warren Dunes, MI” (2003) the modern day equivalents of Eakins’ nude young men depicted in some of his well-known works, such as “The Swimming Hole” or “Arcadia”.

For me, the most compelling work is “Mill River, MA” (2003). Rapids churn against the boulders on the riv-erbank, their combined slick gray launching the green of the background vegetation, as the three people who perch there avoid eye contact and fold their arms in resignation and vulnerability. Is this a family? What can they not let go of from their daily lives that bogs down this otherwise tranquil scene? What do they seek from the river as they dip their legs in and let it wash over them?

Kimball didn’t stage any of his subjects, instead choosing an observational, almost voyeuristic stance, drawing out the drama of his subjects’ psychological states without dictating them.

In doing so, Kimball found that these common, everyday people – regardless of their age, sex, race, or history – only find other people or their own daily worries in these supposedly wild and natural landscapes.

The show’s power comes from its collective nature. A narrative of attempts to heal and to celebrate in the face of daily life unfolds from the walls and certainly from the pages of the book, as each photograph contributes towards an understanding of the role physical geography plays in the American identity.

But what happens to the narrative when one work is separated from the collection? The grand, meta-tale of American struggle and reprieve might seem lost when limited to just one or several photographs.

By themselves, each print could easily resemble a snapshot from another family’s vacation, mixed in amongst your own. At the same time, Kimball still exacts moments of tremendous emotion from his subjects, which, frozen in frame, are incredibly powerful in their own right, even without any context.

Either way, Kimball succeeds in reminding us of where we, as contemporary Americans, often find ourselves: caught somewhere between the present moment and all of what troubles us on a cultural or personal level, look-ing toward the vast landscape for escape and therapy, but unable to completely separate that landscape from the society we have built around it.

JUSTIN KIMBALL WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES

carroll and sons / justin kimball

Documents

massachusetts1997cprint30

vermont2002cprint30

tennessee2003cprint30

maine2003cprint30 x

massachusetts2002cprint30

massachusetts2003cprint30

california2000cprint30

massachusetts1996cprint30