Jamie Zill Senior Portfolio 2010-11: Artist

Represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery

http://www.edelmangallery.com/estabrook-main.htm

“Dan Estabrook was born in Boston, MA in 1969 and attended Harvard University. He received an MFA from the University of Illinois. Dan Estabrook has been using nineteenth-century photographic techniques to make contemporary art. In the last few years he has focused on working with hand-altered calotypes and salt prints. He has exhibited widely and has received several awards, including an Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1994.”

Artist Biography from Jackson Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta Georgia

“In some ways, I have to be constantly vigilant that I don’t get so introspective and interior that I shut out the viewer. And there are times that I start thinking I actually need to focus on the communicative aspect of art making. As much as I love the interior work and I love being in the studio and making work that means something to me, its still important for me to take that piece, put it on a wall and have it communicate something to somebody else.”

Excerpt from above video

"Just one hundred years ago, science could still claim palmistry, phrenology, and physiognomy among its disciplines, and even today we tend to believe that written on the body are the keys to decipher the secret language of the everyday. There is science, too, in photography -- mixing salt and silver to represent the otherwise unseen details of the natural world. By processes physical and chemical, it is even possible to distill one's breath, capture time, and give a material life to the immaterial. It is this alchemy that moves me. Using and emulating nineteenth-century printing techniques, and making visible the very physical materials of which photographs are made, I attempt to have seemingly anonymous photographs become highly personal objects. In these images a single repeated shape, a formation of flowers, or the patterns of dust and decay are almost legible texts, inscribed on the skin of paper, tin, and glass." - Dan Estabrook, 1998

“For the last twenty years, Dan Estabrook has worked with historical photographic techniques to make contemporary work about age-old themes. Using processes like the calotype paper negative and salt print positive, Estabrook often turns the camera on his own body as he examines his wants, desires, and fears. In Nin Symptoms, Estabrook tackles the emotions he has experienced falling in and out of love. With pieces titled “Shortness of Breath,” “Heart Rate Increase,” “Fever,” and “Loss of Appetite,” he evokes old medical photographs to directly confront the passion, obsession, apprehension, and excitement brought on by love, as well as its loss. The work in “At Sea” shows Estabrook expanding this metaphorical vocabulary with the addition of paint, drawing, and other interventions on the print surface. By employing the techniques and metaphors used by nineteenth-century practitioners, Estabrook is able to comment on the timelessness of his concerns and the enduring fascination with love, sex, and death.”

Excerpt from Dan Estabrook's homepage, http://danestabrook.com

Dan Estabrook's work intrigues me because of his treatment of the individual object. His images are very simple, there is not a lot of information given from the limited subject matter, yet they seem to evoke many different feelings. He combines the real and the artificial, and also the real and the opposite (the negative). I admire his expression of ideas through simplicity and traditional practices. He speaks of complicated matters like love, sex, and death in the simplest visual interpretation. I would enjoy working with chemicals again, yet I feel like there is not enough time for that this year. I like how Estabook plays with the frame within a frame, and sometimes goes out of that frame. In the video I inserted above, he notes that he still hasn't found a digital print that he likes more than the traditional processes, but that that would change. Maybe now is the time for change.