With many of these new images I am working with New York based poet Marcella Durand, whom I have collaborated with since the mid 1990’s. These images are responses to her current work in progress, “Montage in the Feuilleton”. In addition to the imagery, my ever-present backwards handwriting notes are my responses to text or spoken word. Perception to me is a combination of what we filter cognitively through our unique set of experiences, and physically through our two eyes. With all of my work, I enjoy shifting between representational drawing & painting and handwriting within a composition. The writing is backwards, reducing the words to gesture lines. This habit developed early on from my my interest in gothic and dated alphabets, and from work as a printmaker, since images/words must be put on the plate backwards to print forwards.
"Stare: What Wild New World is This?"
Elizabeth Howie - 2011 Forward to forthcoming publication of images and paintings by Marcella Durand & Karoline Schleh
Dr. Elizabeth Howie, Ph. D. Art History, University of North CarolinaAssistant Professor of Art History, Department of Visual Arts
Edwards College of Humanities & Fine Arts
Coastal Carolina University
Karoline Schleh paints photographs. Does she make paintings that are copies of or inspired by photographs? No—she literally applies paint, beautiful translucent washes of gouache, to vintage photographic portraits. A photograph is an object presenting a precious moment that has miraculously escaped the onslaught of time—isn’t any mark made on its pristine surface a defacement, a sacrilege in our secular cult of the photograph? Oftentimes we perceive such interventions that way, unless those changes or adaptations are made digitally, surreptitiously, to enhance the picture. But what Schleh does is no assault to the image—instead it is a marvelous bathing or caressing derived from the long history of hand tinting photographic prints prior to the advent of color film. Schleh’s work evidences a sustained investigation of the past, of memory, of the ephemeral traces of lives found in handwriting, into how layers and shadows mediate meaning, into texts and fragments and shreds.
The photographs Schleh paints are the most vulnerable kind, photographic orphans, long separated from their sitters or families or friends or acquaintances, having languished lost, until sold in batches at flea markets, antique malls, or on eBay. She works with benevolently rescued nineteenth century portraits made long before the era of the snapshot in photographic studios. The stylized, flourishing names of these vanished establishments unfurl below the images. Such portraits speak of dressing up in one’s best clothes, a trip to town, extended moments posing before a camera with a relatively long exposure time. German-Jewish philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin argues that early photographic portraits have a special quality because the subjects, waiting during the exposure, had the opportunity to contemplate the nature of having their likenesses recorded for posterity; moreover, they were far less accustomed to having photographic portraits made, and thus had a kind of innocence or naïveté before the camera. These are the photographs honored in Victorian albums, one to a page, inserted in a pre-cut sleeve with a decorative border, encased in a massive crushed-velvet-covered volume decorated with an elaborate clasp.
Schleh’s work encompasses a stilled parade of sitters, solitary, paired, or enfamilied, all different but all subservient to the uniformity of format nearly identical from long-gone studio to studio: same size print mounted on same size and shape of card, same distance from the camera, same poses, same lighting, gazing out earnestly. Schleh’s treatment of these corseted and frocked figures brings the parade to life. Spidery identificatory handwriting seems to have bled through from the back of each card. Colors evocative of the velvet of the very albums which once imprisoned them now breathe festivity back into the ubiquitous sepia. Most captivatingly, a layer of varnish slicks their solemn faces—freshens them—and surrounded by glowing gouache, they magically look back at us. Nineteenth-century German photographer Karl Dauthendey described what it was like to view the very first photographic images by early French photographer Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre: “We didn’t trust ourselves at first…to look long at the first pictures he developed. We were abashed by the distinctness of these human images, and believed that the little tiny faces in the picture could see us, so powerfully was everyone affected by the unaccustomed clarity and the unaccustomed truth to nature of the first daguerreotypes.” Can the faces of those we don’t know, whom no one now knows or remembers, still look at us? As Benjamin wrote of Hill and Adamson’s Mrs. Elizabeth Johnstone Hall, New Haven Fishwife (1845): “there remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art, something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed into art.” Schleh revives that unruly insistence on being known. And as French semiotician Roland Barthes writes, we the viewers are linked to the subject of each photograph by the vehicle of light—what we see in the photograph really was there, in front of the camera, and the light reflected from that referent is the light that pours into our waiting eyes. More than looking at us, Schleh’s sitters—for now they are hers—stare. As we stare at them, our gazes taking in the sacrilegious tampering with the sacrosanct photographic image—they stare back, imploringly, curiously. Schleh’s subjects are puzzled by these intrusions from the present, but are unwilling to let them ruffle their feathers. Propriety is maintained. Their submission to her ministrations is willing and sweet. They tolerate the dreams she imposes on them.
When we look at the figures who populate very old photographs perhaps it may be hard for us to really see them as people. But if as Barthes says photography makes the past as certain as the present, Schleh’s metamorphosis of these images revives the vertiginous terror of what the photograph does: snatch a moment from the vacuum of time, letting us look back at these long lost people and most importantly letting us feel them looking back at us, so that we experience them as real people, individuals who had, up to now, succumbed to anonymity. Barthes argues that society seeks to tame the photograph, to prevent us from feeling the violence of the abyss of time into which each photograph gives us a glimpse. Schleh gently, giddily untames these.
Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London and New York: Verso, 1979), 244. Benjamin, 243. Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 88. Barthes, 117.
"Schleh at Barrister's"
Schleh at Barrister's
Eric Bookhardt - 2010 In times past, it was often said that “photographs never lie,” but one rarely hears that today in the age of Photoshop and widespread digital manipulation. But even in those “purer” times past, photographs sometimes stretched the truth. For instance, the “cabinet photo cards” of the 19th century featured subjects g for portraits in their Sunday best, often in imposing or opulent settings that were actually painted backdrops like theater sets, allowing a farmer, baker or butcher to appear on par with dandies, aristocrats or bon vivants. New Orleans printmaker Karoline Schleh extends that theatrical sensibility by embellishing copies of such images with paint, pencil and varnish, transforming what was already somewhat fanciful into full-fledged magic realism. MIZZENMAST depicts a poetic young man in a purple coat wearing a hat that is actually a sailing ship, as large and colorful fish appear to swim in the air around him. Reverse handwriting rounds out the sense of an alternate reality, visions of a young Victorian opium eater, or what have you. I LOVE MY WIFE, SHE’S A ROBOT is a variation of the commonplace married couple portrait. Here the wife sports a pair of decorous antennae as her well-dressed husband fondly embraces a remote control box in a kind of Jules Verne version of the STEPFORD WIVES. Some pieces appear with prose poems by Marcella Durand, lending an added dimension to the dreamy Dadaism of Schleh’s visual theater, her magical mystery tour of modified vintage photography.
"Hot Up Here: New Work by New Orleans Artists"
Eric Bookhardt - 2009 Organized by Contemporary Arts Center visual arts director Dan Cameron, Hot Up Here picks up where the CAC's Louisiana Open biennial series left off. Although the artists are drawn from galleries all over town, the tone is distinctly St. Claude Avenue, and while the experimental gallery scene there has been fermenting for some time, Cameron's Prospect.1 was the jolt that brought a lot of the new spaces up to speed at this time last year. Consequently, it's hard to view Karoline Schleh's poetic collages and modified stereopticon images and not feel nostalgic for the superb group show that opened at the Universal building last autumn. Schleh's new work builds on that series. This Is You (pictured) is a stereopticon view of a little girl whose head turns into a bird in the otherwise identical twin image, effectively transforming it into a 3-D souvenir view of a dreamlike parallel universe. Generic Art Solutions — Tony Campbell and Matt Vis — are represented by their video screen portraits of themselves as Roman emperors, ghostly white marblelike heads seemingly set in stone. But look closely: They blink. A cautionary metaphor for empire? Another Good Children Gallery member, Stephen Collier, has photo portraits of a biker and a businessman with heads covered with Silly String. Like much postmodernism, this is all about surface effects, "instantaneity," mass media and stuff like that. Michelle Levine's social realist paintings of McDonald's golden arches ravaged by Katrina's winds make a related point but with a more tragically meaningful twist. Antenna Gallery's Brad Benischek is represented by a vast, room-size installation of nasty childlike drawings with Charles Bukowski-esque scrawled texts, all of which builds on his visceral Midwestern expressionist rap sheet with notable verve. And, like much of this work, David Sullivan's Sunset Refinery video was shown on St. Claude, but it warrants multiple viewings. Not everything here does, but if you've never seen any of it before, Hot might come as a revelation.