TAOS, New Mexico — Imagery is suspect lately. Countless filters, deep fakes, social media FOMO, the darkish net — who’s to say what’s actual? However whereas viewing Zoë Zimmerman’s pictures exhibition Forsaken Objects and Untold Tales at Fechin Home, I felt one other form of suspicion creep in: a mistrust of sentimentality.
Zimmerman has made a reputation for herself as a studio photographer. Some readers could also be accustomed to “The Zimmerman Method,” an alternate albumen printing course of that produces a matte floor, fairly than the medium’s sometimes shiny one. Initially working in black and white, Zimmerman started experimenting with shade, lighting, and depth of discipline in digital pictures throughout the pandemic. Right now her hauntingly romantic nonetheless lifes of useless birds, rotting fruit, knives, and linens or her complicated scenes of mirrored feminine nudes learn like modern-day Renaissance, Baroque, and Flemish work. In some pictures, a single candle serves as her gentle supply.
Forsaken Objects and Untold Tales takes as its topic the Fechin household’s private possessions, discovered within the basement of the home, which is now a part of the Taos Artwork Museum. The Russian portrait artist and woodworker Nicola Fechin, his spouse Alexandra Belkovitch, and their solely daughter, Eya, immigrated to New York in 1923 and moved to Taos in 1927, the place they lived for six years.
Set up view of Zoë Zimmerman’s Forsaken Objects and Untold Tales on the Taos Artwork Museum at Fechin Home, Taos, New Mexico (photograph by Nancy Zastudil/Hyperallergic)
Because the title implies, the exhibition is unapologetically sentimental and nostalgic. Put in all through the home, Zimmerman’s richly coloured archival pigment prints hold in shut proximity to Fechin’s work and to the very objects depicted within the images: a vase, a music field, a bar of cleaning soap. Zimmerman additionally makes nice use of humble supplies resembling a tissue stuffed right into a glass bottle and a crumpled brown paper bag, their textures, folds, and hues lending themselves to reminiscences of lives lived and days passed by.
Typically, Zimmerman’s work is closely metaphorical — some may even say didactic. A lemon represents the bitterness of life, a useless chicken signifies misplaced hope, as she defined throughout an artist speak final 12 months on the SE Middle for Pictures. No surprises there. I’m reminded of different photographers, resembling Laura Letinsky, who additionally make use of tropes of the home, discarded, and melancholic. Or Susan kae Grant, whose darkish palette and dreamlike settings embrace magical realism. However right here Zimmerman does one thing completely different, one thing that makes me uneasy. By creating nonetheless life images from the Fechin household’s on a regular basis objects, she inserts herself into the private historical past of others and asks viewers to do the identical. The result’s a sequence of contrived scenes onto which we’re free to challenge emotion and which means, the place maybe there needn’t be any. A wine jug, three-fourths full. A singular ornate blue shoe. A used paintbrush.
Zoë Zimmerman, “Atomizer” (2024), archival pigment print (courtesy the Taos Artwork Museum at Fechin Home)
Some philosophers would say it’s our impending, inevitable mortality that prompts nostalgia, mourning the lack of what we by no means had. And isn’t that the very nature or historical past of nonetheless life imagery, telling contrived tales and presenting objects as metaphors for all times and dying?
As I questioned my suspicion of and resistance to Zimmerman’s images, I discovered myself gravitating towards these through which I might discover proof of the artist herself — a burning cigarette, a squeezed tube of Alexandra’s vacuum cleaner machine oil with the contents snaked out simply so. I used to be doing the very factor for which I used to be important of Zimmerman: making which means by looking for clues, activating life via stillness. With that realization, I immediately longed for extra time … with the images, with all the things. My mistrust had turned to need. Sentimental certainly.
Set up view of Zoë Zimmerman’s Forsaken Objects and Untold Tales on the Taos Artwork Museum at Fechin Home, Taos, New Mexico (photograph by Nancy Zastudil/Hyperallergic)
Zoë Zimmerman, “Rio Grande Drug” (2024), archival pigment print (courtesy the Taos Artwork Museum at Fechin Home)
Set up view of Zoë Zimmerman’s Forsaken Objects and Untold Tales on the Taos Artwork Museum at Fechin Home, Taos, New Mexico (photograph by Nancy Zastudil/Hyperallergic)
Zoë Zimmerman, “Cherry Wine” (2024), archival pigment print (courtesy the Taos Artwork Museum at Fechin Home)
Zoë Zimmerman, “War Bonds” (2024), archival pigment print (photograph by Nancy Zastudil/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Zoë Zimmerman’s Forsaken Objects and Untold Tales on the Taos Artwork Museum at Fechin Home, Taos, New Mexico (photograph by Nancy Zastudil/Hyperallergic)
Forsaken Objects and Untold Tales continues on the Taos Artwork Museum at Fechin Home (227 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos, New Mexico) via March 30. The exhibition was curated by Christy Coleman, Taos Artwork Museum’s govt director.