Jordan Douglas and Jennifer Koch pack a lot into a brief exhibition — just a week long at the new new art studio in Burlington. In a play on the word “extraordinary,” the title speaks to the overwhelming abundance of everyday stuff in a person’s life. An accumulation might result from intentional collections or from simply never throwing anything away; visual chronicles of both are evident in “(extra)ordinary.”
Douglas, a photographer and teacher at Saint Michael’s and Champlain colleges, presents glimpses of objects from his artist father’s home and studio, several steps removed. That is, Douglas photographed individual items with traditional black-and-white film and made contact sheets of the negatives. He then scanned the strips and made 16-by-18-inch digital prints of them, with items arranged in grids.
Stephen Douglas was a fascinating, eccentric character who, early in his New York art career, illustrated theater playbills and portraits of celebrities, his son explained. In the 1960s, he followed an Indian guru before marrying and moving to Westchester. In more recent years, he lived alone in a decrepit house infested with rodents and cluttered with things — Douglas called it “dadtritus.” Now suffering from dementia, the elder Douglas lives in a rehab facility; the task of clearing out his house fell to his children.
As Douglas photographed objects, he began to make decisions about grouping them together, he said. Not only do the items appear as ghostly vestiges of a life — his father’s — but in some way the items relate to each other.
“To have a memory of all these bits and pieces of this world [my father] constructed over 54 years, I realized they were having a conversation with each other,” Douglas said. “That became really exciting, because I like to stretch the bounds of photography, including aspects of process.
“Though they’re imbued with meaning, they’re also intriguing objects,” he added. “When I photograph them in black and white, they become tones, gestures, shapes.”
Douglas’ documentation of possessions has a precedent; he photographed items from his brother Gavin’s life when Gavin died suddenly several years ago. Some of these images were exhibited at Burlington’s Penny Cluse Café in early 2019. After his mother, Linda, died in December 2022, Douglas said, he began a similar series memorializing her via objects left behind.
Burlington artist and custom framer Jennifer Koch collects things: bones, buttons, dice, brushes, pencils, crushed eyeglasses (“Some I find walking or riding my bike before the street cleaners come in,” she explained), paint chips and more. In recent years Koch has primarily exhibited collaborative prints made with her husband, Gregg Blasdel. But this week she’s showing constructions in shadow-box frames that employ items from her treasure troves. She calls them “Charms.”
“I started making them in 2021. They’re really an extension of my work with found materials,” Koch said. “These are mining the culture of stuff that I’ve been collecting for more than three decades. They’re more intimate, quiet, using materials that were once useful and giving them new life in another context.”
One construction features pencils bent at impossible angles and arranged à la pickup sticks. Another looks like an enlarged seed packet for dahlias adorned with blobs of acrylic paint. Yet another is a vintage black-and-white landscape print with a scattering of nearly 30 dice. The works are modest in size, Koch said — 8 by 12 or 13 by 10 inches.
Why call them “Charms”?
“I like Merriam-Webster’s definition of the word: actions or things believed to have magical powers; something to bring good luck; a trait that fascinates, allures or delights,” Koch said. “But I hate to overexplain the work. I’d rather the viewer have their own experience.”
Viewers can do just that Friday, May 5, through Saturday, May 13, at new new art studio, 4 Howard Street in Burlington. Receptions bookend the exhibit: May 5, 5 to 8 p.m., and May 13, 2 to 5 p.m.
This article appears in May 3-9, 2023.
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