Marcus Leatherdale

Artist’s Statement

Asia Society – Michelle Caswell interview:

MC: Isn’t this a romantic notion of Indian culture? How does your work differ from colonial portraits of India?

ML: Initially I looked at colonial pictures [from India] and I thought these could be such extraordinary pictures if there wasn’t such a barrier between the person who shot it and the “specimen”…. I certainly hope my pictures aren’t coming off as that. I’m just trying to depict the pure cultural aspects of India up to the point where they’ve all decided that in order to be modern, they’ve got to be Western. And that irritates me. You can be modern without being American; I think that is possible. To see people who are willing to trade off thousands and thousands of years of glorious traditions just so they can be modern is deplorable. So if you want to call that romanticism, fine.

Montreal-born photographer Marcus Leatherdale has been exhibiting for more than 30 years in galleries worldwide. His work has been published in such magazines as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Details, and Elle Decor, featured in publications from Artforum to Interview, and is in the permanent collections as museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago and Austria’s Vienna Museum of Modern Art.

First known for his arresting portraits of New York City celebrities (Hidden Identities series-Details) in the 1980s, in 1993 Leatherdale began spending half of each year in the Indian holy city of Banaras. Based in a 200-year-old house in the old city, he began photographing the diverse and remarkable people there, from the sadhus (holy men) to celebrities, royalty to the Adivasi (tribals). Each year, for the months he lives in India, he works out of his studio and then travels extensively, setting up makeshift studios in villages and carefully negotiating among some of India’s most elusive figures to make his portraits. Marcus relocated to Chottanagpur, Jharkhand, where he has been focusing on the Adivasis (tribals) of India. When not in India, Marcus is now based in Portugal (Luso Studio) and commutes between Europe and USA. In April, 2015, his show, Hidden Identities, will be up at Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in New York City. http://www.marcusleatherdale.com.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 5)

 

Welcome to Posit 5!

In this issue we are proud to feature literary and visual work by many rising, as well as gloriously risen, stars. As ever, we offer a range of literary aesthetics and approaches, from excerpted book-length projects by Anne Waldman and Pamela Lawton, Jane Lewty, and Deborah Poe, to short fiction by Luke Whisnant. This issue also showcases the poetic potential of the long prose line, put to innovative and distinctive use by Stephanie Anderson, Rob Cook, Kristina Marie Darling, Vanessa Couto Johnson, Bobbi Lurie, and Zach Savich.

We hope you enjoy:

Stephanie Anderson’s delightfully surreal and surprising Ditties, in which “everyone sits in the yo-yo park, staring at the buds,” and we are playfully invited to “look up the appendix” but warned not to “ride in the wrong direction”;

Marcia Arrieta’s gossamer constructions, at once contemplative, startling, and forlorn, in which “everything is dreadfully calm,” “deer come and graze on [her] bed,” and the narrator “often feel like an orphan”;

Rob Cook’s somber, foreboding poems in which he informs us of “the screams where I went / looking / for the clothes / my mother wore”;

Kristina Marie Darling’s wittily slant re-imaginings of nostalgic iconographies of femininity, charting their magical courses “from Iceland to Finland to anxious”;

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s wise wordplay delivered via statements that “think with the delicate,” awakening us to the mystery and ambiguity of our own existence, in which “the heart is not a pound but an apothecary dispensing needs”;

Jane Lewty’s “Spatio-Temporal [Re]Mix” of aural and visual referents amalgamated with precision and care into poems of musicality and provocative design, resonant with “a strange elation,/the skitter guilt of/achievement”;

Bobbi Lurie’s dense and powerful evocations of strength in the face of pain, shunning what is “fake as plastic shrubs” to reveal “how much the pursued is pursuant upon/a clause in the material fabric of a lie” with “the skill to slice whatever needs to”;

Nils Michals’ prose poems, teasing us with the contents of boxes: “an entire forest, petrified white, whereby the occasional breeze stirs the crowns” and something “unclaimed . . . is gifted to the Church in the name of a holy work that shall be unnamed”;

Deborah Poe’s quiet, serene “prouns:” elegant transformations of space to states of being we “don’t have to understand” although we are led to consider “[w]hat is lost when you ask why,” and assured that we “don’t have to connect dirt to language, But the histories cave right there”;

Zach Savich’s spare, starkly simple nuggets of imagist magic, demonstrating that “the things I like are the things that happen,” in other words, why “pleasure educates”;

Anne Waldman and Pamela Lawton’s feminist appropriation of classical oral tradition in which “women’s work is never shunned” and “the skies [keep] circling the/liberated hearth” where the female body is sung by its self and she/we can feel genuinely “welcome to the symposium”;

and Luke Whisnant’s post-apocalyptic flash fiction about a mandolin virtuoso in whose “music [resides] the anguished song of a headless doll and the rubato stagger of a cripple’s broken crutch.”

Thank you for reading!
Susan Lewis and Bernd Sauermann

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Welcome to the visual art of Posit 5!

Made from found and fabricated objects, Mari Andrews’ sculptures delicately dance the line between nature and nurture, form and object. Each piece suggests a multitude of possible references. At once open-ended and concrete, her works are bits of sculptural poetry.

Kevin Brisco’s series “Build” presents a world of young men at work with muscular energy, both literally and imagistically. The raw materials that his images are painted on – wood, tape, and sheetrock – interact with the subject matter in a way that comments on the process and the product of a creative life.

The fact that Marcus Leatherdale uses the English colonial name for the Indian sub-continent, “Bharat,” in the title of this stunning photographic essay gives more than a clue as to its intent. This reference to India’s past jives perfectly with these elegant and haunting portraits of his friends and neighbors, imbued as they are with such a feeling of timeless nostalgia.

Oriane Stender’s work plays with the imagery and the objects of our material world. Using US currency and found paper, she sews, weaves, and paints these sly commentaries on the cultural interplay of commerce and art, image and meaning.

And finally, the video artworks by Tim Tate, elegantly framed in handmade glass, conjure the bits and pieces of half-remembered dreams. Their inhabitants share a moment with us and then, poof — they’re gone.

I hope you enjoy!
Melissa Stern