| Although Shawn Hummel has been known to photograph custom cars, his work is not related to nostalgia or kitsch and is about as concerned with documenting artifacts from a distinct subculture as Edward Weston was concerned with the cultural proclivities of the produce he photographed. Hummel is more enthralled by those same “lovely topologies” that caused a cream-colored Tom Wolfe to go gooey, metal-flake tangerine and start spelling “custom car” with a “K.” Or, by the approach of John McCracken and Craig Kauffman, who worked in between the concomitant tendencies of pop and minimalism, marrying minimalist austerity to the high-key gloss of Southern California car culture. | sm.jpg) |
Light and the City – George Pasterk
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Although Shawn Hummel has been known to photograph custom cars, his work is not related to nostalgia or kitsch and is about as concerned with documenting artifacts from a distinct subculture as Edward Weston was concerned with the cultural proclivities of the produce he photographed. Hummel is more enthralled by those same “lovely topologies” that caused a cream-colored Tom Wolfe to go gooey, metal-flake tangerine and start spelling “custom car” with a “K.” Or, by the approach of John McCracken and Craig Kauffman, who worked in between the concomitant tendencies of pop and minimalism, marrying minimalist austerity to the high-key gloss of Southern California car culture.
Shawn Hummel didn’t know what he was going to get when he first experimented with shooting the lines, planes, parabolas and surfaces of custom cars at night. Taking a reductive approach, Hummel began abstracting the vehicles’ surfaces in order to exploit the formal sculptural elements of the car’s bodywork—more recently he foregrounds these elements to include the surrounding architecture to produce peculiar candy-colored landscapes.
Using medium-format slide film, long exposures and an un-synched flash, Hummel allows for chance discoveries and serendipitous effects. His camera focuses in on a selected sculptural detail and the rest is allowed to go soft, creating pools of congealed incandescent light and neon blurs around the radiant apple reds, poison greens and phosphorus yellows of his central subject. Redolent with a pictorialism that would have caused the aforementioned Weston to reach for his revolver, Hummel’s photos reveal a concern for the painterly. Indeed, by his own admission, Hummel has very little interest in the vagaries of the photographic medium, and is given much more to the formal concerns of shape, color and texture found in painting and sculpture.
Adroit in his ability to embody these ideas in his work, he presents the viewer with an image that has the same optical effect of seeing light reflected through multiple layers of translucent pigments. This illusion of “optical mixing,” which is generally a property associated with the process of oil glazing, is accomplished by digitally printing the image to metallic c-print paper, which is then overlaid with a super gloss UV laminate. Mounted flush to aluminum sheets, these sizeable works (some as large as 38” x 38”) have recessed supports that cause the works to hang several inches from the wall, floating coolly and effortlessly in the air like comic strip word bubbles. The end result is an image that is luminescent and highly respondent to the quality of atmospheric conditions and the position of the viewer in relationship to the work.
This penchant for the sculptural is a tendency that Hummel, not coincidentally, shares with several Las Vegas abstract painters such as fellow University of Nevada, Las Vegas alumni Jack Hallberg and Yek. It is Hummel’s preference to be grouped with painters and sculptors than with photographers. In 2004, Dust Gallery’s “Modern Minimal” show in Las Vegas matched Hummel to the tooled aluminum wall sculptures of Bradley Corman. “Ultraflux,” his more recent show at Dust, found him paired with Milwaukee painter Stephen Hough. Hough’s large, monochromatic works consisting of carved Plexiglas coated in car enamel, which approximate a rippling liquid surface, were a fair match to Hummel’s own fluid veneer. This past August and September, Hummel was featured in a solo showing titled “Ultrachromatic” at San Diego’s R3 Gallery. The preposterous prefixes in the latter two exhibitions indicated the delicious tendency to sensationalize this already sensate work.
In the end, Hummel’s pieces are more than slightly seductive; they reveal just enough of their metal flake curves to warrant a second or third look. With his high-key palette, liquid finishes and parallel source material, Hummel offers the reverse of the cool brightness of the Southern California daylight evoked in the works of his West Coast minimalist cousins and, instead, gives us a look into the peculiar properties of the Las Vegas night. This is a light that does not so much illuminate as contaminate surfaces with preternatural hues. A light that colonizes what it touches, gaseous and inviting, pulling the viewer into a world that the painter David Reed once described as one that “turns matter into color.”
