March 5 – 17, 1982
Lewis Koch artist’s statement from the 1981 National Endowment for the Arts Photography Survey exhibition catalogue Sites of Southern Wisconsin: Three photographers view commonplace structures and the built environment. Lewis Koch, David Mandel, Michael Simon (Beloit, WI: Turtle Press)
There is a quiet eccentricity at large in our everyday environment. Many structures which populate our material plane exude a sedate frivolity, for instance, often underestimated by a casual glance. Yet when seen in a certain equation of light and space, those anonymous and inconspicuous built forms can translate into anthropomorphic masks, totems of an eclectic and elemental present.
Seeking these commonplace structures is largely an intuitive endeavor. As a personal experience, I can best describe it as ritualistic prowling. Looking for the mundane, the non-descript, the uncircumstantial, seeing architecture as underdog, “minority” architecture– these shapes and spaces are shrines of immediate reality. They sit, poised within their surroundings, discovered by the visual explorer as semi-askew stage sets for our daily dramas.
Looking at things this way is sometimes mistaken for a hard-edged Romanticism. I prefer to think of it as Crypto-realism: the fact-is-as-fugitive-as-fantasy realm of photography. It is an attempt to revisualize reality, a “confrontation with the unknown.” Because our immediate locale is so familiar, it often is the unknown, ostensibly invisible. Only when we re-see it as something exotic or totemic does it redeem its substance and become recognized. A strange paradox here, but one with which to recycle the possibilities of our surroundings.
-LK
Documenting the vernacular landscape, “Sites of Southern Wisconsin” (1980-81) was a collective project comprised of photographers Lewis Koch, David Mandel, and Michael Simon, and archivist George Talbot. It was funded in part by National Endowment for the Arts Photography Survey, and Photography Exhibition grants, with additional support from Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission, and the Wisconsin Historical Society, which is the repository for the project archives. Original prints from the project are included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art (DC), Milwaukee Art Museum, The Royal Library (Copenhagen), and others.
Drawing upon aspects of photography, sculpture, assemblage and text, Lewis Koch calls attention to the often unremarked upon elements of everyday life. Over the past forty years, his work has been shown in garages, on kiosks and billboards, as well as in museums and galleries, with solo exhibitions in New York, London, Brussels, Seoul, Toronto, Chicago and Los Angeles. His work is in permanent collections throughout the United States, Canada and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC), Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). As an artist-in-residence at Copenhagen’s Fotografisk Center, Koch created the early web project Touchless Automatic Wonder. It provided an overview of his work prior to 2001; and was the basis for a monograph (Borderland Books, Madison, 2009) by the same title. Examples of these and other projects can be found on the artist’s web pages at https://www.lensculture.com/lewiskoch.