Kay Westhues, photographer

Kay Westhues/Photo by JPC 

Highly recommeded: You have until June 26th to see the exhibit featuring photos from Kay Westhues' two major projects, Fourteen places to eat and Well stories at Artpost gallery in downtown South Bend.  Her lucid images of local events and people are witty depictions of small-town life and of the way the mainstream inexorably bleeds in. 

ABOUT KAY WESTHUES

Kay Westhues studied photography along with anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington, and it shows.  That is to say, what shows is her almost scholarly dedication to using her art to expose the weird beauty and oddness of a place.  Her work is imbued with the pleasure of a social scientist  -- one who understands what she photographs but wants to know more.  Thus, she likens her process to “participant observation,” the methodology favored by those who believe that understanding derives from being a part of, from doing.  Documenting the old/new Midwest in which she was raised, her photographs are intimate, yet theatrical.  They show her intimacy with the little things characteristic of small towns and farm life.  At the same time, she places them on a larger stage.  She is a regional artist, but what she does for this region is to frame its people and its landscapes as characters within the greater dramas of American social, economic and industrial change.   

FOURTEEN PLACES TO EAT

In addition to showing the photos at mainly local galleries and museums, for five years, Westhues posted photos of local cultures to her blog, Fourteen places to eat.  In this collection, whose images all relate in some way to Westhues’ memories of growing up on a farm in Walkerton, Indiana, the country landscapes are lush, the domestic scenes, somehow antiquated.  There is a photo of drying fish heads, nailed to a wall.  There are images of odd animals sold at or attending outdoor festivals (one favorite features a peacock, already purchased and ready to go, wrapped up tight in a newspaper).  In direct relation to the title, there are photos of ancient local diners and the pies that are served there.  The patrons, looking happy or intense, seem at home.  There are at least fourteen places to eat in Walkerton.

Inwood feed and grain by Kay Westhues

In the most compelling photos, Westhues brings together telling details that, juxtaposed, produce a "story effect" if not a real story.  As with Inwood feed and grain, the viewer feels inserted into a movie about some lost America.  The photo looks like it was taken on a stage set that has been lit to emphasize the action in a single store. The sky, seemingly lit from below, is too evenly cloudy, too low, too real.  Something, it seems, is about to happen.

The theatricality of some photos is in their snapshot feeling.  Their story effect comes from the casualness with which they were clearly taken.  They are not posed, but captured.  They are all finds, in an archeological sense.  They are discoveries made by Westhues and her camera along the way.  She goes along her way in life and her photos show us the things that she sees.  Her body of work is thus a collection.  If some people collect postcards or stamps, Westhues is a collector of moments.  She collects the moments that her camera enables her to collect and, from among them she selects the photos in which people and places reveal themselves. 

The things Westhues prefers to photograph are like relics that have unaccountably survived into the present day.  You see in almost every photo evidence of the continuation of older modes in modern life, or the intrusion of popular images into local culture.  She photographs holiday displays and local festivals: in one, a quaint, rundown shop window displays Christmas items, haphazardly organized.  In another, old-fashioned Easter bunnies are spiked into a yard covered with what might be autumn leaves.  In the blog’s artist statement, Westhues explains that “Many of my photos contain signs of a previous time in rural life, when locally owned stores and family farms were the norm. Today chain stores and agribusiness are prevalent in rural communities.  I looked for ways to reveal this change in my photos….” 

  Buster, Crystal, Theresa and Kalvin by Kay Westhues

WHAT IS A REGIONAL ARTIST?

There are photographers, most famously Walker Evans, who have made their name photographing local cultures for the consumption of "the world."  People everywhere have felt the effects of the Great Depression through his portraits of the worst-off.  Yet he was not of the regions he photographed during that period when he was working for the government, documenting the farming poor.  His lucid, moving photographs of their despair and subsistence conditions are the work of a relative outsider who chose the images on the basis of their power to persuade.  The "realism" always attributed to this work fulfills a relatively simple idea of the real, in which real people are generally poor and unhappy.  Even if they are happy, they are presumed as missing - which is to say, missing from the grander aesthetic fields. They are presumed forgotten, and, when they are found, they are put on exhibit. 

By contrast, a truly regional artist is an artist who looks at a place with the eyes of an insider.  To be such an artist, you must belong to what you photograph.  You are, in part, your own subject, whether you are photographing people or rocks or buildings.  In this way, your vision has authenticity, even if it cannot be detected from outside.  You are an expert in your field. 

There is a downside to this kind of expertise, of course.  The larger, global art world centered in cities like New York and Paris is prone to look at the regional with some disdain, partly because Modernism in the arts has favored universal themes and archetypal images - and partly for market reasons (there are fewer potential buyers).  Even regional museums don't necessarily want to be thought of as regional.  The local museum in South Bend has removed the word "regional" from its title, recently going from The South Bend Regional Museum of Art to The South Bend Museum of Art. 

The reputation of the regional is that its works are irrelevant or sweet but not serious.  Like "outsider art," the work of the regional artist is outside a defined inside or center.  However, outsider art -- always epitomized by Henry Darger, closet painter of warring tweens -- has the glamor of total innocence.  Darger was a janitor in a school and painted his scenes behind closed doors, refusing to let anyone know of his terrific output.  His great battle scenes of evil vanquished and child warriors was discovered at the time of his death, and they have been received by the art world as evidence of his purity of intention.  He did not work for money, but for the glory of the battle.  Though his scenes are complex and fascinating, it is his  innocence, like the innocence of the girl children he painted, that especially grabbed viewers.   

The regional artist is not innocent of the market, not necessarily innocent of adult vengeance or adult emotions.  In the eyes of the art world, the regional is only innocent in its lack of ambition to speak as if  for everyone. 

A truly excellent artist - Westhues is one - is someone whose insider knowledge translates to the larger picture.  They are legible to other Midwesterners -- at least those in Indiana -- because they share the same specific world.  They are legible to those in the greater art market because they are beautiful and because they indicate something about the way the Midwest fits in with the rest of the world.  The images may have sweetness, but they are also serious enouch to include the humor of a live mouse gambling device (see below). What is "the world" - even the "global world" - but a bunch of local places, all patched together into one, uncomfortable whole?  If there is a market, including an art market, that pretends to a transcendent vision of that whole, it only does so by overlooking the minor and major differences that maintain a place's sense of itself.  In spite of the Internet and the ubiquity of pictures, places are still particular and they are still available to be revealed by art.

Mouse roulette by Kay Westhues

WELL STORIES

Westhues was recently recognized by The New York Times.  She was featured in an article about artesian wells and the "pilgrims" -- as Times writer Erik Eckholm describes them -- who visit them.  Well Stories is Westhues' project documenting the survival of these natural springs, especially in this area.  She is fascinatinated by their communal function, and by the history of wells that have been used as gathering places for hundreds of years.  Some of this on-going work, as well as certain examples of the earlier project, are on view at Artpost, the South Bend gallery started by Westhues and her partner Jake Webster last year.  You can see these, as well as examples of sculpture by  Webster, until June 26th.