Aesthetics Of Melancholy

Wildfire Sunrise, Colorado, 2024, framed pigment print on matte cotton paper, 15.75"x21"

My exhibit, Aesthetics of Melancholy, at Rosalux Gallery in Minneapolis, opened on November 2nd and closed on November 30, 2024. This new work builds on my last exhibit, Don't Go Into The Light, also at Rosalux, in November, 2022. Below are images of some, not all, of the pieces in the exhibition and thoughts on the process and meaning of the work.

Aesthetics of Melancholy, Gallery Installation View of photographs by Frank James Meuschke

Aesthetics of Melancholy, Installation View.

These works were made between the summers of 2023 and 2024, in locations as varied as New York's Hudson Valley, Gettysburg National Park, and the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado. Despite appearances, each image is entirely in-focus. Image capture is triggered after I place various studio-made, custom plastic filters in front of the lens. The plastics distort the intensity, saturation, contrast, and wavelength of incoming light. The photographs are not digitally altered beyond common color correction for screen or printing.

Kaaterskill Falls, New York is printed on matte cotton rag and is velvety rich in blacks

Kaaterskill Falls, New York, 2024, framed pigment print on matte cotton paper, 15.75"x21"

On Process

First I see something. Then bring the camera viewfinder to my eye. I then see something entirely different and, at times, less engaging. If it passes this test of first transformation, I press the shutter, and review. Now, I see something else, twice removed from what I originally saw. Later, I slip the card out of the camera to view on my laptop, press the space bar, and what is seen is new once again. Images that looked great on a three-inch camera screen, now fully backlit, fall short. The original excitement for an image may have dissipated.

Still, one out of a series may go on from here. Finally, there is my input as I edit an image for yet another, even greater transformation —the print. Now, the image is viewed on my large, matte screen capable of 98% Adobe RGB color gamut. For each test, the "proof," I act as a kind of translator between two similar, yet distinct, modalities where I could spend hours on subtle differences between the two. Each re-proof changes how the same image, last printed, is perceived. Detail and tonality are often unchanged, proof to re-proof, but color is ever shifting with my subjectivity, ambient light, paper choice, and in comparison to a prior proof.

The final print can be, possibly must be, as different from the screen image as a negative is from a wet print. Printing is as necessary to the art-making process as that first sight which compelled me to lift the viewfinder to my eye. Because of this, there is no proper way to select a suite of images from a screen for an exhibit of prints. The solution is to create many more prints than a space can hold so the relationship between images, which creates meaning, can be fully understood. Only then can the depth of the work come together and become visible to you.

Monument, Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii, Arizona is a large photograph printed on matte cotton rag and float-framed in maple showing one of the famed "monuments" of monument valley, with a passing white vehicle, on the Navajo Nation

Monument, Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii, AZ, 2024, framed pigment print on matte cotton paper, 22.5"x30"

On Presentation

I've always had difficulty with common display modalities of photographs, i.e. frame, mat and glass, so like my prints on polyester, for my prior exhibit in 2022, I wanted to explore something new. The images are low contrast and highly saturated due to the process of photographing through plastic sheeting, so I felt printing on a matte cotton paper would be appropriate and transformative —elevating each image beyond the screen on which we so often view digital photographs.

The work is printed on either Epson Legacy Fibre —a Rives BFK-like, matte cotton rag paper made by Canson, or on Hahnemühle Photo Rag —a matte cotton paper with a subtle, watercolor paper-like texture. Heavy ink deposits on textured, matte papers harmonized with the painterly imagery born out of the filtered photographic process. This physical presence is part of the experience of the work, blurring the boundaries of photography and painting.

Placing prints behind glass would work against the physical presence I was going for. So, despite the good advice of more than one framer, I chose to mount the prints on Dibond (a plastic panel sandwiched between two thin pieces of aluminum) within a frame with no glazing. It's unsettling for me to give part of the process over to someone else, but I could not accomplish mounting of delicate prints in my studio, so had the mounting done by a Minneapolis print shop.

I also decided to make my own white-pickled, maple frames with one quarter inch float-gap all around the mounted print. I ripped maple stock to size for this project, mitered, constructed, pickled, and finally wired each frame. The frame face sits about one eighth proud of the print surface to offer a bit of protection. The resulting aesthetic matched my expectations, although I recognize that, without glazing, the delicate print surface is exposed to abrasion, spittle, light, and atmosphere. For this exhibit, I accepted the risk and it turned out well.

Walkers, Storm King Art Center, New York, 2024, framed pigment print on matte cotton paper, 15.75"x21"

On Meaning

My landscape photographs depict places of personal or cultural significance, all potent sites of melancholy, and are evocative of my artistic influences from American Luminist painters to German painter Gerhard Richter, photographers Edward Steichen to Richard Misrach. My intention is to create an experience of melancholy linked to the experience of nature; to synthesize the pleasure of living on this planet with the grief of change.

Melancholy is not sorrow nor depression, but an aesthetic-emotive response to internal or external stimuli. Landscape, a memory, an image, quality of light, a thought, or even scent —these things, and others, can trigger or sustain it. Melancholy has a counterpart in the sublime, and both have roots in nature experience and human emotion. Where sublimity is the transmutation of terror into awe, melancholy is the intentional contemplation of transience, longing or a faint promise of hope; it connects the past with the present, harmonizes the painful with the pleasurable, and links imagination to emotion. Melancholy, like the sublime, is a reflective experience capable of elevating us above unprocessed emotions and synthesizing feeling, memory, imagination, experience, place, and time.

The path to this show was not a straight one. It began within the context of an artist residency at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve where I discovered the concept of hauntology, revisited folk horror, and imagined an occult practice in the artifacts and landscapes of ecology science. Then there is my time in the construction and nursery trades surrounded by, and viewing the world through sheet plastics. Of course, there is climate change, apocalyptic thinking and the raw emotions surrounding our culpability. There is also my history of training and practice as a painter, which undoubtedly influences my photography.

In 2022, a young student came to my exhibit "Don't Go Into the Light" (a reference to the film Poltergeist) and, as I was there that day, told me that the work was "so beautiful, she needed to cry." I think that response to the work was, to some degree, the impetus for the theme of the current exhibit.

As I often do, in preparation for an upcoming exhibit, I began exploring possible show titles through the practice of web searching relevant keywords. This research yielded an article titled Melancholy as an Aesthetic Emotion printed in the journal Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume I, by Emily Brady. I was floored by her consolidation of the many disparate notions and thoughts I had about where my work was and is going. The ideas it presented also helped me recall how, in childhood, I would get lost in an experience I could only describe, now, as an intentionally sustained, internal experience of sadness and beauty whose net outcome felt positive. The experience was most often stirred by a landscape, a quality of light, something as simple as staring, alone, out a window at dusk.

The images above and below each have their own background story —the moment of image capture as well as the significance of the site for me, personally. However, I do not consider myself a photographic story-teller. It is preferable that I do not interject my "reason" for working with a location as it could focus the experience too much on the artist. Many sites are compelling, but that alone doesn't make the work, and sometimes, hard as one tries, imagery from a location might yield little, if any, art. Lastly, a little self-criticism is warranted —I could have developed greater connection between individual images, either by placement or selection.