Message from Gerard Smulevich
Aristotle expressed that “The accident reveals the substance”. This body of work attempts
to identify instances that while they may seem to express disarray, vulnerability and
dysfunction, they attempt a reading that may lead to an understanding of the substantive
qualities underlying urban landscapes.
The work presents an approach for the study of urbanism through a critical use of the frame.
By selectively excluding layers of information and isolating single instances for study,
the frame becomes a subjective eye; one that can identify and distill fragments describing
a city’s urban DNA and recognizes patterns, surfaces and sub-systems that form the multi-
layered armatures of complex landscapes.
The camera becomes an instrument of abstraction, identifying selective conditions of
landscape, geometry and light that represent the choreography of human occupation within
artificially modified landscapes.
It is my intention to investigate the media’s capacity to reveal urban conditions through
a selective use of the frame (re)configured by excluding, collapsing, compressing and
capturing instances taken from the infinite “accidents” found in existing urban landscapes.
These accidents only reveal themselves when the eye discovers an alternative reality
distilled through a controlled, precise optical distortion, such as that of a camera lens.
In considering Picasso’s statement that “art is a lie that makes us realize the truth”,
visualizing an instance selectively through a frame constitutes in itself an untruth, a
willful omission of everything excluded from that framed view; yet it reveals qualities
and conditions that would have otherwise laid buried under the multiple visual layers as
they are seen by the un-filtered human eye.
In this way, photography becomes an essential media for the creation of art, an
amplifier of our consciousness, a magic see-through looking glass that reveals hidden
truths about ourselves and our World.
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In the eight years since I started pursuing this medium as a conscious investigation
(starting with my Bunkerkunst gallery), several people have been essential to the
development of this growing body of work.
I would like to thank my colleagues and friends Paul Groh, Dennis Hollingsworth and
Dr. Paulette Singley for their insights and friendship; And to the inspiring and
demanding critic and mentor that I found in the late Julius Shulman, from whom I continue
to learn even in his irreplaceable absence: a brilliant, straightforward understanding of
what it means to take photographs of buildings that acknowledge the implied presence of
human beings as the catalyst for why we picked-up a camera in the first place.
Our many conversations have a currency that is still present in my mind every time I find
myself behind a view-finder.
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"The Mediator between the head and hands must be
the heart!"
From Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" , 1927
G.S.
updated October 2011
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Gerard Smulevich
1961: B. Los Angeles, California
1972: Relocated to Buenos Aires, Argentina
1986: Dpl. of Architect, University of Buenos Aires
1987: Relocated to Los Angeles.
1993: Master of Architecture UCLA
Student and thesis advisee of the late William Mitchell
Work with the late Charles W. Moore, FAIA (Urban Innovations Group).
Registered Architect, State of California
Professor of Architecture (f/t), Woodbury University (1996-present)
Photography-related training:
Work with filmmaker Ridley Scott (architecture project) 1991-1992
Collaboration/mentor-ship with the late Julius Shulman (2003-2010)
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