His Cup Runneth Over – James Henkel at Artspace

Photographer James Henkel is a Penland kind of guy. Even though he lives and teaches in Minnesota a large part of the year, he’s still able to maintain a studio in western NC.  The influence via Penland and western NC’s craft traditions is apparent in his photographs (I think of them almost as portraits) of various vessels including baskets, cups,vases and assorted glass and metal bowls. Beyond simply documenting the form of the container itself however, Henkel is also interested, perhaps a little perversely,  in the moment of inadequacy and drama when a given vessel fails to do its particular job.  In his Spills series, he has photographed sand spilling through the slats of a woven basket, a salt shaker spill turning into a lyrical drawing, and milk pouring out the delicate cloverleaf shaped holes of  a small metal container.   Henkel has also produced a stacked book series in which he puts old textbooks through the bandsaw- a little woodshop work exploring materiality and ephemerality I think- and then photographs the results which curiously take on abstracted form resembling flags and banners. The tension in his Table Arrangements series of stacked glass bowls is precarious and quirky at the same time.  Meant to last only about as long as it takes to snap the picture, the stackings are about the visual fascination and weirdness of distorted visual appearances inherent when water becomes a lens.

There is a certain poetry in the fact that Henkel’s medium is photography. After all what is a camera but a container for capturing light and form on a recording surface (whether on film or pixels on a digital card.)   The fact that Henkel is interested in expanding the conversation into sculptural and craft territory, turning the notion of vessel on its head if you will, is what truly keeps the work buoyant.

Stacks + Spills, work by James Henkel is on display in Artspace’s Gallery 2 through May 7, 2010 in downtown Raleigh