Artwork by Jamie Gannon
About Jamie Gannon
Jamie Gannon has been creating works of art his entire career. Since graduating from the University of Tennessee with a BFA in Printmaking, his practice has utilized all the tools available to a modern maker of art — including traditional photography, digital photography, intaglio, drawing, painting, and collage. His photographs simultaneously stop time, infuse form, construct memory, and fuel nostalgia. The photographs and paintings are both archive and fabrication, record and invention, emblematic of the way a work of art functions in our contemporary world as both document and storyteller.
Jamie Gannon has been creating works of art his entire career. Since graduating from the University of Tennessee with a BFA in Printmaking, his practice has utilized all the tools available to a modern maker of art — including traditional photography, digital photography, intaglio, drawing, painting, and collage. His photographs simultaneously stop time, infuse form, construct memory, and fuel nostalgia. The photographs and paintings are both archive and fabrication, record and invention, emblematic of the way a work of art functions in our contemporary world as both document and storyteller.
Defamiliarized Perspectives and Distributed Attention
Documenting "place" is an aspect of Gannon's work that is critically important. The precise locations provided with each work add an element of reality that brings into focus the credibility of the original photographs as a recorded archive. Many of the structures found are endangered as time inevitably progresses and their utility wanes. Capturing the subject as completely as possible from all sides is a concerted effort. Presenting the art derived from the original source photos with two sides mirrored gives the viewer an intentionally unfamiliar viewpoint. At the same time the viewer, with prolonged attention, is informed in a way that a single-sided depiction could never provide.
Geometry as Organizing Principle
Underlying all of Gannon's work is an attentiveness to geometry — the lines, grids, and structural logic that organize our built world before we ever think to question them. Architecture makes this ordering visible, but it is everywhere: in the lot lines of a subdivision, the rhythm of a row crop, the arc of a schoolyard track. Gannon
finds in these forms not abstraction for its own sake, but evidence of how human intention shapes the land.
finds in these forms not abstraction for its own sake, but evidence of how human intention shapes the land.
New Constructions
The abstract "new constructions" Gannon creates are an essential extension of the original, documented places. Elements from the physical surrounding landscape and details from a mapped perspective provide inspiration that becomes natural, albeit surprising, visual moments that are based on information from the earth's collaged reality. Our urban cities, our suburbs, and our farmlands are a giant collage — one that is never truly separated from our built environment.
A Legacy in the Built Midwest
This attention to endangered and overlooked architecture is not without precedent in Gannon's own family history. His grandfather, Clair W. Ditchy, was a prominent Michigan architect and former president of the American Institute of Architects whose practice shaped communities across the Midwest during the mid-twentieth century. Ditchy worked and corresponded with some of the most significant figures of modernist design — among them Eero and Eliel Saarinen, Florence Knoll, and Charles and Ray Eames — at a moment when American architecture was actively reimagining the relationship between built form and lived experience. The structures Ditchy helped bring into being were themselves expressions of place, rooted in specific communities and specific landscapes. Where Ditchy constructed, Gannon documents — and in doing so, carries forward a generational attentiveness to what we build, what we keep, and what we let go.