THE LITTLE VILLAGE / IOWA CITY, IOWA
To take in Sandy Dyas’ retrospective is to be overwhelmed at the start. To absorb the show in a meaningful way, you need to take your time.
The show caps off four decades of work. It is, for the artist, a “memoir”: “Looking back at it all tells me a lot about where I have been, what I was thinking and feeling.” That the project was funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Iowa Arts Council, part of the Iowa Economic Development Authority, is validation of her career, and she wanted to make sure that I expressed her gratitude in this piece.
You have to get your bearings, because the artist reveals so much of herself through the number of images on display, the saturated colors, the crisp black and white, and layered collages and videos, the latter forming a low background cacophony. Being in the space almost became too much at moments, because I was trying to make sense of it all at a glance.
Don’t. Start at the divider wall, read the artist’s statement, and grab a list of works for titles, dates and prices. The gallery is bisected, one half devoted to the series Lost in the Midwest, and the other half containing the rest of the series, her video work, and her collages, 10 components in all.
People, places and color
“Lost in the Midwest” starts in a familiar tone, at least for me. I’ve heard of some of Dyas’ subjects, have chatted with one or two, know some names somehow, have maybe seen them someplace. This was a new experience for me, one that got under my skin because of the immediate way the familiar became strange. Dyas reflected the mundane back to me. It’s not someone else’s mundane, not the mundane of any other place or region: it’s eastern Iowa’s everyday life that has been made strange.
It’s my recognizable mundanity that brushes up against me. Dyas mirrors life back to us in a different key. The embedded insider becoming an outsider with a camera: “People tend to trust me, I think. It usually takes a short amount of time for both my subjects and myself to relax and go with the flow of things.”
People tend to trust me, I think. It usually takes a short amount of time for both my subjects and myself to relax and go with the flow of things.
Part of this flow is seen in the use of saturated color and the ways that subjects relate to their environments. These elements may be familiar to you in the work of Hellen van Meene and William Eggleston, artists with whom Dyas shares an affinity. She frames each person (or pet) centrally, and her careful coordination of subject and environment shows deep engagement with her sitters. For example, a subset of four small photographs on the middle wall feature yellow and green: the subjects tonally match their environment, as if the relationship itself between the subject, interior, or landscape create the vivid colors. Other series like Truth & Beauty (2017-2022) and My Eyes Are Not Shut, work similarly: Dyas lets us in on her inner-worldmaking, opening up the contents of her mind to the viewer, as if her attention and care highlight pieces of the world for the viewer to contemplate.
Layers of color, layers of sound
A similar sentiment can be seen in her videos and collages, the process of layering helping the artist make sense of the passage of time and the “impermanence of life,” as noted in her artist statement. Her videos, especially those created since 2013 in collaboration with filmmaker LeAnn Erickson, focus on “the primacy of place.”
My favorite videos in which to see this are red roses for gertrude stein and the barn collapses. In the former, two children toss a ball back and forth in front of a decaying barn while a voice recites lines from Stein’s poem, “Tender Buttons.” Vivid green from the grass and bright red from the barn make the place otherworldly. In the latter, the same video of the children playing is layered over an image of the now-collapsed barn.
In a 2018 talk, Dyas cites filmmaker Wim Wenders as an influence, namely his belief that landscapes tell stories. In recording Iowa landscapes, she is able to “look for traces we leave behind.” In All You Can Eat and Collages & Constructions, Dyas compiles, cuts, tears, tapes and writes on the images, encouraged by the work of Robert Frank and Doug and Mike Starn. Collage is the analog, physical method used to process the traces of time and get at the truth of everyday life: each individual can see the same landscapes, know the same people, and go to the same events, but the sum total will never mean the same thing in the same way to any other person.
Webs of lifeWith so much saturation and texture in the exhibition as a whole, the two black-and-white series, found on the back gallery wall, were a resting place for my eyes, places to pause and shift gears. These photographs behave differently because of their presentation and their hand processing. Both Down to the River; Portraits of Iowa Musicians and The Lost Nation Photographs date from the mid-1980s into the 2000s, and all images have a white mat and black frame. In each series, Dyas closely arranged them in rows, no space between. In these works, you will find resonances with Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, Sally Mann and Diane Arbus.
The arrangement of Down to the River reminded me of a loose yearbook, a record of a particular scene in a particular place in time. If you are a local music lover, musician, or know the subjects as neighbors, characters around town, or friends, these are a treat. Dyas moved to Iowa City in 1987 and through her musician boyfriend, she frequented venues and befriended the likes of Pieta Brown, Bo Ramsey, Dave Zollo, and Jo and Vicki Price, among many others. She lovingly describes the photos as “a personal collection of portraits and memories.”
These photographs are not absolute truth. They are a collaborative effort between the person in front of my lens and myself.
“These photographs are not absolute truth. They are a collaborative effort between the person in front of my lens and myself.” She took a camera with her to capture her experiences at the shows, which was a close-knit and warm community. “I was part of it all…Dancing and having an evening out with my friends and these incredible musicians…It truly felt like magic. I guess for me, it felt…like we were all one—the musicians on the stage, the people dancing.” You feel the love for her subjects here, in seeing what makes the musicians tick.
The Lost Nation Photographs is my favorite series because it reveals the juxtaposition of knowing so much about Dyas through her work, and knowing so little about the lives and landscapes in the frames. Whereas the display of Down to the River evokes a familiar lineup, the presentation here evokes windows onto worlds, filaments in a web made by the artist. She becomes spider-like when she described the images as “made very quickly and spontaneously, reacting to my eye, my gut intuition and timing.” The momentum on this wall is a drawing-in occurring from Dyas’ weaving-together of the images as “a personal and poetic exploration of emotional loneliness and the amazing human spirit.” Yet the images themselves leave me with questions that cannot be answered, filaments that cannot be followed outward and into the worlds of their subjects. Time passes, death will come for us all, and Dyas drives home that the small moments in everyday experiences are what creates life’s mysteries.
