This is the first event in our new Studio Visit series, a set of ArtsWest talks conducted by artist and Bill Lane Center Affiliated Scholar Lukas Felzmann. In each episode, Felzman will introduce a new creative person whose work is based in the American West or is relevant to it. Audiences will have a chance to visit guest artists, writers, and thinkers in their "studios," and engage in conversation about their creative life and work.
Studio Visit: Arthur Tress
Arthur Tress began his first camera work as a teenager in the surreal neighborhood of Coney Island where he spent hours exploring the decaying amusement parks. Later, during five years of world travel, mostly in Asia and Africa, he developed an interest in ethnographical photography that eventually led him to his first professional assignment as a U.S. government photographer recording the endangered folk cultures of Appalachia. Seeing the destructive results of corporate resource extraction, Tress began to use his camera to raise environmental awareness about the economic and human costs of pollution. Focusing on New York City, he began to photograph the neglected fringes of the urban waterfront with a straight documentary approach. This gradually evolved into a more personal mode of “magic realism” combining improvised elements of actual life with stage fantasy that became his hallmark style of directorial fabrication. In the late 1960s Tress was inspired to do a series based upon children’s dreams that combined his interests in ritual ceremony, Jungian archetypes, and social allegory. Later bodies of work dealing with the hidden dramas of adult relationships and the reenactments of male homosexual desire evolved from this primarily theatrical approach. Moving to San Francisco
in 2015, Tress has returned to urban photography again focusing on changing land use around the Bay area from Vallejo to Silicon Valley. In late 2023 the Getty Museum will do a major exhibit of his work from the 1970's.
Lukas Felzmann
Lukas Felzmann is an artist and educator. He was born and grew up in Zürich, Switzerland and has been living and working in San Francisco since 1981. His work and installations contain sculptural elements, and through photographic means explore the intersections of the natural and the cultural. Current themes include our relationship to the landscape, and how we internalize and attempt to control nature. (Waters in Between). Another published body of work (Swarm), is an investigation and celebration of flight, musing on the working of natural systems, and how there might be control without hierarchy. The degradation of the marine environment through plastic and other materials is examined in Gull Juju. Lukas Felzmann’s work has been exhibited internationally, and six monographs have been published on it. The most recent is Apophenia published by Koenig Books, London in 2018. Lukas Felzmann has taught photography at the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University for 25 years, and is currently an Affiliated Scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. In 2018 Lukas Felzmann was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in photography.