Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Portraits and Spaces of Louisville, Kentucky

Photographs by Sarah Lyon

On View at Luscious Garage
459 Clementina Street
San Francisco, California 94103

Closing Reception Thursday June 26, 6pm to ?

With DJ Violent Vickie

Show Dates May 16 to June 27, 2008
Business Hours Tuesday to Friday 7:30 am to 6pm
www.lusciousgarage.com

Text by Erin Fletcher

I feel a moment of prescience looking at Sarah Lyon's photographs that is akin to arriving in a new city: slightly awed and laid bare by the possibilities of a place. "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere" is a collection of images from Lyon's hometown Louisville, KY. Each frame offers us a new scene to consider with its own small story. Some locations divulge their own secrets. At other times the environments respond to their inhabitants. The material ranges from striking and lush to stripped and raw. Lyon's talent is to concoct a reality that is seasoned by both. For the artist, these pictures culminate a five year project documenting small adventures with new friends in Louisville. Hung across the continent from their origins, in San Francisco's woman-owned Luscious Garage, the venue gives a nod to the small non-traditional spaces captured in "Nowhere". Notably, this show also allows Lyon to end her project in the city where she began her Female Mechanics Calendar in 2006. As viewers, this offers us the unique opportunity to watch her come full circle. Sarah honors the transience that gives the photographs their power by bringing a close to the series now that it feels complete.

Lyon focuses on places that could quickly be seen and forgotten in their mundanity: neglected store fronts coveted by artists, urban sprawl eyesores, a factory against a riverbank, broken beams that precede a remodel, banal work surfaces in a morgue. She calls our attention to these liminal zones by isolating each and then steeping them in a context that gives them texture and depth. There are no cars around the building whose sign advertises modern living. The train behind it is exactingly paused. This stillness allows us to imagine that the scene will be exactly the same tomorrow as we see it now. Interiors like "skate, robben's rooste" call on color to saturate the humble outlines of a scuffed up pre-teen hangout. The high wax on the wood floor absorbs the ceiling light so we feel how smoothly skate wheels would roll over it on their heavy trucks. Lyon's photographs benefit from her comfort with available light sources. The ephemeral morning sun engulfing Chris's studio appropriately erases the edges of her white shirt. A low evening sky highlights the dilapidated gravel along Rubbertown's shoreline in "jonathon, rubbertown". These dioramas resonate with us because they are the reality of our cities that got left off the mayor's homepage. This is the white brick of every movie theater complex and the flat stretch of blacktop behind it where you made out when you were sixteen.

While the locations incorporate some elements that seem to resist change, the inhabitants of these vignettes observe us, or their surroundings, with a light and sober grace. Perhaps, they seem at ease because Lyon began the series naturally. She invited friends out for small excursions as a way of building relationships and exploring new places after moving back home. The characters feel both caught and shaped by their environments. However, many of the subjects observe us with a straightforwardness that speaks of acceptance. They own the places they stand in. In these cases the characters become central and their locations halo around them. Two wine glasses of orange juice pay tribute to a morning with Kirby on the train trestle. DJ Jumbo Shrimp stands in a decomposing boat in a wry sailor outfit in "brian at sea". These Louisvillians allow themselves to be gently absorbed by a place but embellish it lightly like a pencil sketch on a bar napkin. Although their attachment often feels tenuous, they have found a small hush of beauty and paused their wandering to be within it for a moment. Like the Neil Young song from which it borrows its name, "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" builds an emotional bridge between the search for something new and the sweet ache of what is worn and known. If these images document nowhere they also speak of anywhere and everywhere.


--Erin Fletcher, May 2008