Portfolio: John Brinton Hogan

Recreational Hikers Near the Summit of Ghost Mountain, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California, November 2017 (Black, Turquoise, Brown, Red, and Orange with Gold Pearl and Glitter Blisters), 2019, pigmented ink, glitter, pearlescent pigment, and acrylic paint on cotton rag paper, 42 x 64 in., Unique

[Image description: A brown desert landscape with an orange sky. Five yellow human silhouettes stand in the landscape. The one on the far right points their finger into the distance.]

Photography has been mixed-media artist John Brinton Hogan’s mainstay since he picked up a camera in his early twenties. He long focused on straight photography recording the western landscape, but since 2013 Hogan has radically expanded his work through the incorporation of glitter, as well as the digital manipulation of the personal archive of photographs he has taken through the years. This new process has resulted in distorted photographic landscapes featuring iridescent silhouettes of finite human figures set against vast natural vistas. 

Embracing the extremes of the desert, his current series, Visual Aphasia, offers a contemporary take on the 19th century Romantic landscape paintings of Thomas Cole and Caspar David Friedrich. Like the Romantics, Hogan explores the sublime found in nature, co-mingling sensations of unease and reverence. Through digital color distortion, Hogan’s source photographs morph into surreal environments where clouds (not present in the initial photograph) emerge, mountains (prominent in the original) recede, and the distinction between ground and sky disappears into enveloping color fields. Hogan removes the photographed human figures, replacing them with sculptural silhouettes, meticulously built-up layer by layer with glitter. This repetitive, labor-intensive process, during which Hogan uses a physician’s magnifying lamp, supports a focused, meditative practice. The figures' detail calls to mind the precision associated with SoCal’s 1960’s Finish Fetish artists. In the vein of Light and Space art, in-person viewing is required to experience the shimmering figures that shift depending on how light is reflected as one moves around them. Hogan combines these historical traditions in his experimental practice to craft entirely nontraditional landscapes— apocalyptic, otherworldly habitats that evoke the Western landscape’s mythic past and project it into a futuristic dystopia.

Through this artistic process, Hogan probes the multiple valances of the landscape in the Southwestern United States. In conversation, he reveals the details of each photograph’s context.  A Group of Artists Stopped at the Intersection of Two Dirt Roads (2019) highlights a black glitter truck with bright red figures remote in the desert. The group consists of artists and academics en route to Utah to witness Nancy Holt’s iconic earthwork, Sun Tunnels. Climber on the Ascent (2014) presents a rugged landscape in rich browns, showing a lone figure (photographer Scott Davis) hiking toward a fabled 200-year-old saguaro cactus seen in the distance. Artists at Tinajas Atlas, El Camino del Diablo (2015)— washed in deep green— offers a dramatic view from the historic El Camino del Diablo trail, used by Native Americans and Spanish conquistadores. Red glitter figures form a V-shape at the steep slope above the water tanks sought by migrants and travelers in hopes of surviving the desert. Yet because of the way in which Hogan renders the figures abstract, specificity falls away during the viewer’s immediate experience, allowing the imagination to roam. 

Through an awe-inspiring landscape— which summons the mix of fear and wonder that so moved the Romantics— Hogan captures the precariousness of the human experience. Confronted by Visual Aphasia’s natural expanses, seemingly without beginning or end, a plethora of sensations may arise in recognition of our finite human condition. Hogan’s work provides reprieve from the noise of an information-saturated culture, but faced with the quiet of nature, diversion dissipates as we are left to face the unknown and acknowledge our mortality. An untenable void may surface or the perspective necessary to make our limited time more meaningful.
 

-Lauren Buscemi, art historian and writer 

Artist and Sons on Cliffs Near Watson’s Bay, NSW, Australia, Exact Date Unknown, Probably Winter, 2003 (Orange with Green and Yellow Glitter Flocking), 2017, pigmented ink, glitter, and acrylic paint on cotton rag paper, 40 x 49.75 in., Unique

[Image description: A faint landscape emerges from a bright orange image. A green, silhouetted human stands in the center, and three smaller figures sit on the ground. ]

A Group of Artists Stopped at the Intersection of Two Dirt Roads, North of Lucin, Utah, July 2014 (Pale Rainbow with Black and Red Glitter Crusts), 2019, pigmented ink, glitter, and acrylic paint on cotton rag paper, 26 x 36 in., Unique

[Image description: A barren landscape with a light yellow ground and pastel-colored sky. In the center of the image is a black silhouetted pickup truck with five red figures standing around it.]

Climber on the Ascent, Palo Verde Mountains Wilderness Area, near Blythe, California, Autumn 2013 (Chocolate with White Glitter Flocking), 2014, pigmented ink, glitter, and acrylic paint on cotton rag paper, 21 x 20 in., Unique

[Image description: A mountainous landscape in dark brown and black. A small white, silhouetted figure appears to be heading up the mountain. ]

Artists at Tinajas Atlas, El Camino del Diablo, Barry M. Goldwater Range, Arizona, March 2014 (Dark Green with Red Glitter Blisters), 2015, pigmented ink, glitter, and acrylic paint on cotton rag paper, 13 x 34 in., Unique

[Image description: A mountainous landscape in dark green and black. Pink silhouetted figures, in various standing and seated poses, appear on the left and right slopes of a valley in the foreground.]