Daniel Grant, Rachelle Reichert:
Artists’ unconventional muses — from plastic camera to graphite — are highlighted in new show
On Saturday, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Artists Gallery at Fort Mason will unveil a two-person exhibition that promises to set artworks’ formal and metaphoric affinities ricocheting around the space.
Daniel Grant turns in photographs of women, including nudes, from a series titled “My Affair With Diana,” alluding not to a person but to the Diana camera he used. An outmoded plastic camera known for its simplicity and unpredictable results, the Diana can yield effects that resemble pinhole photography or tonalist exercises from the late 19th century.
Rachelle Reichert, a graduate student at Mills College, will show drawings, photographs and constructed objects, all of which reveal or exploit the qualities of graphite.
Michelle Nye, the Artists Gallery’s manager of programming, assembled the show and spoke about it by phone.
Q: Why have you paired these two artists in particular?
A: We had another artist in mind for this show, Sheldon Greenberg, to pair with Daniel Grant, but he couldn’t do it at the last minute. Then I saw Rachelle’s work at Mills and saw an immediate relationship between her and Daniel’s uses of the female form, and I was interested in her new work with the materiality of graphite. Some of her pieces are drawings of the figure, while her flowers reference traditional still life material. There were flowers she covered with graphite and photographed after they’d dried. Her sort of zooming in on the medium was similar to how Daniel was using his camera. … He saw the relationship of the camera to the changeable form of the feminine and wanted to capture that, alluding to his relationship with his camera as a love affair.
Q: Did they know one another’s work before this?
A: No. They haven’t collaborated in any way. Q: Can you comment on the variety of media in the show?
A: It was a wonderful coincidence that Rachelle is exploring drawings in so many different ways. We considered just including drawings because they have an obvious connection in terms of content, but the more I talked to her about what she was doing with graphite across media, the more interested I was in showing that.