Megan Pobywajlo

Forever Restless Earth

(July 20, 1969)

Her mother,

swollen with mine

saw new,

but just for a while.

I am drawn to historical moments where photography has marked shifts in human consciousness. (For example a multi-national, simultaneous desire to fix an image of the world - at photography’s inception, and the first ‘Whole Earth’ image taken from space.) This work is driven by an optimistic, even utopian idea - that a photography practice itself could be a kind of meditative search for that next leap.

These large-scale still lifes use homegrown food, plants, and secondhand objects to reveal the photograph as a grounds for unexpected combinations and infinite possibility. My books weave these images into another experience, a more internal one, for those who choose to spend time to access it. As a maker and educator that emphasises self-publishing as a space for radical self-empowerment and agency, I use the space of exhibitions to talk about a type of power that I do not myself have.

In the writing and research for this work, I look to my home state of California as a historical hub of countercultural activity and experimentation that is also emblematic of a troubling “pioneer-spirit”. Hippie nomadism, “Ecotopian” communes, countercultural publications like The Whole Earth Catalog, and Science Fiction desires like terraforming become reference material for new ways to process legacies of neoliberal failure, ecological disaster, and colonial violence.

I hold space for utopia, aware that it does not - and can not - exist.

(Mother, now oracle feminized)

how much more

vision, radical

could she dare

to learn us legacy

not for imitation

but for pushing forward.

Collaboration with Max Wagner

(2016 to present)

From 2013-2020, Megan + Max worked with Archive Collective to strengthen Kansas City’s photo community, pool resources, and create opportunities for our peers. This included local and traveling exhibitions, publishing projects, a photographer’s residency, critique nights, and more. In 2016 we began to work towards a collaboration as artist/photographers, not just as organizers.

We currently make large-scale still life photographs that combine the languages and techniques of commercial photography with mindful play.

We use locally available materials, food, and second-hand, seemingly disparate objects. These can be things natural and transient, plastic and permanent, common or rare, but often, they are objects that are elegant in their imperfection. Each object is slowly studied, the resulting arrangement is careful but free from hard and fast rules; playful and harmonious.

Like placing stones in a zen garden, we take turns choosing objects and colors, shapes and scale, light and shadow. In responding to each other’s ‘marks’ we level hierarchies, build a shared vision, and deepen our individual understandings of how art and advertising operate in the world.

A Dream About My Garden Without the Smell of Dirt

Solo exhibition

Front/Space, Kansas City, MO

documentation : Max Wagner

July 2018

“Megan uses the interior and exterior of Front/Space as a ‘book/space’, creating elliptical narratives through photography, poetry, small books, objects, and food. Megan’s new work negotiates flawed retro-futuristic optimism, family history, care, and future growth.”

Press

I.

I have the benefit of an intimate knowledge of Front/Space and its quirks. I’ve torn down its walls, spent my office hours, eaten my lunch, and learned its light. It became for my collective a temporary headquarters, and for me an almost sacred third space. It is only because of my access, for a time, to Front/Space, that my personal artwork has taken its current direction. My hope is that this exhibition can be an opportunity to fully realize some experiments that began with the radical transformation that Front/Space made to my brain.

II.

Logic is perhaps connected to my pleasure centers, it begs for closed circuits and satisfying ellipses. In my art this relates to the kinds of narratives I build in books. Books themselves are objects meant to be visited again and again. In my continued examination of Front/Space I began to think of it as a book. A spine and two windows spread, a cover : a view from outside in, a curve : a turning page. This process of discovery and decision making contingent on architectural details is a unique solution for me, as it has been some years since I considered my work for ‘the wall’ or in the confines of ‘gallery space’. Front/Space posits the challenge of its unique architecture, the attention to which is key to the success of an exhibition there.

III.

“I am occupied with seeing clearly.. as a way to render recognizable from one time to another, the hieroglyphs I have met.”

The photographs themselves and the act of making them serve as a kind of translation. They are a search for knowledge, as I continue to wade into oceans of images as a human, artist, educator, and organizer so focused on pictures in this media-obsessed moment and culture. My photographs unpack photographs. They are a type of indeterminateness, containing only the visible part of an omission. They are an invitation to see what they do not themselves contain, a world and the ‘real’ just outside of the frame.

IV.

My recent photographs are not all, but mostly, of food. This is largely colored by my experience on government assisted food programs despite deep family roots to subsistence and agricultural work. My living family is now conditioned (and their ancestors forced), to make due with surplus, byproducts, things preserved, artificial, mineral enriched, and deemed consumable. Even on the least eventful days of my current life, the ability to grow, consume, and access fresh food is the most beautiful joy and privilege. Photographing food (fresh or artificial) has become more cathartic than I could have anticipated. I can find a loving kind of humor in it, and share some recognition that what we eat is inextricably linked to the spaces we occupy in the world.

Food is never silent.

V.

As an artist / consumer / collector with occasional time and little money, I am accustomed to most things in my life being second-hand. My home is a collection of gifted scraps and inexpensive second-hand objects. Most of these objects are chosen based on vague mental images of how they might look as a photographs. My collections are filled with decorative objects that contain optimistic views of the future. They are soothsayers and divining objects, and I have genuine affection for their present, imperfect forms. I use my camera to evade nostalgia towards these divining/decorative objects by describing their physical imperfections with care, and anticipating my own future marked by their flawed predictions.

VI.

The language, clarity, and capabilities of my camera are (at this point) a hallmark of advertising photography, pulling this work deeper into the commingling desires of non-artist-consumers and my own.

Clouds in the Cave

Clouds in the Cave set.

Saddle stitched photo zines in custom envelopes.

Edition of 10.

Published with Archive Collective.

2017.

Begun in 2016 as a collection of nineteen cell phone photographs to reactivate "those circuits blown by the speed of the outside world", Megan Pobywajlo continues Clouds in the Cave with this zine set.

In lieu of an introductory essay, Megan includes an e-mail exchange between herself and artist / organizer Kendell Harbin which includes thoughts on the multiple, internal and external memory, poetry, and Luigi Ghirri's 'whole Earth' image.