A Variety Show

Scott Fortino

@ Document

845 Washington

Sept. 6 – Oct. 19

"A Variety Show" at Document

A pushpin is one of the most ubiquitous institutional methods of hanging information. This is true of schools, government buildings, detention centers, and the like. The photographic work of Scott Fortino would attest to this fact. For twenty three years Fortino worked as a Chicago police officer, growing intimate with the institutional spaces that would come to inform the breadth of his work as a photographer.

Fortino had the unique experience of pursuing an MFA at The University of Illinois at Chicago between 1998 and 2001, while still working in active duty as a Chicago police officer. This multi-institutional residency would come to be the subject of his photographic work. Photographing a mixture of institutional spaces including Chicago public schools and police detention centers, Fortino explored the language of minimalist architectural spaces in relation to the absence of their regular inhabitants. In his book “Institutional”, Fortino seamlessly represents these photographed spaces together and without text, confusing the function and specificity of each particular location by generating clean formalist images that rely on the organization of aesthetic properties. It is in his overarching formalist photographic strategy that the spaces are decontextualized, leaving the viewer to surmise what the space might have been used for, and under what circumstances. The images bring to mind the conflict that the police officer cum artist may have been experiencing as he worked for his masters in fine art, and simultaneously toward his retirement– both professions dealing with the rapid interpretation and response to a ceaseless stream of visual information.

Untitled (golden #1)

Certainly the most recognizable, and perhaps the only clear indicator of scale in Scott Fortino’s exhibition at Document this fall is a single pushpin. It is a detail that is easy to miss. Among the eight abstract color photographs in the exhibition, this pushpin depicted in Untitled (golden #1) really stings. It is almost actual size and exists in the bottom left hand corner of the frame, pinning a wavy sheet of some type of gold metallic paper into place. This pin is the pin that holds the work together. The photographic abstractions were constructed in the artist’s studio using materials that could be found at one of the hundreds of ubiquitous Michael’s arts and crafts store throughout the U.S. A retreat to the studio such as this body of work suggests might be considered an extreme departure from the work of “Institutional” by way of its removal from the environment of Fortino’s career thus far, both as a police officer and an artist.

Untitled (glasswork #41)

In a way the studio abstractions might be considered as a form of material and emotional resonance lingering between the hands and eyes of the artist and their prolonged exposure to the confined nature of these institutional spaces. The use of glass in the studio constructions brings to mind the charged presence of glass in many of these institutional settings. In a holding center, the glass might function as a divide between the detainee and the registrar, detainee and their family. In a police car the glass might serve as a divide between the officer and the suspect, the arrester and the arrested. In a school (as is subject in Fortino’s previous work) the glass may resemble the threshold gazed through by idle students during a mathematic lull, or even the somewhat antiquated display cases found in the hallways of old brick school buildings. Behind those sliding glass doors, and line with the narrative thus far, could be a single pushpin suspending a ruffled sheet of metallic construction paper. It makes one wonder what the broken glass is from.

Untitled (paperwork #2)

In all this background and projection is a pigeonhole to the work. Again, the exhibition is comprised of eight abstract studio constructions photographed with a 4x5 view camera. The photographic prints depict an assemblage of glass, paper, metallic surfaces, and light in their ebb and flow of studio interaction. The materials as they are photographed bring to mind Barbara Kasten’s photographs of glass abstraction, though with the weight of an institutional baggage that is perhaps more reflexive than reflective. The departure from contact with the spaces of Fortino’s monograph elicits many unanswered questions about the absence of that world that was once so present, now only to be recognized by the copy of “Institutional” sitting plank upon an information shelf during the gallery hours of "A Variety Show."     -KW