The Jefferson Agrarian

I was fortunate to be one of the few Jeffersonians to hear Iris Credo singing her highly original compositions last Friday evening (June 6) at the Rostel Gallery in Dunsmuir, right here in the State of Jefferson. Her songs of love both lost and gained emanated from a voice that alternately cooed and growled as the unpredictable phrasing dictated. Playing on an unplugged classical nylon string guitar, Iris’ interesting chord patterns really underscored the lyrical content of her compositions.

Within the Rostel Gallery, Mimi Plumb‘s art pieces of large color photographs of horse’s backs continue to haunt me. I find them very accessible, and they somehow effortlessly plunge me into a world of abstraction and memory. Going from piece to piece is not unlike a flipbook of old personal memories – family picnics on beach dunes, first love on a grassy bluff – dredged up from places in my back pages that I’d forgotten, or never even knew existed.

As has come to be expected at the Rostel, the Mimi Plumb exhibition is tastefully curated and presented by John Rickard and Rika Noda. An exhibition catalogue is available at the Gallery. Up next at the Rostel is the legendary Bill Owens, whose 1973 publication “Suburbia” had a profound effect on so many photographers in the 70s, especially in the SF Bay Area.

Owens had taken a course in visual anthropology at San Francisco State, and began to photograph events in and around Livermore, California. The benign and unflinching glimpses into a suburban world that had only recently taken over from an pre-WWII agrarian culture that preceded it really took the photographic community by storm.

This classic body of work stands favorably alongside the works of Owens’ contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. Should be interesting to see his new works on July 5 at the Rostel. Hope to see you there, supporting our emerging Jeffersonian culture.