In the SFCB Gallery
Jan 25-Apr 25, 2008
Curators: Mary Austin & Kathleen Burch
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 Nature Morte
Peter Koch, text letterpress printing on Hahnemuehle Copperplate About Nature Morte: A portfolio of digital pigment prints assembled from historic photographs and documents; the manuscript journals and papers of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Elers Koch; and short legends by Koch hand-set in lead type. In a recent interview, the author Joan Didion recounted traveling with her mother on a familiar stretch of California Highway 580 from San Jose to Berkeley. Her mother hadn't been on the highway for many years and was returning to the state to visit the site of their family home. As the strip malls and urban sprawl flew by, a lingering silence overtook them, broken only by her mother's question, "where did California go?" This in many ways is the entrance to Peter Koch's project Nature Morte. Undertaken to coincide with the Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, this body of work casts a harsh light on the legacy of that journey. The prints are accompanied by texts selected from the writings of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Ross Cox, William T. Horniday, L.A. Huffman, Elers Koch and others. The images were culled from flea markets, historical societies, and museums around the West. Peter Koch comments, "My subject matter is the confrontation of frontier idealism with the un-natural disasters and the aftermath of despair and irony that follows our civilization like the bone pickers followed the buffalo herds across the expanding frontier. "The form is a twenty-first century version of the classic emblem book and memento mori, illustrated books of moral instruction popular in the seventeenth century. Images of buffalo slaughter, Native American captivity, and mining landscapes accompany lyrical passages from the journals of Lewis and Clark and ironic legends hand-set in lead." | |||
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