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Kali: Artographer
The discovery of never-before-seen artwork—vivid, psychedelic, treatment-texured and intensely-colorful photographic prints and Polaroids—of a 1960s runaway housewife named Joan Archibald from Long Island, reborn in Malibu and then Palm Springs as Kali, has been gathered in a trade photo book for the very first time. Her prodigious output, which was rarely seen in the 60s and 70s and then locked away for 40 years, is nothing less than “California’s Vivian Maier” according to Matt Tyrnauer in his substantial essay in this new book.
“The singular work of a California photographer, unearthed.”— The New Yorker
Joan Archibald left her Long Island home and family in 1966, and ran away to the West Coast to reinvent herself as Kali and take up photography at the College of the Desert in Palm Springs. After palling around with the likes of Richard Chamberlain in Malibu, she moved to a house in Palm Springs once owned by Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, and began creating “Artography” in earnest as haunting portraits and double-exposed landscapes made with film, developed in her large bathtub, and finished by hand coloring with dyes, spray paint, and even dirt and bugs, in her swimming pool. Trippy, painterly, intensely colorful prints and later Polaroids were made and seldom seen outside a tight circle (one muse was a teenage Cindy Sherman). She published a few pieces in photo magazines, but by the late 70s locked the work away in suitcases inside a locked shed, never to be seen again for over 40 years.
Kali’s daughter, when cleaning out the house after her death, discovered the work and something journals and journals of photos from closed circuit TV monitors, copied and illustrated with diagrams, drawings and coded she had been housebound for years, convinced that aliens and supernatural beings were visiting, spooking, and tormenting her, perhaps trying to make contact.
The discovery of the work by Kali’s daughter Susan Archibald and her ex Len Prince is being heralded as a west coast version of the Vivian Maier discovery, and a limited edition release of a four-volume set of the work (Matt Tyrnauer essay monograph, Portraits and Landscapes, Polaroids, and Outer Space) was published to wild acclaim in the fall of 2021 (Kali Ltd. Ed., powerHouse Books).
The first major museum exhibition to show Kali’s work will open at the Columbus Museum of Art September 10, 2022 and run through March 12, 2023, and travel thereafter.
“The singular work of a California photographer, unearthed.”— The New Yorker
Joan Archibald left her Long Island home and family in 1966, and ran away to the West Coast to reinvent herself as Kali and take up photography at the College of the Desert in Palm Springs. After palling around with the likes of Richard Chamberlain in Malibu, she moved to a house in Palm Springs once owned by Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, and began creating “Artography” in earnest as haunting portraits and double-exposed landscapes made with film, developed in her large bathtub, and finished by hand coloring with dyes, spray paint, and even dirt and bugs, in her swimming pool. Trippy, painterly, intensely colorful prints and later Polaroids were made and seldom seen outside a tight circle (one muse was a teenage Cindy Sherman). She published a few pieces in photo magazines, but by the late 70s locked the work away in suitcases inside a locked shed, never to be seen again for over 40 years.
Kali’s daughter, when cleaning out the house after her death, discovered the work and something journals and journals of photos from closed circuit TV monitors, copied and illustrated with diagrams, drawings and coded she had been housebound for years, convinced that aliens and supernatural beings were visiting, spooking, and tormenting her, perhaps trying to make contact.
The discovery of the work by Kali’s daughter Susan Archibald and her ex Len Prince is being heralded as a west coast version of the Vivian Maier discovery, and a limited edition release of a four-volume set of the work (Matt Tyrnauer essay monograph, Portraits and Landscapes, Polaroids, and Outer Space) was published to wild acclaim in the fall of 2021 (Kali Ltd. Ed., powerHouse Books).
The first major museum exhibition to show Kali’s work will open at the Columbus Museum of Art September 10, 2022 and run through March 12, 2023, and travel thereafter.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published December 20, 2022
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December 9, 2022
Born Joan Marie Yarusso in 1932, in Islip, New York, she was divorced (now as Joan Archibald) with two children by age 30. So, in 1962, she moved to Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and her mother paid for her children to be placed in boarding school while she, Joan, figured out what to do next. One thing she did was take a few college classes in photography basics, including film developing. She built on those basics by experimenting with the results that could be produced on film—color distortions, superimposition, etc.—via various developing techniques. Her photographer name was Kali and she claimed to have develop 45 unique technique for developing film. The book’s end papers show how meticulously Kali detailed her experiments and strongly indicate that the effects she created in photographs were not the results of happenstance (to the extent she could control such things).
Her understanding and practice of photography extended behind the image developed but also included the medium in which it was presented—the paper, the debris—such as sand—Kali added as the pictures dried, overlaying and spray-painting images out to dry, while others floated developing in the family swimming pool. Oddly enough, her children seemed utterly unaware of what her mother’s hobby amount to, even though they were deeply involved in the world of photography themselves. It just never came up in conversation. But as she was dying, her daughter found thousands of pictures who was shocked by the extent of her mother’s devotion to photography but also by how good the photographs were.
Whiles comparisons to Vivian Maier are made—unknown female of exemplary talent discovered too late—the living circumstances of the two women were markedly different, although they also seemed be plagued by mental health problems: After the death of Kali’s second husband, she became obsessed by UFOs and would photograph and enlarge stills taken from any of eight video cameras she had surrounding her house, recording 24/7. Some of that period is represented here, with a strong pulse of the eerie emanating from the grainy stills of her searching her backyard for the UFO lights she thought she saw when inside the house. (Her meticulous record keeping makes an unhappier reprise here.)
Although Maier and Kali share a predilection for self-portraits, Kali’s are often overlaid with other images and unstable regions of color. Some of Kali’s portrait images struck me as just a background on which to experiment. Vivian Maier seemed interested in the many ways in which her form could be represented in photography. Kali is interested in altering and permutating the perception of it, hiding, revealing, suggesting, juxtaposing, and layering.
While her photographs certainly are of the time—the psychedelic ‘60s and the rainbow-hued colors used to represent hallucinations—they don’t feel dated but instead feel emblematic of a time a place, as it could be said of painters and paintings from the Delft school. The pictures are posed—candid and street aren’t her thing—perhaps in knowledge that shot will comprise only one of several levels which together will be manipulated in various way. Perhaps the seeds of her future dissociation were here.
Artographer—a term Kali invented and copyrighted—makes a strong case for Kali as a photographer—an artographer—who did much to expand photography’s possibilities and technical range.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
Her understanding and practice of photography extended behind the image developed but also included the medium in which it was presented—the paper, the debris—such as sand—Kali added as the pictures dried, overlaying and spray-painting images out to dry, while others floated developing in the family swimming pool. Oddly enough, her children seemed utterly unaware of what her mother’s hobby amount to, even though they were deeply involved in the world of photography themselves. It just never came up in conversation. But as she was dying, her daughter found thousands of pictures who was shocked by the extent of her mother’s devotion to photography but also by how good the photographs were.
Whiles comparisons to Vivian Maier are made—unknown female of exemplary talent discovered too late—the living circumstances of the two women were markedly different, although they also seemed be plagued by mental health problems: After the death of Kali’s second husband, she became obsessed by UFOs and would photograph and enlarge stills taken from any of eight video cameras she had surrounding her house, recording 24/7. Some of that period is represented here, with a strong pulse of the eerie emanating from the grainy stills of her searching her backyard for the UFO lights she thought she saw when inside the house. (Her meticulous record keeping makes an unhappier reprise here.)
Although Maier and Kali share a predilection for self-portraits, Kali’s are often overlaid with other images and unstable regions of color. Some of Kali’s portrait images struck me as just a background on which to experiment. Vivian Maier seemed interested in the many ways in which her form could be represented in photography. Kali is interested in altering and permutating the perception of it, hiding, revealing, suggesting, juxtaposing, and layering.
While her photographs certainly are of the time—the psychedelic ‘60s and the rainbow-hued colors used to represent hallucinations—they don’t feel dated but instead feel emblematic of a time a place, as it could be said of painters and paintings from the Delft school. The pictures are posed—candid and street aren’t her thing—perhaps in knowledge that shot will comprise only one of several levels which together will be manipulated in various way. Perhaps the seeds of her future dissociation were here.
Artographer—a term Kali invented and copyrighted—makes a strong case for Kali as a photographer—an artographer—who did much to expand photography’s possibilities and technical range.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
Displaying 1 of 1 review