Overview

Other Rooms , the first publication to comprehensively feature Jo Ann Callis' mid-1970s investigation of the nude body and sexuality, is a revelation; the work is provocative, seductive and remarkably fresh. The artist's playful, evocative use of constrictions and overlays on the human form, including twine, belts, tape and other everyday materials, are both humorous and fraught, offering an intensely personal assessment of the variable meanings of pleasure and the female nude as a staple of fine art photography. Callis has been an active artist since the 1960s, working in painting, sculpture and photography, among other media, and is known for capturing complex and often opposing emotions in a single piece. Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms is an exquisitely produced artist's book containing Callis' photographs of the human form from her 1976-77 provisionally titled series Early Color, as well as a selection of black-and-white photographs from the same period. In this intimate volume, Callis photographs her models nude, frequently in close proximity, and in anonymous and mysterious settings, juxtaposing tactile props like honey, sand and fabric with skin. The photographs in this volume are at once beautiful and discomfiting, delicate and raw, mysterious and thoughtful, and confirm Callis' important place in the history of 1970s color photography.

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9781597112758

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Reviews

Callis: A (woman's) hand, dredged in flour, nails blackened, rests flat in a yolk of honey on a smooth, eggshell-colored bedsheet. You also glimpse a thigh, and the glint of hairs. Nothing in teh image tells you why. It appears halfway through this new volume, which is the first to survey skin in Callis's work-and, with its funny, silky slippages, exemplifies her dollhouse surrealism. The publication of Other Rooms is excellently timed. There is an international vogue for old-school printed nudity, as well as a furor over nipples on Instagram; the Museum of Modern Art (New York) recently staged a retrospective for Robert Heinecken, whom Callis studied photography with at UCLA. Of the eighty-three images in this book, eighty-two were made in the-mid 70's, when color film was still gaining traction as fine art; seventy-two are in color. All but two contain at least one body part. The bodies are white, slim but not muscular, untouched by scalpel or ink; the decor is self-consciously modest.--Sarah Nicole Prickett Bookforum (09/01/2014)

Callis: A (woman's) hand, dredged in flour, nails blackened, rests flat in a yolk of honey on a smooth, eggshell-colored bedsheet. You also glimpse a thigh, and the glint of hairs. Nothing in teh image tells you why. It appears halfway through this new volume, which is the first to survey skin in Callis's work-and, with its funny, silky slippages, exemplifies her dollhouse surrealism. The publication of Other Rooms is excellently timed. There is an international vogue for old-school printed nudity, as well as a furor over nipples on Instagram; the Museum of Modern Art (New York) recently staged a retrospective for Robert Heinecken, whom Callis studied photography with at UCLA. Of the eighty-three images in this book, eighty-two were made in the-mid 70's, when color film was still gaining traction as fine art; seventy-two are in color. All but two contain at least one body part. The bodies are white, slim but not muscular, untouched by scalpel or ink; the decor is self-consciously modest.--Sarah Nicole Prickett Bookforum

A student of Heinecken at UCLA, Callis offers a female counterpoint to his work: She teases us with sexuality through provocative poses, skin altered by lipstick and binding, relics of fetishes, and another's roving hands. – American Photo Callis helped pioneer studio photography into its full, chromatic potential. She was among the first to blur interiors with interiority in a manner both uncanny and unutterable, like the moment a song shifts from major to minor key, or a scene from a dream in which you can’t name the face, but you know exactly whom you are with. Her picture’s aren’t coquettish; there isn’t any cheeckiness to her suggstions. There is only an odd arousal, an absolute command of the strange. – Dazed The images present a bloodless eroticism, uncanny, simultaneously sexual and absented of desire. – American Suburbx Callis’ body of work doesn’t just speak to hidden desires; it is also candid and almost unsettlingly sensuous in its fragmented treatment of the body, existing in a detached, dreamlike state of timelessness without definitive context. – Interview Callis’ lavishly saturated Cibachromes of cinematic, painstakingly composed tableaux of food, the body, and everyday objects play with surrealism and tease the subconscious, oftentimes set within the domestic space and dealing with tropes of femininity. – Interview Her imagery feels deliciously voyeuristic, with many of her subjects’ faces obscured, or just a ash of bound flesh in frame. Callis invites us to peer in on a private tableau, and praise the power of the body. – Flare

Author Information

Jo Ann Callis began teaching at CalArts in 1976. Her work has been widely exhibited in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art, all in Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Gallery Min, Tokyo. In 2009 a retrospective of her work, Woman Twirling, was presented by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Callis has received three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards and prizes. Jo Ann Callis began teaching at CalArts in 1976. Her work has been widely exhibited in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art, all in Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Gallery Min, Tokyo. In 2009 a retrospective of her work, Woman Twirling, was presented by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Callis has received three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards and prizes. Francine Prose is the author of twenty works of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book is Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. She lives in New York City. Francine Prose is the author of twenty works of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book is Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. She lives in New York City.

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