Artist statement from show at San Francisco Community Acupunture:

Land and Sea photographs by Bill Basquin


The Livermore Range series is from a location scouting trip for a film I made called the 10,000 Mile Bike Race that was commissioned for the Bay Area Now 5 art exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2008. I had loved this mountain range for a long time, but had always enjoyed its undulations from the drivers’ seat of a rental car while traveling on Interstate 5. I am pleased to report that these hills amply reward a closer look.

The waterscapes are an ongoing project. They are, for me, an experiment in pleasure and in color monochromatism; they were instigated both by my love of landscapes and by my love of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s black-and-white Seascapes (www.sugimotohiroshi.com/seascape.html). The series includes a perhaps unlikely waterscape of a frozen lake in Wisconsin (Ice Fishing Shanties).

Some of the images in this show are from the Soiled series; I made these over the course of a year during which I attempted to grow as much food as I could in my 7’x14’ community garden plot without spending money on things like fertilizer and pots (I did purchase seeds) and document the results (I often ate the vegetables before I could take their pictures). The short version of the story is that I did it –I spent very little money, probably less than $100 in seeds and materials (twine) over the course of a year –and that what I was able to grow in the space that I have (98 square feet) is a small fraction of what I consume in a year; the statistics that I've read say that it currently takes commercial agriculture 15,000 to 30,000 square feet to raise all the food for one person for one year. In his book "How to Grow More Vegetables," John Jeavons details techniques that may allow a gardener to grow their years' supply of food on the equivalent of 3403 square feet. (Jeavons, 1974, 2002). The long version of the story is about me as a person and artist who engaged in a year of slow inquiry and the emotional and artistic ethic that emerged from that time. I’d like to note here that that year was made possible both by chronic underemployment (which afforded me the time that I needed) and by a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission (which afforded me the luxury of not seeking further employment).

The biological nature of my subject matter means that the unfolding of the drama is both slow and fleeting. I often wake up early and begin to photograph as the sun starts to shape the land around me. In the process of making my artwork, I find that I am developing a somewhat intangible skill set – skills that I never would have thought to call skills, except that I know that I have them; what this amounts to is something about trusting and investing in myself, and pursuing, on a very basic level, that to which I am attracted (the waterscapes are an example of this).


Bill Basquin
January 2010