historic reference photo

Lock 2 Portal: the Ship's Carpenter, 2022

Materials: digitally transposed historical photograph woven on jacquard loom, 4 panels, each 60"x 60"

Location at Summa:  Juve Family Behavioral Health Pavilion, second floor lobby.  This work was commissioned specifically for this location in the Juve Family Behavioral Health Pavilion at Summa Health Systems.

About the art and the artist- 

Michael Loderstedt has deep interest in and respect for the past, both personal and collective.  For this commission by Summa Health, he identified an archival photograph of an Ohio Canal depot in downtown Akron (the site today is marked by a skeletal reminiscence of a historic canal boat).  The shot appears to have been taken from the east embankment of the canal that runs along Water Street (which you can see in this 1892 plat map), while the area of the ship's carpenter yard in front of what Loderstedt identifies as MacClelland's Sawmill and a row of houses (addresses 300-308) is today the site of Children's Hospital.  To the right of the crane and on one of the canal boats stands a resolute figure, dark against light. Loderstedt speculates that this is probably the ship's carpenter and that the photograph, still relatively uncommon and thus expensive, served as advertisement for his trade, making repairs to the boats that he pulls from the water with that crane. "This discovery has personal resonance for me as well, having worked as a small boat builder, I can identify with this figure," says the artist.

The transposition from photo to work of art involved multiple calculations and estimates: Loderstedt had to conceptualize how the photograph would work across four very large (5' square) panels, the maximum size of each determined by the width of the digital loom, while their overall scale was determined by the particular space, they would occupy in the Juve Family Behavioral Health Pavilion.  Spaces inside the pavilion can be quite large, so that many artworks would be simply too small to introduce without making them seem lost or overwhelmed.  Here the artist worked with Summa Health to attain the right scale and then with the mill in North Carolina that turns artists' digital files into weavings on large commercial looms (too large for any single artist to own personally but available to artists when a commercial run has room to accommodate "extra" footage).

The color algorithms Michael Loderstedt chose for their visual impact and then tweaked details of the image, color saturation, and composition with the beholder in mind. Always on his own mind was the medical setting, so he was influenced by imaging techniques both familiar (CAT-scans, X-radiographs) and exotic to create something that he wanted to feel "futuristic," in alignment with the aspirations of the medical-health care/research complex in Akron and, more widely, Northeast Ohio. At the same time, the materiality of the weaving -- it's obvious warp and weft of threads, even as also creating an image -- he hopes offers a point of reference for us to pose questions about the relationship between the "handmade" and digital fabrication, "in perhaps the same ways robotics [can] help surgeons, or MRIs pinpoint anomalies within the body."

It's helpful to have the original photograph in mind in order to locate the ship's carpenter (in the third panel from left), from which we can sort out the various components of the shipyard, the neighborhood behind, and the boats themselves on the canal. With the historic document as a kind of touchstone, we can appreciate the artist's efforts to emphasize the qualities that result from digitalization.  They give the panels a shimmery, almost ghostly quality that feels appropriate for this scene long-gone but very much a part of the history, the character of the city of Akron.

Michael Loderstedt's fascination with historical views of Akron also gave rise to an earlier commission by Summa Health, his Y-Bridge (Twilight) of 2019, which was also a digital photograph translated into weaving. 

Other digital views of the city in the Summa Collection include work by Joe Levack and Scott Goss.  Views of Akron in other media are to be found in work by Ibojka Maria Friedman, Rita Montlack, María Alejandra Zanettia, Timothy Callaghan, Lizzie Aronhalt, and Diane Pribojan.

Y-Bridge (Twilight), 2019 

Materials: Digital tapestry in cotton, 42” x 60”

Location at Summa Health:  Dr. Gary B. and Pamela S. Williams Tower on the Akron Campus (141 N. Forge St.), blue neighborhood, fourth floor, hallway outside patient rooms H4-131 and H4-132

Commissioned by Summa Health

About the art:

This aerial view of an important transportation link in Akron was captured on video by a camera on the undercarriage of a medical rescue helicopter crossing the Cuyahoga River valley; the camera was pointed from Cuyahoga Falls toward the Akron skyline. Noted Cleveland photographer Michael Loderstedt found the video online and selected a frame available as a digital file; he then manipulated color, with pale blues suggesting the early morning, to highlight certain areas and emphasized the high, distant view by accentuating the curvature of earth’s horizon. The sweep of the elevated point of view also gives the beholder a feeling of reassurance, even power.

The artist then sent the resulting digital file to a mill in Henderson, North Carolina, that uses automated digital loom technology to do consumer weaving. The mill wove the picture file, pixel by pixel, using cotton thread, to create this work. It is at once a photograph, a weaving, and a complex, unique digital product that, in recognizable details like trees and others that only resolve themselves into yellow streams of headlights in traffic when we step back from the surface, remind us of the pointillist paintings of the 19^th century.  Loderstedt has created about a dozen pieces using these techniques, in an effort to find new ways of presenting photographs and in an effort to find new ways of presenting photographs and photo-based work such that viewers will look at them with fresh eyes. What might look simple at first glance turns out to have multiple layers of technical and historical references that make us appreciate all the tools available to artists today.   

The finished piece today hangs at one end of a hall from which you can glimpse the Y-Bridge in the distance; it further enriches the Summa Collection of images of our Akron home (for additional Akron images, see the works in the collection by Diana al-Hadid, Lizzi Aronhalt, Tim Callaghan, Ibojka Friedman, Scott Goss, Joe Levack, Rita Montlack, Diane Pribojian, and María Alejandra Zanetta). Loderstedt points out that when we learn the context in which the original image was made – from a medical helicopter at work -- we will also recognize the importance of the high-quality medical care available in the region.

In focusing on the Y-Bridge, the artist also calls our attention to both the geographical feature, the Cuyahoga River, as well as to the human solution for crossing it, both of which have been critical to Akron’s history. The present Y-Bridge was built in 1981-82, replacing the older North Hill Viaduct. The latter was celebrated in 1986 by Akron-born United States Poet laureate Rita Dove, when she wrote “Under the Viaduct, 1932.” This poem was published first in Callaloo and then in Thomas and Beulah, Dove’s book of poetry about her family, which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize. So Loderstedt invites us to appreciate the physical, topographical landmarks, familiar to all in Akron and throughout our region, as well as leading us to recognize their life in poetry and literature, celebrated by a world-famous native daughter.