Zoë Zimmerman’s painterly photographs of early-20th century hair clippings, cigarettes, and other ephemera from the bowels of a Taos house museum only hint at larger mysteries.
TAOS, NM—When the executive director of the Taos Art Museum at the Fechin House, Christy Coleman, discovered dusty boxes of Fechin family memorabilia in the basement of their former home, she showed them to artist Zoë Zimmerman, knowing she would be able to capture their “vulnerability, intimacy, and nostalgia.”1 Carrying on the mission of the Fechin Institute to preserve the art and legacy of 20th-century Russian portrait painter Nicolai Fechin, the museum was particularly eager to find a way to share these family keepsakes with the public.
Founded by Fechin’s daughter Eya in 1981, the institute arose after Eya returned to Taos to help her mother, Alexandra, revive an estate that had remained uninhabited for the past thirty years. It has since showcased Fechin’s paintings and unique wood carvings, which decorate the house’s furniture and other architectural features.
The Fechins moved to Taos In 1927. During his fourth year in New York after migrating to the U.S. from Russia, Nicolai Fechin developed tuberculosis and hoped the drier climate in New Mexico would aid his recovery. Having visited local patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan on her estate near Taos Pueblo land, he was already attracted to the landscape and its inhabitants. For the next six prolific years, he produced works that reflected a longing for the unspoiled rural Russian countryside he left behind, which he saw reflected in the environment in Taos.
Forsaken Objects and Untold Stories, an exhibition that covers both floors of the Fechin House, allows visitors to pry into the banality of the Fechins’s everyday existence as interpreted through Zimmerman’s still-life photographs of these stored-away and forgotten belongings.
A lot of it wasn’t treasure. There is a lot of ennui in these objects.
“A lot of it wasn’t treasure,” Zimmerman tells me, referring to the begrimed bottles and miscellaneous junk she came to call “Fechin recycling.” “There is a lot of ennui in the objects,” she adds. At the same time, Zimmerman refers to the belongings as “precious.”
Because these possessions provide a precious and confidential portrayal of the family, Coleman decided to show the work throughout the whole house, not just in Fechin’s former artist studio, which generally hosts contemporary art exhibitions. Additionally, Fechin’s portrait paintings appear alongside Zimmerman’s photographs, compounding traces of the family’s presence already palpable through the permanent display of such effects as Eya’s books in her study, spice bottles in the kitchen, and medications in the bathroom.
Inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes, Zimmerman’s photographs look like paintings, too. “I see like a painter more than a photographer,” Zimmerman, who has a close relationship with her mother, a painter, confides.
Discussing her technique, Zimmerman shares that she works in a studio with natural light, using a remote-controlled skylight. The lighting and a deep depth of field render the images like paintings.
“In early still-life paintings, everything is rendered with equal sharpness and detail,” Zimmerman says, adding that seeing everything in focus comprises “a pre-photographic way of seeing.” Since the development of photography, our eyes have been trained to expect a shallow depth of field, where the background, foreground, or both are blurred to emphasize a focal point.
Parts of the exhibit beckon us to test our expectations for photographic realism as Zimmerman’s photographs hang next to the objects she depicts. Vase, featuring a nineteenth-century French carafe holder containing Italian glassware from the same century, appears next to the heirloom, as does Bird Cage and Flowers, showcasing a nearby bird cage and gold screen with illustrations of birds and a blossoming tree.
Comparing Zimmerman’s photographs to the three-dimensional antiques highlights the artistry of Zimmerman’s renditions, especially her use of color, which she picked up recently. In Blue Bottle Caps, Zimmerman stages glass bottles with blue caps on a white table, with a complementary flourish of blue fabric in one corner; Varnish presents a glowing jar of orange-gold varnish behind a red-tipped paintbrush next to an earthy corked jug.
Before the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Zimmerman worked with antique photographic processes and large format cameras. During quarantine, she taught herself color and digital photography. What she anticipated as being a self-study over a few weeks of lockdown while her college-age child was home for spring break became an ongoing project as the pandemic dragged on. Three years later, she was still immersed in this new practice.
“You can see my learning process during this period,” Zimmerman comments. “At first, I would use one or two colors, keeping it monochromatic. Over time, I took pictures with a lot of colors.”
Serendipitously, upon entering the gallery, visitors find Series 3, a photograph of Fechin’s art supplies, including tubes of paint. The placard quotes Fechin on his color philosophy: “An artist actually has to deal with only three basic colors: red, blue, and yellow. All the rest are combinations of these fundamental colors . . . To avoid murky results, it is necessary to learn how to use [them].” Although Zimmerman does not apply her colors with paint-dipped brushes, she masterfully uses color theory in her compositions.
Initially, Zimmerman planned to document the memorabilia objectively, but as the objects spoke to her, the project became an intimate portrait of the Fechin family. As Zimmerman discovered, many of the scrapped relics belonged to Alexandra, who stayed on the Taos property for fifty years after divorcing Nicolai in 1933. At that time, Eya returned with Nicolai to New York, leaving Alexandra mostly alone in the house they had shared for only six years.
If you look through anyone’s discarded stuff, it isn’t necessarily happy.
“If you look through anyone’s discarded stuff, it isn’t necessarily happy,” Zimmerman reflects. “What do we put in the basement? Things we don’t want to get rid of but don’t want to see.”
Going through the bric-a-brac, including used lipstick tubes and various ointments and creams, Zimmerman felt pity for anyone who would keep these toiletries, contrasting with her melancholy about the rise of disposable culture.
Walking through the exhibition, it is hard not to share Zimmerman’s troubled fascination with the Fechins’s refuse. In a bathroom on the second floor to the right of an open medicine cabinet, a piece called Hair shows a bag of dark hair clippings in a brown paper sack next to a glass bottle and a pink wrapper containing hairpins. The image evokes disgust and charm, underlining the complicated attraction to strangers’ detritus and how we grant ourselves the dubious permission to assume the history and significance of the rubbish left in their wake.
Viewers are indeed invited to speculate about the use and sentiment attached to the photographed artifacts, projecting real or imagined triteness, tenderness, or tragedy onto them. Some works come with more explanations than others, guiding our analysis. In the caption next to Tannic Acid, 1941, depicting burn ointment, we learn that Alexandra “sustained minor burns from a small fire.” Elsewhere in the show, Foundation includes jars of foundation creams spilling out of a brown paper bag. Zimmerman links the images of the tannic acid and foundation in our conversation, noting the foundation’s function to hide or cover things up. Because the full details of Alexandra’s injury are lost to history, her foundation continues to conceal something she perhaps didn’t want us to discover.
Smokes, one of Zimmerman’s favorite works in the show, tells a less personal account of the family. Featuring a collection of unopened cigarette boxes, Zimmerman informs me that they ”transcend the site-specific aspect of the show.” The cigarettes are emblazoned with advertisements for war bonds and a Zia-symbol seal for the New Mexico two-cent tobacco tax, dating them to the 1940s and inviting us to imagine broader Taos life at the dawn of U.S. involvement in World War II.
Another photograph, Myron Brinig, shows a medley of objects, including an envelope labeled with the name of the American writer, a former Taos resident, mentioned in the piece’s title. Filled with scant granules of cyanine blue pigment, the depiction of the near-empty envelope keeps Brinig’s relationship with the Fechins a secret. Moreover, it is placed among other items that may or may not have anything to do with the author: a rouge compact, a black comb with missing teeth, and a green glass bottle of lavender salts.
The title card adjacent to the piece explains that Alexandra Fechin applied the rouge with cotton balls, “leaving behind telltale cotton fibers.” The word “telltale” strikes me as a perfect one-word exhibition summary. The Fechins’s artful junk is pregnant with the promise of enlightenment, offering to bring us closer to a complete account of the family that left behind a beautiful white adobe house in the heart of Taos. Yet, in unpacking items that were, as Zimmerman put it, meant to be kept but not seen, we find nothing better to soothe our need to know them than half-empty bottles of bygone over-the-counter remedies.
Despite the openness of their estate, mystery stubbornly enshrouds the family, fueling our voyeuristic pleasure in beholding the scraps of their former inhabitance and our insatiable desire to uncover more.
1. From the exhibition title card, written by Christy Coleman.