Among photography’s earliest, and most enduring, conceits is that of a single ‘perfect moment,’ a pristine fragment of time, arrested and secured through the minute intervention into the unconscious opticality of the camera by an authenticating eye. By itself, photography is little more than a technical intercession, a process of recording, inscribing onto a sensitive emulsion a stabilized image generated by a chemical interaction with light. It is this photo-chemical index that is apprehended as an evidentiary trace, marking presence and absence, exercising a promise: by marking the place of an absence, photography induces the presumption of presence, as if what had passed away has not abandoned us entirely, but persists in the perennial promise of its recall; as if an event, or a person, having once been present before the camera, cannot ever fully disappear; as if what remains is an essential trace of an object, a countenance, or a scene from the real world, an image that has embedded itself ‘directly’ into an inert technical surface/substance. The history of photography, and of its critical and philosophical reception, has enframed and preserved the surface of the photographic image as the central, irreducible, index of its being. It is via this index that photography’s claims to verisimilitude, to representation and reference—that is, to the truth of an event, figure, or phenomenon—is conceived as legitimate. In fact photography’s preferential claim to the real has never resided in this surface at all, but has always been attributed from the outside. With the advent of digital technologies the deep repressed history of photography’s complex and problematic relation to objectivity and deception has resurfaced, not only as an historical and theoretical topic, but in a wide range of (post) photographic practices. Interstices: New Photographic Works presents the recent work of three artists who brilliantly address the notion of the photographic ‘surface,’ playfully teasing and tampering, and rigorously pushing the limits of what we call photographic. Sherry Millner addresses the artifactual nature of the photographic image through a Situationist-like détournement, displacing and redistributing fragments of images. Her sources are everyday family snapshots, postcards, and commercially reproduced images that are torn —literally— from one site or context and collaged into startling new constellations of image, reference and meaning. These image-constellations are then rephotographed, and meticulously printed so that the ‘return of the real’ is situated ironically, in the most minor and minute trace, as the perfectly realistic illusion of the torn edges, photographically reproduced. The fragmentary fields that emerge as images emphasize photography as a site of loss; absent friends, faded memories, feelings, references. While Sherry Millner’s works address the fragmentary nature of the photographic surface—every photograph is a tacit ‘edit,’ with arbitrary and contingent boundaries—the works of Leslie Thornton operate in a different register. Pluralization and deferment are common tropes here, as Thornton explores the relations between images, within images, and at the boundaries of images. Thornton’s beautiful, complex, rich fields of color and form, mimicry and affinity, are seductive and enervating. At the same time they constitute one of the most sustained meditations on the relations between seeing and thinking, affect and absence, memory and invention, in contemporary post-photographic practice. Leslie Thornton’s play of multiple surfaces addresses the ubiquity of the image, its instabilities and porosity. Photography’s ‘attachment’ to the world is thrown radically into question, only to re-emerge in other places, other spaces and works, as a refreshing new way of thinking about image. Thornton’s works investigates not only what photography might be, but what it can be. Carolien Stikker, in her photographic work, and in her media collaborations with Philippine Hoegen, takes up the question of surface in an entirely different, and more abstract way. Stikker displaces the focal plane, shifting and displacing the photographic Z-axis to produce starkly beautiful and, at times, unnerving minimal compositions of color and the intimations of form. Her lexicon of blurs and diffusions begets a surprising presence, rendered all the more poignant in those moments where recognition secures an object, a hue, or form to an order of familiarity. In one early work (not shown) Stikker rephotographed the advertisements in Artforum, Flash Art and other magazines, shifting the focus so that all detail was suffused, but the tacit compositional matrix of each selected page remained as the ostensible raw phenomena—the subject—of her work. Sherry Millner, Carolien Stikker, and Leslie Thornton are media artists and filmmakers, as well as photographers and visual artists. Consequently there are complex affinities in evidence between, that is to say, in the interstices of their works, and some remarkable interstitial relations between theirs and other contemporary post-photographic practices. Exhibiting these diverse works together, for the first time, draws out their points of intersection in refashioning an approach to photographic images/surfaces. FLUXspace is pleased to present the first exhibition of new photographic works by Sherry Millner, Carolien Stikker, and Leslie Thornton, and their first appearance in Philadelphia. Interstices: New Photographic Works will also present media work by Carolien Stikker and Philippine Hoegen, and a screening of film and media works by Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen, and Leslie Thornton. Interstices: New Photographic Works is curated by Thomas Zummer.
Best Regards,
Images: + Coming Soon +
Press: + Coming Soon +
For more information on this show, contact info[at]thefluxspace[dot]org. |
