BE THERE
The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary PhotographyPresented by Aperture Gallery May 15, 2009- July 9, 2009Reception: May 16, 7:00 pm - 10:00 pmCurated by Lyle Rexer with artists Bill Armstrong, Carel Balth, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Ellen Carey, Roland Fischer, Michael Flomen, Manuel Geerinck, Shirine Gill, Barbara Kasten, Seth Lambert, Charles Lindsay, Edward Mapplethorpe, Chris McCaw, Roger Newton, Jack Sal, Penelope Umbrico, Randy West, Silvio Wolf, Ilan Wolff
Some of the photographers in the exhibition adopt highly conceptual approaches; others can be considered documentary, although their subjects, from building facades to light-filled doorways, cannot be readily parsed. Still others take their inspiration from the reductive nature of Minimalism. All join a broad contemporary trend to look critically and freshly at a medium commonly considered transparent. The exhibition is divided into two sections. The wall labeled “Propositions” displays a range of approaches yielding abstract images. The other walls of the gallery constitute a series of installations exploring in greater depth distinct and radical investigations of photographic processes and meanings. What, after all, is a photograph, and where does its meaning lie? In the picture itself? In the world or its phenomena? In us? These questions are as vital and open today as they were 170 years ago, when no one knew exactly what a photograph should look like or what it might disclose. The Edge of Vision is accompanied by a new book,"The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography" by Lyle Rexer (Aperture, May 2009). Illustrated with more than 150 images, this is the first book in English to document this phenomenon and to put it into historical context, while also examining the diverse approaches thriving within contemporary photography. The book covers the impulse towards abstraction from the early days of the medium through the present day. LYLE REXER (editor) is a New York–based independent writer and critic. His previous books include "Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde" (2002) and "How to Look at Outsider Art" (2005); he contributed an interview with Chuck Close and Bob Holman to "A Couple of Ways of Doing Something" (Aperture, 2006). THE ARTISTS Bill Armstrong creates optical reverberations by photographing his subjects with the lens set at infinity, then taking the results and rephotographing and processing them. The result is a visually destabilizing experience that undermines the eye’s ability to resolve the image and explores the position of the viewer in relation to the work. Carel Balth, who works in the Netherlands and began his career as a sculptor, involves viewers in a multileveled examination of the relation of photo imagery and time. He bases his “Videowatercolors” on a vast archive of digital still images he has arrested from videos. In a sense he double stops time to distance us from originary sources and focus on immediate visual experience. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are two South African photojournalists whose work seeks to overcome the image anesthesia that undermines the ability of photographers to communicate the urgency of other realities. Their nonrepresentational works made in Afghanistan embody the idea of photography as an opportunity for reflection, not merely inspection. Ellen Carey pursues what she calls Photography Degree Zero -- operations that involve physically pulling long strips of Polaroid film through the gigantic 20”x 24” Polaroid camera, creating both positive and negative imagery. Roland Fischer explores the mechanics of perception and its relation to form and meaning in photography by photographing highly regular building facades. The resulting geometric patterns create still images that display and involve the viewer in seeing as a dynamic process. Michael Flomen, who lives and works in Canada, exposes large rolls of photographic paper at night in natural settings, including underwater and under covers of snow. His cameraless images record the direct encounter of medium and world. Manuel Geerinck, from the Netherlands now working in New York, came to photography through painting and drawing. By animating his drawings and capturing their motions on photographic film, he creates abstract surfaces that hover between pure photography and a visual art yet to be named. Shirine Gill creates and captures effects of light by moving a digital camera through fields of light projected in urban settings, including such iconic locations as the Whitney Museum of American Art. Barbara Kasten photographs constructions of clear panels and mirrors. Her 4”x5” view camera the optical qualities of a lens, film variables, colored light and light temperatures contribute to the “subject.” The mirror reflection compounds the complexity of the image, and rather than identifying it as a construction, renders it as an abstraction of light and form. Seth Lambert uses a digital scanner to subdivide images taken from the empty scanner glass. The minute artifacts of this process include specks of dust, hair and other ephemeral objects almost too small to be resolved by the eye. Charles Lindsay refers us to the early hybrid technique of cliché verre, which involves drawing on glass and printing from the resultant negative. Lindsay creates special carbon and chemical emulsion films that, when captured digitally and printed, yield fantastic landscapes of uncanny dimensionality and resolution. Chris McCaw created his series “Sunburned” by deliberately exposing photographic paper to natural light over lengthy periods, even to the point of allowing the brightest light sources to burn the surface of the prints. His work testifies to the penetrating power of light. Edward Mapplethorpe fashions large-scale chromogenic prints that record both highly ordered phenomena (circular light effects) and disordered physical objects (piles of human hair). Roger Newton extends the range of photographic seeing by developing unusual lenses, including such materials as oil and ground diamonds. Often photographing sculptures he creates, Newton seeks to widen the field of visual association by unbinding the eye from sight’s expectations. Jack Sal has for more than three decades been creating installations that reveal the physical properties and actions of photography even as they comment on its history. His conceptual works straddle the line between process and object, sculpture and event. Penelope Umbrico navigates the tide of untethered images that inundate us in print and on the internet by capturing them in all their banality and re-presenting them in photographic form. Her quasi abstract and repetitive documents are at once poignant, politically chilling, and aesthetically complex. Randy West asks the question, What pleasure do we expect from a photograph? In the series “Pretty” he has isolated qualities of the print that have become hallmarks of its popular aesthetic appeal, including nuanced tones of industrial/chemical color and the unblemished surface of the print itself. Silvio Wolf, who lives and works in Italy, conceives of his series “Voyager” as a journey into photographic comprehension and personal contemplation. These images, documentary but ambiguous in their references, invite us to suspend our compulsive desire for resolution and meaning in favor of an unfolding range of metaphoric associations and intellectual speculations. Ilan Wolff makes “photographs” without the aid of light by placing objects (hot metal) or material (melting ice, earth) directly on photo paper and developing the results. His “Four Elements” series is a record of the transmutation of these encounters into photochemical reactions. Recommendations of The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography
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