SOME RECENT FINDINGS // Curated by Andrew Kensett
Some Recent Findings
The twenty-four artists represented in this portfolio consider two acquisitive potentials of photography: to collect visual records of experience and to produce objects that may themselves be collected and circulated. Their artworks constitute findings both in the sense that their content is, in one sense or another, found and in the sense that they represent new knowledge generated through experimentation. They stretch the capacity of photographs to take on and lose meaning—to cross-contaminate with new environments, materials, images, and perspectives and to be changed in the process. These artists assert that a photographic object and the image it bears can never exist in isolation. Its meaning is made through memories, memes, histories, and fictions.
Some of the artists represented here assert the presence of photographs by incorporating them into sculptural installations and still life arrangements. Many have used analog, experimental, and hybrid processes to reproduce and transmute their images, encouraging particular readings of their content and calling attention to their corporeal qualities. (If one personified the photographs, these transformations would be harrowing: they have been cut, cloned, spliced, burned, and slopped with chemicals.) Others included in this portfolio use photography to examine various archives, which range from institutional to personal and contain both photographic and non-photographic materials. Still others probe photography’s evidentiary role; photographs are deployed here both to question the historical record and to lend credibility to fabrications. All of these artists understand that a change in a photograph’s context, a transformation of its physical form, and an alteration of its image content may each equally influence its reception.
These twenty-four artworks prompt questions. Why do we consider images ephemeral? Why should we think of ourselves as permanent, and the pictures we create, live with, and leave behind as transient? Isn’t it much more often the case that we make appearances in the lives of photographs? That they, these immotile and more or less durable things, will outlast us, as long as there is somebody new around to look?
—Andrew Kensett
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The twenty-four artists represented in this portfolio consider two acquisitive potentials of photography: to collect visual records of experience and to produce objects that may themselves be collected and circulated. Their artworks constitute findings both in the sense that their content is, in one sense or another, found and in the sense that they represent new knowledge generated through experimentation. They stretch the capacity of photographs to take on and lose meaning—to cross-contaminate with new environments, materials, images, and perspectives and to be changed in the process. These artists assert that a photographic object and the image it bears can never exist in isolation. Its meaning is made through memories, memes, histories, and fictions.
Some of the artists represented here assert the presence of photographs by incorporating them into sculptural installations and still life arrangements. Many have used analog, experimental, and hybrid processes to reproduce and transmute their images, encouraging particular readings of their content and calling attention to their corporeal qualities. (If one personified the photographs, these transformations would be harrowing: they have been cut, cloned, spliced, burned, and slopped with chemicals.) Others included in this portfolio use photography to examine various archives, which range from institutional to personal and contain both photographic and non-photographic materials. Still others probe photography’s evidentiary role; photographs are deployed here both to question the historical record and to lend credibility to fabrications. All of these artists understand that a change in a photograph’s context, a transformation of its physical form, and an alteration of its image content may each equally influence its reception.
These twenty-four artworks prompt questions. Why do we consider images ephemeral? Why should we think of ourselves as permanent, and the pictures we create, live with, and leave behind as transient? Isn’t it much more often the case that we make appearances in the lives of photographs? That they, these immotile and more or less durable things, will outlast us, as long as there is somebody new around to look?
—Andrew Kensett
Included artists: Noritaka Minami, Jo Ann Chaus, Yajing Liu, Veronika Pot, Marcus DeSieno, Andy Mattern, Elizabeth Albert, Dominic Lippillo, Jeroen Nelemans, Fatemeh Baigmoradi, Edouard Taufenbach, Paulo Simão, Arden Surdam, Martin Venezky, James Reeder, Nancy Floyd, Aimee Beaubien, Alyssa Minahan, Larson Shindelman,
Aline Smithson,
Tamara Cedré, Amy Friend,
Jessica Buie, Tianqiutao Chen