Handmade

Wallspace is pleased to announce “Handmade,” a group show curated by photographer Tim Davis. Handmade is an effort to investigate the state of the manipulated photographic image. In this heyday for photography, when everything from direct observation to staged narrative to digital construction is considered an acceptable photographic practice, there has been little effort to track the effect of all this acceptability on photography itself. This show, mixing young, unknown artists with venerable practitioners, is a sounding of current efforts to physically alter the essence of the photographic image.

Matthew Connors uses Photoshop with such skill in his created street photographs that there is no evidence of manipulation. Reka Reisinger makes self-portraits by placing a life-size cutout of herself in the landscape; and while the pictures are direct documents, their space appears collaged and altered. For years John O’Reilly has been building images of complex visual space and sensual experience through a process of montage and re-photographing. Marco Breuer, also manipulating the photograph’s surface, manages to create images of strange, nearly digital realization without ever touching a camera or a computer. Brenna Youngblood employs collage techniques and doubling as a means to construct a sense of identity and place; whether fictive or actual, the images become vestiges of a very personal, albeit, constructed past that relies on the photograph as document. Daniel Gordon, represented here by a life-size pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses made entirely of negatives, plays on the storied transparency of photographic images by using photographic materials to make opaque and ironic objects. Carter Mull describes his work as “Analogue Photoshop,” manipulating minute and liminal still lives into shiny and glamorous accumulations of human attention. Penelope Umbrico’s “Mirrors” are scanned from the backgrounds of sets in commercial catalogs, then digitally skewed to face forward, and printed to scale, so we seek our own reflection in a multiply-manipulated reality. William Wendt’s “Snowbergs” are documentary projects carried out in New England parking lots, set in the venerable tradition of alpine photography.

In 2004, Tim Davis had solo shows at the Bohen Foundation (New York) and Recontres d’Arles (France) and will have three in 2005, at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels), Kevin Bruk Gallery (Miami), and Jackson Fine Art (Atlanta). His work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and The Museum of Modern Art, among many others. Tim is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Bard College.

Handmade
kuratiert von Tim Davis

mit Marco Breuer, Matthew Connors, Daniel Gordon, Carter Mull, John O´Reilly, Reka Reisinger, Penelope Umbrico, William Wendt, Brenna Youngblood