Wonderful Lies – A Summer Show
July 7 – August 14, 2015
For our 25th summer show, the gallery is presenting a group show of gallery artists that looks at the way much of today’s photography can be both wonderful - and a lie. Through the use of Photoshop, digital printing, and the increasing movement of the medium towards the subjective – photographers are more than ever constructing, conceptualizing, and experimenting with process and scale.
Rather than being a medium dedicated to observing and recording the world as it appears before the camera, much of the most interesting work being done today deals with innovative ideas and fictions. Some bounce off the internet (Corinne Vionnet), others engage more pointedly with the history of painting (Hendrik Kerstens and Hisaji Hara), while others respond to the end of production of their original materials by finding innovative new means of production (Susan Derges and Christopher Bucklow).
All this has ushered in a new chapter in photography where wondrous and magical images are being created. Karen Knorr places fearsome animals in opulent Indian interiors. Thierry Cohen reunites the no longer visible starry skies with their home cities. Robert Toren creates an impossible but totally plausible mash-up of two icons. Farrah Karapetian creates vibrant life size cameraless works of musicians and instruments that hum with energy and color.
Blending mediums, Liz Nielsen combines photogram with collage while Enoc Perez layers hand cut and painted shapes onto images that women have posted of themselves on social media. Jim Krantz’s heroic cowboys and Ian Ruhter’s large scale collodion prints continue to propagate their own western myths while aerial photographer Michael Light and surf photographer Will Adler bring a luminous modernist perspective to land and water.
Recognizing that photography has no claim to the truth need not be seen as discrediting the medium but rather as opening the doors to the freedom of imagination.