Gallery
Stage Presence
June 29 - August 4, 2024
Lacey Lennon
Arlene Mejorado
Andrea C. Nieto
Sasha Phyars-Burgess
Emilianna Vazquez
Curated by Keko Jackson
To emit a stage presence, an audience is required regardless of how big or small. In photography, this presence is the product of its many variables including the stage and its audience, which both have the potential to take on a variety of shapes, sizes and responsibilities. For some, the person looking at the final photograph from the outside becomes the audience, whereas others suggest the primary audience is the person who’s being photographed—usually collaborators in the process. Another variable: the “performer” has a responsibility to the audience to deliver an action no matter how subtle or scripted and it is this action that becomes the subject of the photo.
Because photography invokes the absence of the physical, the challenge lies in discerning what is found and what is arranged, or in other words how framing prompts the duration of a performance making less clear when it’s over and reality begins. Despite photography’s ability to render things more real, the different scales of performance complicate this process (i.e. hired actors, casual encounters, long term relationships, empty spaces, assembled structures, staged landscapes and documentary). What becomes more real is how photographs lend themselves to expressing kinds of interior truths through an imaginative or performed action.
In this case, photography can be seen as an act of communication and performance as a told story. Each image contains an implied narrative similar to the effect of a film still where spaces alone can become stories too. The action in the photograph is used to share social knowledge through ephemeral and embodied acts of transfer that communicate ways of being, feelings and memories that can only be understood by looking at a photo. The different scales of performance on display here explore the malleability of the photographic space as a theatre and exchange of ideas meeting people where they’re at and picking up what they’re putting down.
Beyond The Apparatus
May 11 - June 15, 2024
David Campany
Edward Cushenberry
Eduardo Consuegra
Don Edler
Luke Harnden
Steve Kado
Soo Kim
Jacob Murtle
Juliana Paciulli
Pacifico Silano
Before photography became a tool to fix the three-dimensional world onto the two-dimensional
surface of an object, society relied on artists to depict reality. Photography relieved artists of
this duty. It can be argued that the way we view the world since the invention of photography is
through a series of images. This multiplicity of images has allowed reality to be bent to the will
of its handlers, creating multiples that lead to multiple realities. Thus, images lost our trust to
depict reality. Photography is no longer a reliable tool except to its user, and to those who
believe in the merit of that user. So maybe, the power of the image has shifted back to the
artist’s ability to use the medium of photography to depict reality.
It is the system of photography itself that is instrumental in asking the critical questions, and
these questions, rather than the material that elevates the medium. Inherent in its use,
photography has always reacted to both technology and science. Perhaps, having reached the
edge of both, photography is moving towards a place where there is no longer a normal system,
there is no order of operation, becoming a truly conceptual medium. And maybe, the material
of photography is now only another simulacrum attempting to trigger multiple levels of memory
in order to arrive at more malleable levels of engagement than the cold digital system that is
the contemporary order of the day. If we, the users of the medium, continue to explore the
ethos of photography, and its output continues to be dematerialized in digital form, where does
that take us as a society and what is it that now constitutes a photographic object?