Second Sight: New Representations in Photography

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description

Second Sight refers to the apparent power to perceive things that are not present to the senses. Conversely, this term is also adopted by theorist Roland Barthes in his criticism and theorization on photography, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Barthes states that the “photographer’s ‘second sight’ does not consist in ‘seeing’ but in being there”. Second Sight: New Representations in Photography ventures beyond our preconceived perceptions of what is and what is not photography today. Whether they investigate photographic image-making as object, history, truth, or trompe l’oeil, these artists challenge, push, and ultimately expand upon the lexicon of photography.

Transcript of Second Sight: New Representations in Photography

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Cultural Arts Commission

Lynn Frangos, ChairAnil Muhammed, Vice-ChairLynda BuntingEd CandiotyDale A. KormanGerry RischeGreg Taylor

Cultural Services Division

Eve Rappoport, ManagerCarl Kaemerle, Senior SupervisorDebbie Collins, Secretary

Torrance Art Museum

Max Presneill, Museum Director/CuratorLisa Desmidt, Assistant Curator/Event CoordinatorChris Reynolds, Assistant CuratorNatasia Gascon, Volunteer Coordinator

Torrance City Council

Mayor Patrick J. FureyHeidi Ann AshcraftGene BarnettTim GoodrichGeoff RizzoKurt Weideman

Rebecca Poirier, City ClerkDana Cortez, City Treasurer

LeRoy J. Jackson, City ManagerMary Giordano, Assistant City ManagerJohn R. Jones, Community Services Director

For more information about the City of Torrance and other programming at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center, go to www.TorranceCA.Gov or call 310.328.5310

3320 Civic Center Drive Torrance, CA 90503

[email protected] www.TorranceArtMuseum.com

The Torrance Art Museum is the premiere visual art space to view contemporary art in the South Bay. It is a program of the City of Torrance Cultural Services Division of the Community Services Department. The Cultural Services Division is responsible for city sponsored arts and culture initiatives held at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center and throughout the City. All events are FREE to the public.

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March 28th - May 14th, 2015

SECOND SIGHTNew Representations in Photography

Kate BonnerChris Engman

Sean C. FlahertyMegan Flanders

Ken Gonzales-DayValerie Green

Soo KimNikki S. Lee

Joshua Mark LoganGina Osterloh

Nancy Popp

Curated by Chris Reynolds

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Second Sight refers to the apparent power to perceive things that are not present to the senses. Conversely, this term is also adopted by theorist Roland Barthes in his criticism and theorization on photography, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Barthes states that the “photographer’s ‘second sight’ does not consist in ‘seeing’ but in being there”.

Second Sight: New Representations in Photography ventures beyond our preconceived perceptions of what is and what is not photography today. Whether they investigate photographic image-making as object, history, truth, or trompe l’oeil, these artists challenge, push, and ultimately expand upon the lexicon of photography.

- Chris Reynolds, March 2015

Second SightNew Representations in Photography

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In 1995, high school students who took the AP United States History exam were given Charles Moore’s 1963 photo of a police dog tearing the trousers from a Birmingham demonstrator; the low-resolution scan was one of eight ‘Documents’ with which they were to analyze the civil rights movement of the ‘60s. Two decades later, the Republican National Committee has inspired six state legislatures to consider defunding AP U.S. History classes by contending that the College Board’s test-prep guidelines present “a radically revisionist view of American History that emphasizes negative aspects while omitting or minimizing the positive.”

Last fall, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Youth Insights outreach team had its own document for high school students: a handbill produced for distribution at its Jeff Koons retrospective. “KOONS IS GREAT FOR SELFIES! Take a selfie and post it on Instagram! Use: @whitneymuseum and #Koons #ArtSelfie.” For every selfie proponent, of course, there is an equal and opposite selfie obstructionist: museums around the world have banned or are moving to ban selfie sticks (handheld monopods), social media optimization via optimized amateur self-portraiture be damned.

An AP U.S. History teacher would argue that photojournalists such as Moore—producing primary source material, privileging particulars of their field research, and developing critical narratives—are historiographers performing a sacred duty. Susan Sontag maintained in “In Plato’s Cave” that photographs “alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” What, in turn, are the selfie-snapping teens at the Whitney’s Koons retrospective? If its critics are to be believed, self-portraiture as executed by tourists whose engagement with their surroundings is superficial verges on onanism (the first selfie stick/vibrator hit the market in March of this year).

Second Sight’s contributors survey the terrain between Moore’s rhetorical battleground and #ArtSelfies that struggle to pronounce more than their own names; they then break camp and resettle in foreign territory. In the angles and distances between their approaches to photography, we approach a new map of the medium.

I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

LAUREN OSTER

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Via audio engineering software, Megan Flanders becomes datasets that corrupt her source material; reformatted as image files, the artist’s intonations of her own name produce unique glitches as intimate as an infant’s inherited phenotype. Flanders’ assertion of dynamic authorship is viral rather than maternal—selfies, as it were, on a cellular level. In Nikki S. Lee’s accumulated self-portraits, by contrast, the artist’s image develops like striations in sedimentary rock; in an assembly composed entirely of distortions, Lee’s authorship asserts itself in her presentation of the deviations between street artists’ perceptions of her. Here is evidence that Lee saw Seoul, or evidence that Seoul saw Lee.

Sean C. Flaherty, in turn, offers mere hints of his documents’ original subjects (Disneyland, Focal Point, Grandpa’s Pool). Overlaid with Flaherty’s memories of those absent family photographs, would a viewer’s imagined versions of them seem more dissonant than Lee’s aggregate portraits? If not, what purpose does a photo album serve? The conspicuous absences in the most recent installments of Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching images recall the activism in Moore’s civil rights photography. Initiated in response to the misrepresentation of victims of vigilantism in the history of the West, the series now challenges the invisibility of contemporary racial violence; the past, as William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” It is, however, vulnerable: Joshua Mark Logan’s meticulous Generation Loss registers the quality we sacrifice to expediency in low-density data transmission.

Second Sight’s elegiac notes are counterbalanced with play and transmutation. Chris Engman’s trompe-l’oeil installations delight in their artificiality, and the deliberate imperfection of Gina Osterloh’s hand-rendered grids on seamless backdrops lends them a coltish grace. Nancy Popp offers documentation of her explorations of identity and public space that is both borderless and generous. Kate Bonner rends her documents and presses them into service as building materials with a finch’s lack of sentimentality. (We mustn’t forget that photographs are objects.) Soo Kim’s meticulous scissorings, in turn, reveal her subjects’ poetic architecture: a gallery wall revealed in a cut is a caesura, not an absence.

Finally, Valerie Green’s minimizer functions as Roland Barthes’s celebrated punctum, that which pricks and bruises us. Here, it reminds us that all the world’s a screen, and all the men and women merely pixels. How, in 2015, do we avail ourselves of Barthes’s “second sight”? Sree Sreenivasan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s chief digital officer, encourages selfie-stick enthusiasts to explore exhibit-friendly, wide-angle attachments for their devices. “You can also hand your phone over to someone and ask them to take it like we did growing up with a camera,” he adds, “and you can make sure the tallest person in the group is always reaching out and taking the picture himself or herself.”

Lauren Oster is a writer in New York City.

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Kate Bonner

Kate BonnerTurned down corners

2012Digital print on MDF22 x 22 x 15 inches

Courtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

A photograph is a wall. It is beautiful, or it is dim and the surface is too glossy. It contains people and places and things that you don’t know, and you don’t know how I know them (or if I know them) either.

When I work with a photograph, I am working with an object. My work is an attempt to see in and around an image – to break apart the frame. I use digital tools as well as power tools to create the image and form. The erasures, the cuts, and the folds in the images and in the structures break the frame, block narrative, and instead call attention to the act of looking (or trying to look) at the images. My work is an attempt to use representational imagery for abstract purposes – to deny story, to aim for a kind of anti-narrative.

My work values perceptual failures and contains real boundaries: literally walls, windows and frames that serve as entry points or that limit access.

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Kate BonnerEmpty or non-empty fields (on the left), There were obstacles(on the right)2012Digital print on MDF40 x 60 x 10 inches (each)Courtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

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Kate BonnerSeen through the side

2013Digital print on MDF36 x 44 x 10 inches

Courtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

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Chris EngmanPaper II2015Pigment print42 x 42 inches framedCourtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

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Chris Engman

In this piece, printing paper was pinned to a wall and photographed. A print was made, pinned to the wall, and photographed again. The third and final version, which you see here, is a photographic print of a photographic print of paper. My intention - here and with this body of work as a whole - is to implicate images with their surroundings, to complicate the relationship between the two, and thereby to problematize the status of the image and the act of looking.

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Chris EngmanReflection2015Pigment print42 x 42 inches framedCourtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

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This photograph was shot from the side. The image was stretched to fit the frame. As a result, “correct” perspective is simulated only when viewed from the side, from the vantage point where the photograph was shot. The ghost like image is a reflection on plexiglass and depicts a wall of shelves and tools in my studio. Walking around the piece, the viewer is meant to become aware of the way the image changes relative to the angle from which it is viewed. The piece is meant to emphasize the physicality of a framed photograph hanging on a white wall and to hint at the context of its construction.

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Chris EngmanWork in Progress2015Pigment print42 x 42 inches framedCourtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

This image depicts the construction of the same frame used in its presentation - the frame you are looking at. It is hung diagonally because that is the same as the orientation of the frame as it passed through my table saw while cutting a groove for a corner spline. Photographs are limited in the sense that they portray so little of the context of what they purport to record. This image is meant to call attention to this, and to expand that context marginally, by depicting something photographs seldom do: the process of its own construction.

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Sean C Flaherty

Focal Point, Grandpa’s Pool, and Disneyland are part of a larger body of work that was the result of research into my past using family photo albums. The titles refer to the content of the photographs that have been removed from the album pages. Those photographs served as an indexical and historically sound foundation from which subjective memories and experiences form. Over time many of my memories around the photos have become blurry, cropped, edited, removed from their original context, and have lost all linear relationships. After working with thousands of family photos I found I could have a more impactful and productive experience dealing with the abstraction of the empty pages. Just like the photographs they once held, the pages themselves contain their own stories and allow access to memories and abstract contemplation.

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Sean C. FlahertyFocal Point 2014Archival Pigment Print, Walnut Artist’s Frame 31 1/2 x 38 inchesCourtesy of the Artist

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Sean C. FlahertyGrandpa’s Pool

2014Archival Pigment Print, Walnut Artist’s Frame

31 1/2 x 38 inchesCourtesy of the Artist

Sean C. FlahertyDisneyland

2014Archival Pigment Print, Walnut Artist’s Frame

31 1/2 x 38 inchesCourtesy of the Artist

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Megan FlanderSI have always been drawn to traditionally male-dominated occupations that require technological skillsets such as audio engineering and preparator work, and have encountered sufficient awe and respect from my largely male coworkers such that it borderlines insulting. This is when I feel the most Feminist. Drawing upon these skills, I have forged together a visual practice of codifying a mixture of digital representations of feminist artists of their time and inserting my own name and information into the code, through a process of trial and error, until a sufficient output is achieved. Often this process is done using audio engineering software, though occasionally I will revert to text editing programs as Wordpad. The digital medium allows me to “break” the image into datasets that can then be read as an audio or data file instead of simply a visual one, manipulated, and re-coded back into a dynamic visual form only vaguely reminiscent of its original counterpart. For example, in the piece The Three Graces // Single Ladies, I recorded myself saying my name repeatedly and spliced it into the screeching, harpy-like noise produced when an image is transformed into digital audio before forcing my computer to read the image again as a jpeg. When presented with this change in coded information, the image is instantly glitched in a unique and personal way. Each inclusion of this extraneous information modifies the image in a permanent way in that if the image cannot open after the addition, the entire file must be scrapped and restarted from a fresh version of the image.

Megan FlandersThe Three Graces // Single Ladies2014Based on the work of Peter Paul Reubens, 1639Digital print on nylon71 X 87 X 2 inchesCourtesy of the Artist

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Megan FlandersAfrica // Oh You Fancy, Huh?

2015Based on the work of Rosalba Carriera, 1673-1757.

Inkjet print on face-mounted plexiglass11 x 13 inches

Courtesy of the Artist

The internet, and technology in general, has become a parallel to the feminist struggle in many ways—information is cited without relation to its source, rumors abound, and anything that isn’t on the cutting-edge is judged harshly while arbitrary trending sets the agenda or discourse without proper “how”s and “why”s. By inserting a digital version of myself into the code required to view the images of these classical works of art, I inquire into my own place within the context of feminist art history. The relationship between where I situate myself in the technology absolutely changes the visual output of the finished work, often to the detriment of the original image itself.

My challenge as a female artist today parallels that of the artists I draw from and their strife more than 475 years ago—my solidarity with these artists, my relationship to their plights--the methodology and medium continues to change even though the illogical and antiquated conflict remains the same. By inserting an ubiquitous selfie into the code required to view classic western works of art on a computer screen, my practice reexamines the implications of gender and authorship, rather than continuing the legacy of the indexical signature while upturning stereotypes of gendered media by asserting my female authorship via digital code.

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Ken Gonzales Day-

Ken Gonzales-DayMarietta(The unsolved lynching of Leo Frank, Marietta, GA., 1915)Lightjet on Aluminum.36 x 46 inchesCourtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

The Erased Lynching series (2000-2015) initially began as an artistic response to the fact that racially motivated lynching and vigilantism had been under represented, and even mis-represented, in a number of historical texts when I began the project in 2000. My specific interest in this particular topic grew out of concern over the increased tensions that began to emerge along Mexico’s boarder after 9/11. A new breed of vigilantes had begun to take up arms. Today, issues like the Michael Brown shooting, have raised a whole series of new questions about racialized violence and its representation today.

Initially, the project sought to highlight the then, little known fact that race was a contributing factor in California’s own history of lynching and vigilantism. When taken together, the lynching of African Americans, Chinese, Latinos, and American Indians, outnumbered white on white vigilantism by nearly two to one, and revealed that race was clearly a contributing factor in many of the historical cases.

The images in the initial series derived from appropriated lynching postcards, mostly from the American West, but not exclusively, and from other archival source materials from which I removed the lynch victim and the rope from the image. This conceptual gesture was intended to redirect the viewers attention away from the lifeless body of lynch victim and towards the mechanisms of lynching and lynching photography, to allow viewers to see the crowd, the mechanisms of the spectacle, the role of the photographer, and even the impact of flash photography, and their various influences on our understanding of this dismal past. The perpetrators, when present, remain fully visible, jeering, laughing, or pulling at the air in a deadly pantomime. As such, this series strives to make the invisible - visible.

As an artistic gesture, these absences or empty spaces become emblematic of a forgotten history -- made all the more palpable in light of our expanding understanding of America’s history of lynching.

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Ken Gonzales-DaySikeston

(The unsolved lynching of Cleo Wright, Sikeston, MO.)Lightjet on foamcore

66 x 42 inchesCourtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Ken Gonzales-DayWako

(The unsolved lynching of Jesse Washington, Wako, TX., 1916)Lightjet on foamcore

66 x 42 inchesCourtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

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Ken Gonzales-DayUniversal Photo Art

(The Universal Photo Art Co., 1901)Lightjet on foamcore

42 x 71 inchesCourtesy of the Artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

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Valerie Green

Valerie GreenIMG_ 7688_3/1/14, 4:04:58 PM

2014Film lamination, archival pigment print, sintra, airbrushed acrylic,

wood frame30.5 x 23.5 x 2 inches

Courtesy of the Artist

Our mobile devices function as both an extension of our reach and a partition to our view. The photographic objects from the Look Up series began with an impulse to adhere a “screen protector” to the moonroof of my car. The resulting photos made with my phone’s camera capture one year of the Los Angeles sky from inside my vehicle. These images depict the space in front of, directly on, and beyond the glass. Hand airbrushing extends the sky around the frame, allowing it to at once blend in to the photograph and assert itself as a barrier. The multiple framing devices at play in these works simultaneously function as a compression and a decompression of three dimensional space, image space, and virtual space.

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Valerie GreenIMG_0413_5/6/13, 7:32:28 PM

2014Film lamination, archival pigment print, sintra, airbrushed acrylic,

wood frame30.5 x 23.5 x 2 inchesCourtesy of the Artist

Valerie GreenIMG_7036_2/8/14, 5:37:37 PM

2014Film lamination, archival pigment print, sintra, airbrushed acrylic,

wood frame30.5 x 23.5 x 2 inchesCourtesy of the Artist

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Valerie GreenMinimizers

2012dye sublimation on ceramic

3.5 x 12 x variable dimension of the wallCourtesy of the Artist

Placed in the top left corner of any given wall, Minimizers propose a challenge to the viewer’s spatial reasoning. They play with the interface crossover that can occur as we switch back and forth between digital and physical space. This work has the ability to activate or de-activate an entire wall, re-contextualizing the architecture and the contents within…all with just one imagined “click.”

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Soo KimMy practice as an artist concerns the making of photographs and the critical interpretation of images on a broader level. Centering on the subtraction of visual information from the picture plane through the techniques of cutting and layering photographic prints, and introducing areas of absence or disruption, I attempt to address issues of photographic transparency, ubiquity, and the rapid consumption of images. Through these cuts and subtractions, I hope to create a “slowness” in the reading and understanding of an image that makes evident the materiality of the medium as well as the time of labor and deliberation, marked by imperfection, that works against the speed and perfection of changing technologies.

My work is equally invested in both the photograph itself, and the transformative processes carried out after the print has been made. For the series, Midnight Reykjavík, I photographed the capital city of Iceland at midnight, during the summer solstice when there is nearly 24-hour daylight. The suite of twelve photographs made a loose panorama of the city and its surrounding natural landscape. In each of the works, I excised areas of the built environment, leaving behind an architectural skeleton on the natural landscape of the city. This Borgesian cityscape is amplified by layering two views of the city, overlaid and synthesized into one, in order to create a new image that is densely interwoven yet porous, creating a complexity of architectural voids.

I activate my images by cutting away photographic material and revealing the surfaces beyond their immediate picture plane. The process of excision provides an antidote that is both hostile and sympathetic toward the type of reverie the images – left to themselves – might belie.

Making the photograph aware of its own physicality was developed further in Elysian where parts of the photograph of bare trees in winter were cut, branch by branch, but still attached to the picture plane, letting gravity pull the pieces of the cut photographs forward, revealing their painted anterior, and turning the flat photographic surface into a sculptural form.

My work attempts to consider photography that is neither objective nor allegorical. In this, the absence of the picture’s material becomes the focal point. Rather than using the ruination and degradation of photographic materials and processes, I assert in my practice, a quality that remains lyrically intact. This lyrical tendency in my work is a revealing frame of reference in so far as the term exemplifies a cultural impulse that is often overlooked and left unspoken.

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Soo Kim(He turns on him suddenly, reaches out a hand)

2012Hand-cut inkjet print, acrylic lacquer

49.75 x 72.75 inchesCourtesy of the Artist

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Soo Kim(Night. Eight bells. A man descends the rigging and goes off.

Leaving over the rail, looking seaward)2014

Hand-cut and scored pigmented inkjet prints, acrylic lacquer, frame27 x 18.5 x 4.75 inchesCourtesy of the Artist

Published by ERIC GERO / Editions

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Soo Kim(Clear as winter ice, this is your paradise)

2010Hand-cut chromogenic print

61.75 x 61.125 inchesCourtesy of the Artist

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Nikki S Lee

Nikki S. LeeLayers, Seoul 1, 2, 3

2007Digital C-Print18 x 41 inches

Courtesy of the Artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Nikki S. Lee investigates notions of identity through the medium of photography and film. For her latest series, Layers, Lee continues this exploration of identity. She investigates her personal identity through the perception of others in different cultural settings.

I am interested in identity as it is affected or changed through social contexts, cultural categories or personal relationships. This interest began through personal experience. I realized that I changed between my surroundings in New York and Seoul, depending on whether I was with my family or friends. So before I was thinking about “who I am” I first started thinking about “where I am”.

Lee traveled to different cities around the world, from Bangkok to Madrid, and in each city asked three separate street artists to draw her portrait on translucent paper she provided. Back at her studio she layered the drawings from each separate city one on top of the other, using a light box to bring out details from the underlying drawings, and then photographed the image. Due to the layering of the drawings, the resulting image is a distorted portrait of the artist that raises questions of perception.

I recognize the difference between the “I” that I perceive and the “I” that others perceive. I think I am shy but others think I am outgoing. So who am I? How do I understand this gap? To understand others sincerely might mean to understand this gap?

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Joshua Mark Logan

Joshua Mark LoganArizona (#46)

2015Oil and acrylic on canvas

32 x 32 inchesCourtesy of the Artist

In my work I seek to examine the architecture of the cultural touchstones, landmarks, and handholds I encounter in my attempts to navigate my surrounding environment.

This body of paintings originated from landscapes that I photographed while traveling throughout the western U.S. These images were captured and then saved, uploaded and emailed, shared and liked and downloaded and filtered and posted again, dozens of times over, amplifying the effects of the degradation that occurs during the successive processing and copying of a digital image. This Generation Loss, like a visual manifestation of the telephone game, is laid bare by these paintings, my ephemeral original experiences with these landscapes obscured by the generations of re-presentations that followed them.

The choice of painting these images, as opposed to simply showing prints of the photographs themselves, highlights the intentionality in the images depicted and the purposefulness of the artifacts, abstractions, and “glitches” present in each picture. The glitches aren’t just byproducts of the digital photographic process, something one attempts to overlook in viewing the image of the landscape, but rather an element of the work that is of central importance. Each out of place geometric abstraction or unnatural block of color is a direct effort towards re-focusing the viewer on that Generation Loss itself. The purposeful, intentional, deliberate nature of the decisions made in these paintings allows them to function not simply as representations of a real landscape but rather Re-Presentations of that representation itself.

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Gina OsterlohPress and Outline16 mm loop (black and white reversal film)Dimensions variable Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

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Jim Ellis, Rodger’s Dream

Gina OsterlohGina Osterloh’s photographs depict life-size constructed sets, performances, and drawings created solely for the camera, while visual strategies of abstraction – with a strong focus on color and pattern – create slippages in the fixed relationships between foreground, figure, and background. In her most recent series of photographs, Drop Shadow, Intimacy is Never Perfect the “body” is implied through grids hand-drawn or painted onto vertical photo backdrop sweeps and then photographed. The photographs underscore the set of mechanical coordinates that comprise the structure of looking through the lens and how a body is fixed in photographic space.

Press and Erase #2, depicts a curved red room, in which the artist’s body clad in black leotard presses into a hole or void on a wall. In Press and Outline, a new 16mm film loop, Gina Osterloh presses into and outlines her own shadow projected onto a wall. Both odd as well as intimate – the physical body and its shadow simultaneously oppose and support each other, and at times are rendered indiscernible.

With the artist’s silhouette/shadow operating as the symbolic representation of self and the erasure of self identity – the photograph and film together, investigate operations of tracing, mimesis, and pressing into the nothingness.

- existential questions of being- pressing into self, pressing into nothingness- pressing into obliteration / obliterating representations of self- silhouette / shadow = erasure of identity signifiers (facial recognition/face, gender, race)

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Gina OsterlohDrawing for the Camera (Vertical)

2014Archival inkjet print with UV laminate in artist’s frame

53 x 31 inchesCourtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

Gina OsterlohDrop Shadow, Intimacy is Never Perfect

2014Inkjet photograph in artist’s frame

50 x 36 inchesCourtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

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Gina OsterlohPress and Erase #22014C-print mounted on aluminum in red aluminum artist’s frame24 x 20 inchesCourtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

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Jim Ellis, Rodger’s Dream

Nancy PoppThese seven concept sketches from the Untitled (Climbing Performances) series were created for a site-specific performance at Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee WI. As part of a yearlong residency Popp explored Lynden’s transition from a private estate to a public non-profit, showcasing a modernist sculpture collection and a local arboretum of over 400 trees.

After photographing the trees in winter to better reveal their structural architecture, the images served as the basis for Popp’s concept sketches for a summer performance in which she free-climbed 20 trees on the grounds using Mason Line to trace her movements. The concept sketches explore numerous possible performance trajectories within specific trees, and expand the two-dimensional photograph into more of a three-dimensional space within which her action, represented by the Mason Line, is mapped by a physical intervention within the photographic plane.

For this installation at Torrance Art Museum, Popp climbed the California Sycamore in the museum courtyard, connecting her actions to the photographic images through the Mason Line.

Nancy PoppUntitled (Climbing Performances) - Concept Sketches, Lynden Sculpture Garden

2014Digital Inkjet Prints back-mounted on Acrylic, sewn with Mason Line

13 x 17 inches each, Series of 7 Courtesy of the Artist and Klowden Mann Gallery

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Nancy PoppUntitled (Climbing Performances)

Torrance Art Museum - March 17th, 2015Mason Line, California Sycamore Tree

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