WELLESLEY, MASS.- The Davis Museum at Wellesley College explores human engagement with digital devices in Tabitha Soren: Surface Tension, an exhibition of photography by former television journalist Tabitha Soren. The exhibition of 20 photographs from Soren’s Surface Tension series invites the viewers to look beyond the picture and see how it was consumed by its intended audience. Surface Tension, on view in the Morelle Lasky Levine '56 Works on Paper Gallery, runs from February 7 through June 9, 2019.
Tabitha Soren’s Surface Tension intervenes into the cool, disembodied, transactional relationships we conduct with our digital devices—and meddles with the “neutrality” of the information we receive through them. Soren pulls images from social media, web searches, images shared by friends and family, and screengrabs from news videos. Her subjects are united by a focus on touch, reinstating the haptic as an essential aspect of our human experience, and the images carry a charge that is at once familiar and uncanny.
Soren shoots iPad screens with an 8 x 10 view camera under raking light to reveal the grime we leave behind—the fingerprints and greasy smears of our embodied selves, so seemingly at odds with the chilly detachment and objectivity of the information that flows towards us, unrelentingly. The photographs are titled simply as urls, bringing viewers back to the “original” of the image while signaling both instantaneity and mediation. It not only considers “how people consume, manipulate, dismiss, cherish, interact with image-driven content online—and the relentless layering that accompanies this experience,” but insists that we pause to reconsider too.
“Tabitha Soren’s work in Surface Tension is conceptually elegant, timely, and deeply resonant,” says Lisa Fischman, curator of the exhibition and Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis Museum. “Soren’s pictures are rendered with painterly detail, luscious and beautiful, by virtue of the surface mess posed in contrast to the discernible subjects that emerge below. The project is simple, suggestive, and transformational.”
The exhibition at the Davis Museum includes photographs of various sizes—from large-scale photographs to smaller images stacked in a tower. Fourteen of the twenty works in the Davis exhibition are being displayed for the first time, and all of the photographs are connected with a focus on the element of touch. For example, personal touch, such as a picture of a daughter to blowing a kiss to her mother, as well as images of the damaging human touch on environment in places such as the Great Barrier Reef or Greenland.
In conjunction with Surface Tension, the limited-edition volume Trace, featuring Tabitha Soren, Kota Ezawa, and Penelope Umbrico, recently published by Yoffy Press in Atlanta, Georgia, will be available for purchase in the Davis Museum shop and online.
Tabitha Soren (b.1967, San Antonio) is a former Peabody Award-winning journalist for MTV and NBC news. Her work is held in many private and public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum of Photography, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and San Francisco’s Pier 24. Her first monograph, FANTASY LIFE, was published in the spring of 2017. Soren lives and works in the Bay Area.
