NEW YORK.- The Chelsea Art Museum presents It's Not a Photo, on view through August 26, 2006. It's not a photo is an exhibition of abstract photography and electronic media. If this sounds like a contradiction, the confusion is intentional. Photography has long passed its status a document of "truth" - the very basic "the camera does not lie." Photography "lies" most of the time; given the ubiquity of photo shop that even the most amateur photographer can use to the conventions within art practice of creating sets that are then photographed as "real" or the "real" shot to look as if it were fake, artifice and manipulation reign.

The group of artists selected for It's not a photo have abandoned representation to focus on the media itself. Like abstract painting, it has become increasingly self- referential, using the freedom of its apparent lack of subject to investigate the tools of its own making - light, paper, chemicals, digital process, j-pegs and the like.

The resulting work is often mysterious, evocative and replete with a sense of haunting beauty.

Artists selected for the exhibition include: Dimitrios Antonitsis, Jeremy Blake, Marco Breuer, Willa Davis, Bjørn Melhus, David Samuel Stern, Wolfgang Tillmanns, and James Welling.