SEATTLE.- The Seattle Art Museum announces the exhibition Smoke and Mirrors, which will be on view from May 10 through November 9, 2008, in the museum’s Modern and Contemporary Galleries, on the 3rd floor of the museum’s downtown location. Smoke and Mirrors presents thirty-five works on paper that address time, motion and narrative device, in turn creating images that provide a compelling dialogue about illusion and the constructed nature of representation. This selection of works from SAM’s permanent collection, by artists including Jan Groover, Imogen Cunningham and Hiroshi Sugimoto, offers a variety of ways to examine this idea of illusion, often using the most ordinary objects or commonplace situations as subject matter.

The installation takes its name from a recent acquisition, Smoke and Mirrors #10 by New York-based artist Eileen Quinlan. Her vivid abstract photographs are produced in a traditional darkroom setting using “tricks of the trade” including mirrors, strobe lights and smoke. Consistently incorporating the same materials as the common, underlying structure throughout this series, Quinlan stages visually complicated, illusionistic compositions that are also entirely non-narrative.

Dealing with structure in relation to perception, Eadweard Muybridge’s revolutionary Animal Locomotionseries from the late nineteenth century examined motion in relationship to time. These photographs were the first sequential views of simple movements, such as a horse galloping, a woman walking or a man jumping. The continuous flow of real time was broken down by the camera lens into individual units, making it possible to analyze and understand movement in a new way. These fragmented, incremental views, however, are not the way the eye sees or people experience reality.

Starting in the 1930s, Harold Edgerton expressed similar ideas in his stop-action photographs. Capturing action with the use of a strobe light, he achieved yet another level of “stopping time,” exaggerating the breakdown of movement to heighten our perception of how objects move through space. Ordinary objects, such as a bursting balloon, become highly dramatic when seen as a compression of movement in one single image. This unreality is highlighted by Patrick Nagatani, whose 1985 photograph Unsafe Light ironically and playfully exposes the act of staging a photograph and the ability of an image to deceive the viewer.

In different yet equally compelling ways, each of the works on view deals with perception, artifice, and the constructed nature of photographic and cinematic experience.

Smoke and Mirrors was curated by Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Marisa C. Sánchez.