NEW YORK, NY.- Marlborough Chelsea presents Intersection: Photography / Painting / Document, an exhibition that brings together the work of sixteen contemporary artists whose concepts and practices recharge and reframe the historic canon of photography in a number of ways.
The field of photography has traditionally involved an artist taking a camera in hand to make an image. Many artists in Intersection: Photography / Painting / Document do not wield a camera, and those who do use a camera do not shoot straight or documentary photographs. Manipulations of technique and form mark the work of these artists. They are employing innovation and re-evaluating their medium and message as they recast and reconsider key themes in contemporary culture such as: time, place, politics, the body, language, and identity.
The 1980s saw a great shift in the importance of photography as a medium of artistic expression that rivaled painting in its scale and power to express subjects immediately relevant to the contemporary world. Appropriation as an accepted form of art, along with the advent of computers, scanners, and the internet greatly expanded the practice of photography. It became characteristic for artists who were primarily photographers to ‘think like painters’ by availing themselves of programs such as Photoshop, which allowed them to enhance and mutate their image almost endlessly. And artists whose primary medium may be painting, sculpture, or drawing began to pick up the camera as an everyday tool.
All of the artists in Intersection: Photography / Painting / Document experiment with and manipulate materials to make truly hybrid, photo-based objects. Some begin with historically important, iconic images ‘sampled’ from the internet or from newspaper clippings, and others take photographs rummaged from old photo albums or flea market bins. They embellish or change them into more psychologically, emotionally compelling objects that resist categorization.
In the hands of these artists, the photographic image becomes an amalgamation—a composite image—that has moved beyond the boundaries of Romanticism, Pictorialism, or street photography established in the early twentieth century. New narratives are created from journalistic images of decades old, politically potent headline-news events that when reprinted and collaged bring a fresh focus to and re-examination of compelling historical moments that seem not terribly distant from political events in today’s world. Several artists dismantle and reorganize the urban landscape and the people in it to reflect dynamic environmental changes.
Intersection: Photography / Painting / Document demonstrates that the mechanized image that a photograph once was can become dislocated from the familiar when imbued with traces of the artists’ hand through creative practices that may include folding, painting, stitching, scraping, printing, or painting on paper or canvas. These artists are exploring multiple levels of meaning and drawing connections between contemporary art, art of the past, and everyday existence. Overlap and simultaneity, once associated with the brushwork of Abstract Expressionists, has become the hallmark of the post-computer / postmodern generation.
Included in the exhibition are: Maurizio Anzeri, Radcliffe Bailey, Sebastiaan Bremer, E.V. Day, Lesley Dill, Richard Galpin, Juan Genoves, Susy Gómez, Ja’Bagh Kaghado, Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry, Bruce Robbins, Jason Salavon, Doug & Mike Starn, Liu Wei.
The exhibition will be shown on the first and second floors of the gallery, with video featured on the second #oor.
