At the same moment that Photography itself has been declared "dead" and "dying", its dismembered and dematerialized corpse is mysteriously reappearing in the central nervous system, the structural body and the re-animating spirit of other practices ---painting, sculpture, architecture, installation. In PERSISTENCE OF VISION, curated and organized by Abigail Simon, three distinct emergent threads in the discourse take shape and questions about the “death” of photography are displaced by meditations on its evolution.
RECOMBINANT NOSTALGIAS, opening Tuesday July 20 6-9, presents the work of EVA DAVIDOVA, EDWARD DOTY, WAYNE LIU, HEATHER M. O’BRIEN, LIZ SALES, FELISIA TANDIONO and PAULA WINOGRAD. These artists reject the notion of the photographic as an evidentiary practice carrying descriptions of a world composed of facts and solids. Using diverse practices ranging from self-reflexion to appropriation, installation to digital manipulation, they bypass rational thinking with cognitive transformations so forceful they verge on violence. These diverse practices are united by a shared interest in the idea of “moment”, and by a desire to re-imagine the narrative of time and spatial relations so that the surfaces of the world are reconfigured to reflect a more internal, less quotidian real.