Matter
Friday, 18 April 2014
Featuring work from Caleb Charland, Matthew Gamber,Mary Voorhees Meehan, Johan Rosenmunthe, and Bill Sullivan.
“In cataloging technology’s effects on culture, Marshall McLuhan wrote, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” The five artists adopts this observation as a motive to examine photography’s equal but opposing powers: The photograph aptly informs and misleads our perceptions of information and history.
The installation will be an amalgamation of individual studies. Artists will work, somewhat siloed from one another, not unlike scientists each to his station in the lab, investigating the paradox of the photograph. They will present the resultant videos, prints, and constellations of objects together, as a body of evidence.
Concurrent with the exhibition opening, the artists will release a book – another study – but this one worked on together, simultaneously. They will utilize Matter as a starting point. Published in 1963 as the inaugural title of the Life Science Library Series, and written by Ralph Eugene Lapp, a renowned Manhattan Project physicist, the book was designed to match the popular layout of Life Magazine, with a focus on educating readers on the wonders of physical world. The reconstituted book will echo the original thematic arc, but the new layout will be an augmentation of its default reading. The visual approach will maintain photography’s ability to illustrate ideas, rather than explain them.” – New Shelter Plan