Photo Plus

Photo Plus

Sep 6–Nov 4, 2007

“The idea of photography as documentation, as an unbiased, impartial, inevitably truthful witness of events in the world has long fallen by the wayside. We certainly know by now that photography can be manipulated like any other medium and the interpretation of its production–even if that production is journalistic–is not without its greater or lesser measure of ambiguity, of innate deceptiveness. Photo Plus, however, is not particularly interested in photographic truth; instead, the premise of the exhibition is to simply identify photography as a medium juxtaposed with other media to form hybridized constructs that reflect our contemporary obsession with multiplicity, complexity, fluidity and the heterodox. If there is truth here, it is an aesthetic truth, a veritas that parallels but is not the same as the truths of nature.”

“The six gifted artists in Photo Plus, all with an international background, explore photography’s possibilities and parameters in a number of innovative ways. Vivien Bittencourt, a photographer and videographer, and Vincent Katz, a poet, writer and curator, collaborate on various projects, including evocative installations that combine pristinephotographs, often of a classic site, with allusive, hand-inscribed, graffiti-like text. Isidro Blasco uses prints of architectural images to build intriguingly complex, three-dimensional, temporary structures that are skewed, subtly deformed representations of the original. Sebastiaan Bremer draws dazzled patterns of figurative images on the surfaces of his large-scale photographs, doubling the narrative as the two mediums intersect in a charged response that can be both positive and negative. Oliver Herring, a conceptual artist, has taken dozens and dozens of photographs of his subjects which he then cuts up into fragments to re-create them as astonishing life-sized sculptures, as if double-dipped in reality, with a scintillating, cubist-like surface. Gwenn Thomas often starts with a painted collage which she then photographs but the final work, which is the photograph printed on canvas, is so clearly delineated and lighted that it appears more textured and dimensional than the actual collage, in a trompe-l’oeil cycle that is also a homage to abstract painting.”

Curator Lilly Wei