Thursday, February 16, 2012

Limits of Photography Exhibition Review



The Limits of Photography exhibition currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, “explores the area where the viewer loses faith in the veracity of photography”, explains Curator at Large for the museum, Rod Slemmons in his statement for the show.  “The exhibition title exploits a double meaning”, he goes on to say: “the first is that many of the artists in the show push photography to the limits of recognizing it as photography. The second refers to the limitations encountered when we trust photography as if it were perception […] rather than a flat, constructed surface.”  When walking through the exhibition, both “meanings” of the use of “limitation” are clearly articulated in the works considered and support the show’s intent to challenge widely held understandings of photography and the photographic process.
             On entering the show, the viewer is presented with a large photographic collage by Randy Hayes and works by Rhona Shand.  These artists are an impactful way to begin the exhibition, as each artist deals with photography in a manner that, though still recognizable as such, pushes the viewer to distrust what is being presented.  Randy Hayes’ piece, Pass Christian/Kyoto, is a tiling of photographs of homes that have been directly painted on to create a larger image.  The paint entirely covers some photographs and allows others to become just visible under their new surface.  The painted image is photorealistic, from a distance it appears as a large manipulated photograph, but the direct intrusion of the artist’s hand causes the viewer to question the image created and subsequently the photographs underneath. 
The work of Rhona Shand is ethereal and menacing- she creates digital photo-collages that fall somewhere between crime-scene photos and spirit photography.  Her manipulations are highly visible in the work and on viewing them it becomes difficult to discern what existed before the camera and what was digitally altered.  The lines of reality and construct are blurred allowing the viewer to question the truth of what is presented and whether or not the image can be deemed a photograph.
            In the gallery on the second floor is the work of John Brill.  Personally, I find the work of Brill epitomizes the intent of the exhibition.  On first viewing, the work appears purely photographic.  The small silver gelatin prints point to the photographic process we are familiar with and the titles seem to indicate exactly what is being presented to us.  However, the images themselves are blurred completely and the figures in them are barely recognizable.  His subtle manipulations cause the viewer to question what is being shown and how it is being shown.  Once the truth of the image is broken down, we are then left to question if the images are indeed photographs by contemporary standards despite his use of typical photographic process.
             Perhaps what is most interesting about the show was the incorporation of video.  The inclusion of video pieces by J.J. Murphy and Chris Naka questions photography’s relationship to video and how we perceive video as truth.  J.J. Murphy’s piece Sky Blue, Water Light Sign is an 8 ½ minute video that pans across a light sign of a mountain river scene.  At first the video seems to be like any other video of a panning outdoor scene, but the visitor quickly realizes that what is being presented to them is in fact artificial.  Chris Naka’s piece I Can’t Feel My Face, upstairs from J.J. Murphy, was shot with Naka’s iPhone and depicts his silhouetted hand moving around family photos on his iPad.  The piece discusses the physicality of photography as well as the digital manipulation of it.  The work highlights the object-hood of the photograph and discusses how this is broken down in an increasingly digital age.  We are shown photographs in pieces and interrupted by his hand, questioning whether or not photography, and video, is indeed perception.
            The Limits of Photography exhibition offers the visitor photographic and video artists that are pushing the boundaries of their medium to question current understandings of them.  Using digital and physical manipulation through a variety of processes, the works become a blurring of reality and the viewer questions their veracity as well as the accepted standards of the medium.  As curator Rod Slemmons intended, conceptions of photography and truth are indeed broken down and discussed through out this exhibition.

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