“…This was back in the 70’s. I was sitting with my dad and his friends in a cloud of blue pot smoke looking at cigarette ads for subliminal messages. That’s how I learned about photography—that there could be a lot of meaning packed into a photographic image, whether it’s real or not.” Thus began “SIGNS and the Language of Photography,” the final installment in Mt. Tremper Arts’s Thursday Night Lecture Series. The above quote is from Tim Davis, who along with Lisa Kereszi and Mathew Pokoik (who curated SIGNS) showed slides of their work and talked about how and why they photograph signs....
Laurie Dahlberg starts her lecture, “Pirates, Pilferers, and Pranksters: A Brief History Of Photographic Appropriation,” with a photo of Duchamp’s “Fountain.” And then she dives into the juiciest questions about making art. In her talk she speaks about Duchamp’s shift from an old definition of aesthetic value (beauty, truth, and craftsmanship) to a new definition focusing on recognition and choice. She posits that this shift did nothing less than justify the practice of photography as an art form....
This Thursday night, July 31 at 7 pm, we will have a lecture by choreographer Jonah Bokaer, poet Anne Carson, and members of Jonah’s company. They’ll be integrating the following video into their lecture, “Possessives Used As Drink (Me): A Lecture On Pronouns In The Form of 15 Sonnets.” It should be fascinating. We hope to see you at the lecture and at their performance of STACKS on Saturday night!