...I am often baffled when looking at photographs. I feel like many artists are often trying to trick me (the viewer) into thinking that I am not looking at an hyper-altered and photoshopped image. Each photograph in this show debunked my feeling. I found that each work engaged me to think about how a picture is constructed and how we approach an image. I liked how I had to circle the show a few times and slid across the room to verify what I saw was in fact what I saw. In her essay, Whitaker writes, "There's a modesty to the works of the artists that I find attractive, as if they are simply sidestepping the race to find the next great artist out of the devastation, in favor of more honest pursuits. They asymptomatically approach a basic core, where hard meaning can reliably be found, like a rock smoothed by friction." The works were playful and diligent in engaging the audience with focused imagery which Whitaker describes as "acts not of escapism, but of affirmation." At a time like ours, we need as much affirmation as possible and I appreciated Hannah Whitaker's sincere direction of the show....
I’ve enjoyed the exhibit on two nights, and was fascinated by the way the different performances affected the way that I attended to the art on the walls. The first evening’s performance was exploratory, sometimes subtle, blurring the line between performance and “real life.” The attentive tone of the piece resounded more than any particular emotive quality. After the performance, the audience migrated to the walls, pulled to the art like magnets. People quietly took in the exhibit, just as we’d taken in the performance. The second time I saw The Noble Savage and the Little Tramp was at the closing night of the season. The dance performance was raw with emotion and afterwards few people looked at the images. I tried to look (because I wanted to be able to see the exhibit and say something about it!) but when I tried to go toward the walls, I felt disinterested, unable to engage it at all. I had to come back to it later....
...The exhibition is Spiegelman's experiment, designed to see what happens when artists seize this medium; when they question, appropriate and utilize the potential of offset printing in a different way; and when they make work to be produced (and reproduced) specifically as offset prints. And so while offset printing enables the mass reproduction of a preexisting image as an affordable print or poster, Spiegelman and the artists in Offset strive to do the opposite....
Offset
Ten Contemporary Artists Make Posters
Photo Gallery inside blog post
...I think that the way art makes change is one consciousness at a time. It forces us to stop our usual patterns of processing information sometimes through causing us confusion, sometimes through pointing us to pleasure. It is through arguing for the inherent worth of a life lived with confusion or pleasure that art makes us re-think the world we live in. Because in those moments we are revealed to ourselves and others without pretense. We want those moments but we fear them as well, so we tame them, we cloak them in formulas and focus our attention on less threatening things like income levels and social squabbles. So much for change. Our real job is to be the guardians and cultivators of those moments where ever we find them....
We've had some excellent recent press (and a collective audience review) for our off site Spring Season at CPR - Center for Performance Research, in Williamsburg Brooklyn and for our upcoming summer festival at MTA...
“…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....
SIGNS
July 19 - August 31, 2008
Curated by Mathew Pokoik
Featuring: Tim Davis, Shannon Ebner, Lisa Kereszi, John Lehr, Christian Patterson, Mathew Pokoik, Zoe Strauss, Brian Ulrich, along with Stephen Shore and Walker Evans.
Additional resources about SIGNS and its artists will be posted throughout the festival.
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Stephen Shore
Amarillo, Texas July, 1972
5″ x 7.5″, C-print
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York City