Bard College Alumni/ae Association Presents
Essex Jct., VT - Maxwell Ross '96 in group exhibition
Runs through Sunday, December 6, 2015
Essex Jct., VT
To make an “odd” photograph is, in some to ways, to disrupt the very foundations of what a photograph is thought to be. Even in this digital age, when photographs are as malleable and open to manipulation as paintings, we continue to ascribe a certain assumption of objectivity to a photographic image. If we see a photograph that is in some way disconnected from spatial or temporal specificity, we're tempted to ask questions we would never think to ask of a painting, things like “what is that…where is that….when is that?”. Perhaps because of the desire to sever this tie to objectivity, many of the photographs submitted for this exhibition turned to tropes and imagery traditionally associated with Surrealist Painting. It’s not an exaggeration to say that dolls, masks and dreamscapes make up a majority of the pictures I reviewed. And yet the images that seem in many ways the oddest to me, and those that hold the most appeal, are those that somehow rest between the real and the imagined. The oddest photographs are those that keep one foot planted in the plausible, forcing the viewer to question whether what they are looking at is made or taken, and reminding us that in the end fact is indeed stranger than fiction.
To make an “odd” photograph is, in some to ways, to disrupt the very foundations of what a photograph is thought to be. Even in this digital age, when photographs are as malleable and open to manipulation as paintings, we continue to ascribe a certain assumption of objectivity to a photographic image. If we see a photograph that is in some way disconnected from spatial or temporal specificity, we're tempted to ask questions we would never think to ask of a painting, things like “what is that…where is that….when is that?”. Perhaps because of the desire to sever this tie to objectivity, many of the photographs submitted for this exhibition turned to tropes and imagery traditionally associated with Surrealist Painting. It’s not an exaggeration to say that dolls, masks and dreamscapes make up a majority of the pictures I reviewed. And yet the images that seem in many ways the oddest to me, and those that hold the most appeal, are those that somehow rest between the real and the imagined. The oddest photographs are those that keep one foot planted in the plausible, forcing the viewer to question whether what they are looking at is made or taken, and reminding us that in the end fact is indeed stranger than fiction. - See more at: http://darkroomgallery.com/exhibits/current#sthash.2Cgn5016.dpuf
For more information, call 845-758-6822,
or visit http://darkroomgallery.com/exhibits/current.
Location: Essex Jct., VT