 Amanda Ross-Ho: Business Ink jet print on sintra, 37 x 48 inches Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance) Walead Beshty, Peter Coffin, Elspeth Diederix, Marius Engh, Daniel Lefcourt, David Lieske, Lisa Oppenheim, Eileen Quinlan, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sara VanDerBeek, Melanie Willhide, Spencer Young Photography has undergone two major shifts in the past few decades: the loss of its objective relationship to reality, and the medium's increasing distance from modernism through its use in conceptual art. Recent conceptual photography has amended these two directions with a break from the way conceptual artists relegated photography to architectonic and instrumental uses, often merely to illustrate, dematerialize or record. What results is a form of conceptual photography that approaches the medium as a poetic and expressive process. While digital technology has transformed the medium's pictorial potential, supposedly bringing it closer to the logic of painting, this new kind of photographic practice engages a conceptual space specific to the medium. "Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance)" aims to contextualize a set of artists - many not yet associated with each other - that approach photography as an ideational, anti-mimetic, yet decidedly formal area of artistic practice. Whether by treating a photograph as an instantiation of an idea or an object - rather than its surrogate - or as a distinct image-making method, this kind of photography moves beyond the notion of a photograph as illustrative, as a "picture" of the real, or as a mere supplement for ephemeral and time-based art. Replacing many of the traditional concerns of photographic practice, such work also confronts the reductive understanding of the medium's role in the wake of conceptual art. With an active investment in the epistemological, socio-cultural, and material aspects of photography itself, and by intersecting it with a variety of disciplines, the artists included in "Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance)" develop a diverse set of issues intrinsic to photography moving beyond the notion of a photograph as illustrative, or as a mere supplement for ephemeral and time-based art. Curated by Joao Ribas and Becky Smith Exhibition: October 12 - November 11, 2006 Gallery hours: Tues-Sat 10 am - 6 pm Bellwether Gallery 134 Tenth Avenue (between 18th and 19th Streets) USA-New York, NY 10011 Telephone +1 212 929 5959 Fax +1 212 929 5912 Email info@bellwethergallery.com www.bellwethergallery.com |
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