Let Me Tell You This
Chris Boyne, David Crocker, Maegan Hill-Carroll, Kyla Mallett, Erdem Tasdelen
GALLERY 295
July 25 - August 23rd, 2014
Featuring a mix of established and emerging artists, each of the works address the malleability of collecting through an immersion of photographic technique as both material property and recorded spectacle. This exhibition establishes the archive as a navigation of new-narratives through discovery and re-interpretation. The materiality of each archive is recognized in these new perspectives as a surface of expression and is interpreted further through both the ways the artists handle the material and immaterial content of their own positions within these archives. Narrative is presented as playfully abstracted in the potential reading by the hand of the artist, and this is addressed in the material methodologies of presentation. As such, this exhibition contains works that are a function of a material history, ever located in a virtual moment of time yet locked to the medium of the archive itself, one that calls to be further enacted upon, inserting the collection into the present experience of events.
The artists in Let me tell you this take up different aspects of the new-narrative archive. Christopher Boyne takes us through the story of his father catching a big fish, and visualizes the latent drama saturated by his father’s repeated oral telling in the architecture of the of photo-cinematic gaze. David Crocker situates himself into the role of the archivist, working through old photographic plates and presenting them as documented objects in a sequence of paired images that illustrate the material fragility of the negative and situate the printed positives to which they are paired as a reference to a distant personal history. Maegan Hill-Carroll dives into her own personal archive, taking herself back 15 years to Otse, Botswana, using the visual remnants of this lived experience as a point of entry she reconfigures her archive to explore the limitations of fully representing rich period of her own personal history. Kyla Mallett on the other hand enters the archive by exploring the material association in how one learns to read an aura based on her research in self-help and new-age literature. Erdem Tasdelen takes the concept of the archive into the teleological space of social identity and takes self-described profiles from the platform of a hook-up social network and presents these texts as a catalogue of photograms.
Exhibition text Patryk Stasieczek, co-curated with Mike Love and Jason Gowans.