NYAB Event - "Every Photo Graph Is In Visible" Exhibition

"Every Photo Graph Is In Visible" Exhibition

Churner and Churner

This event has ended.

Churner and Churner, in association with Luise Kaunert, presents its summer exhibition, “Every Photo Graph Is In Visible,” with work by three artists who use photographic methods and darkroom techniques to produce images that interrogate the representational nature of photography with equal parts reverence and skepticism: Matthew Brandt, Christine Nguyen, and Letha Wilson.

Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida that photographs are “signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does.” This exhibition starts with such turning of photographs, be it through the chemical processes of Brandt and Nguyen or the physical manipulations of Wilson. Barthes continued, “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see,” and yet like the natural processes of ionization that builds salt crystals or erosion that produces dust, photography is a process with tangible results. For these artists, the photograph is a process of synthesis that leaves a physical, visual trace, one intertwined with its physical presentation. Brandt connects the subjects of his images to their representations by using the materials from the image source in the developing process; Nguyen grows crystals on the surfaces of photo paper, simultaneously creating an image of them and destroying the ability of the page to fix that image; Wilson draws attention to the physicality of images of nature by folding, cutting, and burying her prints.

Christine Nguyen’s Untitled (Cosmos) is a beguiling mural of 35 panels, each 20 x 24 inches, made from leaving borax and salt on unprocessed color photo paper. The resulting images mimic bodies of water or cloud formations from afar; up close, the salt crystals that grow across the paper’s surface are visible. Throughout the exhibition, the crystals will continue to grow as changes in light and humidity hamper or encourage growth, and the caustic borax and salt Nguyen uses, which adhere to the surface of undeveloped color paper with the tenacity of barnacles, will continue to eat away at the page, rendering them impermanent and unstable signs.

[Image: Letha Wilson "Right Back at You" (2009) Digital print, flashlight, and rock. 36 x 24 x 30 in.]