Thomas Witte "Tourist"
Christopher Henry Gallery
This event has ended.
Using cut paper to depict the everyday world caught in the lens of a camera, Thomas Witte strips the photograph of much of its subjectivity, leaving behind a more pure, universal and atemporal distillate. The artist’s manipulation of paper is a transformative act - the
material, or absence of it, become the major components of the artist’s narrative framework revealing the mystery and beauty of pure form. The meticulous act of cutting might suggest an obsessive tendency with an undertone of brutality but the end result is a graceful, often ethereal, arabesque of positive and negative space.
Witte reveals a fragile connection between the physical and spiritual world - the delicate connections of paper serve as an analogy to the delicate remnants of recollection. Simplified and iconic, the intangibility of memory is made tangible. Witte lifts the photos beyond a sole connection to a specific time and place and transforms them into meaningful objects of remembrance. Rather than give in to photography’s deceptive impression of reality the artist isolates the truth and introduces the viewer to a new imagistic and suggestive world that invites reflection on what we need to remember from those who preceded us, what we wish to pass on to the future, and
why we need to do so.
Media
Schedule
from October 11, 2012 to November 25, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-10-11 from 18:00 to 21:00