NYAB Event - "Resourced: The Influence of Photography in Contemporary Art" Exhibition

"Resourced: The Influence of Photography in Contemporary Art" Exhibition

Lyons Wier Gallery

This event has ended.

Lyons Wier Gallery presents Resourced: The Influence of Photography in Contemporary Art, an exhibition of eight contemporary artists who use photography to create and sometimes inspire their art making. Each artist appropriates certain aspects and assets afforded by the camera, creating work that is referential but independent in spirit. The featured artists are: Ryan Bradley, Mary Henderson, David Lyle, Tim Okamura, Fahamu Pecou, James Rieck, Aristides Ruiz, and Cayce Zavaglia.

Although the advent of the Daguerreotype utilized and revolutionized the principles of the camera obscura by capturing images in the early nineteenth century, the use of the camera obscura as a preparatory tool for artists dates as far back as the Renaissance when in 1490, Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first detailed description of the camera obscura in his “Atlantic Codex.”

Resourced presents a contemporary look at the influences and inspiration borne from the platforms of photography, ranging from found vernacular photography to self-portraiture. Collectively, the exhibition reveals the inexhaustible possibilities of how an artist can appropriate and re-contextualize a photographic image into a distinct conceptual perspective through various other media.

The artists’ methodology of capturing a moment or finding inspiration is as subjective as their aesthetic point of view. Some artists choose to take a traditional approach by staging studio shoots that generate self-produced photographs open for creative transformation. This can be seen in Ryan Bradley’s digitally manipulated shots of muse Adi Neumann that result in ornate hand drawn deconstructions of the female figure, Fahamu Pecou’s painted self-portrait that evolves into a parody of contemporary media, Cayce Zavaglia’s intimate and striking portrait of her daughter, Abbi, that becomes a painstaking hand stitched embroidery on canvas, and Tim Okamura’s expressive and provocative oil portrait of friends that he intuitively situates within urban environments of New York and its surrounding boroughs.

Others artists seize captured moments from the past and present for re-contextualization, thereby transforming the original source material via personal and societal prisms into another place and time. David Lyle’s use of found vernacular prints and vintage photographs are cleverly reimaged and redefined within our contemporary zeitgeist, executed in his limited use of only black paint. Mary Henderson’s oil paintings source images from photo-sharing websites that she alters compositionally into an intentional public image executed in paramount technical detail. Aristides Ruiz’s hyper-realist ballpoint drawings metamorphose extracted shots of animated New York streets into baffling renderings of urban life. And finally, James Rieck’s appropriation of commercial advertising into deliberately cropped photo-realist paintings truncates contemporary culture to its essence.

With a focus in “conceptual realism,” the common ground shared in Resourced is the realist platform that photography allows and the conceptual leap the artist affords.