NYAB Event - Richard Wentworth “Motes to Self”

Richard Wentworth “Motes to Self”

Peter Freeman

This event has ended.

Wentworth, widely recognized for his sculptural repositioning of ordinary objects, is a keen observer and chronicler of daily life. His extensive series of photographs, taken while walking through city streets - primarily his own hometown of London but also urban settings far from home – captures the provisional ways in which people modify the world they inhabit. Wentworth’s project is simultaneously that of a wanderer and archivist, walking among, encountering, and recording happenstance, creating unpeopled landscapes full of the evidence of human life in all its oddities, adjustments, shortcuts and elliptical solutions. Each image captures particular local eccentricities of the city in which it was taken, but more so reflects a human capacity to deploy inventive and creative means to assemble the world.

In the artist’s words: “I am not a photographer and have never much been drawn to its possible ‘preciousnesses’. There are photographers I admire, but it’s content driven. There are artist’s archives which I recognize, but probably only know at a distance. Smithson/Rauschenberg. Walker Evans/Bechers. Charles Sheeler/Paul Nash. Assorted Germans - Sander/Richter.”

This exhibition comprises hundreds of images from the past eight years both on the wall and displayed on tables. The full-gallery, wall-to-wall accumulation of images here offers the viewer an immersive, direct engagement with a small example of the artist’s way of looking and experiencing. Importantly, amassing the pictures in this way allows for connections to be made by the viewer. For the artist it is not so much the images as the “gaps between that seem to be where energies flow. The ‘mortar’ proposes some friction, the ‘bricks’ just ‘are’.”