“This Synthetic Moment” Exhibition

David Nolan Gallery

[Image: Kwame Brathwaite, Photo shoot at a school for one of the many modeling groups who had begun to embrace natural hairstyles in the 1960s, c. 1966. Courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.]

This event has ended.

Curated by David Hartt

David Nolan Gallery presents This Synthetic Moment, curated by David Hartt.

A picture of one woman looking at another, a portrait of a man holding a camera, a portrait of several women in a schoolyard, a picture of a dancer recumbent, and a picture of several ships.

A crisis of borders, a fold in time, a rupture in space. An assertion of gradience.

I was having a hard time describing how I was feeling and then Thomas said “synthetic” and it stuck in my mind. I wanted something porous, a polymeric structure where the voice, agency, geography, and temporality of others collude to produce a more compelling version of the world. Brixton, Los Angeles, Accra, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, etc., spinning a new distributed off-axis center.

I was having a hard time describing what I was seeing. So I’ll show you instead. Pictures of power and pride and grief and desire and confusion and community and celebration and abandonment and of a wandering itinerant solitude.

I want to hold all of these things together in this synthetic moment.

The exhibition brings together a disparate group of artists who use photography almost as a will to power, an assertion of their own positionality. A compound description of the world as vast and contingent. — David Hartt, 2017