Curator: Marilyn Waligore
[exhibition catalogue, 2014]

Curator's Statement:
Author and curator Susan Bright has discussed the concept of photography and materiality, how contemporary artists are creating "photography that is about photography" using a variety of methods.  Digital technology has guided the transformation of photographers' attitudes toward the medium, prompting them to revisit and renew modernist experiments, while often maintaining a critical distance. The artists in this exhibition seek to transcend representation, to investigate the potential of abstraction, working in the studio to connect to traditions in collage, painting, and sculpture, while often being informed by digital processes.  

Reduction and recombination of photographic information serve as strategies to prompt reconsideration of the familiar.  Betsy Williamson embraces understatement through her achromatic abstractions, prioritizing the photograph’s existence as an object, rather than its conventional role as representational device.  Shawn Saumell explores a similar vein, inserting a wry commentary on modernist masters.  Vargha Manshadi foregrounds optical properties in his photographs of iridescence; we are reminded that the camera lens bends light rays to form an image.  Through her constructed records of interior space, Emily Loving foregrounds human perception by creating a sculptural, interactive environment for the viewer.   Using the primaries, red, yellow, and blue, Suzanne Williams obsessively colors the interior surfaces she documents; she aims to raise awareness of the suffering endured by chronically ill children.  Mona Kasra appropriates and superimposes socially engaged self-portrait photographs in her video sequences, championing the dialogue generated by online activists.  These artists use photography to edit visual information, to distill and reframe realities, to prompt a more nuanced reflection on daily experience.

[from the portfolio, A Ply]