- Christopher Gianunzio
Opening Reception, Saturday, April 4, 1pm - 4pm
Limited free seating is available on a roundtrip chartered bus from New York City for the April 4th opening. Reservations are required and can be made on this by calling +1 845-758-7598 or emailing Mary Rozell at mrozell@bard.edu.
Artist/Participant Names: Sara Cwynar, Arthur Jafa, Mike Kelley, Carmen Winant
How do artists contend with the relentless image worlds America produces? part of being alive gathers the works of Sara Cwynar, Mike Kelley, Arthur Jafa, and Carmen Winant, who each engage vastly diverse—though all decisively American—photographic sources to elaborate on the ways in which photography constitutes our life worlds. Spanning the early 1990s to the present, the works in this exhibition traverse photography’s modes of distribution—magazines, yearbooks, album covers, newspapers, television, film, and otherwise. In part of being alive, photography is a material witness that produces knowledge, enacts power, and mediates interpersonal life.
Cwynar’s photographs repurpose the language of advertising imagery to overwhelming effect. They deliberately confuse scale to consider the operations of the commercial photography studio, as well as the screens through which its images are projected and encountered. Within the pages of Jafa’s Untitled notebooks (1990–2007) commercial photography, the filmic image, and fine art overlap to depict Black culture: simultaneously valorized and frozen into the confines of racialized subjectivity. Kelley’s unfinished series Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000–11) collects images from late 20th-century yearbooks and, through a dual process of elaborate restaging and documentation, creates a work that is wholly new, metabolizing the original image into the visual imaginary Kelley sought to build through memory and its falsehood. A recurring motif in Winant’s process is imagery that teaches us how to live, which by its nature is instructional. She developed her series of mobiles from a growing archive of images of instructional photography. The form of the mobile itself resists a fixed state—its component images always balanced in motion.
The show presents artistic processes of collection and redistribution, which become discrete methods of critique. By slowing down and recasting the image, these artists demonstrate not only how images overwhelm, but how they can also become tools for resistance and choreographing the self.
