My Show is Open

My exhibit, titled Constructed Realities, is now open in DeCaprio Gallery at Moraine Valley Community College. Tuesday is the official opening day, but it was open on Monday, because we got all the work installed pretty quickly last Thursday.

The show looks pretty good. I'll take some photos in the gallery and post them here soon. I'm showing 38 pieces total, which fills the space nicely. The number of pieces to include was a guess. Because I hung nine prints of photos taken at the Musee Mechanique in San Francisco in a salon-style grouping, and had frames of varying sizes, I really had no idea how many pieces it would take to fill the space. I was thinking that I would have too many, but while laying out the show, I thought I would need to quickly frame a couple more pieces to fill the space. It turns out that I got it just right.

The opening reception is this Thursday, March 27, from 2-4 PM. Good food, live music, rubbing elbows with artists and students, how can you refuse?

Much (although not all) of the work in the show has appeared in this blog over the past few months, so it seems appropriate to post the artist statement I wrote for it. Understand that I hate writing these things, and procrastinated it for as long as I possibly could. It's not a bad statement, all things considered. It does what a good statement should: Explains the underlying ideas without revealing too much.

Constructed Realities
Artist Statement

The work in this exhibit reflects an interest in how information is organized and presented, and how the display of information effects our interactions with and understanding of that information.

From museums to shop windows and even parks and public spaces, displays are created with the aim of guiding our thoughts, feelings and interactions with these created spaces. These displays strip away some aspects of the world while heightening others. In museums, an attempt at education is made by focusing on specific bits of information to heighten or emphasize scientific narratives. In a similar manner, retail window displays are designed to emphasize the psychology of desire.

I photograph these spaces, created to elicit a particular response or to communicate a specific concept, not as a straightforward documentation of how materials are used or displayed or information conveyed. Rather, I examine them in an expressive manner, achieving a subtle subversion of their intended function. The camera and photographic processes I use obfuscate the motivational or instructional intent of these displays, allowing the viewer’s reactions and responses to recontextualize and create content. Through this recontextualization, new realities are constructed which question the authority of informational and commercial display.