David Nolan Gallery, New York, United States
18 Jan 2018 - 10 Mar 2018
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. (detail) Courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.
David Nolan Gallery presents This Synthetic Moment, curated by David Hartt, on view January 18 through March 10, 2018.
With: Liz Johnson Artur, James Barnor, Kwame Brathwaite, David Hartt, Zoe Leonard, Christopher Williams
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
Opening reception: Thursday, January 18, 6:00 – 8:00pm
.
