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From:
Fresh Work IV:
Actualities - New Photographic Art Engaging the Themes of Representation,
Reality and Illusion, Southeast Museum of Photography, May
18 - September 3, 2004 [www.smponline.org]
Catalogue essay
by Dr. James Murphy
"As we entered the
post-structuralist period, the signifier no longer had any archaic
obligation to refer to the signified, much less to the referent.
Meaning was dispersed, decentered, present and to some degree
absent. Truth or reality was called into question, as were the
modes of representing it, and the individual artist was seen less
as a producer than as a product of systems. The work of art itself
was less an expression of originality and artistic intention than
the result of appropriation, re-contexturalization and deconstruction,
words we have come to recognize as part of the post-modern mantra.
These are some of the
basic ground rules to keep in mind when viewing the photographs
of Lorna Bieber and Kathryn Dunlevie, who take the post-modern
image to a dramatic stage..."
"…I began by stating
that several of the artists in past fresh Work shows have attempted
to crate a new way of perceiving and expressing the experience
of contemporary life. This seems to be the concern of Kathryn
Dunlevie in the current show. In her own words she records the
'ceaseless bombardment' of shifting images caught in the maelstrom
of urban life. Her work has been compared to Cubism, especially
(it seems to me) Leger's mechanized abstractions of the industrial
city. More appropriate ancestral roots are the constructivist
montages of El Lissitsky and Alexander Rodchenko, or even the
Vortographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn.
John Szarkowski, in
his book, Photography Until Now, listed linear perspective among
the intellectual tools contributing to the modern world's system
of rational space, and to the progressive invention of photography.
This collective effort of western civilization towards depicting
a heightened sense of reality eventually allowed us to grid the
world and to fix ourselves within the grid. The camera, which
so faithfully indexed the world, eventually transformed the manner
by which we understand and relate to the world. In an age of electronic
and digital communication, mediated experiences and simulacra
have supplanted reality itself. In contrast to the 'undivided,
indivisible visual field'* bequeathed to us from the Renaissance,
Dunlevie's painted photocollages express a perfect universe of
hyperreality and multilocality, devoid of authenticity or pictorial
logic, a labyrinth of colliding signifiers without referents.
One may argue that
the modern metropolis has long been presented in critical thought
as the realm of 'flux, hyperstimulation, phantasmagoria, and alienation.'**
In recent decades photographers have devised various strategies
to document the urban environment, from the conceptualists Ed
Ruscha and John Baldessari, to the new topographers, such as Robert
Adams, Stephen Shore and Lewis Baltz. The more recent work of
Andreas Gursky, moreover, raises the possibility that the commoditized
environment he captures is itself staged, that, "one cannot make
a clear distinction between the representation between a staged
reality and an image that is independent of reality.***
The work of both Dunlevie
and Gursky may be compared to the Carceri d'Invenzione (Prisons
of the Imagination) of Piranesi, those fantastic, visionary dungeons
filled with mysterious towers, bridges leading nowhere, and an
irrational spatial perspective. Like these, Dunlevie's paintings
are works of the imagination, even though they retain certain
aspects of depicted reality…they continue to question the relationship
of image to reality in contemporary photography."
*John Szarkowski, Photography
Until Now, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1989, p. 19.
**Steven Jacobs, Andreas
Gursky: Photographer of the Generic City," Exposure, Vol. 37:1,
2004, p. 25.
***Ibid., p 27.
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