Photography in the Expanded Field at Northlight Gallery

Visiting Curator: Josh White
School of Art
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts
Location: Northlight Gallery
Campus: Tempe           
Opening reception: Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011, 6:00 p.m.
Curator: Guest Curator: Josh White
Cost: Free

In 1979, Rosalind Krauss published her seminal article Sculpture In The Expanded Field. The article discussed the current state of sculpture and how the work of many artists within that medium, such as Robert Smithson, Richard Sera and Constantin Brancusi were pushing the definition of the medium. No longer confined to the pedestal or the gallery, these artists were experimenting with transience, perception, and the very core of the sculptural medium, the object. Krauss sought to reconcile these new ways of working through discussion and the use of Klein groups, which are the complex diagrams she used to illustrate the relationship between landscape, architecture and sculpture.
 
Photography has long pushed against its own boundaries. Since the publication of Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, photographers have sought to document, represent, capture, interpret, fictionalize and memorialize their subjects. The desire to encapsulate a moment is at the heart of photography. These instants form a kind of vocabulary that allow the photographer to write whatever fiction the he or she wishes to present. 
 
This photographic instant, however, is not peculiar to photography.  William Faulkner said, “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” The works in this show, many of which utilize no photographic process at all, were chosen to create a discussion about the preservation of the moment. 
 
 

For more information
E-mail: lizallen@asu.edu
Website: Northlight Gallery
Phone: 480.965.6517

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