After
Analysis
Four days a week for nearly eight years, I lay on my psychoanalyst’s
couch and tried to free associate. I shot all the photographs in this
exhibition within a few hours after getting up from that couch, which
explains the most literal reading of the exhibition title, but more
figurative readings get you closer to my intentions: After, as in
following, seeking, behind, in allusion to, despite, over and done
with. Analysis, as in examination, interpretation, separation,
psychoanalysis and its free association.
Because the pictures in the show were arrived at and edited so
associatively, this show marks a new direction for me: my previous solo
shows with Newman Popiashvili Gallery have comprised pictures shot and
edited analytically—according to strict rules of composition,
inclusion, and juxtaposition.
I think each photograph in this show embodies a tension between the
conceptual and the visual. Visually, by depicting ordinary physical
things in a peculiar under/over relationship. Conceptually, by
suggesting such relations as unconscious to conscious, death to
resurrection, subtext to text, reconstructed past to anticipated
future, and figurative to literal. Which is to say, conceptual to
visual. So that these pictures are allegories of their own viewing.
This exhibition studies the tension between tensions: tension between
elements depicted in a photograph, tension within a photograph’s
imagery, tension between the associations a viewer brings to a
photograph, tension between viewer and photograph.
One photograph in the show, Il
Gattopardo, gets its name from the title
of a book barely visible in the storefront that is the photo’s subject.
Called The Leopard in English
and written in Italian by Giuseppe Tomasi
di Lampedusa, the novel is best known for a line spoken by one of its
characters, Tancredi: "If we want things to stay as they are, things
will have to change."
Click here to see these pictures.
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