AFTER IMAGE

January 29th - March 27th 2010. School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, Maryland. Curated by Jamillah James.
Exhibited with Lucas and Jason Ajemian, Alessandro Bosetti, Patrick Cadenhead, Keren Cytter, Nicolas Djandji,Joseph Ernst, Claire L. Evans, Martijn Hendriks, Gareth Long, Matt Lipps,Rashaad Newsome, Alee Peoples, Kristine Thompson, and Wu Ingrid Tsang.

The term afterimage describes when an image persists in one’s vision, even after exposure to the original image has ceased. The focus of this exhibition is how communication, memory, and history are manipulated or reconstructed through aggressive means—remixing, erasing, repetition, translation, and so forth—and how these interventions disorient viewer expectations, and offer new interpretative and narrative possibilities. The nature in which information is exchanged and circulated on the Internet allows everyone an audience and anyone the latitude to borrow, cite, remake, or edit, with origins, contexts, and ownership becoming casualties as daily life becomes more open source. In response, the artists in AFTER IMAGE reflect this cultural shift with a more deliberate presence—literal or technical—in their work, and especially, interjected into that of another artist, image, place, or time; these practices, however, are not exclusive to digital media. Collage, photography, sculpture, and sound also have the same capacity, with each cut and choice of arrangement being revelatory and critical acts. Revisiting archival material, conventional media formats, or presenting mundane and familiar objects in an unusual manner invest them with new vitality, leaving equal opportunity for reflection and confusion.

Ultimately, the strategies used by artists in this exhibition create tension between the information we encounter and index, the manner in which we communicate, and the formation of memory—how do we reconcile original intent, meaning, and context with new exposures? Where does understanding begin with fragmented or imperceptible content? If an image has a past and a present, who determines its future and how? The artists participating in AFTER IMAGE take this moment as invitation to intervene, favoring discursive freedom over rigid constructions of meaning and representation.