October 13

THE HIGH: TECHNICOLOR-JAIME HAYON, AMY ELKINS- BLACK IS THE DAY BLACK IS THE NIGHT, PAUL GRAHAM- THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE, AND THE MELLON UNDERGRADUATE CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP GALLERY SHOW

Posted by Layla on October 13, 2017 in ART, KAP CAS

TECHNICOLOR: JAIME HAYON

Enter the vibrant world of Technicolor, an immersive installation in the Museum’s Anne Cox Chambers Wing featuring dramatic new works by Jaime Hayon (Spanish, born 1974). Hanging from the ceiling are six large-scale textiles based on designs Hayon created for last summer’s piazza installation Tiovivo (those murals are still on view at the Arts Center Marta Station). Hayon worked with the renowned Tilburg Textile Museum’s TextielLab in the Netherlands to weave the plush, dimensional surfaces on a modern Jacquard loom. The tapestries were thoughtfully constructed using a mix of traditional and non-traditional materials including mohair, Lurex, cashmere, and rubber. Six quirky, stacked ceramics with colorful, expressive designs are displayed on round pedestals dotting the floor. Hayon free-styled the surface designs with colored glazes. All of these new works showcase Hayon’s explorations in color and technique. The High commissioned all of these works as part of its ongoing commitment to enhancing its significant twenty-first-century design collection.

TEXT: Courtesy of http://www.high.org

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AMY ELKINS: BLACK IS THE DAY., BLACK IS THE NIGHT

Black is the Day, Black is the Night is a multi-layered photographic project by artist Amy Elkins (American, born 1979) that explores the psychological effects of long-term solitary confinement. Of the 2.2 million people incarcerated in the United States, 100,000 of them are kept in isolation, often for years on end. Because her subjects are physically inaccessible and hidden from view (prisons generally do not allow photography inside), Elkins drew on correspondence with several men living on death row or serving life sentences. In addition to seven photographs from the project, the exhibition includes letters and ephemera written by the incarcerated men over the course of many years.

Elkins blended fact and fantasy to create extensively processed portraits and landscapes that evoke her subjects’ unstable senses of identity, fading memories, and the banal realities of everyday life in prison. The selection on view in this exhibition is drawn from a larger body of work that culminated in a book.

Elkins’s photographs are not an overt indictment of the American criminal justice system, yet in asking us to question the impact of a system designed to be out of sight, she implicates us in a decidedly political act. Elkins does not demand that we empathize with her subjects but instead asks us to pause and question our own stances on the use of capital punishment and solitary confinement before passing judgment on these men and dismissing them from our thoughts.

TEXT: Courtesy of http://www.high.org

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PAUL GRAHAM: THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE

Paul Graham (born 1956), an internationally renowned British photographer, has been at the forefront of contemporary photography since the 1980s. His work is celebrated for its unique blend of documentary observation and conceptual innovation. This exhibition brings together three of Graham’s most groundbreaking bodies of work, made across the United States between 1998 and 2011: American Night (1998–2002), a shimmer of possibility (2004–2006), and The Present (2009–2001). Linked by a common subject matter, the work gathered here examines the state of race and social class in America while using the very nature of sight and the medium of photography as metaphors for inequality, invisibility, and the ways photographs inflect our perceptions of the world.

Graham continually seeks out inventive ways to photograph the world as it is. American Night (1998–2002) contrasts barely visible, over-exposed images of lone working-class figures with saturated color pictures of immaculate suburban homes to present contrasting views of America’s class divide. In a shimmer of possibility (2004–2006), Graham embraces photography’s relationship to time and the stuttering nature of seeing by assembling sequential frames into subtle stories plucked from the flow of everyday life. The Present (2009–2011), a series of diptychs and triptychs, riffs on the tradition of street photography by emphasizing how slight shifts in focus and a moment’s passing can yield dramatically distinct narratives of public life. These three projects draw a connection to the three principal controls of the camera—aperture, which adjusts exposure; shutter, which controls time; and focus, which directs our attention—to emphasize a particular facet of vision and representation. Together, this informal trilogy interrogates the process and politics of looking while challenging photography’s conventional role in addressing social issues.

Paul Graham: The Whiteness of the Whale is organized by Pier 24 Photography and features nearly forty works, ranging from individual large-scale photographs to sequences of over a dozen images.

TEXT: Courtesy of http://www.high.org

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