Luisa Lambri, Untitled (Barragan House, #08A), 2005. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Restricted gift of Verge: The Emerging Artists Advisory Group of the MCA and Bernice and Kenneth Newberger Fund. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Melanie Schiff, Spit Rainbow, 2006. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Restricted gift of Kay and Malcolm Kamin and Kay Torshen in honor of the MCA's 40th Anniversary. Photo courtesy of Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago. |
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Museum
of Contemporary Art
220 East Chicago Avenue
312-280-2660
Chicago
Rabin and Sternberg Family galleries
Third Floor
Elements of Photography
June 13-October 4, 2009
Elements of Photography is a collection-based exhibition developed in relation to the MCA's major exhibition, Take your time: Olafur Eliasson. Elements of Photography brings together photography and video works that focus on the natural elements of light and water and capture the natural world as it approaches a state of near visual abstraction. In concentrating on these ephemeral moments, the photographs quietly reflect on themes such as the presence and passage of time and the nature of perception, from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s haunting series Time Exposed which reduces the seascape to its pure elemental materials, to Adam Ekberg’s Aberration #8 which presents luminous circles of sunlight viewed through tree branches.
Light and water are natural elements inherent to the traditional photographic process: photosensitive materials are exposed to light, forming a latent image which is revealed through a development process involving water and liquid chemicals. In concentrating on the elemental materials of light and water, the works become self-referential, drawing the viewers attention to both the photographic process and the materiality of the photographic object. In Luisa Lambri’s Untitled (Barragán House) photos the window shutters poetically suggest the shutter of the camera; the circles of light in Ekberg’s Aberration #8 are created through the interplay of sunlight and the camera lens, emphasizing the optics of the camera; while Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ghostly seascapes forefront the importance of both the frame and exposure time in photography.
The exhibition combines works by established figures of contemporary art, such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, with emerging Chicago artists like Adam Ekberg, whose whimsical video work Disco ball in the woods shows the movement of speckled light over a snow-covered forest. The exhibition also includes one of Nathan Lerner's early formal experiments from the 1930s which records the play of light across photosensitive materials; and one of Joseph Jachna’s Wolf River photographs from the 1960s, which uses a slow shutter speed to present stylized views of rushing water. |
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