As a complement to Screenings, Stills expands the dialogue between the still and the moving image from the perspective of still photography. Presenting works by thirteen contemporary artists, Stills explores the idea of the photograph as an isolated instant in time. Artists engage different techniques to emphasize the “freeze frame” nature of photography. Moyra Davey (whose work also appears in Screenings) explores the serialization of images, presenting single images as meditations on a common theme. Daniel Gustav Cramer and Paul Graham create photographic story boards, assembling multiple images to suggest cinematic narrative. Multiple perspectives on a single moment may be seen in multi- panel works by Talia Chetrit and Barbara Probst, while Ryan McGinley and Matthew Porter boil the moment down to a single, dramatically-staged, stop-action frame. Finally, John Stezaker develops the rapid-fire slideshow to reveal the vast output of repetitive imagery in the world and to call attention to our incessant absorption of this flow.
Stills explores the photograph as an essential component in the varied visual environments we inhabit from moment to moment. Each of the works exhibited approaches the seamless naturalism of the moving image, stopping short of that experience for a more studied, analytical rumination of our ever-changing world.
