Kavi Gupta (Chicago) presents artists addressing themes of migration and geography through the medium of photography. Melanie Schiff, Tony Tasset, McArthur Binion, and Curtis Mann span both traditional and conceptual methods to expound upon these themes. Together, these artists will present an understanding of how photography can be implemented as both a subject and medium to convey the topic of time and place.
Melanie Schiff‘s recent work is a personal record of discovery. A recent transplant to the Los Angeles area and native Midwesterner, Schiff familiarized herself with the landscape and terrain of her new home with photo documentation. The visual mementos she creates reflect moments in time, alone with the landscape. There are no people in this recent work, a diversion from previous bodies, but the human footprint is evident. These recorded moments are studies of a transplant – the bright LA sun, the mountains, a lemon tree, or a rose growing in the desert.
McArthur Binion layers sepia ink and oil crayon over photos that represent his personal history as an African American whose childhood was spent in 1960’s rural Mississippi. His labor-intensive process of layering this media over and over itself is a physical manifestation of his childhood experiences of picking cotton. He incorporates this grueling and time consuming process with photographs of himself as a young man, his home in Mississippi, his mother, and racially loaded symbolism. The life changes he experienced upon his family moving to Detroit in the seventies and being an African American within the Post Minimalist movement in 1970’s New York influence his conversation with Modernism and personal narrative.
Curtis Mann stretches the limits of traditional photography. In much of his work he re-appropriates images from other times and places taken by other photographers. He bleaches, tears, or rearranges these images, bridging a gap between his own history and that of the subjects represented. Conscious of photography as a physical medium, Mann questions the materiality of photography as object that represents memory, time, and place but which also is merely a medium that is a result of science and technicality.
Tony Tasset explores the American amusement culture and the popular aesthetics of Americana. Often approached via representational sculpture, Tasset has predominantly explored the Mid-West region of the United States within his work.
